TL;DR: Here’s my talk as a DRM-free .mp4 and my corrected English subtitles in .srt or .vtt format.Watch below, and the corrected subtitles are already inside the embed, but you’ll probably need to click the three vertical dots at the video’s bottom right and select “Captions” to turn them on (Chrome) or click the [cc] box at the video’s bottom right to toggle them on (Firefox). The subtitles greatly remediate editing errors and also gaps in my speech where I omitted transitions or didn’t make certain logical connections fully explicit. You’ll want to watch with them on. Don’t forget the recommended resource list.Enjoy!
Note: You might also be interested in my Foreign Policy article from two months ago about G, the global commons for public data collaboration. Gift hyperlink; alternate hyperlink.
On Oct. 9, the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) staff made every talk from this summer’s HOPE XV conference in New York City available via their website. Buy them all on a thumbdrive or download individually. I bought just mine and embedded the DRM-free .MP4, meant for sharing, above. It’s also on my youtube. HOPE staff said then that sometime soon, they’ll put this year’s presentations on theirs.
I gave the talk on Friday, July 12 starting at 7 p.m. on the main Marillac Auditorium stage. Sure, there were technical difficulties and I used too many filler words—it was my first time presenting to adults without scripting it all before, and due to life/journactivism exigiencies, I’d prepared the outline just hours prior, meaning no rehearsals or revisions, especially as I was busy writing the 14-page recommended resource list (PDF) that accompanies my presentation, as mentioned in my talk.
But if your goal is to learn from a Survey and Scrutiny of Election Security, the video will meet that need, especially if you employ the corrected subtitles.
The $.99 downloadable from HOPE came with subtitles—English, German, Spanish, French—and the transcript .txt they’re based on. I edited the numerous errors, some at the hands of 2600 (I replaced these), others my own mistakes while speaking [fixed in brackets]. Here’s the corrected transcript and the corrected English subtitles (.srt; .vtt). If anyone wants to translate my corrected version to any language, email me and I’ll add your subtitles to this post for others to peruse.
Much of my talk is simply trying to steer you toward the recommended resource list—your homework, so to speak. That document definitely puts election security and activism knowledge in your hands so you can do something awesome with it—which would make a great story to leave in the comments. In my presentation, I also mention uploading the flowchart to my site; I’ll do that at some future date when I have time and can improve it. For my June post and one-minute video promoting this talk, go here.
Embedded below, the full Biden video I showed on stage during my talk (all 41 seconds). HOPE’s after-the-fact editing removed the audience gasp and shortened Biden’s three kisses to two. Following the full Biden video, a few final notes for my presentation overall, in quick bullet points.
Here are the two RAMRANTS tweet-thread URLs, mentioned in my talk, leading to many more examples of Biden being creepy, mostly C-SPAN footage:
In the Q&A, someone asked about the accuracy of recent U.S. elections. I gave two answers: we need more data, and second, that though former pollster Jonathan Simon’s exit poll forensics show many voting jurisdictions presenting legitimate results, there have also been enough jurisdictions with significant enough disparities between totals and exit polls to raise serious alarm.
A third answer would have been to give a bird’s eye view of the strength and frequency of official audits. These are voting jurisdiction staff doing sort of the same thing Simon is, but drawing on very different data sets, usually spot-checking handmarked paper ballots and comparing those samples with the vote totals, ideally according to Stark risk-limiting audit protocols. If you can see what’s going into a black box and what’s coming out of a black box, and it makes sense against a neutral standard (i.e., spot-checked handmarked paper ballots), then you don’t have to fear, say, the proprietary black box software so much—though people debate that too, particularly if audits aren’t conducted, as they should be, for every single contest regardless of margins of victory.
Here’s what the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote in 2018 in the first volume of their underexamined report on Kremlin election interference in the 2016 U.S. elections: “Statistically sound audits may be the simplest and most direct way to ensure confidence in the integrity of the vote. States should begin to implement audits of election results. Logic and accuracy tests of machines are a common step, but do not speak to the integrity of the actual vote counting. Risk-limiting audits, or some similarly rigorous alternative, are the future of ensuring that votes cast are votes counted. [Unnamed] State 8, State 12, State 21, State 9, State 2, State 16, and others already audit their results, and others are exploring additional pilot programs. However, as of August 2018, five states conducted no post-election audit and 14 states do not do a complete post-election audit. The Committee recognizes states’ concern about the potential cost of such audits and the necessary changes to state laws and procedures; however,the Committee believes the benefit of having a provably accurate vote is worth the cost.”
Verified Voting has a map/visualizer, as of 2022, for post-election audit law and practices. It appears that two years ago—i.e., four years after Senate Intelligence Committee passage above—we had five states carrying out risk-limiting audits, though not always binding or fully comprehensive ones. And we had eight states with no post-election audit law. The remaining states (and setting aside the territories) were somewhere in between: audits, but not the risk-limiting gold standard kind; or audits that were optional, partial, nonbinding, or otherwise deficient …
It’s a hodgepodge mess. The results are likely trustworthy, except where they aren’t; you just can’t trust ’em, except where you really can because of overlapping accountability layers of high-quality audits, statistical forensics, scrutineers, and more. And all of this is in motion every single day. It does seem to be slowly getting better…so the swing state majority who come to consensus for a particular presidential candidate can impose on the rest of the country, and more can feel confident that the destined-to-be-unfair hierarch will enter into the White House above them fairly.
In the video, I mention MAGA’s Stop the Steal lawsuits tanking except for one minor case in Pennsylvania. A great resource on all that is the July 2022 reportLost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election.
One great thing about Scrutineers.org that I neglected to mention in the talk is that they’re specifically working to bring together—to bridge the gap between—on the one hand, the grassroots, boots-on-the-ground movement activists, often black activists, fighting decades-old voter suppression tactics—which stymie vote capture—with, on the other hand, the academic, cerebral, often white guys who are digging into the proprietary voting computer vulnerabilities, which interfere with the vote tallying side. These two disparate realms really need to come together, as they increasingly have in Coffee County, Georgia, for example.
I mention in the talk that Trump almost certainly owes China substantial money. Here’s my 2021 blog post on that (CTRL+F “China” to jump to the relevant section). Some other information on the topic worth checking out: Jan 2024 report on Chinese-owned or -backed entities spending millions of dollars at Trump’s properties while he was in office, likely a violation of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause; in 2016 he described himself as the “king of debt,” saying, “I’ve made a fortune by using debt, and if things don’t work out I renegotiate the debt. I mean, that’s a smart thing, not a stupid thing” and explained, “You go back and you say, ‘Hey guess what, the economy crashed, I’m going to give you back half'”; In 2023 Trump said of Xi Jinping, who abolished his own term limits in 2018, “He runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. Smart, brilliant, everything perfect.”
Just two notes to self for future talks. First, I’m going to practice not using filler words when I leave voicemails on Signal or whatnot. Second, as in fiction, my examples should have been on theme. My example of a dominance hierarchy struggle, for instance, should have been political candidates vying to win the same office (on theme) instead of two boxers fighting (not on theme).
Finally, links to my election security journalism, all from 2023: Texas Observer article on whistleblower Reality Winner; investigative article on Coffee County Georgia and accompanying AM/FM nationally syndicated radio appearance on the BradCast; another investigative article related to Georgia not patching voting software despite the Coffee County elections office breach; Daily Dotinvestigative article about the missing laptop in Coffee County, GA with accompanying blog post. Those are all in the recommended resource list (PDF).
Guidelines touted by Kamala Harris at Bletchley Park in 2023
Note: On Sept. 22, the Daily Dot published my latest article, Election 2024: The future of TikTok and tech policy under Trump versus Harris. It’s an overview of where the two leading U.S. presidential candidates stand on various tech topics: TikTok, net neutrality, the FCC, Section 230, the digital divide, and more, with a few surprises along the way—such as power-to-the-people NYC Mesh. My article also discusses their stances on artificial intelligence. I had some paragraphs on that subject left over unused, so I decided to put together this quick blog post.If you’re an actual human reader, rather than an AI scraping my webpage, enjoy.
On Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris, campaigning for the U.S. presidency, spoke at a fundraiser in Manhattan, raising more money—$27 million—than you or I will ever see, reportedly her highest-grossing fundraiser. It should help her warchest stay better funded by far than that of her main opponent, the twice-impeached first presidential felon Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee. But her speech? It echoed another she gave, nearly a year ago, at the U.K.’s Bletchley Park.
In both talks, she spoke of government collaboration with the AI industry, portraying it as voluntary rather than as demanded. Maybe aside from the helpfulness of machine translation services such as Google Translate, as well as other AI tools, and maybe beneath the opulence and publicity, things aren’t so safe. Or at least, the topic of artificial intelligence is too poorly understood for rando-journos to really give helpful hot takes without first boning up on the underlying material—material that started, more or less, some 80 years ago in/near Bletchley Park, though Harris didn’t mention the particular ghost in question when she was there last November.
To merit $27 million in a single day, Harris must have said something really interesting at Sunday’s swanky event venue, Cipriani Wall Street (pictured left), yeah? She did, if you’re a venture capitalist (or journalist) seeking more details on her tech positions, some of which she’s been circumspect about. Indeed, until Sunday, she hadn’t—as a presidential contender—stated openly her position on cryptocurrency, leaving Trump to chest-pound about being the “crypto candidate” while she focused on traditional voter concerns such as reproductive rights. According to Bloomberg, at Sunday’s fundraiser, Harris said, “We will encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets,” (read cryptocurrency for the latter) “while protecting our consumers and investors.”
Sounds a bit like former POTUS Barack Obama. We will do the good things that are important and that bring us hope and prosperity, and we will not do the bad things that cause problems for folks in this country. God bless you and God bless the United States of America. It’s a strategy: as long as Harris continues painting by numbers without enormous gaffes or grave October surprises, and sans whatever serious, hard-to-predict dangers might arise from election interference, I say she’ll probably sit behind the Resolute Desk come Jan. 20.
But what about AI? In terms of direct quotes from Harris, not much more has trickled out of her fundraiser speech thus far—not that I’ve seen. She did say, apparently in the same passage addressing cryptocurrency and AI, that she “will bring together labor, small business founders and innovators and major companies[.]” Some say that’s Harris pitching young men leaning Republican.
Likely so, but it’s also in line with something I mention in my Sept. 22 Daily Dotarticle: the voluntary industry agreement she facilitated as current Prez Joe Biden’s “AIczar.” She touted this AI safety agreement at the Bletchley Park inaugural global summit on AI in 2023, two days after Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence calling for the United States to lead AI development while ensuring safety.
The bog standard campaign schmaltz and vagueness, combined with rejuvenated hopes after the happy Harris replaced the about-to-pass-out Biden, maybe make this stuff regarding AI, the industry, the voluntary non-binding safety promises—this We can all work together, biz, labor, even the guy passed out on the tarmac, wait is that Jo– stuff—feel enticing. Maybe it is: though the agreement is on paper non-binding, a presidential administration has antitrust and other levers at hand to knock companies in the head with reminders. But I doubt it.
Why am I not more certain, or why are AI agreements not critiqued in depth across news media? I’ve been given a few recommendations, but generally, I don’t know of any deep-digging investigative reports on where the AI industry is headed that, crucially, combine a valuable, highly literate philosophical perspective on what computers and artificial intelligence are accomplishing, and threatening, beyond the journo-exposés about Silicon Valley powers-that-be signing up for cryonics, aiming to infuse themselves with young blood, throwing zillions down shady corners, the youzhe. Know of some? Let me know. Astute philosophy, remember. I know that the TESCREALs/rationalists (today’s, not Spinoza) are orgiastic over their quasi-famous neckbeards pronouncing this or that, but I don’t agree with their scientism, so skip ’em. People who touch grass please.
