business insider
ntbcw biz investors daily BS
https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-climate-change-chinese-hoax-2016-11?op=1
this is legit
...
—Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2014
"NBC News just called it the great freeze — coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?"
A few days later.
—Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2014
"Snowing in Texas and Louisiana, record setting freezing temperatures throughout the country and beyond. Global warming is an expensive hoax!"
—Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2014
"Give me clean, beautiful and healthy air — not the same old climate change (global warming) bullshit! I am tired of hearing this nonsense."
Last January he told Fox & Friends that climate change was merely a very expensive form of tax.
"A lot of people are making a lot of money. I know much about climate change. I'd be — received environmental awards.And I often joke that this is done for the benefit of China," he said. "Obviously, I joke. But this is done for the benefit of China, because China does not do anything to help climate change. They burn everything you could burn; they couldn't care less. They have very — you know, their standards are nothing. But they — in the meantime, they can undercut us on price. So it's very hard on our business."
In a speech on energy policy in North Dakota last May, Trump referred to "draconian climate rules" and attacked "all the job-destroying Obama executive actions, including the Climate Action Plan."
"President Obama entered the United States into the Paris Climate Accords unilaterally and without the permission of Congress," he said. "This agreement gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use right here in America."
The fact that the new president of the US has repeatedly disagreed with the science is concerning, not just for the future of climate science, but for everyone that lives on earth. The USA is the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide, so if Trump makes decisions to make the situation even worse, we could all suffer.
an 8 23
a seasoned Federal Bureau of Investigation counterintelligence officer told the United States Senate Judiciary Committee that he was ordered by his superiors to "stop investigating Rudy Giuliani and to cut off contact with any sources who reported on corruption by associates of former President Donald Trump," according to a whistleblower complaint that was exclusively obtained by Business Insider's Mattathias Schwartz.
"The agent, who served 14 years as a special agent for the bureau, including a long stint in Russia-focussed counter-intelligence, claims in a 22-page statement that his bosses interfered with his work in 'a highly suspicious suppression of investigations and intelligence-gathering' aimed at protecting 'certain politically active figures and possibly also FBI agents' who were connected to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs," Schwartz writes. "Those figures, the statement claims, explicitly included 'anyone in the [Trump] White House and any former or current associates of President Trump.'"
Schwartz explains that the employee's account was "apparently leaked and posted in mid-July to a Substack newsletter. Insider has independently obtained a copy of the complaint and verified its authenticity, but has not corroborated all of its claims."
READ MORE: 'They’re coming for everyone': Looming Georgia indictments send Trump allies running for cover
The unnamed individual said in an interview with Insider that he was motivated by the desire to "policymakers accountable, whether they're on the left or the right." According to Schwartz, the whistleblower felt the FBI was at "a decision point" and wondered, "Are we going to do public corruption or not?"
Schwartz continues, "The whistleblower told Insider that he was finally ordered to stop investigating Giuliani and the rest of the Trump White House in August 2022, after months of what he says were persistent efforts to frustrate his work,at a meeting with three FBI supervisors at a bureau field office. Insider was able to confirm the agent's account of the meeting with a second source with knowledge of what took place."
Schwartz notes that "the directions he received included a strict prohibition on filing intelligence reports relating to Giuliani or any other Trump associate" during an August 2022 meeting where he was fed "performance issues and concerns" despite having "eight consecutive years of "excellent" or "outstanding" work.
"In one case, the statement says, the agent developed information from confidential informants that Giuliani had allegedly done paid work for Pavel Fuks, a Ukrainian oligarch and 'asset of the Russian intelligence services.' (That charge was previously reported by Rolling Stone.) The whistleblower also looked into claims that Giuliani had fraudulently raised money from investors to produce a never-completed film about Joe Biden in the months before the 2020 election," Schwartz explains. "The agent's reporting on Giuliani wasn't received well in the bureau's New York field office, his statement says. 'In the midst of my reporting involving Giuliani, which had previously been identified by my supervisor as 'high impact,' my management told me they received a call from a supervisor in [the New York field office], who they did not identify,' the statement says. 'This supervisor had taken issue with my reporting.'"
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-donates-to-climate-change-denying-organizations-2019-10
Google has been funding organizations which deny climate change and actively lobby against climate legislation, the Guardian reports.
- Google has been funding organizations which deny climate change and actively lobby against climate legislation, the Guardian reports.
- Google donates to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an organization that was reportedly key to President Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord.
