Last Week a Well-Known Youtuber Funded By the ‘Dark Money ATM of the Right’ Launched Into A Bizarre Diatribe and Tried to Co-Opt Barrett Brown’s Work

Last week, political commentator and Youtuber, Tim Pool, launched into a bizarre diatribe about the Twitter Files and fractional reserve banking policies, during which he briefly promoted the work of journalist and political target, Barrett Brown, to his guest, Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who crossed state lines, took up arms, and killed some people. To say that Brown and Rittenhouse have conflicting political views would be a vast understatement. Rittenhouse has been described as a fascist, Trump-loving, racist while Brown has celebrated his grandfather via Twitter on more than one occasion for taking out some Nazis during WWII.

Since the 2020 Kenosha shootings, where Rittenhouse shot three Black Lives Matter protestors, killing two of them, he has become a right-wing hero, lionized by the likes of Donald Trump and Fox News celebrity, Tucker Carlson. But regardless of how the liberal media has portrayed Rittenhouse, we’re able to glean enough about his political ideology based on the very people and organizations he’s surrounded himself with. 

In January 2021, he was seen meeting with members of the Proud Boys at a bar in Wisconsin and last December, he was invited to speak at “one of the most high profile proto-fascist conferences in the United States” called “Turning Point USA,” a nonprofit organization that “advocates for conservative politics on high school, college, and university campuses.”

Turning Point USA was founded by Charlie Kirk and Bill Montgomery, the former of which is a member of the Council for National Policy, an organization that I reported on previously in my 2019 Gatekeeper Files series (“Rise of the Alt-Right” and “How Trump Sold You on Fascism“):

At the time of Breitbart’s death, he may have already been a member of a secretive group called the Council for National Policy (CNP), an ultra-conservative organization The New York Times once called a ‘staging ground for conservative efforts to make the Republican Party more socially conservative.’ Members of this exclusive club, which appears to have close ties with the NRA, were described as ‘the most powerful conservatives in the country.’

Due to the secrecy of the organization, it remains unknown just how far to the religious right the group actually leans. According to a 2014 leaked membership roster, members at the time included ‘neo-Confederate’ Michael Peroutka, a former board member of the white supremacist group, ‘League of the South,’ and Jospeh Farah, who runs the far-right news site, WorldNetDaily…

Although CNP appears to operate in the shadows under a cloak of secrecy, members exposed over the years have included [Steve] Bannon; Kellyanne Conway, now Senior Counselor to Trump; Jerome Corsi, who later became a central figure in the Roger Stone-WikiLeaks debacle; and the Mercers, who invested millions in Breitbart News and co-founded Cambridge Analytica in 2013.

According to The Washington Post, current U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the sister of Blackwater founder, Erik Prince, wasn’t listed as a member but their mother, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen served on the council’s board of governors and Betsy’s father-in-law served as president twice. Vice President Mike Pence became a member in 2017, and he doesn’t even try to hide it, illustrating just how safe the Trump administration has made it for people to advertise that they rub elbows with far-right extremists.

Charlie Kirk also has close ties with the Trump family and his organization endorsed Yiannopoulos, as well as Ann Coulter, Joe Walsh, and James O’Keefe. The staff of O’Keefe’s Project Veritas once received what was “essentially clandestine training at a ranch in Wyoming that’s owned by the family of Erik Prince.” Prince also recruited former British and U.S. spies for Project Veritas’ operations which included “conducting stings on news organizations and other groups.” 

Hardly surprising then is the fact that Turning Point USA has received funding from the DeVos Foundation. They’re also tied to groups like the National Review Institute and in 2018, The Heritage Foundation was listed as one of their partners on the organization’s website. 

Turning Point also receives money from the Donors Trust, a donor-advised fund that has been described as the “dark-money ATM of the right.” In 2020, the trust reported approximately $360 million in revenues and net assets worth over $600 million. Top contributors alone gave the fund no less than $7 million each, with one donor contributing a whopping $158 million. In 2020, Robert and Rebekah Mercer also donated almost $20 million to the fund. 