We need better, more insightful assessments of artificial intelligence, because, among other reasons, algorithmicbias, as a chief aspect of it, is putting on steroids plain ol’ human bigotry’s human rights violations and bodycounts.
The Bletchley Park mansion, photographed by DeFacto in 2017
Harris gave her voluntary agreement! high-profile speech at the first global AI Safety Summit, which took place at none other than Bletchley Park. That country estate in England was once home to the British government’s Code and Cypher School, now called Government Communications Headquarters, the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. At the first ever global summit on artificial intelligence, in other words, Harris was discussing its emergence precisely where the 1940s originated Five Eyes, the post-World War II secret-sharing alliance between five countries’ worth of intelligence agencies staffed by actual humans, including those of the United States.
At the summit, Harris discussed the Biden administration’s efforts to safeguard against AI dangers such as “algorithmic discrimination[,]” undertakings for which she was the seniormost Biden administration official involved. One such effort Harris spotlighted: the “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.” The non-binding Blueprint lays out expectations for technologists developing artificial intelligence systems—such as Google’s sentiment analyzer that a 2017 Vicearticle footnoted by the Blueprint found to be biased. Among other goals, the expectations aim at reinforcing and expanding existing anti-discrimination legal protections “to ensure equity for underserved communities[,]” defined to include “Indigenous and Native American persons,” as well as “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex” people, and various others.
Like a ghost unseen at the Bletchley Park summit, unmentioned in Harris’s Bletchley Park speech, late British mathematician Alan Turing, who dreamed up the idea of computer software in a 1936 math paper, worked at that same country estate for the Code and Cypher School in the 1940s cracking Nazi codes. Shortly after the end of World War II, Turing gave the first public lecture on AI. He said, “What we want is a machine that can learn from experience” and “alter its own instructions[.]” Interpreting those as Turing himself often did—by setting aside religious or philosophy of mind questions in favor of mathematical and engineering ones—today’s artificial intelligence is understood by experts as doingboth to some sizable degree.
In the longstanding philosophy journal Mind, Alan Turing in 1950 proposed what’s now called the Turing Test: essentially a guessing game or experiment where, by writing down questions and passing around slips of paper, a person tries to determine which responses are generated by an unseen human and which by an unseen AI—with the argument that, if the person can’t tell the responses apart, the AI should be considered to be thinking as legitimately as the unseen human is considered to be thinking. That’s how the Turing Test is typically presented—bereft of the gender codings in the 1950 original, which subtly and impishly (by 1950s standards) depict gender as something as fluid as intelligence.
Photographed in the 2000s, Bletchley Park stableyard cottages, one location where Turing worked
The original Turing Test is also not so behavioristic as it sounds from textbook glosses, with Turing’s actual writing praising the “quite a strong” counterargument “from Extrasensory Perception” (this is why read primary source and not just watch youtube vids). While in this portion of the paper he mostly sticks to familiar psionics language such as telepathy and precognition, one might discern someone living in a dissociated world where empathy (as emotional contagion, not as cognitive exercise) is regularly off the table, especially for someone sensitive, “good as a telepathic receiver” (see Turing’s best-known premonition), and required to keep silent. About classified secrets. About what he must have witnessed and heard of, the 1940s birthing the current world order dominated by spy agencies and an attempt at a global mono-empire underpinned by information technology. About even his own criminalized sexuality.
Sentenced for “gross indecency” under anti-homosexuality laws in 1952, one of the foremost founders of artificial intelligence was instructed by a British court to pick either estrogen-based chemical castration or imprisonment. Turing chose the former and, almost certainly as a consequence, was driven to alter his own instructions fatally in 1954 at home, alone.
It seems wrong to me that Harris, at Bletchley Park, did not mention him in her speech, though the U.K.’s government-backed Alan Turing Institute was among the contributors to the voluntary agreement. I assume she didn’t mention him at Cipriani Wall Street, either, despite his story as one of the foremost founders of AI—occasionally argued to be the founder—waiting as a perfect example of how good deeds especially get punished when you’re deemed to fall into the wrong group affiliation categories, and how that’s the kind of bias, now often enshrined into algorithms, that she says we need safeguards against. Marketing happyspeak, however, is what brings in the $27 million/night.
Artificial intelligence didn’t kill one of its founders, but bigotry, one of AI’s biggest problems, sure did. It’s presently up for grabs to what extent the 47th U.S. president, others in power, and the worldwide public can learn from such experiences as AI becomes increasingly more common, assuredly with dignity-depleting privacy violations in its train. Like some coked-up computerized version of the long and sorry history of human bias, algorithmic bias has zillions in funding, endless apologists, and a growing body count. Politicians limit themselves to the art of the possible, for better or worse, but definitely crop out anything their “possible” and “realistic” tunnel visions don’t have time for, like, say, omitting mention of Bletchley Park ghost Alan Turing and anybody else who might lie in a grassy field and dream up system-changing ideas such as computer software or artificial intelligence. More time spent understanding AI’s origination and its development over three quarters of a century would be a good start to transforming it from a pol- and journo-buzzword into something we can usefully self-govern.
ADDITIONAL UPDATE:14-page PDF I put together: a recommended resource list for this talk, presented July 12, 2024. The resource list contains the following sections: Books and papers; Documentaries; Reality Winner and Kremlin cyberattacks on 2016 elections; BMD vulnerabilities, Coffee County, Georgia elections office breach, and ongoing statewide voting software compromise; Election activism; General deep politics and activism; Douglas Lucas.
UPDATE: The conference schedule is now available. My talk is at 7 p.m. on Friday July 12 in Marillac Auditorium; 50 minutes total including Q&A.
A decade ago, I was a panelist at HOPE X, the tenth Hackers on Planet Earth conference in New York City. Youtube of that panel — on crowdsourcing research into the cyber-intelligence complex — still collects views.
On the way home from the conference, I wrote a humorous article describing my experience: my surprising, then interviewing NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake; the private spies who showed up to surveil the panel and seemed more interested in my articles than most people I actually know are; my rooted smartphone getting hacked … Ah, wonderful times, so long ago.
Now — well, next month, July 12-14 — I’ll give a solo talk at HOPE XV titled Survey and Scrutiny of Election Security.
Wait, what’s this conference again? Sponsored by the magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, HOPE is held every other year in New York City — previously in Manhattan, now in Queens at St. John’s University. Top-billed speakers over the years have included Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra, frenemy of the state Edward Snowden, you get the idea. Typical offerings include lockpicking villages, ham radio and vintage computer stuff, vendors, film screenings, socializing, controversy real or ginned up, private spies watching me, people hacking my phone … plus panels/talks.
You can check out the conference website here, speakers’ bios over here, various promo videos HOPE requested way over here, and short descriptions of every panel/talk all the way over here. The description for mine:
Fake news or flawless? Our computerized elections are neither. To truly understand corporate, closed-source election computers requires understanding how they fit into the wider electoral system and its interlocking parts. Douglas’s investigative journalism will provide case studies documenting how it can go haywire: the 2016 Kremlin cyberattacks on U.S. election infrastructure exposed by whistleblower Reality Winner, the MAGA-led Coffee County elections office breach still compromising Georgia’s statewide voting software, and more. Such details will show how you can help secure elections: scrutineers, statistical forensics, free software voting companies … the list goes on. He will address democracy’s evolution, too, scrutinizing statist voting within the bigger picture of human collaboration.
I’ll create an online reading list for attendees interested in learning more, as well as an overview diagram of the election system’s interlocking parts.
As of this writing, I don’t know which exact day and time my talk will be, but the conference website should be updated with that information any moment [see update above]. If you decide to attend and want to get together, email me: dal@riseup.net. I plan to arrive a day early and stay a day after. Otherwise just watch my talk afterward on Youtube or at the happenin’ headquarters of DouglasLucas.com.
Will I get into any zany HOPE incidents this decade around? Probably. If I encounter anyone from Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — their three uses of the word security there totally isn’t overcompensation or anything — I have some remarks for them, including regarding my potential lawsuit over their FOIA deni… but that’s another story.
Just remind me not to root my phone.
This blog post, My talk at HOPE XV: Survey and Scrutiny of Election Security: July 12-14, NYC, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2024/06/02/talk-hope-election-security-july-nyc/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Please feel free to discuss this post in the comments section below, but if you’re seeking permissions beyond the scope of the license, or want to correspond with me about this post (or related topics) one on one, email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!
Note (added Apr. 8, 2024): On initial publication this blog post incorrectly stated that Friday night lacked a flesh-and-blood DJ. There was one, in fact, by the pseudonym mcbaud300. When I was briefly in the ballroom, I didn’t see mcbaud300, but I did see a sign that led me to wrongly conclude the DJ was artificial intelligence. Below, in the apropos section of this post, I’ve added a photo, by Michael Citrak, of that sign, which read VIRTUAL DJ. That’s actually the name of a product that replaces physical DJ gear—such as turntables—with software,not something the replaces actual human DJs with software. Thanks Norwescon Discord for the corrections.
On Fri. Mar. 29, I attended Norwescon 46, the annual four-day science fiction convention nowadays based in Seattle (okay, SeaTac) that’s been running continuously since 1978. This was my first Norwescon — which I assume means NorthWestConvention, though I’ve never seen that explicitly stated. Previously I’ve gone to a few other conventions: ConDFW (2009), Wiscon (2009), and Conflation (2014 or so).
Since I live in the Emerald City, I could bypass hotel room fees. And by limiting my participation to Friday only, I wasn’t diverting too much time away from work or toward crowds, which by nature repel introverts such as me. Before departing for the convention, I told myself to have a good attitude, to make the most of it, and — well, I had a good time, but it felt faintly elegiac. Like something that, if you look down to check your wristwatch too long, might not be there when you look back up.
Norwescon is the Pacific Northwest’s premier science fiction and fantasy convention and one of the largest regional science fiction and fantasy conventions in the United States. While maintaining a primarily literary focus, Norwescon is large enough to provide a venue for many of the other aspects of science fiction and fantasy and the interests of its fans such as anime, costuming, art, gaming, and much, much more.
Norwescon features hundreds of hours of panel programming, over 200 panelists specializing in fantasy, science fiction, horror, science, and more, the Philip K. Dick Awards, a 6,000+ square-foot Dealers’ Room, Writers’ Workshops, a full masquerade, an art show, dances, and more!
In the early afternoon, I parked by one of the far walls of the overpriced, crammed DoubleTree guest lot and started hiking on foot to the hotel. Long before I reached the lobby, it seemed the science fiction convention had already begun, outright, straight up in my face. Yes, right there in the parking lot. Where I was confronted with —
The Knightscope autonomous security robot
My surprise halted me. Recovering, I snapped two photos:
At first I was quite confused, thinking this was some Doctor WhoDalek-esque creation of the convention’s. But I soon confirmed it’s the hotel’s, and in fact, the hotel has been using the Knightscope for several years. The convention staffer I spoke with seemed unperturbed by the strange device, or perhaps resigned to it, trailing off his discussion of the subject matter …
In my photos, it looks stupid and harmless, comical even — like a big inflated balloon — but in real life, it’s actually kind of intimidating, as my video below hopefully shows. If I understand Knightscope correctly, the self-driving gizmo records surveillance film for optional review by humans later. Gives you those warm fuzzies that we’re all in this together, trusting one another to do our best and forge the optimal outcomes for our communities, right?
In a slogan asserting that crimefighting is impossible without such high-tech interventions, Knightscope’s website boasts that You need superhuman abilities to fight crime. Let’s be frank, law enforcement and security forces have long been keeping crime at the Goldilocks levels required to maintain whichever heinous balance of power the highest-ups prefer, a la cyberpunk novelist William Gibson’s character Ainsley Lowbeer. Fighting crime is something else entirely, and while outsourcing it to these robots might prevent automobile smash-and-grabs, that likely comes at the expense of us further forgetting how to use social support and shunning/approval to do so, because everyone can just be hyper-surveilled constantly and the unseen, promised Good Guys with superhuman abilities, far away somewhere, can help dispense justice on command for a fee. Turn your brain off; escape into adoration of the superhuman, the supertastic Knightscope!