- A spokesperson told Business Insider that just because Google donates to these groups, it does not mean the company endorses their "entire agenda."
no lnx
Google has been funding think tanks and lobbying organizations which actively fight against climate change legislation, The Guardian reports.
Google has been a vocal champion of climate change initiatives, and last month following a series of protest walkouts CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company's "biggest renewable energy purchase ever." Google has been trying to offset its carbon footprint by purchasing more renewable energy than it consumes as a company, not solely to power its own data centres and offices but also to boost clean energy development.
Despite making noises about becoming more environmentally friendly, Google has been quietly funding organizations which say climate change isn't real.
As highlighted by The Guardian, Google's list of beneficiaries for "substantial contributions" include numerous organizations which have been active in denying climate change exists and lobbying against legislation to combat it.
One organization funded by Google describes the 'climate delusion'
One of these organizations is the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which has referred to climate change as "climate delusion."
The CEI's director Myron Ebell was also reported as being instrumental in Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord in 2017.
For its part the CEI appears to generate positive press coverage for Google. Last month a senior fellow at the CEI published an op-ed in the Atlantic arguing against the antitrust probe launched by 50 state attorneys general into Google.
Another organization named on the list is the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. Google's involvement with the Heritage Foundation came under heavy fire earlier this year when it announced the appointment of Kay Coles James, the foundation's president, to its AI ethics council which collapsed after a week.
Kay Coles James Donald Trump
Kay Coles James sits next to Donald Trump during a meeting of conservative leaders in January. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The decision sparked a fierce employee backlash because of James' history of anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and climate change-denying rhetoric. Over a thousand employees signed a petition to have James ousted, and the following week Google disbanded the council entirely.
"We're hardly alone among companies that contribute to organizations while strongly disagreeing with them on climate policy," a Google spokesperson told the Guardian. The company declined to tell The Guardian how much it had donated to these groups.
When contacted by Business Insider, a Google spokesman said:
"We sponsor organisations from across the political spectrum that advocate for strong technology policies. We've been extremely clear that Google's sponsorship doesn't mean that we endorse that organization's entire agenda — we may disagree strongly on some issues. Our position on climate change is similarly clear. Since 2007, we have operated as a carbon neutral company and for the second year in a row, we reached 100% renewable energy for our global operations."
Do you work at Google? Contact this reporter via email at ihamilton@businessinsider.com or iahamilton@protonmail.com. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.
https://www.businessinsider.com/constitutional-convention-conservatives-republicans-constitution-supreme-court-2022-7
simulation: COSAction (conventionofstates.com)
vids:
We know you are anxious to see the complete results, and we appreciate your patience. As an independent assembly, the statement about the final results from the Convention must come from the body, and not our organization. We will circulate it on behalf of the Convention.
Here's a quick preview. The Convention passed amendment proposals on the following six ideas:
- The public debt shall not be increased except upon a recorded vote of two-thirds of each house of Congress.
- Term limits on Congress
- Limiting federal overreach by returning the Commerce Clause to its original meaning
- Limiting the power of federal regulations by giving an easy congressional override
- Require a super majority for federal taxes and repeal the 16th Amendment [fed income tax?]
- Give the states (by a 3/5ths vote) the power to abrogate any federal law, regulation or executive order.
The events at Williamsburg will be remembered as a turning point in history. The spirit of liberty and self government has been reignited." Michael Farris - Co-Founder, Convention of States Project.
not complete but most links
biz insider
common cause : ConCon-Opposition-Letter-March-2019.pdf (commoncause.org)
A convention is gaining momentum but still far away
So far, 19 GOP-controlled states, including four in 2022 alone (Nebraska, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wisconsin), have passed applications and calls for a constitutional convention under the model pushed by the conservative nonprofit group Convention of States, an offshoot of Citizens for Self Governance.
because of their efforts, "it's the first time any of these applications have had this much movement in quite some time," Viki Harrison, director of Constitutional Convention and Protecting Dissent Programs at Common Cause, told Insider. She called the passage of four new convention calls in states including South Carolina "a brutal loss."
Citizens for Self Governance and Convention of States, led by former Tea Party activist and ex-Parler CEO Mark Meckler, are relatively newer and well-funded players on the scene with connections to wealthy and powerful conservative interests.
Tax filings obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy reveal the groups, which are not required to disclose their donors, have received millions from the Koch-connected DonorsTrust, the Mercer family, and groups linked to powerful conservative lawyer Leonard Leo. A 2020 internal audit of Convention of States obtained by the group revealed that a $1.3 million donation made in Bitcoin made up 16% of the group's budget in 2019. Two donations totaling $2.5 million accounted for 36% of the group's 2020 budget....
so does Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, a staunch Trump defender who wrote an entire book, "The Con of the Con-Con," about the dangers of conventions.