According to Politico, Donors Trust took in more than $1 billion in 2021, and that absurd but politically powerful number came from a mere three donors, all of whom have remained anonymous. Essentially, we’re talking about a fund bankrolled by the Raymond Tusks of the world. At the top of this year, the fund had “roughly $1.5 billion in assets.”

The president of Donors Trust, Lawson Bader, is also a member of the Council for National Policy because of course he is and you can find a searchable directory of 2022 CNP members here.

This story goes beyond Tim Pool’s guests and their alleged affiliations with far-right groups like the Proud Boys, black money ATMs, and shadowy organizations steeped in Christian zeal. Pool himself is funded by Turning Point USA, and when he promoted Barrett Brown’s work to Rittenhouse, he did so live from a studio that Turning Point built for him. This is what makes Pool’s comments so questionable (among other things) because, again, this entire right-wing shit show is the antithesis of everything that Brown stands for. 

Here’s what Pool said during the show:

It just feels like the whole machine is about to explode, okay? With, with the Twitter Files, we’ve got so much coming out. Twitter Files 8.  The FBI—I think it was the FBI, right? Who was it, military intelligence engaging in psychological operations pretending to be Middle Easterners? We’ve actually known this story going back to, I think, 2011 or 2012, with, uh, it was, um, I think it was Barrett Brown who did, uh, what was the name of their—Project PM, I think it was—and they exposed that U.S. military was were buying sock poppet accounts, fake accounts, to do psychological operations.

We now have new developments from Twitter. The fact that we know that and it came because Elon Musk bought Twitter, it’s like the whole facade is crumbling. You look at how they’re spending money, we’re off the fractional Reserve banking policy, we’re on infinite reserve. Banks can just make whatever amount of money they want, give it to whoever they want…the system is just gutted and it feels like they know it. Everything’s about to collapse. I guess my question is ‘Is it intentional…?’

Right, let’s talk about the Twitter Files. Elon Musk has been feeding them to multiple journalists including Bari Weiss, a former New York Times editor who announced last year that she’s opening an academic institution in Texas called the University of Austin. According to Yahoo, the school is going to offer “forbidden courses,” and is funded by none other than Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale. 

After exposing the HBGary Federal/Palantir’s presentation to take down WikiLeaks back in 2011 (among a host of other sordid undertakings found in the HBGary emails), Barrett Brown has been more than open about his opposition to Peter Thiel and Palantir. Again, Pool’s attempt to intermingle his work with a cesspool of data mining, analytics, surveillance, and CIA-funded projects is questionable, and laughable, at best. 

What immediately stood out in Pool’s comments was his fleeting mention of Brown among a host of other unrelated things. He mentions Brown, quickly moves on to Musk, and then immediately starts talking about fractional reserve banking policies. After all of this time, why is Tim Pool and Turning Point USA interested in having Brown’s name circulating in right-wing circles? Better yet, why didn’t Pool give his audience any details as to what Brown and Anonymous uncovered back in 2011? 

After Anonymous hacked and leaked the emails of then-HBGary Federal CEO, Aaron Barr, in 2011, they unearthed something called “persona management.” In an interview with Counterpunch’s Eric Draitser earlier this year, Brown explained further (the video should start around the 23.20 mark):

It all started with an email that Barr received containing a link and full copy of the Air Force’s request for this “new iteration of software.” It detailed exactly what the U.S. government was looking for:

Online Persona Management Service. 50 User Licenses, 10 Personas per user. Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent.

Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.

Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user friendly application environment to maximize the user’s situational awareness by displaying real-time local information.

Anonymous  dubbed the program, “Metal Gear,” and released a statement:

We believe Metal Gear involves an army of fake cyber personalities immersed in social networking websites for the purposes of manipulating the mass population via influence, crawling information from major online communities (such as Facebook), and identifying anonymous personalities via correlating stored information from multiple sources to establish connections between separate online accounts, using this information to arrest dissidents and activists who work anonymously.

A company called Ntrepid Corp. was awarded the $2.76 million contract and to this day, the founder and chief executive of the company is still trolling Anonymous on the company’s website:

Richard Helms’ trolling doesn’t change the fact that this former 30-year CIA agent has long been involved in the intelligence game:

Internal communications from Aaron Barr say that the RFI for the persona software was written for Anonymizer, a company acquired in 2008 by intelligence contractor Abraxas Corporation. The reasoning is that they had existing persona management software and abilities.