Would there be actual superheros inside the hotel, with sincere hearts? Say, Phoenix Jones — real life crimefighters dressed up as superheroes? Didn’t the genre’s classic writers want readers to respond with this-worldly heroism, rather than robots replacing what’s left of people?
As I walked side by side with the Knightscope filming the thing, I really felt it was deliberately staring at me through its camera apertures. Maybe because I was blocking its vision. I don’t think the Knightscope carries any weapons, yet I couldn’t help but think of the Star Wars robot R2D2 and its Taser-style electric shock prod. About halfway into the video below, I start laughing, as does a couple nearby in a car, observing l’affaire robot. Then the couple starts their vehicle, ready to leave, kind of pinning me in from behind; the robot seized this moment to start coming at me from the front, shown in the video’s final seconds. I died then, and this is my replacement writing to you now.
High on panel: Managing unsolicited submissions in the era of AI
Waldo
Once I entered the hotel proper, collected my badge, and saw a man hilariously dressed as Waldo from Where’s Waldo as well as a large Doctor Who Dalek prop carried by attendees, I headed for the panel titled Managing Unsolicited Submissions in the Era of AI. Four panelists: Podcastle editor Craig Jackson (moderator); Clarkesworld founder, editor, publisher Neil Clarke; Uncanny Magazine managing editor Monte Lin; The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction publisher Gordon Van Gelder. The panel discussed exactly what its title says, a Turing Test problem that became major news in multiple outlets once Clarke opened up about it last year.
In other words, all these robots from without are assailing our science fiction — what can we do about it from within?
Below, I embed the seven-post thread I made on Bluesky loosely transcribing portions of the thought-provoking panel. Bluesky, you may know, is a Twitter-esque rival to the platform commandeered by Elon Musk; it has a smartphone app and no longer requires an invite code to join, though it still lacks DMs and support for video uploads. To read the seven posts directly on Bluesky, you can click through the below embeds, or follow this link, even if you lack a Bluesky account and don’t sign in, as with Twitter of yore.
As the panel concluded, I felt elated. Following the past few years of reading and writing science fiction, and doing investigative journalism and copywriting and philosophy research assistance — all of it writerly work, freelance jobs making up the majority of my mostly solitary life — suddenly, fresh topics I’ve been curious about were being discussed back and forth live among knowledgeable panelists and inquisitive audience members, all of them friendly, not competing to see who can be the most cruel at ripping off strangers’ heads or minimizing their every word, unlike much of social media and the offline realm. I’m not enough of a joiner to say I felt like I belonged or anything definitive like that — but I was really glad I came and looked forward to additional panels and events.
T-shirt for sale at Norwescon from Arkham Bazaar and Sigh Co. Graphics. Depicts a Lovecraftian Elder God.
I resolved to check out Clarkesworld more often, then headed downstairs to the general area by the lobby, where my newfound excitement encompassed the various booths. There were H.P. Lovecraft-themed T-shirts for sale, a table with riddles written on wood with vendors offering clues, a huge supply of free books for the taking, and more. All at once these science fictional images, usually confined to my bookshelf, had bloomed all around me, left, right, up, everywhere I looked. I even asked some vendors research questions about miniature painting, related to my fiction-writing, and got some good leads. Again, a topic that had almost entirely existed in my lonely head for years was now in the flesh, and everyone cheerfully acted as if that were normal rather than the other way around.
Place of refuge losing luster
I ducked out for lunch, again seeing the Knightscope patrolling the parking lot. To the restaurant through hectic, smelly traffic. Something I ordered didn’t quite agree with me; my mood soured a smidge. Already I’d seen every vendor booth (though I forgot to check the art show, unfortunately). Hurrying back for another panel felt like a chore.
Wasn’t there something backward about all this? The last time H.P. Lovecraft wrote anything new was almost a hundred years ago. Isn’t there something more we can do about AI-spam besides write our Congressfools and beg the FTC chair, tactics that I myself do but that still feel dated next to real cutting-edgeresistance? And that cumbersome Dalek prop, that robot-y Doctor Who creature attendees had carried through the hotel, was derived from a TV show that began more than a half century back. I assumed the Dalek lacked onboard electronics to theoretically counter the sleek, unapologetic Knightscope, which would probably vaporize it. Okay, not really. But all the same, though the unsolicited AI manuscripts panelists were certainly informed from their front-line battles with that particular problem, and led a truly interesting discussion, the convention as a whole was now feeling, to my postprandial self, like an enclave for out-of-touch museumgoers. There were very few in their Gen-Z twenties present, and when they were, it was typically because they were assisting their vendor parents.
From the start, I knew Norwescon wouldn’t be some best-in-class, outward-connecting headquarters of artistic resistance (is there such a place anywhere?). I wasn’t expecting earth-shattering revelations from any panelists. Why not just go home? Why couldn’t all — rather than merely some — of the panels be put online, with the audience able to type in questions, as mainstreamed during the years the United States called COVID-19 a federal public health emergency?
Because of the vitality, of course. Physical presence in such an environment, enjoying such conversations, festival like, brings its own energy surplus, or did initially. Now I just felt drained and was urging myself to keep going, a familiar self-flagellation from decades ago at university where I’d scolded myself to hurry, to make it to ̶p̶a̶n̶e̶l̶s̶ classes on time. I’m not sure why my mood had inverted. Maybe it was that, born in urban Texas, I’m unaccustomed to the obligations of participating in an interesting, mostly benign group-self — the convention, that perhaps I’d joined simply by being there — and unfairly demanded nonstop perfection from it. Maybe it was the sense of an unthinking eternal return, passing by the same booths over and over, the same unpurchased H.P. Lovecraft T-shirt over and over, has-been consumerist ants stuffed into an airless maze, the largely unacknowledged winds of change outside — not just Knightscope, but a collapsing trade economy, a birth strike and children insufficiently raised — steadily working on blowing down the insular walls of any type of convention anywhere.
Well, I’d only attended a single panel. Another might clarify things? I drove back to the hotel, seeing upon my return, industriously cruising past, the Knightscope.
Orbiting another panel: The rest of the world in space
The next panel I’d selected from the programming (also available here) was titled The rest of the world in space. A pair of space historians gave basic information about, and showed photos of, recent non-U.S. space missions. Below, I’ll embed my four Bluesky posts from the panel. Click through the embeds, or follow this link, to see the posts directly on Bluesky.
To me it felt a little like two gruff older guys showing you their favorite Wikipedia timeline. A chill way to ooh and aah over non-U.S. spaceships. It was good that one of them mentioned, albeit very briefly, the Belarusian dictator — without mentioning his name, Aleksandr Lukashenko — and his longstanding alliance with Putin as the real reason behind a Belarusian astronaut’s joint publicity photo with the Russians. I wish he’d said more, but he did not step out farther on the limb of the supposedly unspeakable, not during this panel anyhow.
When their presentation ended, I asked the panelists about the legal penalties (or not) for failing to de-orbit artificial satellites, and how the graveyard orbit fits into that framework (or not). Once again it was wonderful to talk with actual human beings highly knowledgeable about subjects I’m interested in, many of them underreported, yet powerfully impacting people, usually without their understanding. I regained some enthusiasm — tempered somewhat this time.
Briefly I met up with one of my fellows from Clarion West Writers Workshop class of 2008, Caren Gussoff, and we commiserated about the introvert struggle of attending a populous convention. We finished talking and she left; now I had a few final Friday hours to wander around, hoping to locate value.
Odds and ends
Exploring the hotel indoors, where windows were firmly shut and people were packed like proverbial sardines — an unofficial early estimate from Norwescon staff says 1,800+ people attended across the four days — I reckoned that one out of every eight or so individuals was masking, as in, against COVID and/or RSV and/or whatever this very recent bird flu in Texas is, something that jumped from birds to cattle to humans like a UFO from the microbial dimension. I was masking, as I do for packed-like-sardines settings such as schools and hospitals. It often appeared that more were using canes to help with walking than were using masks to help with preventing the spread of respiratory diseases.
I find it difficult to draw conclusions from the absence of widespread masking. In May 2023, the federal government declared the public health emergency over, and the CDC hasn’t collected as much COVID-19 data since, though their wastewater monitoring is interesting and as of this writing says COVID-19 viral activity is low countrywide. We might imagine scientists and science fictioneers hacking together their own experiments to audit or replicate data, bridging knowledge and questions from expert to novice levels and back again, testing out various hypotheses motivated by public interest and with complete transparency for public data, so that anyone interested could observe, doublecheck, and understand. Building something for sampling or imaging viral titer from the air, as scientist Justin Lee says, accurately assessing airborne transmission dynamics, ideally in real time. We might also imagine scientists and science fictioneers at the hotel bar, drinking to assuage the guilt and shame of a dissociated society that too often refuses and mocks effort, DIY innovation, and self-governance, even when those endeavor to keep us alive and buying H.P Lovecraft-themed swag as the Knighscope watches from outside a window.
Galaga, fun but dated…
Easier challenges to conquer were the extraterrestrial enemies in Galaga, one of the many arcade games available that didn’t need quarters — I’m not sure if the games were part of the hotel or the convention, but I think the latter. Lighter fare.
As the night wore on, I checked out the ballroom. Looked like a carbon copy of the one I saw at Conflation in St. Louis circa 2014. It had a bar. It had a dance floor. It did not, however, have a human DJ [see correction at top of post—there was a human DJ, one by the pseudonym of mcbaud300—note added Apr. 8, 2024]. The DJ was some unseen robot — a sign touted this fact. The beautiful people danced and danced; for a few minutes, I watched from afar, before turning around to leave.
Photo of mcbaud300 that night by Michael Citrak (added Apr. 8, 2024)
Likely I would have had more fun had I attended more panels, literary-focused ones, or participated in events specifically designed to facilitate socializing. There was a Speed Friending event I should have tried, where attendees converse one-on-one with a line of others for a few moments each, discussing interests, seeing if they might want to hang out more after the event. There were many rounds of charades I failed to attend as well, among them one on a Star Trek theme, which sounded really fun. Maybe some other time, some other life.
Concludingin the lounge
One area I enjoyed, and returned to often, was Norwescon’s lounge: essentially two hotel rooms, connected by a door, emptied out in favor of tables and chairs, free chips and soda, and other comforts. People — most, probably fifty years of age and up — gathered around in conversation, many already knowing each other. One told the heartbreaking story of how she’d lost her son due to a drunk driver. All the bureaucratic transportation department studies, good or bad, would turn to ash in the face of such a recounting. A while later, an older guy in a brown Jedi robe demonstrated the lightsaber he’d built, modeled after Luke Skywalker’s in the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special. I of course gravely intoned: I see you have constructed a new lightsaber.
The lounge spawned a few random encounters with people my own age-ish, and as I got to know them a tad, I observed a certain pattern I’ve seen before. Namely, when they asked my background in science fiction and fantasy, and I began talking of my writing it during Clarion West Writers Workshop and in the subsequent few years, their attentive eyes focused on me — they seemed not a little impressed: Here we have an author on our hands! Then I explained that, though magazine acquisition editors were quite complimentary of my work, I never managed to sell any stories and partially as a result, transitioned to focusing on investigative journalism for roughly a decade, despite my druthers. That made their gaze drop, their hands fiddle with a phone or piece of candy. Then, once I said how recently, I’ve resumed fiction-writing, still without selling anything but with a better understanding of the world — now their eyes would look at me, again interested, albeit less so than at first. You can really feel an audience — even just one person in a casual conversation — drifting in and out of interest, reducing or increasing the amount of approval they’re expressing in reaction to your words.