"In states where you would have expected this to pass because they have Republican leadership, they're firmly on our side because they're scared about losing guns," Harrison said.
Natelson, who has published numerous writings and academic articles on Article V, charged that people who fear a runaway convention "don't know what they're talking about" and GOP legislatures that have resisted calling a convention out of those worries "have been sold a bill of goods."
"Those academics who go before the legislature and say things like, 'we don't know anything about the process, it could be a runaway convention' without exception, are people who have never published any scholarship on the subject," he said....
at the Convention of the States' 2016 mock convention in Williamsburg, Virginia, delegates, including Eastman, voted out six amendments, including a proposal that would eviscerate the 16th Amendment, which grants Congress the ability to impose an income tax.
The resolution the group is pushing would limit a convention to amendments that "impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit its power and jurisdiction, and impose term limits on its officials and members of Congress."
But limiting "the power and jurisdiction" of the federal government is an expansive mandate that could encompass virtually anything and enable delegates to pass extreme amendments while technically staying within the bounds of the convention....
Recent blog posts on the Convention of States' website explicitly reference the need for a convention to limit federal overreach on abortion, guns, and immigration.
"The Supreme Court has said that amending the Constitution is a political question in which the federal courts cannot get involved," Super said. "The president has no role at all in the process. And the whole point of the convention route is to sideline Congress. So Congress can't overrule the convention … there's no one to intervene. There's no one to stop a convention from doing whatever they want to do."
States have the flexibility to caveat their calls for a convention, and some have included penalties to keep delegates in line. Indiana and Florida have even made it a felony for convention delegates to defy the legislature's intent, measures they passed alongside their pro-convention resolutions....
Behind closed doors, Meckler, Santorum, and Natelson pitched a convention to GOP lawmakers gathered at a December 2021 ALEC workshop as a way for ordinary citizens to force sweeping changes to every facet of government.
"We would be aiming at the Deep State and potentially the federal judiciary as well," Meckler told lawmakers in the closed-door session, a recording of which was obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and shared with Insider. ...
moments later, Meckler said his effort could be judged by its "enemies," railing against a slew of "leftist" advocacy groups who oppose a convention.
"It's every leftist group in America, radical leftist group in America that stands for, I would argue, the destruction of America, the destruction of babies in the womb, the destruction of life itself," he said. "They hate America, they want to destroy America, and they're against Convention of States."
Santorum also assured lawmakers that conservative interests would be strongly represented in a one-vote-per-state convention due to the outsize influence of lower-population states, saying, "we have the opportunity, as a result of that, to have a supermajority, even though…we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who we agree with."....
https://twitter.com/olgaNYC1211/status/1248436809870249989/photo/1
ton-that hack malware phish ggl pAx dickinson bix insider, weeve stormer
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https://www.businessinsider.com/state-department-alleged-white-nationalist-employee-2019-8
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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/clearview-ai-facial-recognition-alt-right_n_5e7d028bc5b6cb08a92a5c48
long many lnx pix docs?
Far-Right Helped Create The World’s Most Powerful Facial Recognition Technology
Clearview AI, which has alarmed privacy experts, hired several far-right employees, a HuffPost investigation found.
By Luke O’Brien
04/07/2020
Advanced facial recognition technology poses a mortal threat to privacy. It could grant the government, corporations and even average citizens the ability to capture a photo of anybody and, with a few keystrokes, uncover all kinds of personal details. So when The New York Times published an exposé about a shadowy facial recognition firm called Clearview AI in January, it seemed like the worst nightmare of privacy advocates had arrived.
Clearview is the most powerful form of facial recognition technology ever created, according to the Times.With more than 3 billion photos scraped surreptitiously from social media profiles and websites, its image database is almost seven times the size of the FBI’s. Its mobile app can match names to faces with a tap of a touchscreen. The technology is already being integrated into augmented reality glasses so people can identify almost anyone they look at.
Clearview has contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, BuzzFeed reported earlier this year, and FBI agents, members of Customs and Border Protection, and hundreds of police officers at departments nationwide are among its users.
With the coronavirus pandemic increasingly throwing the country into chaos and President Donald Trump moving to expand domestic surveillance powers ? in theory, to better map disease spread ? Clearview has sought deeper inroads into government infrastructure and is now in discussions with state agencies to use its technology to track infected people, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Even if you’ve never heard of Clearview, you likely have an online presence — maybe a friend or a relative has posted a photo of you to Facebook — which means you’re probably in its database. Clearview’s CEO and co-founder, Cam-Hoan Ton-That, and his associates chose to mass-violate social media policies against scraping accounts to build an image warehouse of unprecedented size, as several outlets have noted recently.