In 2010, Abraxas was purchased by another intelligence contractor, Cubic for the tidy sum of $124 million in cash. Some of the top talent at Anonymizer, who later went to Abraxas, left the Cubic umbrella to start another intelligence firm. They are now listed as organizational leaders for Ntrepid, the ultimate winner of the $2.7 million dollar government contract.

Ntrepid, ‘provides national security and law enforcement customers with software, hardware, and managed services for cyber operations, analytics, linguistics, and tagging & tracking,’ a company profile explains.

Ntrepid’s corporate registry lists Abraxas’ previous CEO and founder, Richard Helms, as the director and officer, along with Wesley Husted, the former CFO, who is an Ntrepid officer as well. The shifting company names and management has led to some speculation that this is a front company for Abraxas, but there is no proof of those claims.

And:

Barrett Brown was doing some very serious investigating into a company called Cubic from San Diego, that was alleged to own TrapWire as a subsidiary of their firm. This is an allegation that they officially denied. However, these tax filings from 2010 that Barrett uncovered clearly state that Cubic had in fact merged with Abraxas Corporation. If you click through and take a look, you can see that Richard Helms’s name is right there on the top of the first page.

And:

This rabbit hole gets deeper and the bottom is nowhere in sight. [Barrett] Brown, trying to link the pieces together, saw a consortium of private intelligence contractors (PICs) and US government agencies working hand-in-hand in acts that clearly impinge our civil liberties, and more disconcerting, our lives….

I also recommend that you read this 2011 article published by The Guardian about NTrepid and the U.S. military’s use of bots. Interestingly, the article can also be found in an email thread between two Stratfor analysts dated March 18, 2011.  Lena Bell sent the entire article entitled, “Revealed: US Spy Operation That Manipulates Social Media,” to Sean Noonan. The emails are no longer available on WikiLeaks’ site but you can find them here. 

It seems fairly unknown that Barr and then-HBGary CEO, Greg Hoglund, also wrote a proposal for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) “to create something like a lie detector,” to complement DARPA’s Cyber Insider Threat (CINDER) program. CINDER was an “expensive effort to find news ways to watch employees with access to sensitive information and root out double agents or disgruntled workers who might leak classified information.” 

According to their proposal:

[W]e believe there are physical changes in the body that are represented in observable behavioral changes when committing actions someone knows is wrong…Our solution is to develop a paranoia-meter to measure these observables…In this hypothesis we will have a rootkit on the host that monitors keystrokes, mouse movements, and visual cues through the system camera. We believe that during particularly risky activities we will see more erratic mouse movements and keystrokes as well as physical observations such as surveying surroundings, shifting more frequently, etc.

The software would also “collect select file access, process execution with parameters, email communications, keyboard activity…and IM traffic.” But Barr and Hoglund’s proposal was hardly groundbreaking. Six years prior, a company called Next IT filed a patent titled, “Detecting local intrusion or implementing counter-measures involving event detection and direct action,” under six different classifications, including G06F21/554, which states:

Detecting local intrusion or implementing counter-measures involving event detection and direct action

Monitor the system, user actions on the system, etc., immediately analyze the monitoring data gathered and directly take action.Examples: Detect abnormal user behaviour, security issue or physical attacks; and immediately react.

Because, according to Next IT:

Protecting computing systems from the other side of the fence — that is, from the inside — from activities undertaken by insiders is somewhat of a different problem…For example, a rogue insider may attempt to use organization computing resources to steal or maliciously tamper with the organization’s resources.

The program was called ActiveSentry and we’re obviously talking about an “enemy within” scenario and government/corporate concerns about leakers, whistleblowers, and saboteurs. This technology was being developed in the wake of 9/11 and George Bush’s “War on Terror,” but well before the likes of Manning or Snowden showed up.  Less than a year after Next IT filed the patent, networkworld.com reported:

NextSentry in February became a wholly owned subsidiary of Next IT…In June, NextSentry will release ActiveSentry, which uses artificial intelligence to learn an employee’s role within an organization to determine when that employee may be violating company policy, says CEO Jim Hereford.