Of course, at an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, the reverse would happen: I’d talk of journalism publications to the lounge listener’s interest, then switch to discussing fiction-writing and at once get the silent you lost me, what’s that squirrel outside doing? While people naturally and rightfully have different interests, at Norwescon I couldn’t escape the sense of a terrible siloing taking place. Science fiction at this convention. Journalism at that convention. CDC COVID-19 policies over yonder. Belarusian dictator, trail off. Knightscope surveillance, trail off. Tactics beyond begging Congressfools, trail off. If no one faces up to that which determines our lives — governance, spy agencies, propaganda, the sharing or censorship of knowledge — then a shrug, for if all that remains for the triumph of evil is for good people to say they work so they deserve to just be happy, doormatting for injustices is (mostly) your right in the marketplace, even when the consequences harm everyone. The phallic toy weapons notwithstanding, inaction (or the milquetoast minimum) doesn’t really match the morals presented in the beloved science fiction and fantasy novels, but magically holds court nonetheless, all that dissociated guilt and shame and fear.
The fun conversations, the vitality between lonely souls sharing obscure interests, guarded by walls the outside of which includes a recent auto-coup attempt… With such threats largely unchallenged — yes, I know the news says it’s all under control, just as they did before the 2016 general election — conventions like Norwescon may have fewer and fewer attendees, no new blood. Every time I turn around in Seattle, another business closes, so will science fiction conventions suffer the same fading, fading away?
I asked above what science fiction could do from within to combat the robots assailing the genre from without. It’s as if there’s a monstrous, metalmade elephant in the room with no one’s face, and yet everyone’s face, attenuating anyone’s attempts to initiate efforts or escalate them into radical approaches. But the only superheroes within the hotel walls are us. As if the New Wave of Science Fiction never ended, I could have belted out Tell us more! when the space historian alluded to Lukashenko; someone could put together panels about tactics, mutualaid, strikes, boycotts, the provisioning of alternativegovernance; attendees in lounges could discuss ideas, and goals, and steps to get there for whatever problems — drunk drivers, out-of-control AI, space debris, or even the Justice Department’s endangerment of Sci-Hub and its founder Alexandra Elbakyan. Just going along as done in the past is robotic. Forging a human future requires not obeying the siloes — nor activism-scolding roommates, spouses, co-workers — but building bridges between concerns and perhaps even organizing new kinds of conventions, full of surprises.
Science fiction, involved in the future, a metaphorical realm where Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard does something about injustices other than sit on his hands gloating about don’t think too harddon’t care too much — all the threats the genre and the world face today, the roving surveillance bots, the AIs, the pandemics, the international spy agency subterfuge, even censorship of the genre’s Hugo Awards affecting big names such as Neil Gaiman and confirmed to have global political motives — they all have a science fictional flavor. Recall William Gibson’s remark to the effect that, for understanding the 21st century, reading 20th-century science fiction is a wonderful toolkit. But it doesn’t help much to merely understand, say, the chemical formula of some corporate poison if it completely kills you. To combat injustice, to protect ourselves, we have to cease existing primarily as escapist voyeurs, and actually take risks, actually open up the toolkit, actually use the tools.
I’m glad I went. Maybe someday I’ll go again, see what’s new, in the future.
My Norwescon badge hanging at home in my apartment
Previously unpublished surveillance image of Trump co-defendant Misty Hampton outside the Coffee County elections office on Dec. 15, 2020.
Today I emailed a PDF letter to the Coffee County Commissioners, the Board of Elections and Registration, the election supervisor, the county administrator, the County and/or elections board’s legal representation—Jennifer Herzog and Tony Rowell for Hall Booth Smith; Ben Perkins and Wes Rahn for Oliver Maner—and the only newsman in the otherwise news desert county, editor of Douglas Now Robert Preston. I separately sent the letter to multiple Coffee County residents who have a history of boldly speaking out during public meetings.
The four-page letter does what this blog post’s headline says. On Dec. 19 of last year, the Daily Dot published my latest investigative article, of some 4000 words. It concerns a federal lawsuit over procuring the county’s records related to the infamous elections office breach, most memorably the missing silver laptop used at work for years by then-election supervisor and now Trump co-defendant Misty Hampton. Also on Dec. 19, I self-published a blog post with additional important information cut from the article due to length considerations. My letter takes three revelations from the article, and some information from the blog post—mostly, truths I uncovered about the county not coughing up records—and compressed them down to bullet points for the county leaders’ convenience.
Of the many goals here, one of them is for Coffee County to produce all records from the breach, its run-up, and its aftermath (another interesting goal is Hudson’s proposal; see the article and blog post for more on that one). The unprecedented elections office intrusions in Coffee County were part of an unprecedented campaign planned by top Trumpers, even Trump himself, to arrange for technicians/operatives to make, and take off with, exact copies of the voting software still used across the battleground state of Georgia and myriad jurisdictions beyond. Amplifying this information, sending it to editors, or even advancing it in some useful way (via phone calls, emails, records requests, digging in trash bins outside Dominion Voting Systems offices, et cetera) might, I don’t know, affect some sort of huge upcoming election thing and (more important than that outcome) the narratives we are made to tell ourselves about it. Yeah, seems like there’s something happening later this year on the 5th of November, what could it be again? Remember remember…
Without further ado, the PDF letter as a fancy embed (or download):
Misty Hampton in the Coffee County elections office with the silver laptop, Feb. 22, 2021
Note: All four surveillance images in this post, previously unpublished, are published here for the first time.
Today the Daily Dot published my new investigative article, entitled EXCLUSIVE: A missing laptop could be key to prosecuting Trump. This rural Georgia county only recently admitted that it exists. Prior to publication, I worked on it for about half a year.
Some material was cut to make the article shorter and more focused on the missing silver laptop.
However, of the cut passages, I can post below as paragraphs in a bullet-point list the ones that are, in my view, urgent and important. Think of them as DVD extras showing you deleted scenes from the theatrical release.
To be serious, I believe it might help residents of Coffee County—in the swing state of Georgia—as well as interested people elsewhere to have access to this information immediately. Without further ado:
Here’s a summary of the breach by the federal judge presiding over Curling v. Raffensperger, Amy Totenberg in the Northern District of Georgia.
For her account of the intrusions, Totenberg drew on cybersecurity experts’ declarations—including their review of computer forensics and the surveillance footage—in a Nov. 10, 2023 ruling: the breach included “various individuals and entities (1) providing and gaining unauthorized access to Coffee County voting equipment, data, and software over the course of multiple dates; (2) copying, downloading, and imaging the County’s equipment, data, and software; (3) uploading and sharing that data and software on the internet via a file-sharing website; and (4) further distributing physical copies of forensic voting material downloaded from Coffee County.” (Online distribution was via private access, not public internet.)
Some, notably Coffee breach-funding lawyer and onetime Trump lieutenant Sidney Powell, who has pleaded guilty, have tried to justify the intrusions by claiming the elections board approved the electronic collection of the computers’ contents. They offer insufficient documentation to support this claim; further, no board quorum has ever been found to have authorized copying the elections data nor does the security video show any quorum in the elections office during the breach. In a deposition, then-Board of Elections chair Wendell Stone denied that the board gave permission to examine their systems. The civil disobedience or altruism arguments sometimes made are undercut by the plundered proprietary voting software, almost three years later, having never reached the public, nor rival political campaigns, only the breachers’ allies, as far as can be determined.
If the subpoenas lawsuit is successful, it might spell out why the county’s public statements, which have focused on Hampton, have been so careful not to mention by name then-elections board member Eric Chaney, who was caught on film participating in the breach. “I didn’t do anything without the direction of Eric Chaney,” Hampton said in deposition. The plaintiffs in the subpoenas case go further, saying Chaney, who has not been charged, “warned Ms. Hampton of her impending termination the evening before” and characterizing him as a “key participant[] in planning and executing the breach.”
A letter that counsel for the plaintiffs in the subpoenas case sent to county attorneys in April and filed this month argues that crucial Eric Chaney-related records were improperly withheld by county manager Wesley Vickers and senior county lawyer Tony Rowell, a pair multiple interviewees described to me as the area’s de facto diarchy.
Examples of how the lawyers seem to have more power than the people they represent:
Listening to their lawyer Ben Perkins discuss legal issues at their Nov. 14 meeting, every elections board member said they were not informed of the desktop seizure before it happened, which he told them their then-underling, former election supervisor Rachel Roberts, had been involved in. Ernestine Thomas-Clark, who has long sat on the board, asked the lawyer to clarify how they could in theory terminate him when they hadn’t hired him. Fireable like any board vendor, Perkins was retained by county manager Vickers this June—an appointment some members have described as appearing out of nowhere one day, without their input or vote, something Perkins acknowledged in the meeting. Except for the two initial Oct. 24 motions, he has provided lawsuit filings to board members only when asked, according to board members who told me such requests were rare.
Surveillance footage—procured by Coalition for Good Governance despite months of Coffee claiming it had been irrevocablylost— shows senior county lawyer Tony Rowell in December 2020 meetings with people who would go on to participate in the breach. The plaintiffs’ analysis of the video shows that prior to the intrusions, Rowell spent hours and hours in the elections office with, among others, Misty Hampton, Eric Chaney, Ed Voyles, and Cathy Latham. Voyles, who has not been charged in the Georgia-Trump RICO case, chaired the elections board two years prior to the meetings. Latham, like Hampton a Trump co-defendant who has pleaded not guilty, chaired the Coffee Republican party at the time of the intrusions. Also a Trump fake elector (imposter in the Electoral College process), Latham was in a position to have possibly connected Coffee County with MAGA D.C. shortly before the breach.
Misty Hampton, Ed Voyles, and holding the coffee mug, Tony Rowell, in the elections office, Dec. 3, 2020
Ed Voyles (seated), Eric Chaney, Tony Rowell (holding cup) in elections office, Dec. 10, 2020
The Coffee County Commissioners, almost never mentioned in discussions on the breach and the most powerful county executives under law, have the ability to fire their vendor Hall Booth Smith—including Tony Rowell—and county manager Vickers, though not Oliver Maner (the elections board’s vendor for legal services). I repeatedly contacted all five commissioners with questions on the subpoenas lawsuit and a CCTV still of the silver laptop, asking if they’re satisfied with the performance of the county’s de facto diarchy. County commissioner Jimmy Kitchens told me “I have no comment”; county commissioner Oscar Paulk deferred to legal counsel Tony Rowell. The other three commissioners never responded.
In Judge Totenberg’s same Nov. 10, 2023 ruling, she concisely addressed the underexamined cybersecurity plight of state voting systems and the possible ripple effects of the breach: “The importance of the security, reliability, and functionality of state election systems, classified by the U.S. Homeland Security Department as critical national infrastructure, cannot be overstated in a world where cybersecurity challenges have exponentially increased in the last decade. The dynamics of how a breach in one part of a cyber system may potentially carry cybersecurity reverberations for the entire system for years to come exemplifies the important concerns raised in this case.”
The Curling v. Raffensperger plaintiffs seek to force the swing state of Georgia to (on the vote capture side) abandon mandatory electronic ballots and in most circumstances use hand-marked paper ones, that will (on the vote tallying side) still be scanned by computers but always audited.
The GBI report (critique; critique) omits reference to the silver Hewlett Packard altogether and instead, any laptops it mentions are either nondescript or an old black Toshiba. Their report acknowledges that the Toshiba had last been used in 2015—the Obama era, and thus not relevant to the breach, the run-up to it, or the aftermath, except as a red herring that the county many times brought up in place of the silver laptop.
Also per the GBI report, in August 2022, surrounded by three of his lawyers—including Rowell of the de facto diarchy—recently resigned elections board chair Wendell Stone refused to participate when the Bureau tried to interview him in person. Then, making his public statement in June 2023, Stone promised “transparent” elections to the locals in front of him—but did not share that eight days earlier, the GBI had seized their elections office desktop.