What hasn’t been reported, however, is even scarier: Exclusive documents obtained by HuffPost reveal that Ton-That, as well as several people who have done work for the company, have deep, longstanding ties to far-right extremists. Some members of this alt-right cabal went on to work for Ton-That.
Clearview stated that it had immediately parted ways with some of these people when HuffPost reached out for comment for this story, but the pervasive links between the company and the alt-right can’t be simply dismissed as a few bad apples.
Big Brother, it turned out, was wearing a MAGA cap.
A Mysterious Hacker
Little is known about Ton-That, a 31-year-old Australian hacker who moved to San Francisco in 2007. He made a name for himself two years later by unleashing a computer worm that phished the login credentials of Gmail users. Ton-That showed no remorse after journalists traced the worm to him— he simply set up another phishing site.
By 2015, he had joined forces with far-right subversives working to install Trump as president. They included Mike Cernovich, a Trump-affiliated propagandist who spearheaded the near-deadly Pizzagate disinformation campaign; Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, a neo-Nazi hacker and the webmaster for The Daily Stormer; and Pax Dickinson, the racist former chief technology officer of Business Insider who went on to march with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In this far-right clique, two of Ton-That’s associates loomed larger than most thanks to their close connection to billionaire Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and Trump adviser: Jeff Giesea, a Thiel protégé and secret funder of alt-right causes, and Charles “Chuck” Johnson, a former Breitbart writer and far-right extremist who reportedly coordinated lawfare against media organizations with Thiel. And according to new documents obtained by HuffPost, Johnson appears to have received funding from Thiel for a startup that the Southern Poverty Law Center would label a “white nationalist hate group.” (Johnson has filed suit against HuffPost in Texas over a January 2019 article about his visits to members of Congress to discuss “DNA sequencing.”)
People involved with Clearview appear to have gone to great lengths to conceal their links to the company and each other. Johnson, for instance, does not appear on any of the incorporation documents and has left little public trace of his association with Ton-That beyond a Facebook post. But multiple far-right sources who know Johnson told HuffPost that he and Ton-That were in close contact at least as early as 2016, and that Johnson told them he was working with Ton-That on facial recognition.
Johnson told one source late that year that he viewed the technology as a way to potentially “identify every illegal alien in the country.” In early 2017, Johnson introduced Ton-That to another source, saying he was a gifted coder he’d hired to build the facial recognition tool. Around the same time, Johnson stated on Facebook that he was “building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads.”
Video and private messages obtained by HuffPost confirm that Johnson and Ton-That were collaborating on far-right schemes in 2016; by early 2017 at the latest, they were in contact about scraping social media platforms for the facial recognition business. At least two people who worked for Johnson took jobs with and worked for Clearview until late March, when the company claims to have severed ties with them after HuffPost reached out with questions.
Thiel himself has an obvious interest in mass surveillance: Palantir, his data-mining behemoth, aggregates enormous amounts of personal information about immigrants and undocumented workers, and it provides the analytical tools for ICE raids. In 2017, Thiel became one of Clearview’s earliest investors. He did not respond to questions sent to him and his spokesperson.
Like other tech products scaled in dodgy ways, Clearview may have grown too big to rein in. Every time police use Clearview, they upload images of people they’re trying to identify ? even child sex abuse victims ? to Ton-That’s unregulated and ever-expanding database, where they are stored indefinitely.
No federal laws exist to govern the use of facial recognition. “The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, told the Times.
Clearview also appears to spy on law enforcement searches. After a Times reporter had police officers run her photo through the app, the officers received calls from Clearview representatives asking if they were speaking to a journalist. The potential for abuse is vast.
“The fear is that the kind of authoritarian control this [tool] will grant will wind up in the hands of the wrong people,” said Liz O’Sullivan, the technology director at the nonprofit Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.
Like, for instance, a Clearview contractor who is fond of disseminating Third Reich propaganda about Jews. The same extremist, with whom Ton-That now claims to have parted ways, was instrumental in helping sow disinformation from Kremlin operatives in 2016 to assist the Trump campaign. A Clearview “investigator” who appeared to work for the company until late March is part of a D.C.-based white nationalist crew that gathers in secret.