The desktop software monitors employee actions for distribution of sensitive information via e-mail, instant messaging, blog postings, file transfers, printouts or saving to removable storage devices. The software is based on a context-based engine called ContextIQ that aims to understand a user’s intent.

Next IT was clearly producing invasive, surveillance technology well before Barr and Hoglund put together their proposal for DARPA. However, it wasn’t that the government didn’t have programs like ActiveSentry already at their disposal when DARPA put out an open request for technology that would complement CINDER. It was that the U.S. military was allegedly looking for “new ways to identify malicious insiders and stop them from operating from within government and military networks.” 

Not surprisingly, DARPA’s open request was posted mere months after Chelsea Manning leaked a massive cache of military documents to WikiLeaks, clearly proving to the government that the systems they had in place to protect their data had been woefully inadequate.

So, how am I aware of some obscure company called Next IT that virtually no one has ever heard of and that filed a patent for ActiveSentry back in 2005? It was during my research into one of Anonymous’ most deceptive and manipulative operators, Christopher Doyon (“Commander X”), and his involvement in artificial intelligence that I stumbled across it.

I have extensively covered Christopher Doyon’s background in my ongoing #OpISIS series, which you can find here. As a brief rundown as it pertains to this article, in 2006, Doyon claimed that he had a laboratory where he was running artificial intelligence tests on 6-12 year-old children. I know, right? Bizarre. He also founded the “MLAI Foundation,” a website dedicated to artificial intelligence. 

Doyon’s especially interested in chatbots and in 2008, he created an avatar named “Allison,” which he later remade into a full-blown chatbot. That same year, Dr. Richard S. Wallace posted a blogspot entry announcing the revival of Doyon’s website, mlaifoundation.info. 

Wallace is renowned in the field of A.I. for inventing Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) and the infamous chatbot, A.L.I.C.E. Prior to these creations, he worked at a startup firm called Vision Applications, Inc., which was “entirely funded” by the Department of Defense. From #OpISIS 8.1:

If you want to know just how truly dangerous and, perhaps, incredibly naive Doyon’s hero was, in the same interview in which Wallace said that Vision Application’s project was entirely funded by the DOD, he also stated that he was bothered by anyone trying to regulate the A.I. business because, and I quote, ‘We are really relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things…’

We’ll later revisit what the public knows about the U.S. military’s use of artificial intelligence, how they wanted to contract out bots to infiltrate IRC chatrooms, and what Barrett Brown and others uncovered in the HBGary emails, including ‘persona management.’ It’s terrifying but we were also warned over a decade ago.

Clearly, I’ve decided that we’re going to revisit this now rather than wait for my next #OpISIS article…

After infiltrating Anonymous via Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Doyon continued to dabble in artificial intelligence and on December 2, 2014, he tweeted from his sock account @LegionSecGlobal, “We now confirm that Legion Sec will be the first hacker crew in history to have an Artificial Intelligence in our group.” When prodded for more information he responded, “Her name is Allison,” the same name he used for his chatbot. 

While researching current events in the “chatbot industry” around the time that Doyon made these comments, I came across an article that was published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) eight months prior to Doyon’s announcement that his “hacker crew” was using artificial intelligence.

On April 18, 2014, EFF published an article entitled, “Answers and Questions About Military, Law Enforcement, and Intelligence Agency Chatbots,” which questioned the military’s use of chatbots. During to their research, EFF discovered a government document online that showed “Sergeant STAR” (SGT STAR), a bot that the U.S. Army used on their website, was “built on technology developed for the FBI and CIA more than a decade ago to converse with suspects online.” From the document: 

LTC Robert Plummer, Director, USAREC PAE, while visiting the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL) in late 2003, discovered an application developed by Next It Corporation of Spokane, WA, that PNNL identified for the FBI AND CIA. The application used chat with an underlying AI component that replicated topical conversations. These agencies were using the application to engage PEDOPHILES AND TERRORISTS online, and it allowed a single agent to monitor 20-30 conversations concurrently.