Local lawyer Jim Hudson’s proposal for independent and possibly pro bono counsel and the idea of asking the Department of Justice for help are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Hudson’s idea, while nebulous to some ears, at best would allow those most affected by the intrusions—Coffee voters—to participate in a bottom-up inquiry into all aspects of the breach and its aftermath, aided by the independent counsel and able to notify the Justice Department of any criminality discovered. The Department of Justice, by contrast, boasts multistate range and federal muscle, but without a strong defense of the local public interest in place, they would risk being seen, fairly or not, as just another set of politicized outsiders, at worst sparking more resentment than repair.
A November poll in the New York Times shows Trump ahead of President Joe Biden in five of six battleground states, including Georgia. Legally, nothing prevents an incarcerated individual from running for president, nor indeed, from serving as president. However, the Supreme Court might affirm state or local officials disqualifying Trump due to his inciting of the Jan.6 auto-coup attempt. If not, my guess is, Mar-a-Lago house arrest would be set up for such a presidency.
My final two paragraphs from an earlier iteration of the article:
With bold leadership missing like a silver laptop, jitters about the GBI or other law enforcement behind every Eastern red cedar—paranoid or justified—proliferate; simultaneously, the known extent of the Trumpers’ multistate breach plot grows, reminding voters from coast to coast that their jurisdiction could have been hit. “Scared to death” Matthew McCullough, fulminating against the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, must not be the only Coffee County official afraid “to go to jail.”
Aside from the immense force of the breach records lawsuit and its costs, it seems the only way the county’s status quo will change is if the region’s residents, perhaps in conjunction with the DOJ, perhaps aided by Hudson’s vision for independent counsel, reshape the area’s stepped landscape of power themselves. The Trump era cannot be locked up by any prosecutor, nor can it be compartmentalized away with the click of a television remote—the healing of truth and reconciliation would be more realistic. Cyber–vulnerable Election 2024 is less than a year away. Self-governance requires effort.
Misty Hampton with the silver laptop in the elections office, Dec. 15, 2020
This blog post, Extra material for my Daily Dot investigative article about Coffee County, Georgia missing laptop likely relevant to Curling and Trump cases, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2023/12/19/extra-material-dailydot-investigative-article-laptop/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Please feel free to discuss this post (or the underlying article) in the comments section below, but if you’re seeking permissions beyond the scope of the license, or want to correspond with me about this post (or the article) one on one, email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!
On August 3, I woke to see on my smartphone a text from David Shedd, a retired career intelligence officer who started at the CIA as an intern decades ago and climbed the ranks to senior management, even meeting with Obama face to face in 2008 to discuss continuing the agency’s torture program. Why is a lifelong spy who also headed the Defense Intelligence Agency messaging me at five in the morning? He’s as spooky as anybody in international espionage: he was on the transition team of organized crime-linked Donald Trump, he’s on faculty at Patrick Henry University — a Creationist school requiring all students and staff to attest that the Bible is their deity’s inerrant word — and who knows what else. And now he’s in my texts.
Back to back in 2018, I wrote one article, for Buffalo’s Daily Public, and contributed to the writing of another, at Boing Boing, regarding video footage Shedd ordered censored that year. So that’s why I’m on his radar generally. But all that was more than four years ago. Why ping me now?
First, some background to contextualize his odd message.
The Backstory
Left to right on the whistleblowing panel: Heather Marsh, moderator Laali Vadlamani, David Shedd, Ewen MacAskill
On February 27, 2018, the Oxford Union held, then censored at Shedd’s demand, a three-person panel on the very topic of whistleblowing. Here in the United States we don’t hear much about this debating society, but in the United Kingdom the Oxford Union is a huge deal: not only have Malcolm X, Winston Churchill, and additional historic figures spoken there, but over the years three of their student presidents have become U.K. prime ministers. A few months ago, one of the planet’s biggest newspapers offered the headline: How the Oxford Union created today’s ruling political class.
The controversial panel, held in the forum’s Goodman Library, consisted of philosopher and human rights activist Heather Marsh, longtime Guardian reporter Ewen MacAskill, and Shedd. Toward the end of the evening, the spy didn’t fare well in a back-and-forth with Marsh about torture and other subjects involving how hurting people in shadowy cages is bad actually, so with a politican’s pettiness, Shedd told the Union never to release the video recording. Marsh and her lawyers contend the Union is contractually obliged to upload the film as promised to youtube, which they’ve so far failed to do. The handful of photos they posted don’t count.
Marsh, Shedd debating during panel. Her friend is former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Omar Khadr.
A few months later, Marsh became a whistleblower herself, posting audio of her portion of the panel as well as a transcript. She wrote an accompanying analysis of the censorship, too, discussing how free speech for corporations, predators, and tyrants is shrilly upheld but the words of women and other marginalized people against the powerful are regularly shut down. When the Oxford Union bills itself as the “world’s most prestigious debating society” and the “last bastion of free speech” — then agrees to third party censorship of their own footage of a panel on whistleblowing — the society reveals its ultimate loyalty to the likes of Shedd making up the protection racket that today’s governance amounts to, where the arch-abusers run wild, occasionally promising security and belonging to the gullible who surrender their self and become obedient.
Learning of Marsh defeating Shedd, and Shedd’s subsequent censorship demand, I decided to cover the story and bought phone numbers for the his homes so I could ask him for comment. Through public records sites, personally identifiable information of just about anyone in the United States, king or streetsweeper, is available online legally in exchange for lucre. I politely called the Shedd-associated numbers, which did not include the one he texted me from. His wife — I think that’s who answered — came to the phone, but didn’t put him on the line. “Stop with the harassing phone calls!” she said, though I’d been well mannered, and though her husband had been a senior manager at a notorious worldwide purveyor of waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation — you know, harassing people, to say the least.
Marsh, Shedd debating during panel. Read more about ICE.
Politely seeking comment is harassment? They clearly have an outsize sense of persecution. I simply wanted to ask him straightforward questions such as Mr Shedd, should I describe you in my article as petulant? Or do you prefer petty? How about sore loser? Anyway, my calls to his homes were the only contact I’ve ever had with Clan Shedd, and since I didn’t get ahold of the man himself, I’d never had contact with him until his weird SMS. It’s a routine thing: journalist writing article requests comment; doesn’t hear back. But more than four years later, a sudden text?
To finish up the backstory, note that while the Oxford Union student newspaper mentioned the controversy in 2018, and so did the World Socialist Web Site that same year (one; two; three; four), nobody else — besides me (with my in-depth reporting), Marsh, and social media supporters — has uttered a peep. Even Ewen MacAskill, the third panelist, has said nothing from his perch on good terms with the highly influential Guardian newspaper. Likely that’s because in the aftermath of the censorship, the Oxford Union gave MacAskill a paid lecture series to talk to audiences about, you guessed it, whistleblowing. You see, experts on whistleblowing don’t talk about censorship they know of. They keep quiet like good puppies awaiting treats. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Now fast-forward to this summer, what triggered Shedd to contact me out of the blue.
Why now?
In the time frame of Shedd’s message, two things were occuring that might have prompted him to send me his strange little note.
One: Unbeknownst to me until late August, the Oxford Union in July asked Marsh to give a solo talk, something she wrote about today on her Patreon in a public post. She asked if they’d post the panel video — with Shedd blurred and muted if necessary, something they’ve done before when an individual didn’t want her performance published. In response, the Union ghosted Marsh. Presumably the debating society, following up on her question, asked Shedd if he’d change his mind, and the hierarch must have said No. And had nothing better to do than text a freelance journalist deceptively — petty and petulant and a sore loser — worrying about how all this is going to reflect on his legacy. Silverbacks like Shedd love legacy: parades, presidental libraries, pyramids. Retired and aging, he must fear the facts around February 27, 2018 will correctly tarnish his status in history. Books and articles are routinely published that trumpet Shedd (and separately, the Oxford Union), so he’s accustomed to accolades, not dissent.
Subterfuge Shedd losing debate
The other: On an ongoing basis I have for years submitted pieces to mainstream and alternative media sites that either focus on, or include, Shedd’s censorship. Revelation of the facts in a large venue would greatly help impute guilt to Shedd in the public record so he can accordingly be shunned and feel shame, unless of course his emotional processing is atrophied, which it probably is from aiding in the command of the CIA. That organization has a long history of propagandistic manipulations of the media. See for instance Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein’s 1977 Rolling Stonedeep dive on the topic addressing cover-ups of how the United States news media “worked hand in glove with the Central Intelligence Agency.” All that said — to indicate the water I’m swimming in — I have no evidence, nor even intuition, that anything illicit has happened with my freelancing, but it’s within the realm of possibility somebody at such a venue told somebody who told somebody who told somebody a freelancer named Doug is still working on winning amplification for this story, and it reached Shedd’s ears.
With the 2018 and 2022 contexts established, let’s scrutinize the spy’s missive.
Scaredy cat’s sneak attack
Good morning Ed. This is David Shedd writing from our new place in south Florida in response to your wonderful update letter. Before writing more, I want to make sure that you get this note and the text works. Warm regards, David
The message arrived at 5:20 a.m. Pacific time (I’m in Seattle). Assuming he was actually in Florida, that would be 8:20 a.m. Eastern. Pretty early to shoot off a mysterious communiqué — maybe he was in a bad mood, rising on the wrong side of the bed after earlier listening to the Oxford Union ask his permission to publish the video. Since he apparently controls them now and apparently told them No way.
I have no idea who Ed is, if anyone. In December 2020, Shedd authored an op-ed titled “Edward Snowden Should Not Get A Pardon Under Any Circumstances,” so I don’t think Shedd means him.
Shedd on the debate panel he lost
As stated above, I’d never before seen this (703) 408-2506 number, but it’s a northeastern Virginia area code where the CIA is located some ten miles from D.C. And my trusty public records services confirmed it belongs to David R. Shedd. Now I have a convenient number to call him at in case I need to request comments again. And so do you.
Regarding Shedd obtaining my phone number, maybe he paid for public records too, maybe he successfully stored my digits for over four years and put in the effort to move them to his (703) 408-2506 device, or maybe, as I documented the Austin-based private spy firm Stratfor assisting with in an unrelated but similar matter, he called a friend with access to surveillance databases and got it that way, saved himself a few bucks. He spearheaded the 2008 revisions to Executive Order 12333, which outlines when and how federal intelligence agencies may spy, so I’m sure he knows multiple ways to grab someone’s digits.
Here’s the big question. Why the deception gambit? The message asks the recipient to respond to confirm the connection is good. Why not just address me as Douglas and say … what exactly? Stop talking about me getting whopped in that debate?
Surely after more than four years, it was no mere pocket-dial or oopsident. If you’ve spent time reading leaked cables between government agents and the like, you know they pick words carefully and stamp security classifications on their papers and all that jazz. Somebody in the spy-versus-spy, backstabber-versus-backstabber world of meetings in the White House and the intelligence agencies is probably going to take his communications pretty seriously especially in light of Marsh concurrently asking the Oxford Union to release the recording.
To understand this better, let’s turn to the spy glossary created by that Austin firm Stratfor, sometimes called a “shadow CIA,” staffed with former military, former intelligence agency spooks, and an assistant to corporations in defending against activists. They define disinformation in part as “A plausible story designed to confuse the other side or to create an uncomfortable political situation.” Pinging the system means in part “Emitting information that is designed to be intercepted by the other side. Usual purpose: figure out their response patterns. Other uses, confusing the other side.” In short, subterfuge is a way of life for these people, including propaganda and manipulation of media like freelance journalists. They’re not serving the public honestly; they’re serving the shareholders and themselves; so why expect a message from a straight shooter?
My guess is Shedd, too timid to use his own name, was trying to bait me into responding, and/or stress me out: I’m watching. CIA is watching. But if you ask them for comment, they’ll just say I must have dialed the wrong number. Hahaha!