Yet another Clearview employee who left the company after an inquiry from HuffPost is a Croatian-born extremist who wrote in 2015 that he “wholeheartedly endorse[s] racism, racialism, ethnocentrism, Islamophobia, Eurocentrism and anti-Semitism.” Writing under a pseudonym on various blogs, he had embraced the possibility of balkanizing America, which could allow authoritarian states such as Russia or China to fill the power vacuum.
“For a stable and sustainable global order to exist,” he wrote, “the United States Government as we know it must be destroyed.”
A White National Convention
In July 2016, far-right extremists descended on Cleveland for the Republican National Convention. The alt-right’s intellectual figurehead, Richard Spencer, was there, as was Cernovich. So was Johnson, who at the time was running GotNews, a site that employed white nationalists to crank out race-baiting content for Trump supporters. Peter Brimelow, the publisher of the white nationalist VDARE, showed up. British political saboteur Milo Yiannopolous attended a “twinks for Trump” party that featured anti-Muslim speakers such as Pamela Geller and Geert Wilders.
One night, Spencer attended a dinner with Johnson and other members of the far-right at an upscale Italian restaurant. He found himself sitting at a table with Ton-That, a striking figure with long black hair. The hacker arrived at the dinner with Johnson after they’d caused a minor fracas. They’d harassed Michelle Fields, a former Breitbart reporter who’d had her arm roughly grabbed at a Trump rally a few months earlier by the candidate’s then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. At the RNC, Johnson chased after Fields in the street until her fiancé shoved him away. The incident was captured in a video uploaded to Johnson’s GotNews YouTube channel. In the background, you can see Ton-That with Johnson, laughing as Fields scrambles away. (Fields worked for HuffPost at the time.) Over dinner that night, the hacker was more subdued.
“He was smart,” Spencer told HuffPost of Ton-That. “He was into this esoteric reactionary sphere stuff. I remember he was talking about celibacy and the priestly order being celibate and thinking for the group and not having mundane concerns.He was into quasi-Catholic neo-trad[itional] reactionary type stuff.”
The neoreactionary movement, also known as “NRx” or “Dark Enlightenment,” is a geeky subset of the racist, misogynistic far-right that has festered in Silicon Valley’s libertarian circles for over a decade, especially within the cryptocurrency community. Its members revere Thiel, microdose LSD and gussy up totalitarian ideas with a pseudo-intellectualism that creates a moral pretext for them to undermine ? “engineer,” they might say ? democracy. With tech skills and access to vast wealth, they have an influence that has eluded the bookish young men in Spencer’s orbit. Ton-That had been affiliated with this neoreactionary confederacy since before the 2016 RNC.
The movement’s high priest, Curtis Yarvin, is a programmer who goes by “Mencius Moldbug” and has a cryptocurrency startup funded by Thiel. Yarvin, who seemingly endorses slavery and has written approvingly of apartheid, has argued the U.S. would be better off if ruled by a CEO-king. To make this happen, he advocates for a soft coup. Among neoreactionaries, Trump is often referred to as the “God-Emperor” who will restore order to an immigrant-flooded nation under the thumb of a progressive media-academic complex ? “global Jewry,” in neo-Nazi-speak.
Giesea, whose ties to Thiel go back decades, organized the dinner in Cleveland. As a student, he edited Thiel’s libertarian newspaper, The Stanford Review. He later worked for Thiel’s first hedge fund, and then for Koch Industries’ public affairs office. Thiel put up seed money when Giesea started his own company.
Ahead of the 2016 election, Giesea worked closely with Cernovich to help organize a social media insurgency that could direct the far-right’s energy toward a singular purpose: getting Trump elected. Their network amplified extremists, besmirched opponents and disseminated Kremlin-boosted disinformation.
Jeff Giesea talks politics in a Periscope video.]
In a “How to Fund the Alt-Right” guide posted online in 2016 under an alias Giesea used, donors were encouraged to give money to white nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations. (“Not me at all,” Giesea said. “I don’t know who did that.”) The guide stressed the importance of anonymity and recommended donors use Bitcoin and PayPal, the online money transfer company founded by Thiel.
Spencer said Giesea donated $5,000 ? the maximum amount that didn’t require donor disclosure to the IRS ? to his white nationalist organization, the National Policy Institute, in 2016. (“No comment,” Giesea said.) Spencer told HuffPost that he later came to feel as if Giesea was trying to use the energy of the alt-right for political subversion and profit.
Auernheimer, the neo-Nazi hacker, described Giesea in a private Discord chat as a “major investor providing help to racists … a hugely connected dude … with lots of business interests who was supporting [T]rump stuff.” (“That’s not true,” Giesea said.)