In case you missed it above, the company behind Sgt. Star’s technology was Next IT, the same company that filed a patent for ActiveSentry, the covert software that spies on employees, and that HBGary may or may not have used as framework for their DARPA proposal.

According to Next IT, ActiveSentry “evolved from a proven technology we developed that has been deployed by government agencies to monitor Internet Relay Chat (IRC) rooms for such suspicious behavior as potential threats to national security, child exploitation, and drug trafficking.”

Deployed by government agencies to monitor Internet Relay Chat. 

Next IT made this statement around 2007, so if members of Anonymous were telling you back in the days of #LulzSec and #OpISIS that IRC wasn’t infiltrated, or that it was perfectly safe, they were either feds, informants, or just incredibly naive. 

In their 2005 patent application, Next IT provided multiple examples as to what their technology was capable of doing:

Using the above-described systems and methods, agents can be deployed to essentially sit in multiple chat rooms and use knowledge bases to monitor and process the dialog that takes place in the chat room. If and when problematic words or patterns are identified the agent can react immediately.

In one instance, the agent might notify a human monitor…that a pattern has been detected, thus allowing the human monitor to join in the conversation in the chat room and participate in further law enforcement activities. In another instance, the agent might be programmed to engage in a conversation a potential molester and, in parallel, generate an alert for a human monitor.

In this particular instance, the inventive systems and methods are force multipliers in that the ratio of chat room-to-human monitors can be dramatically increased.

Here’s excerpt from another example Next IT provided:

In one example, links are built through proximities—where proximities can be subjects that appear in or at the same media, place, time, and the like. As an example, consider that a subject of interest is ‘John Doe’ and that John Doe is suspected of having a relationship with a certain person of interest ‘Mike Smith’. Yet to date, this relationship has been elusive. 

Consider now that a system…is set up with agents to monitor various data origination entities for information associated with John Doe and independently, Mike Smith…Once this information has been developed and processed by the inventive systems described above…a search can be conducted on the table to establish a link or relationship between John Doe and Mike Smith.

Unlike ActiveSentry, SGT STAR was an Army chatbot that used Next IT’s “ActiveAgent Product suite and FPML” technology.

Prior to the advent of SGT STAR, a private software company called Spectre AI Incorporated, which “served various government agencies and defense contractors in the early 2000s,” developed what’s called a “functional presence engine” (FPE). This system allowed for “conversational AI [e.g. SGT STAR] and virtual assistant platforms to respond correctly to new inputs outside their training sets.”

Spectre AI was acquired by Next IT sometime in 2002-2003, at which time 95% of Next IT’s business was with the federal government. 

Spectre AI’s development of FPE led to Next IT’s creation of Functional Presence Markup Language (FPML), the computing language used for the Army’s SGT STAR bot. FPML was based largely on Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML), an earlier computing language created by Dr. Richard Wallace and used by his chatbot, A.L.I.C.E. You know, the same guy who promoted Christopher Doyon’s artificial intelligence website back in 2008, so there’s that.

At the time that the U.S. Army was looking to develop SGT STAR there were only two companies authorized to sell and install ActiveAgent, TKC Communications (AKA Truestone Communications) and Nakuuruq Solutions, both of which were listed as “proposed contractors” on the document published by EFF. 

Both companies also appear to be subsidiaries of Akima, a U.S. government contractor that consistently lands massively lucrative contracts. In May 2020, Akima hired former CIA agent, Duncan Greene, to lead their Mission Systems for Engineering and Technology division:

Akima has hired Duncan Greene as president of mission systems for engineering and technology. He will oversee group companies providing mission support, IT and analytic services to the Defense Department and the intelligence community. Greene, a former CIA officer, was BAE Systems vice president and general manager for space intelligence and global analysis.

Fun fact: Remember when that woman got fired from her job back in 2017, for giving Trump the middle finger when his motorcade passed by her? Yup, that was Akima who fired her. 