Since vanishingly few have ever published about the whistleblowing panel censorship, you have to wonder who else besides the Oxford Union Shedd is intimidating. He’s not stopping me.
David Shedd keeps losing
Such childish antics are among the activities of egregious human rights-violating hierarchs — when they’re not losing debates. Because on their side, they don’t have the truth. He prefers propaganda and fears the facts.
If Shedd’s goal was to scare me, he failed. Fragile Shedd lost again. Whatever the CIA (or Stratfor) may say, protection rackets for the highest bidders, as Marsh pointed out on the panel, aren’t security. As she said, “security is strong involved and supportive communities networked with other communities.” When I moved to Seattle in 2016, I began participating with local chapters of the Hearing Voices Network and Food Not Bombs. These egalitarian movements — and more associations with genuine activists — have afforded me close friends who, unlike many among the civilian/loyalist population, understand my work and show up to support me regularly or when something spooky happens like Shedd’s text. Protective, interlocking horizontal networks turned Shedd’s grenade into a grape bouncing off me harmlessly.
I think, somehow, one day, the whistleblowing video will be released. And then Shedd will have an opportunity to realize he’s not entitled to exceptional treatment. It’s not just his lifelong subterfuge that he tried to deploy on me. I think he’s also trying to fool himself. The longer the footage stays secret, the more easily he — and the public — can follow the head-in-sand, pro-impunity bipartisan philosophy of “look forward, not back” to avoid facing the truths Marsh (and others) have brought forward about our real legacy of torture, governance protection rackets, and so many more injustices. And the more petty and petulant Shedd’s sore loser legacy becomes.
Note: In 2021, I wrote a new blog post every weekend or so. I skipped Week 51 for various reasons. But here’s the final entry for this year, number 52!
In 2021, I blogged for an entire year consistently for the first time in my life. I wrote a new entry each and every weekend, pretty much. The effort totaled 42 posts.
This post describes what I learned from the experience as well as my writing plans for 2022. Then in closing, a list of all 42 posts from 2021 with their titles and hyperlinks; the ones I recommend most are in bold.
What I learned from a year of blogging
Year 2021 completed
Before 2021, I wrote blog posts often, but I was either rusty (years back) or simply hadn’t yet managed to pull off a full year of nonfiction blogging (2020). That’s now changed with my completed year of blogging in 2021.
My blog entries this year have usually been about matters of social significance … except in many ways, I wrote them for me, primarily to improve my blogging skills and consistency. Putting together an entry remains a lot of underpaid/unpaid work—often a single post, when all is said and done, eats up an entire weekend—but it no longer feels particularly overwhelming. Nowadays I’m confident I can bust out such a blog post easily. Might feel sleep deprived and a bit out-of-body after making phone calls and staring at PDF details for ten hours straight, but such mild nuisances are at this point mere matters of routine.
Regarding writing craft. Readers have told me they don’t have much time to read my posts, what with crumbs to clean and kids to feed. They’ve asked for shorter posts. And I have been shifting toward providing shorter entries. Plus, I usually now include reader-friendly subheads and try to stick to a single point or two, or at least mark where my train of thought diverts to a side topic. That wasn’t the case when I began in January, but now it thankfully is.
Another big lesson I learned was how important the under-the-hood elements of a blog are. For example, this year, for the first time in half a decade, I updated the blogroll (list of links on the right side). To oversimplify, online writers shifted from the blogosphere to social media half a decade or more ago, but now we seem to be returning, at least a very little, to individual URLs, so it was time to spiff mine up. I added, across my website (here and here specifically), images of publicity I’ve received over a decade-plus from various venues. I scrutinized my whole website to upgrade hyperlinks from HTTP to HTTPS. I improved the leave-a-comment area to hopefully make it more enticing for readers to use. For instance, it now optionally sends you a notification email after I approve your comment following its initial hold in the moderation queue. All that stuff took not exactly gigantic, but still significant, amounts of time.
Many of my posts include original research, the result of excitedly engaging sheer curiosity. While writing about the Belarusian dictatorship declaring opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya a terrorist, to take one example of dozens, I found the Belarusian KGB’s online Excel spreadsheet (since taken down) where you could see her designation on Sheet 1, Row 730. It’s my hope that readers might share my curiosity and click through to see such a crazy spreadsheet, and thereby become more invested in themselves (their own curiosity, passion, etc.) as well as in the Belarusian pro-democracy resistance that involves the United States too. Hopefully such research—even if some items, like the online KGB spreadsheet, aren’t exactly revelations—makes my posts unique in a field where journalistic competitors often offer nothing more than speculation. I remembered what I already knew from a decade ago, my days of pouring through Stratfor emails, that it takes quite a lot of time to conduct such research and fit it into a post, especially since researchers never know ahead of time for sure what they will or won’t find.
I don’t like the dumbed-down approach, even if it would generate dolla dolla bill. Yet I’m having to slowly drag myself in that direction, kicking and screaming, since this blog made, in 2021, less than $20 USD in donations. Bear with me for a moment; I’m not going to complain, just point out some facts that impact whether this blog will continue, not in 2022, but in 2023. Too often, audiences haven’t deigned to consider any story wherein they themselves might need to change, including when it comes to forking over cash; since in the blog relationship, audiences monopolize the power of the purse, that leaves us with a story about how independent content creators should alone bear the burden of changing. Have you tried Patreon? Are you on Medium? I’ve heard people are having success on Substack, why aren’t you there yet? When I do comply with those requests, audiences typically move the goalposts, mentioning yet another site they expect me to add a profile to instead of opening their wallets. In the final analysis, just as audiences are slow to change from banal complicity with oligarchs to amazing resistance against them, so they’re likewise slow to warm up to the idea that they could deliver donations instead of unsolicited advice about how I might could milk donations out of some other third party. Well, authors have been complaining, er not complaining, about this for only hundreds of years. And besides, blogging, even unpaid, is a much better way to spend time than being forced to work in a mine or not having any freedom of expression. It’s just, when I leave the United States for the Netherlands in mid- to late 2022 if they approve my business plan (under the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty), there’s every reason to think I just might have to quit blogging in 2023 due to lack of income from it.
I’ve ghostwritten oodles of content marketing pieces in the past decade and I’ve recently begun a highly regarded content marketing certification course—but I hope not to revamp my blog in that style. Thankfully, even putting out verbose, meandering posts routinely led to or at least likely facilitated additional opportunities for me this year, including giving a talk at a college hacker club and a quite sizable, important venue commissioning a nonfiction essay from me for 2022. And I’m not much for another option sometimes seen: the telegraphic, truncated style of listing seemingly endless human rights violations. I hope some readers find the variety of subject matters, quotations, history, literature, etc., threaded together in my posts a valuable and somewhat unique sales point rather than an erroneous lack of message discipline.
Readers separate blogs from diaries, as, uh, Castlevania reminds us …
Speaking of impact, that was the best thing about this year of blogging. In a handful of instances, individuals contacted me, perhaps people I hadn’t heard from in a long time, asking for more information about something in one of my posts. Because of a June entry, for example, pharmaceutical consumers who’d never heard of how and why to use compounding pharmacies until my writings are now getting their pills in custom dosages, whereas they were previously limited to the manufacturers’ increments due to fog of war, lack of knowledge. When I wrote about the Belarusian KGB’s murder of Andrei Zeltser, an employee of a Pennsylvania-based IT firm who like that company opposed the Lukashenko dictatorship, I wrote about how his wife Maryja Uspenskaya, the sole witness to his shoot-out death—about which the regime created propaganda footage that spread around the world—was placed in a psychiatric hospital, with, worryingly, no info available in English about her whereabouts or well-being for more than a month. I mentioned how Uspenskaya had been left off lists of Belarusian political prisoners. The day after my entry, the opposition leader herself tweeted to recognize Maryja Uspenskaya as a political prisoner. (Progress on her case still needs to be made.) The point of these examples is not to humble-brag but to show that, instead of centering a career/life on complying with corporate publishers, DIY bloggers can have impact, so why not try it yourself? And definitely, much thanks to everyone who’s been reading this blog, commenting, contacting me, sharing the entries, critiquing, donating, and more. That’s what separates a blog from a diary.
My writing plans for 2022
There’s more I need to do for my website on the technical side of things. In terms of design, readers understandably want something formatted well on their phones and tablets. I could make improvements there. I need to install and regularly use better analytics so I can observe factually what’s happening with reader traffic, not just imagine things in my needy head. Probably I should provide chatty video with screensharing graphics of open records requests and the like; in 2021, I did start a youtube channel.
In 2022, I’ll aim to post on the same day—maybe even at the same time—every week, as that consistency would probably increase audience loyalty and prevent audience attrition. For the United States, Sunday mornings would likely be best, meaning I could write and line everything up on Saturday, then do a final revision in the morning after a night of sleeping on the prose, then click publish and shoot off the teed-up social media posts.
In 2021, I took off several weekends—ten, to be exact—but some additional weeks I took halfway off, so to speak, putting up short “placeholder” posts instead of leaving the blog blank of new entries. In 2022, I want to hit all 52 Sundays, even if some entries will be very short. That consistency will let you know you can tune in at the same bat time, same bat channel, every single weekend.
I’ll make my final decisions on these matters in the next workweek, but in short, douglaslucas.com/blog will continue more or less as is for 2022, just with the above changes in the pipeline. I’ll even keep the same Note: In 202x… intro, except modified for 2022!
My big news for 2022, however, is that I’ll start writing and self-publishing new flash fiction! That means each item will be 1000 words or less. My web hosting service told me DouglasLucas.com can have more than one WordPress blog installation. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to say hello and leave comments at a new subfolder of this site, probably douglaslucas.com/fiction/2022, which doesn’t exist just yet. At first—in January 2022 and perhaps in February 2022—I’ll simply make available two of my already completed “trunk” stories (old stories) that haven’t ever been published, self- or otherwise. I’ll get the new fiction blog configured and maybe write up some of my research into northeast Oregon and the year 2036, the setting of some of my forthcoming fiction. But the main focus will be new flash fiction pieces. They might or might not connect with my 2036 setting (still thinking that through).
The 2022 fiction blog will mainly be intended to do for my fiction-writing what my 2021 nonfiction blog did for my nonfiction-writing. Get me accustomed to quickly and consistently creating what one of my creative writer friends, Aelius Blythe, calls literary graffiti fiction. To that end, I’ll probably use plot formula, standard tropes, prefab characterizations (e.g., Star Trek characters as in fanfic), and so on. The 2022 fiction blog isn’t supposed to win any prizes; it’s supposed to be fun; it’s supposed to repair the rust on my fiction-writing gears. Though you can still comment, share, donate, etc. if you want! I’ll try to engage a visual artist(s) to sketch. Maybe each entry can have a single, quickly sketched image at the top.
And while the 2022 nonfiction blog (this one) will continue mostly in the same vein as in 2021, I hope to focus more on original investigative journalism work, although that might end up in other-published places since I have some sneaky biz ideas for commissions. Whether the original investigative journalism work is self-published here or other-published, some of my posts here, whatever the content, will remain defiantly noodly, philosophical, random, simply about the moments of our strangely global lives …
List of all 42 posts from 2021
Behold, listed below, all 42 of my 2021 blog posts. The 22 in bold are the entries I most recommend. And what’s this? Ahem, that’s my donation page! So that you and I and anyone else can continue enjoying this site without paywalls, without advertisements, without wrong walls ….
Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 50 of 52.
On October 27, I gave an in-person talk to the University of Washington computer security club Batman’s Kitchen. The presentation was simultaneously virtual over Zoom. I obtained the video file back a bit, but was busy substitute-teaching at the local youth jail for three weeks; that assignment completed Friday, I’m today making the video available, right above!