At Giesea’s dinner in Cleveland, conversation turned, inevitably, to building the ethnostate, according to Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart editor who attended the event and has since renounced far-right extremism. A group of Hispanic waiters in earshot looked on warily. Someone at the table apologized to them. The waiters laughed nervously. Then the extremists, Ton-That among them, set out into the night to put their plans into motion.
Chuck Johnson’s Online Hatefest
If you were a hip far-right elitist in 2016, the online place to be was a Slack channel Johnson set up for WeSearchr, a now-shuttered crowdfunding platform he had launched. In private messages between Johnson and McHugh from 2015, Johnson described a meeting with Thiel that year to pitch his crowdfunding idea.
“Thiel gave me all the money I need,” Johnson said. “[W]rote me a check on the spot.”
Thiel declined to comment.
WeSearchr raised bounties for alt-right causes and would soon earn the designation of “white nationalist hate group” from the SPLC.
Johnson had a well-deserved reputation as a troll, but he was also a central node in a web of extremists. And he had many enemies ? the social media companies that took away his platforms, the news outlets that exposed him, the liberal society that he was convinced had allowed minorities to get into Harvard at his expense.
“When I met Chuck, I wondered why we weren’t weaponizing people like him,” Giesea told BuzzFeed.
Giesea belonged to Johnson’s WeSearchr Slack. So did Cernovich. And so did Ton-That.
Altogether, there were about 400 people in the channel, according to McHugh, who was a member and provided HuffPost with several dozen messages from the channel. The group was a who’s who of racist political saboteurs and moneyed terraformers of society, with a sprinkling of alt-right celebrities like George Zimmerman, who joined the channel in June 2016 and was auctioning off the weapon he used to kill Trayvon Martin. Johnson, who had deemed Zimmerman a “great man,” published a GotNews post to drive up the price of “the mighty gun that slain the dindu.”
Far-right politics brought George Zimmerman and Chuck Johnson together, as illustrated by this social media post of the two discovered by Little Green Footballs, a blog that has been tracking Johnson for years.]
Ton-That shared his far-right views in the WeSearchr Slack, as well as online more broadly. He has since deleted his social media accounts, but archives of his Twitter exchanges from 2015 and 2016 show him spreading anti-liberal talking points and Islamophobia, as well as amplifying figures like Yiannopolous.
He was clearly reading/listening to pretty trashy conservative media, and/or pretty trashy conservative people.
Ben Wheeler, a coder in New York, about Clearview co-founder Cam-Hoan Ton-That
Ben Wheeler, a coder in New York who met Ton-That in 2015 through programmer pals, called out the Australian for tweeting far-right conspiracies in the run-up to the 2016 election.
“He had some very inaccurate takes on [Hillary] Clinton, he was clearly reading and talking to people in the Breitbart vein,” Wheeler wrote in a message to HuffPost. “[A]s an example of her corruption, he pointed to the ways he said the Clintons used Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to embezzle money. I looked that up and it was one of those almost certainly false claims from one untrustworthy source. He was clearly reading/listening to pretty trashy conservative media, and/or pretty trashy conservative people.”
One of these people was likely Andrew Auernheimer, the webmaster for The Daily Stormer, the most popular neo-Nazi website. Another member of the WeSearchr Slack channel and a close collaborator with Johnson, Auernheimer devoted ample time to boosting both Johnson’s crowdfunding platform and his extremist friends.
Aurenheimer told HuffPost that he had “never heard of” Ton-That.But in 2015, he appeared to interact publicly with him on Twitter to bemoan the number of liberals in academia, a conversation HuffPost was able to piece together by looking at replies to the two alt-right members that remain online.
Auernheimer spoke often of his desire to slaughter Jewish children, start a race war and destroy the United States. He landed in federal prison in 2013 on identity fraud and hacking charges. After his conviction was vacated on a jurisdictional technicality, he reentered society with a giant swastika on his chest. He declared himself a neo-Nazi on The Daily Stormer and called for government agents and their families to be assassinated. He left the country and vowed revenge on America. “I plan on coming back with an army, be it human or automaton,” he wrote. He now claims to be based in Transnistria, a breakaway region of Moldova aligned with Moscow and beyond the reach of U.S. extradition treaties.
Andrew “weev” Auernheimer publicly declared himself a neo-Nazi in 2014 in a post on The Daily Stormer, which included this picture.]