As for Next IT, the company was acquired in December 2017 by Verint Systems Inc., a tech and analytics company that laughably characterizes itself as a “customer engagement company.” How’s this for customer engagement:

In a rare and candid admission to Forbes, Retired Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the highly secret Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, noted his former organization’s influence on Comverse, which owns Verint, as well as other Israeli companies that dominate the U.S. eavesdropping and surveillance market. ‘Take NICE, Comverse and Check Point for example, three of the largest high-tech companies, which were all directly influenced by 8200 technology,’ said Gefen. ‘Check Point was founded by Unit alumni. Comverse’s main product, the Logger, is based on the Unit’s technology.’

And this from Counterpunch:

Together, Verint and Amdocs form part of the backbone of the government’s domestic intelligence surveillance technology. Both companies are based in Israel – having arisen to prominence from that country’s cornering of the information technology market – and are heavily funded by the Israeli government, with connections to the Israeli military and Israeli intelligence (both companies have a long history of board memberships dominated by current and former Israeli military and intelligence officers).   Verint is considered the world leader in ‘electronic interception’ and hence an ideal private sector candidate for wiretap outsourcing.

At one point, even the the founder and former chairman of Verint, Kobi Alexander, was wanted by the FBI on nearly three dozen charges of fraud, theft, lying, bribery, money laundering and other crimes.

So, yes, all of Next IT’s chatbot software, surveillance technology, and whatever other monstrosities they’ve been building now belongs to an Israeli company directly linked to both the Israeli government and Unit 8200.

Now I ask you, why didn’t Pool discuss with his audience what Barrett Brown and others uncovered rather than abruptly changing the subject? There’s a myriad of reasons why he may have mentioned Brown but none of them appear to be well-intentioned or sincere. 

First and foremost, Pool is currently suing Brown’s associates (who, in turn, are countersuing him), and so it seems highly implausible that Pool was simply giving Brown a “Hey, I dig your work and Kyle Rittenhouse should check it out” shoutout. Here was Brown’s response to Pool’s statements:

Also the idea that Kyle Rittenhouse is going to "learn more" about our work, which has been chiefly focused on his white supremacist sponsor Peter Thiel, is especially cute.

— Barrett Brown (@ProjPM) December 22, 2022

I'll explain later as it's a bit complex, but I don't think this was primarily intended to divert credit away from me, but rather something close to the opposite. Pool has previously gone out of his way to avoid discussing me even when pressed to do so. Short version is…

— Barrett Brown (@ProjPM) December 22, 2022

… that going on the air to talk me up to Kyle Rittenhouse, of all people, while claiming that my work validates Musk's current claims, would be a great way of signaling to the left that my output should be disregarded. We've seen similar maneuvers in the past, and the timing..

— Barrett Brown (@ProjPM) December 22, 2022

… is especially interesting given that a number of people in Thiel's influence network, particularly those with FBI ties, are aware that I'm close to putting out some unusually damaging material on those involved, and indeed several have threatened lawsuits in advance.

— Barrett Brown (@ProjPM) December 22, 2022

There's also been a pretty severe uptick in other types of pushback of the sort you've seen and even been subjected to yourself, by some of the same individuals as last time around.

But it's also quite possible that I'm being paranoid and Pool is just a dumbass.

— Barrett Brown (@ProjPM) December 22, 2022

Everything that Brown suggests above, from Pool trying to destroy his credibility before publishing “unusually damaging material,” to him just being a dumbass all seem like plausible explanations as to why Pool is dragging Brown’s name into right-wing circles. As I was finishing this up yesterday, I wrote that Pool may just be trolling Brown because of his proximity to the journalists he’s now suing, but that was before Brown published this (see link in the tweet):

After a seven-year hiatus, I'm renewing my old prison column, this time with a focus on FBI operations against the left as disclosed via leaked recordings and other documents. It will also be funny.

Here's the first edition.https://t.co/IwddIp4gWG

— Barrett Brown (@ProjPM) December 29, 2022

Aside from Brown’s immense talent as a writer, anyone who took the time to read his latest article realizes that this is going to be a wild ride. Brown previously released Val Broeksmit’s recordings where a group of feds were caught asking about Brown. From Brown’s latest article:

FBI Special Agent David Ko escorts Val through the necessary checkpoints and on to the secure conference room wherein a handful of other FBI officials sit waiting. They bear different titles and hail from regional offices as far-flung as DC, New York, and Texas.