The title of the talk on the first slide, Hacktivism meets journalism (or something like that), is a little misleading. Because of time constraints—I created the presentation in a hurry, within something like a 48-hour period—the majority of the material I provide is actually intellectual history as it applies to people, especially young activists, interested in computer science, including but not limited to those going into the field as a profession.
Some helpful details. The footage is under two hours and fifteen minutes (since hundreds of years of philosophical history can’t particularly be conveyed in a quick monosyllabic bumper sticker slogan). The Questions & Answers section begins at 1:48:12. Download the .MP4 file or the powerpoint if you like. I’ve added this event to both the in the media page and the front page of this website.
In related news, I created a youtube channel finally, where this Zoom footage may be found. If 100 people subscribe to my nascent youtube channel, where I’ll use words like nascent without apology, I can customize my youtube URL. So whatever you do, don’t hit that like button, and definitely don’t smash subscribe, for we here all believe in reverse psychology.
Next talk, I’ll not waste time with cutesy images of cats and Castlevania—older generations in the United States want those things, but thankfully Gen Z doesn’t need them, I observed—and hopefully cut the metacognitive authorial intrusions that permeate my speech. Minor flaws aside, I hope people learn something from the video! Share as thou wilt.
Even more #PardonRealityWinner progress
Again an Ursula K. Le Guin stamp!
Yesterday, I put into a USPS dropbox my snailmail letter to the federal Office of the Pardon Attorney, advocating for a pardon of Putingate whistleblower Reality Winner, whose story you can read about here (my article from her sentencing), here (my entries about her on this blog), or by following her mother Billie J. Winner-Davis on twitter.
Reality Winner and her whistleblowing to alert everyone regarding Russian military hackers executing, just days before the 2016 elections, cyberattacks against US voting infrastructure, remain of key importance.
Consider, for example, Friday’s Washington Post opinion piece authored by three retired Army generals expressing grave concern that, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, a politically divided US military will be vulnerable to foreign attacks and will see rogue units supporting a successful coup by Trump (or some other reactionary demagogue). “Not a single leader who inspired” the January 6 coup attempt “has been held to account,” they write correctly. While failing to address the country’s private spies and private militias such as those Blackwater members pardoned by Trump, the three retired generals urge convictions for the January 6 conspirators, mandatory civics reviews for Pentagon members (hey throw in some international law while at it!), and coup-based war games along with defensive intelligence work.
Without Air Force veteran Reality Winner, it’s quite possible—maybe even probable—that such a WaPo piece wouldn’t exist, since we’d be living in a universe where Trump would be perceived as a horrible but legitimate ongoing occupant of the White House, akin to how many viewed George W. Bush while he was in office (prior to that war criminal’s latest rehabilitation as an affable, Michelle Obama-hugging grampa).
(Side note: The opinion piece also states: “Imagine competing commanders in chief […] Biden giving orders, versus Trump […] issuing orders as the head of a shadow government.” Well, imagine as well the public heading yet another shadow government that, instead of issuing orders much, horizontally helps one another in everyday ways as we do during natural disasters, another example of regular government breaking down. Imagine that shadow-government-of-the-public recognizing its own power and expanding it. That would be genuine self-governance.)
Achieving a pardon for Reality Winner would send a strong signal domestically and internationally that the United States refuses Trump/Putin-style autocracy. The Office of the Pardon Attorney does give advice to the president regarding pardons in some cases (I don’t yet know the details of that). Plus, whatever intern opens the envelope might start an interesting water cooler discussion, you know? And such things matter.
I based the letter on the one I sent last week (PDF) to Joe Biden; I improved the text overall, too. If you want to use my letter as a basis for your letter to the Office of the Pardon Attorney, clicky-click for a PDF or clicky-click the below embed to read it. You can always share your own beseeching of the Office in the comments below or online elsewhere. Consider using the #PardonRealityWinner hashtag.
Remember, smugly explaining to each other that wisdom means defeatism is out, whereas taking specific, real life, step by step, existent, active-y action yourself to achieve huge prosocial goals is in. If you prefer to be out, well, then just psychology reverse. :)
Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 46 of 52.
You probably remember the name Reality Winner and at least some of her story: in May 2017, when Trump fired then-FBI director James Comey for his investigation into the Putin regime’s interference with the presidential election on behalf of a certain cheeto-colored demagogue, a whistleblower in her twenties leaked a classified document detailing how the Russian military hacked US election systems just days before the November 2016 election. I reported in person from her August 2018 sentencing in Augusta Georgia, where, in the Trump administration’s first espionage case against a domestic whistleblower, Reality Winner was given the longest prison term ever for a disclosure to the media.
This week, news in the United States — whether social, corporate, or other — will likely focus on Reality Winner again since the Bureau of Prisons on Tuesday is changing her status from her current home confinement situation (began June 9) to three years of supervised release, phase similar to the more familiar, state-level term parole, which technically no longer exists on the federal level. Her ankle monitor will finally be removed. Recent and ongoing media of various types continue to focus on her case, especially this week.
As a result of the news, the public may have a lot of questions. This post provides an overview of her case, the leaked document and its implications, as well as the surrounding media discourse, plus definitions of relevant Bureau of Prisons jargon and a menu of actions you can pick from to help Reality Winner gain a pardon, the chief goal her family is calling for help with.
Who’s Reality Winner again? What was that document about?
Reality Winner is an idealistic, intelligent, and altruistic Texan. The two best sources of information about her as a person are probably the 2017 New YorkMagazine profile titled “The World’s Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread” and the twitter feeds of her family: her mother Billie J. Winner-Davis, her sister Brittany Winner, and her (step)father Gary Davis. If you’re interested, follow those accounts, or at least know how to search their tweets. A good rule of thumb for whistleblower cases: get your information not from the social-climbers and co-opters, but from their families, loved ones, and lawyers like Reality Winner’s attorney Alison Grinter. (The whistleblowers themselves are usually under gag orders.)
Beginning of the document Winner leaked
Winner is also an Air Force veteran who, at the time she snailmailed the restricted document to The Intercept, was working for Virginia-based spy contractor Pluribus International. You might know the US spy agencies — rebranded intelligence agencies especially following 1970s revelations of scandals such as Operation Mockingbird — are mostly staffed by contractors, whose trade secrets and other private properties are exempt from public oversight due to the laws of biz. In other words, the so-called intelligence community, its structure if not particular individuals within, is motivated not by public safety, but by profit and worse. For Pluribus International, the multilingual Winner translated into English surveilled terrorist communications from languages such as Farsi and Pashto. As Trump was firing Comey, a secret network board system, akin to a classified version of Reddit and accessible by Pluribus International staff, ranked a certain document highly, indicating wide interest in it.
The document, and The Interceptarticle about it, describes cyberattacks, carried out just days before the 2016 elections, by Russian military hackers against more than 100 local election officials in the United States and at least one U.S. supplier of software used to manage voter rolls in multiple counties. In short, Winner gave everyone information required for self-governance, gave everyone necessary knowledge otherwise unavailable. That includes any voting vendor staff who, without security clearances, would not have been able to access such protective classified information unless it appeared in open discourse. Computer security expert Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, wrote in a June 9, 2017 post on his personal website that the cyberattacks disclosed by Reality Winner “illustrate the real threats and vulnerabilities facing our elections, and they point to solutions.”
Such computer vulnerabilities ultimately show how state, corporate, or other criminal actors (or combinations thereof), anywhere in the world, can manipulate elections, anywhere in the world, to secretly condition the public into believing lies. As philosopher and former Wikileaks Central editor Heather Marsh explains in my article from Winner’s sentencing:
“This document is more than just evidence of Russian interference. In many ways, the US election is a high-profile, long-term investigation into the nature of how democracies work today. Opinions are manipulated by organizations such as Cambridge Analytica in conjunction with intelligence collection by organizations such as Wikistrat. These are problems which have plagued all democracies for years now–Canada’s 2011 voter suppression robocalls and Andrés Sepúlveda’s decade-long manipulation of Latin American elections are two earlier reported examples of modern election interference.”
Marsh’s quotation continues in my article from her sentencing. The public’s understanding of TrumPutin wouldn’t have developed to the extent it did, had Winner not gifted us (and Congress) with the secret document.
In that same article of mine, long-time elections integrity activist Bev Harris explains the cyberattacks described Winner’s in disclosure are part of the same cyberattacks that make up the last count in then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s ’12 Russians’ indictment against the Putin regime’s military hackers. The top prosecutorial agency in the United States issuing an international criminal indictment drawing in part from the deed of this imprisoned whistleblower, an individual in her mid-twenties wrongly called by that same agency’s lawyer Bobby L. Christine “the quintessential example of an insider threat,” suggests, as do many other things, that Winner deserved a medal, not a prison sentence, and at the very least deserves a pardon now.
Sinners in the hands of an angry audience
Reality Winner did nothing wrong
FOX News ran a paint-by-numbers campaign tarring Winner, the arguments of which are easy to dismantle. The TV hosts, typically on whatever forms of speed — just hit pause and look at their eyes; also, how do you think they manage to broadcast nonstop? — raged about how on social media, Winner called Trump an “orange fascist” and messaged her sister about hating America. Besides considering Trump’s actual fascism and horrible things done by the United States (for instance, by the CIA), just imagine for an analogy that you’re waiting at Discount Tire for the mechanics to finish with your car. In the morning, a caffeine-deprived mechanic in the back employee area, perhaps a decorated veteran like Winner, grouses to another mechanic about hating Discount Tire’s early start times and lack of vegan food in the break room. As afternoon arrives, the same mechanic and a third mechanic talk together about how the company does offer them good things too, including the opportunity to tinker with a steady stream of various automobiles. By evening, the mechanic says they have mixed feelings about Discount Tire and the company should make some improvements. That’s essentially what the comments of Winner and everyone else venting about politics on social media boil down to. It isn’t difficult for those outside tunnel vision to understand.
Meanwhile, on the mainstream US left, comfy members of the public have seemingly decided that nothing is possible except voting for evil on un-auditable computerized election infrastructure while making fun of whistleblowers’ unusual names. If horrific human rights violations happen every day and humanity goes extinct, well, the thinking seems to go, at least they got a few more moments to [insert distractions here]. Expecting lifelong entertainment, these audiences will get angry when instead they’re presented with education.
Bottom line, fight for justice: don’t be a newb whose biggest ‘contribution’ this week is shitposting lazy remarks about Reality Winner’s excellent aptronym; instead, learn more about her case (below) and select a way to help her get a pardon (also below).
Recent or ongoing media offering more about the whistleblower and/or the document she disclosed
Photo from stageplay Is This a Room
Reality Winner is the subject of Is This A Room, a new Broadway stageplay based on the transcript of her FBI interrogation, during which she was not Mirandized: she was not read her rights, not for remaining silent, not for a lawyer’s presence. This (il)legal sleight of hand was pulled off in the courtroom by the prosecutors denying the context and insisting Winner “would have felt free to terminate the encounter.” But the eleven FBI agents, each male and almost all of them armed, pressured her in many ways, tantamount to coercion, including by bullying her into the titular seven-by-nine-foot unfurnished back room she told them was “creepy” and “weird.” With her cramped into the claustrophobic space, they blocked the doors and proceeded with the supposedly voluntary interrogation. According to reviews, the stageplay — I’ve yet to see it — reunites the transcript and the context, helping to alter our crazymaking world into something new that actually drives people sane.
(Such isolation and control as the FBI agents’ is similarly employed elsewhere in our lives to produce bogus psuedo-realities. To take one example out of zillions, consider an antidepressant trial started when the COVID-19 pandemic started. How’s the confound of a terrifying pandemic removed from the analysis of the psychopharmaceutical’s efficacy? Likewise, the context of study participants being paid and promised better lives, is likewise snipped out by contractor scientists who sometimes even hold conflict-of-interest patents on the pills in question, since unlike salaried scientists, contractor scientists, akin to those contractors staffing spy agenices, are exempt from disclosure requirements, that is, transparency and accountability requirements.)