Like Ton-That, Auernheimer also had an interest in biometrics. Around the time of the 2016 RNC, he told a friend that he was “working on facial recognition, specifically about black people.” When contacted by HuffPost, Auernheimer clarified that he’d been “building a racial, not facial, recognition project [that] took characteristics from the entire body, not just the face.” At the time, the system had been too costly to mount on drones, he said, but he planned to revisit the idea soon. Auernhemier could not provide any proof to support his statements. Ton-That told HuffPost that Clearview had nothing to do with the neo-Nazi.
“I never met him and he did no work for the company,” Ton-That said.
But Auernheimer had worked closely with Johnson for years, and he, too, claimed a connection to Thiel. A month after being released from prison in 2014, Auernhemier told a hacker friend in direct messages that he was “meeting with Peter Thiel’s right hand.” (Auernheimer denied making this claim, but HuffPost authenticated the messages with their recipient. Thiel didn’t respond to questions for this story.)
That same year, Auernheimer teamed up with Johnson to mine the leaked database of the Ashley Madison infidelity website for kompromat. They partnered again in 2015 to publish covertly recorded smear videos of Planned Parenthood officials. (Auernheimer told HuffPost he and Johnson “have nothing to do with each other” and are “radically opposed politically and socially.” HuffPost obtained numerous friendly emails they had exchanged.)
Johnson frequently collaborated with Giesea as well. In one especially inglorious caper, they arranged for Bill Clinton’s sexual assault accusers and Barack Obama’s Trump-supporting half-brother Malik to appear at the 2016 general election debates. “Malik Obama, getting him to endorse Trump, they brought him to Giesea’s apartment and just gave him cash,” Spencer said. “At least, that’s what Giesea told me.” (“I don’t recall any of that,” Giesea told HuffPost.)
When HuffPost reached Malik Obama in Kenya to ask if he’d taken money from Johnson and his associates to promote Trump, Obama responded by saying, “Donald Trump is the best president America ever had and Charles Johnson is my friend.”
But Johnson always had bigger plans than Malik Obama. He’d filled his black book with the names of far more important people whose coattails he could ride: Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas; xenophobic commentator Ann Coulter; Blackwater founder Erik Prince; high-profile attorney Alan Dershowitz — and Ton-That, whose technical ability offered Johnson a different pathway to power. They were the same age, with the same focus, fighting the same internet culture war.
In one WeSearchr Slack exchange, Johnson linked to an article about the aggressive stock trading habits of Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), calling her “one of the best day traders ever.”
“Of course,” Ton-That replied, “it’s a chink.”
They also agreed on target selection.The WeSearchr Slack members reserved a good portion of their animus for Gawker, a publication that had aggressively covered Thiel and his business interests. Thiel had furtively bankrolled numerous lawsuits against the blog ? the most notable being an invasion of privacy case filed by former professional wrestler Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea after Gawker published a portion of sex tape he was in.
The alt-right backed Thiel to the hilt. WeSearchr co-founder Pax Dickinson urged members of Johnson’s Slack channel to compile a list of Gawker employees and feed it to neo-Nazi trolls on far-right websites such as 4chan. “Let them do the contacting,” Dickinson wrote of the trolls, seemingly aware that his plan could lead to harassment.
Johnson had his own vendetta against Gawker, which had covered him critically and in one instance mocked him over a rumor that he defecated on a floor in college. Johnson had sued Gawker for defamation and later reached a confidential settlement with the blog. “In a just world, I’d have them killed,” Johnson said of Gawker and its CEO, Nick Denton. “But we are not there yet.”
Johnson, however, was in a position to crowdfund a WeSearchr bounty to sniff out plagiarism at Gawker, an ultimately fruitless quest. Ton-That, whom Gawker had also covered critically after his phishing scams seven years earlier, jumped at the chance.
“[W]ho else is working on gawker plagiarism & wants to collaborate?” he messaged the channel at the beginning of June 2016. “[I]’m scraping all their articles right now.”
On June 10, 2016, Gawker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and put up its assets for sale. A few days later, Cernovich posted a photo of Ton-That and Johnson having a meal, both of them flashing the “OK” sign that has become a popular hand gesture for white nationalists in the Trump era.
Chuck Johnson and Hoan Ton-That flash the “OK” sign over a meal in 2016.]
When BuzzFeed confronted Ton-That about the photo, he claimed he was “only making the Okay sign in the photo as in ‘all okay.’” That August, Ton-That messaged the WeSearchr channel with an idea to crash a “funeral” party Gawker employees were throwing to mourn the demolition of their publication. “Wish I had a hulkomania shirt,” he wrote.
