Episode 470: Shadow Gate

Dan and Jordan discuss Millie Weaver’s new documentary, which some people are pretending are involved in her recent arrest.

Topics covered include:

  • Millie says that upstream collection of data is a large part of what the NSA does, but this is not accurate. A 2011 report found that 9% of internet data collected was upstream collection, as opposed to stuff acquired directly from ISPs. Also, the NSA reported that they amended their upstream collection practices in April 2017.

  • The 2008 passport data breach involved contractors from Stanley Inc and The Analysis Group. It did not involve CGI, although CGI did acquire Stanley in 2010, two years later.

  • The Analysis Corporation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Global Strategies Group.

  • Millie thinks that CGI stands for Canadian Global Information, because those words are in the first line of their Wikipedia page. The name actually stands for Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique.

  • The John Brennan quid-pro-quo theory does not make sense, given that he was a high level Obama advisor prior to the passport breach, and was clearly on a short-list to be in the administration.

  • The PRISM program did not involve upstream collections of data.

  • Dynology has received many government contracts over the years. One of these contracts involves work that was performed in Germany, which Millie is claiming involves the Congressional Knowledge Management Service. This is based on her seeing the acronym “CMKS” on the contract, which she took to mean Congressional Knowledge Management Service, although the acronym for that should be CKMS. In cloud computing, CMKS is an abbreviation for Customer Master Keys, so it is entirely possible that this is what this contract was for, and there’s no evidence provided that it has anything to do with the Congressional Knowledge Management Service.

  • Patrick Bergy asserts that the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 made it legal for the US government to propagandize the US population. This is a misunderstanding that apparently began with a sloppy column in Buzzfeed, which took on a life of its own. The Smith-Mundt Act of 2012 only made it so programs created by the Broadcasting Board of Governors could be accessible in the US, primarily because with the internet as it is, there’s basically no way to stop it, and because these programs may be the preferred news sources of diaspora communities in the US. The Act itself explicitly lays out that money allocated to these organizations cannot be used to sway public opinion in the US.

  • Patrick Bergy seems to think that every recent instance of non-white communities expressing dissatisfaction with things like police violence are examples of people being swayed by Department of Defense IIA operations. The documentary doesn’t include instances of white identity protests being accused of being IIA, which is weird.

  • Patrick Bergy’s story seems to include a whole lot of instances of him being rebuffed by prominent people, like Matt Gaetz and Dan Bongino, after he approaches them about ShadowNet. The fact that they won’t sign onto his conspiracy theory seems to consistently be taken as evidence that they themselves are involved in the ShadowNet conspiracy.

  • Millie’s other expert, Tore, was also Millie’s primary source for her “reporting” about questions surrounding the 2019 election in Kentucky.

  • Tore’s full name is Terpsichore Lindeman, and her claims about voter roll discrepancy were debunked by ProPublica.

  • Tore was investigated by the North Dakota attorney general for inappropriately soliciting charitable donations in 2018. She also decided to run for mayor of Minot, North Dakota on a platform of Make Minot Great Again. She did not make it to the ballot. Fellow citizens started a Change.org petition to stop her from running for mayor.

  • In 2011, Tore is listed as an undergraduate student in biology at the University of Kentucky, in the program for their Showcase of Undergraduate Scholars.

  • However, according to her own Medium page, she claims that she was in medical school in 2008. In Millie’s documentary, she also claims that she was working on secret projects for John Brennan in 2008, which seems like a problem. Her page on TogetherWeServed also claims to have been attending the University of Kentucky in 2008.

  • Tore’s Medium page was largely about issues related to foreign language interpreting and serving immigrant communities, until August 2016, when the tone completely changed and it became a very intense conspiracy, pro-Trump blog. Even as her writing shifted into being about the evil forces conspiring about Trump, she did not claim to have first-hand knowledge of these evil forces, which she does claim now, which seems weird.

  • Robert Storch was re-nominated by Trump in June 2017. In December, he was confirmed by the Senate as the Inspector General of the NSA. Millie says that it “appears he was never actually confirmed,” which makes no sense.

  • Paul Manafort was not the only Trump campaign connection to Psy-Group.

  • Shawn Lucas was in a video serving papers to the DNC, but he was just employed as a process server. It was not his lawsuit. Though tragic, the claim that his death was suspicious or a murder has not been substantiated at all.

  • Trump did not make it so people lose their security clearances when they leave their jobs. Because of how clearances work, this would be a logistical and administrative nightmare and create so much more bureaucracy.

  • Millie read the first paragraph of an Interpol report about robotics and law enforcement and reported on it. She neglects to mention any of the relevant content of the report.

  • Millie found a 2017 patent for employee surveillance technology owned by Dynology. She presents this outside of the workplace context, and misrepresents the patent. She also fails to point out this is just an updating of an existing 2015 patent.