Given the success of the stageplay, the Broadway Podcast Network recently launched a series entitled This Is Reality. With more on the way, they presently offer four full episodes, released between October 18 and November 17. I recommend listening for great, up-to-date information about Reality Winner, her case, and more, including how the 1917 Espionage Act, more than a century old, is used federally not to prosecute individuals for sharing military movements with foreign enemies, but to prosecute domestic whistleblowers for sharing restricted knowledge with the public (usually via the media), i.e. the enemy of authoritarians is the public, you and me.
The DC-based Dworkin Report, hosted by politico Scott Dworkin, cofounder of The Democratic Coalition political action committee, offers a trio of recent interviews. First, from August 4, an interview with Winner’s lawyer, Dallas-based Alison Grinter. Second, from October 5, an interview with the whistleblower’s sister, Brittany Winner. Third, from October 7, an interview with Billie J. Winner-Davis, Reality Winner’s mother who on social media fiercely advocates for her family every single day. Those Dworkin Report links have been going down sometimes, so if they’re temporarily unavailable, try elsewhere: first interview, second interview, third interview. Make sure you listen to Scott Dworkin’s interview of Billie J. Winner-Davis, the whistleblower’s mother. I’ll note two things about it. First, she calls upon Biden to grant her daughter clemency (a pardon is a form of clemency). Second, about Glenn Greenwald. After I spearheaded a successful effort to drag him in 2014 long before it became popular to do so (see here, here, here, here, and elsewhere), I switched to just ignoring Greenbacks, since that’s often the most effective way to turn someone’s volume down. However, Billie J. Winner-Davis says something in the third interview that I think is worth making an exception for, worth amplifying. Reality Winner was burned (arrested) as a source for The Intercept because (as the official story goes, anyhow), journalists there not only talked with government officials trying to confirm the document’s veracity (which is fine), but also sent them the document itself (which isn’t fine), enabling them to track the whistleblower down from various clues associated with the document. Asked about that, Billie J. Winner-Davis told Scott Dworkin:
“Glenn Greenwald is, I mean, he’s hard to figure out; he likes to use Reality to create, you know, a social media storm. But that’s what he’s doing: he’s using her. I wish he would just stop. You know, I have gotten so much support from people from The Intercept and from First Look Media who have reached out to me personally who have expressed the regret about what happened to Reality and who have expressed their support for her and for our family. Glenn Greenwald is not one of those people, and I just wish he would go away.”
I predict that during this new decade, revelations will arrive of popular US-based or US-ish lefty journalists being on the take (receiving illicit money from) the BRICS regimes such as Putin’s. Occasionally I look at job openings at tiny “radical news” outlets and see the high pay and think, yeah, this doesn’t add up. As Spock might say, simple logic. An important byproduct of Winner’s leak has been the reactions of others, exposing who cares about inflating themselves as Great Men while supporting red-brown alliance (red commies cliquing up with brown fascists as oft black-clad anarchists go on as DIY as ever) and BRICS interests (here’s looking at you, clan Assadnge), versus who cares about human rights, including for whistleblowers who are women (and thus too often downplayed or ignored), as well as open democracy over authoritarianism.
Another source of information: documentary filmmaker Sonia Kennebeck’s 93-minute movie United States vs. Reality Winner that premiered earlier this year.
Finally, my August 2018 article from her sentencing is the only detailed narrative from the courtroom, and one of the very few written detailed analyses, besides the original Intercept article, of the leaked document. I’ve also written posts about her case here, which you can find via clicking my blog’s Reality Winner tag. I have some additional unpublished investigative material I plan to pull together for release soon.
Vocabulary workbook series given to students at in my K-12 in the eighties and nineties, in Texas
Frequently asked vocabulary
Like any bureaucracy, the carceral industry and the Bureau of Prisons in particular have their own specialized, intentionally impenetrable jargon. Since these terms will be thrown around this workweek — and in the future regarding other federal whistleblower cases — here’s a quick glossary explaining what the lingo actually means on the federal level and how it pertains to Reality Winner.
Note: To follow the below, it helps to understand the timeline of Winner’s imprisonment: after sentencing, she was moved to incarceration at FCC Carswell in Fort Worth. Then on good time earned, she was moved a little early to incarceration in person at a halfway house. Next, on June 9, she moved to home confinement, still considered incarceration, involving conditions such as a buzzing electronic ankle monitor, and requiring frequent reporting to the halfway house for drug testing and the like. Then Tuesday she’s no longer incarcerated, but on three years of supervised release, basically the federal equivalent of parole.
Now the definitions. On Monday I asked Winner’s lawyer Alison Grinter about these terms, but any mistakes are mine.
Supervised release) A period of time after incarceration that’s supposed to help prisoners re-integrate back into society. Sort of a midpoint between full Bureau of Prisons custody and living out in the free world. It’s close to the more familiar, state-level concept of parole, which no longer exists on the federal level. If a prisoner on supervised release is held to have violated conditions, the Bureau of Prisons can yank them back behind bars for the remainder of the sentence.
Halfway house) To be exact, halfway house is an umbrella term that encompasses a few different types of facilities. Generally, though, and in Reality Winner’s case, a halfway house means what the Bureau of Prisons calls a Residential Reentry Center (RRC), unsurprisingly run by a private contractor. Typically, federal prisoners go to these halfway houses directly after incarceration and physically stay there. Later, during home confinement, the prisoners frequently report to the halfway houses, which set the conditions of their home confinement period.
Home confinement) Still considered incarceration, home confinements see prisoners living at home with a heavy electronic ankle monitor. They’re expected to obey strict conditions and report to the halfway house periodically.
Clemency) Formally speaking, clemency isn’t a federal concept. Informally, though, it refers to the remedies an executive can give prisoners, among them commutations and pardons. Reality Winner asks for clemency, specifically (and more precisely) a pardon.
Commutation) A commutation is a federal remedy that essentially speeds up a prisoner’s sentence. A commuted sentence is stopped early; prisoners’ sentences are over sooner than they would have been otherwise. But with the behind bars, halfway house, and home confinement phases over on Tuesday, Reality Winner is no longer seeking a commutation; instead, she’s seeking a pardon.
Pardon) A convict receiving a federal pardon is no longer a felon; in the eyes of the law at least, they’re fully and completely forgiven. Yet there’s no federal expungement: the pardoned individual’s case still happened. The point of the pardon is that legally, any and all the felony conviction disabilities, as the adverse consequences are called, are removed. That said, what specific employers or apps choose to do regarding a pardoned former felon, may be up to them.
Expungement) This isn’t available at the federal level. Expungement is a state-level remedy. For example in Texas, an expungement (“expunction” in the Texas statutes) means files about a crime are destroyed and the offense is removed from the person’s criminal record.
Parole) A state-level concept. Parole technically no longer exists at the federal level; it’s been replaced by the concept of supervised release. For general audiences, though, it’s fair enough to imprecisely refer to someone’s supervised release as parole, but for the more exact among us, supervised release is correct.
Probation) This doesn’t relate to Reality Winner’s case. Probation is something imposed in place of incarceration. For example, at a sentencing, a federal judge might impose two months of probation on a defendant as opposed to two years in prison.
Office of Probation and Pretrial Service) Also known as the U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services System, this is the bureau in the judicial branch that not only administers probation, but also administers supervised release.
Probation officer or supervised release officer) Employed by the Office of Probation and Pretrial Service, this person is the one making the day-to-day decisions about a felon’s supervised released conditions. Technically, they’re called a supervised release officer. They might refer to themself as a probation officer, given their employer. That may even be true of Reality Winner’s officer, despite her being on supervised release, not probation.
Those are the vocabulary terms for how the federal carceral system is supposed to work, although as a May 2017 article I wrote for The Cryptosphere shows, things may play out differently in practice, suggesting a strange mix of incompetence and/or decision-makers who aren’t on the up and up, to say the least.
#PardonRealityWinner
It’s important to recognize that even on supervised release and afterward, Reality Winner, though outside prison walls, isn’t free. Her felony record and plea agreement will continue to prevent her from fully speaking out about her case and the leaked document and its implications. On Monday, I asked Winner’s lawyer Alison Grinter about that adverse consequence of her conviction and the additional adverse consequences I describe in the two paragraphs below, but again, any mistakes are mine.
Photo of Reality Winner taken by her mother in December 2016. A pardon would be the best present
While Winner’s on supervised release for three years, she must obey strict conditions, which may vary according to her supervised release officer’s interpretations or caprices. To legally dispute the officer requires expensive, time-consuming, and stressful requests to the court in Augusta Georgia. Winner on supervised release has a curfew (can’t leave before 6 a.m. and has to be home by 10 p.m.) and must remain physically within the Southern District of Texas, though it’s the Augusta Georgia court that convicted her that ultimately calls the shots. The officer may choose to continue the surveillance of her smartphone. References in interviews to dating apps blocking her as a user revolve not around the supervised release conditions, but rather those apps querying databases and determining she’s a felon and thus barred from swiping.
Without a pardon, Winner will suffer what lawyers refer to as the disabilities of being a felon. For example, she’s banned from certain federal lands (the specifics are complicated). She’s not eligible for various federal benefits such as housing. She can’t own weapons (not uncommon in rural Texas), nor, in a strange provision, may she own body armor. Certain other countries may forbid entry or permanent residency to a U.S. felon. The list goes on.
A pardon would delete all of the above problems and restore Reality Winner’s freedom. It would allow her to share the full story. Like the full story, a pardon would also send an enormous domestic and international signal that the United States does not endorse TrumPutin-style autocracy. In other words, in the interest of open democracy, the United States Government has the need and ability to pardon Reality Winner not just for her, but also for itself and the public. Obama commuted the sentence of, but did not pardon, whistleblower Chelsea Manning; that suggests a pardon for Reality Winner can indeed happen under the Biden administration, but it will take significant effort.
Here are several ways to make #PardonRealityWinner happen:
Correspond with the US Pardon Attorney by phone +1 202 616 6070, by email USPardon.Attorney@usdoj.gov, and/or by snailmail: U.S. Department of Justice / Office of the Pardon Attorney / 950 Pennsylvania Avenue – RFK Main Justice Building / Washington, DC 20530. It would be very helpful for them to be deluged with international messages explaining how a pardon for Reality Winner would improve the international standing of the United States after the Trump administration convicted her for keeping the investigation into Russian interference alive.
Share articles and posts about pardoning Reality Winner, including in places other than your most familiar/comfortable social media sites. For example, during offline conversations, on social media sites you aren’t yet familiar with, via art such as graffiti or music, and so on.
If you know more than one language, translate and share articles and posts about pardoning Reality Winner.
Politely badger elected officials about Reality Winner, always pushing for the goal: pardoning her. Schedule appointments, call, donate a small amount to get them to actually reply (hey if corporate interests can bribe so can constituents). I’ve talked about Reality Winner with Kamala Harris at one of her campaign stops; I’ve talked to federal staffers, etc. If you haven’t done similar already in your life, you should, even just for the interesting experience.
Anything else you can dream up. Don’t listen to the naysayers boasting of their cynicism to promise themselves it was wise to have given up in life. Beautiful Trouble is a handy resource book / toolkit for learning nonviolent tactics.
I'm a Seattle-based freelance writer/journalist originally from Texas. I'm also a substitute teacher in public education. I write about anything and everything, but usually philosophy tied to current events, liberatory mental health, science fiction and fantasy, investigative journalism, technology, justice, and more.
Email: DAL@RISEUP.NET (ask for pgp key or check keyservers if you want encryption)
Snailmail (United States Postal Service only): Douglas Lucas / PO Box 75656 / Seattle WA 98175 / United States
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Note the single-character change in ZIP codes, between the address for USPS (98175) and the address for private carriers (98125), is not a typo.
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