Perhaps the significance of this is lost on most people. Sure, I’ve come across a lot of nut job activists who think they’re being surveilled and targeted by the feds because they got a flat tire, their internet went out, or they heard static during a phone call, but only Brown has produced evidence that proves he’s not only on the FBI’s radar, agents from “far-flung” offices got together to rustle information out of his associate, Broeksmit. Literally, the FBI in recorded conversations:

Barrett’s on the radar.

The question is whether Pool is trying to destroy Brown’s credibility in the midst of him publishing “unusually damaging material”? I don’t know.

What did stand out to me was Brown’s other theory that Pool might be trying to “[signal] to the left” that his “output should be disregarded.” He added, “We’ve seen similar maneuvers in the past.” Indeed, if there’s one tactic we’ve seen bad actors repeatedly use in the last few years to troll, harass, defame and discredit their targets, is guilt by (false) association.

However, it’s not just about discrediting the target. Sometimes it’s about stealing the target’s work after you’ve discredited them. One Twitter user responded to Brown’s tweets with, “More than that he is stealing your cred.” Yup, that right there. Not only did Pool try to hijack Brown’s “cred,” he tried to hand it over to Elon Musk. Like, “Sure, Barrett Brown uncovered some stuff but Elon, he’s over there tearing it up on Twitter…”

Let’s be clear about what Musk, Matt Taibbi, Weiss and others have been exposing: U.S. intelligence’s interest in controlling both content and users. This exposure, of course, is a good thing but at no point have I seen anyone release any documents that show bot accounts being controlled by U.S. intelligence or military. I’m not saying that isn’t happening, it absolutely is happening, but Musk hasn’t exposed it which makes Pool’s revival of Brown’s work even more bizarre. 

And if Pool has suddenly decided to throw around credit then why isn’t he talking about Twitter’s former head of security, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, and his testimony in front of the U.S. Congress? This guy barely made a blip in the weekly news despite the fact that his revelations were stunning:

Twitter doesn’t just have access to your tweets and email address, they also have access to all of the data necessary to directly access your device and even pinpoint your exact location.

Really, Twitter has direct access to your device? Let’s talk about that and why Pool isn’t asking whether or not Musk’s team inherited the power to do this? Are there emails that suggest U.S. intelligence used Twitter’s software to track and hack journalists, activists, and protestors?

The stuff uncovered in the Twitter whistleblower report is much crazier than anything in the "Twitter files" but it's much less politically/tribally salient so it got no attention. Going to do a thread on some of the craziest things, in no particular order.

— Avid Halaby (@AvidHalaby) December 12, 2022

The bottom line is that based on Pool’s funding and associations alone, I don’t think he gives a flying fuck about bots, private intelligence firms, the feds, or even the CIA. This is the same guy who hired Cassandra Fairbanks, bestie to Trump’s intelligence community, to be the editor of his news site. 

Today it was announced that Tim Pool has hired Cassandra Fairbanks as an editor for his new news website. He has previously indicated that he wouldn't trust her to fact check articles and suggested he wouldn't hire her because she's "partisan" and he wants "actual journalists." pic.twitter.com/fppMlXWqNv

— Tim Pool Clips (@TimPoolClips) June 15, 2021

If Pool’s antics are more than just a trolling expedition, my guess is that he and others are looking to co-opt Brown’s work in order to weaponize it into some sort of pro-right, political narrative built on storylines they themselves don’t actually believe about the dangers and duplicity of the U.S. intelligence apparatus in order to fulfill some sort of right-wing agenda.

Think of it like this: Remember when Trump said, “I love WikiLeaks?” Right. That was an operation designed to make supporters (even the most liberal of the liberal) feel comfortable about believing a multitude of things including, but not limited to: 

1. Trump would pardon Assange if elected 
   
2. It’s okay to root for a narcissistic fascist if they’re willing to do something that’s important to you e.g. pardon Assange

When Trump said, “I love WikiLeaks,” there was exactly zero pushback from WikiLeaks or the support community. And when the former head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, tweeted support for WikiLeaks in June 2016, apparently no one thought to themselves, “Gee, this might be part of a larger intelligence operation to co-opt both WikiLeaks and Assange’s credibility.”