It was during this period of his life, ensconced among extremists online and off, that Ton-That began building the company that would become Clearview.
In 2016, the Australian hacker brought on two unnamed engineers to help him on the project, according to The New York Times. Ton-That refused to give HuffPost their names. One helped design a program to scrape images of faces from a range of sites and social media platforms, often in violation of their policies. The other created a facial recognition algorithm.
The Birth Of ‘Smartcheckr’
On election night, Ton-That partied with Johnson and Dickinson in New York amid a sea of red MAGA caps. Two days later, Johnson posted a news story from The Sun to his Facebook. It included a photo of Dickinson and Ton-That celebrating bawdily. “My business partners are in the Sun and I feel left out,” Johnson wrote.
Far-right extremist Pax Dickinson celebrates Donald Trump’s election in 2016 with Hoan Ton-That in New York City.]
Johnson was very likely referring to a business that was registered in New York a few months later and followed the same naming convention as WeSearchr: Smartcheckr. The company would eventually rebrand as Clearview, as Ton-That later told the Times.
In January 2017, Johnson indicated on Facebook that he was “building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads.” Soon, he was boasting to friends and acquaintances that he was working on a powerful facial recognition tool.
Chuck Johnson dropped hints on Facebook in January 2017 that he was working on a facial recognition project.
A person who used to be close to Johnson and requested anonymity out of concern for their safety told HuffPost that they saw him “with a whole bunch of really important people” at Trump Hotel in spring 2017, “and he was going on and on about this facial recognition software he had hired people to build.” Johnson, they added, was with one of these hires ? “some coding wizard” with long hair in a ponytail. “He kept introducing him as a prodigy who was building the software,” the source recalled. When HuffPost showed the source photos of Ton-That, they confirmed he was the man with Johnson. “If it’s not him, that’s his twin.”
Not long after the election, McHughgot a call from Johnson. “He told me they had a way to identify every illegal alien in the country,” she said. “He brought up facial recognition technology and demanded I call Stephen Miller because he knew Stephen Miller was a true believer.”
It’s unclear if Johnson ever spoke to Miller, the architect of Trump’s brutal immigration policy. But around the same time, Johnson was working behind the scenes with Giesea and Thiel ? a member of the transition executive committee ? to recommend alt-right candidates for science and technology appointments with the incoming administration, according to Forbes. A person close to Trump’s transition confirmed to Politico that Johnson participated in transition-related meetings.
By this point, Johnson had a well-documented track record of bigotry and dirty tricks. In 2015, he’d been permanently ? and noticeably ? suspended from Twitter after requesting funds to “take out” a Black civil rights activist. In 2016, he’d gone on an alt-right podcast called “Fash the Nation” to talk at length about the evolutionary traits of “Jews” and “Blacks.” (“They’re dumber,” Johnson said of African Americans.)
In January 2017, Johnson hosted a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session during which he was asked for his thoughts on “the Holocaust, WW2, and the JQ in general.” (The “JQ,” or “Jewish Question,” is a term anti-Semites, including Hitler, have used for over a century as shorthand for their conspiracy theory that Jews have too much control over society.) “I do not and never have believed the six million figure,” Johnson wrote. “I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic but I confess to having complicated views on the subject. I think the Allied bombings of Germany were a war crime. I agree with [Holocaust revisionist] David Cole about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real. Why were their [sic] swimming pools there if it was a death camp?”
Two weeks after Johnson’s Holocaust denial on Reddit, SMARTCHECKR, LLC was registered in New York. The address associated with it belonged to Richard Schwartz, who had been a top aide to Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor of New York City. Schwartz would later admit to being one of the founders of Smartcheckr.
Thiel was one of the company’s earliest investors. “In 2017, Peter gave a talented young founder $200,000, which two years later converted to equity in Clearview AI,” Thiel’s spokesman, Jeremiah Hall, said in a statement. Hall didn’t specify which founder he meant and did not respond to questions for this story.
Emails and messages obtained by HuffPost show that Ton-That and Johnson were in touch about Smartcheckr in 2017. In one email thread, Johnson and his associates at GotNews discussed a dogwhistle post they were putting together about a racially motivated mass shooting in Fresno, California, that had been committed by a Black man who was Muslim. Tyler Bass, a GotNews writer, wondered if there was an easy way to scrape “an entire Facebook page quickly ... the next time another American goes apeshit and before Facebook pulls it down out of shame.” He added Ton-That to the conversation, who replied quickly. “I’m working on this for smartcheckr,” the hacker wrote. “Plan to make these tools available for our guys.”
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