Instead, the community bought into it hook, line and sinker as Assange’s quest for freedom became more and more desperate. WikiLeaks not only allowed the right to co-opt their entire reputation, they actively participated in it.

WikiLeaks and the more well-known support accounts on Twitter normalized left-wing activists promoting pro-Trump, right-wing disinformation operations such as the Warren Flood-Guccifer 2 narrative, the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, and “spirit cooking.” The spirit cooking story alone was spearheaded by none other than Pool’s Editor-in-Chief, Cassandra Fairbanks, via We Are Change, an organization founded by Luke Rudowski, who also appeared as a guest on Tim Pool’s show, alongside Rittenhouse.

Mike Pompeo, Trump, and others played their intended liberal audience hard and won. Even today, WikiLeaks tweets almost daily about a Yahoo story published last year in which at least “30 former U.S. intelligence and national security officials” allegedly confirmed a CIA plot to murder Assange.

So yes, not only is it perfectly acceptable today for the left to believe what one intelligence agent tells the press, now it’s perfectly normal to believe what dozens of intelligence agents tell the press. 

Glenn Greenwald, the former darling of the left, showed up on Tucker Carlson’s FOX news program as early as January 2017, basically crying about how mean the U.S. intelligence agencies were being towards Trump. And Kim Dotcom, a regular promoter of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, offered to help Tucker “investigate alleged NSA spying” into his show just last year. 

I can’t tell you how many so-called liberals and progressives I’ve seen sign off on guys like Greenwald appearing on Fox news because “It gets the message out to a larger audience.” Right. How’s that working for you? Oh, you’re upset about January 6th? Gosh, maybe you can go on Tucker Carlson and cry about it to a larger audience. 

And Suzie Dawson’s #Unity4J embraced the far-right like a long lost child with Fairbanks and Jack Posobiec becoming regular guests on her Youtube “vigils” despite the fact that both of them had obvious ties to U.S. intelligence during the Trump administration. #Unity4J even allowed Posobiec to use their platform to push Q-lite conspiracy theories and no one blinked an eye.

What this comes down to is that #Unity4J has been presented with evidence that shows their group has been promoting conspiracy theories that pacify people into believing that #Trump is looking out for #Assange. pic.twitter.com/59qdPYBHk8

— Llama (@TheLlamaFiles) May 30, 2019

With the blessing of whoever took over Assange’s Twitter account (some suspect it was his wife, Stella Moris), #Unity4J repeatedly pressed upon their followers that it was acceptable not only to promote, but to work hand in hand with fascists and/or those directly tied to the Trump administration and/or intelligence community in dozens, if not hundreds, of online “vigils.” 

In fact, Dawson and her brainwashed followers made it clear that anyone who didn’t follow this insane ideology was probably a fed, JTRIG agent, informant, or instigator.

Additionally, no one even mentions #Unity4J’s ties to fash, the Trump administration, and U.S. intelligence anymore because of self-professed liberals like Jesselyn Radack, who co-opted my work, and the work of others, and parlayed it into a self-absorbed, delusional circus act about how she and her family were “viciously attacked” by Dawson and her #Unity4J associates, none of which ever happened.

So, let’s be honest. Democrats and liberals have played a role in the normalization of right-wing co-opting hence why I think very few have questioned Pool’s statements about Brown’s work. Some of them have even gone out of their way to discredit and/or bury good journalism about the rise of the far-right, playing themselves while the political right takes full advantage.

There’s a good chance I’m overthinking the Pool/Brown story but as of now, I’m concerned that this is what Pool is doing, meaning he’s using Brown in a WikiLeaks/Trump-like scenario in order to normalize liberal support. “No no, really, get in, the water’s warm. It’s okay to support (maybe even promote!) right-wingers funded by dark money and shadowy religious groups because they support Barrett Brown’s work!” I mean, we’ve been here before it’s just that everyone has an attention span somewhere between eight to twelve hours.