chuck johnson

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:{:{big lawsuit} vs lambert}:

scary link?

[### United States : GEOINT champion Umbra at centre of ...

Intelligence Online

https://www.intelligenceonline.com › 2023/11/29 › geo...](https://www.intelligenceonline.com/corporate-intelligence/2023/11/29/geoint-champion-umbra-at-centre-of-dispute-between-investors-with-historic-ties-to-far-right,110113116-eve)

Nov 29, 2023 — Charles Johnson, a controversial former political operative, alleges that investment manager Hal Lambert and his firm Point Bridge Capital ...

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sjpl

Hatewatch reviewed a trove of emails, first reported on by Buzzfeed, that detailed the relationship between the NYPD and Clearview AI. Clearview AI founder Ton-That put the NYPD and the non-profit group Thorn in contact after meetings with Ashton Kutcher, Thorn’s cofounder. Kutcher and Ton-That discussed possible investment, according to a former associate of Ton-That who spoke to Hatewatch.

Ton-That sent the email to NYPD Lt. Felix Rivera and a person whose name and email were redacted by the NYPD’s Records Access Office.

Ton-That, March 19, 2019, 6:23 p.m. ET: Hi [redacted], Felix Rivera can tell you more about how he’s used our software to solve cases.

A source close to Thorn confirmed that someone introduced Thorn and Clearview AI in 2019. Demi Moore and Kutcher founded Thorn in 2012. Thorn uses facial recognition technology for its Spotlight program, which is designed to help law enforcement identify victims of child sex trafficking. Thorn claims officers in “all 50 states and Canada” use Spotlight.

The introduction “went nowhere,” the source told Hatewatch in a call. There “were concerns with how that technology was deployed, and there was no interest in working with Clearview AI.” Still, the email further demonstrates Clearview AI’s ambitions to integrate itself in law enforcement operations across the U.S.

It is unclear if Rivera responded to Ton-That’s email. Thorn no longer has emails related to the introduction, according to the source, who declined to elaborate. Hatewatch requested further emails from the NYPD, but a records officer said there were no more emails to release.

Hatewatch emailed an NYPD spokesperson for a comment on the email. The spokesperson referred Hatewatch to its policy on facial recognition technology adopted in March 2020 and said their “previous practices did not authorize the use of services such as Clearview AI nor did they specifically prohibit it.”

Ton-That responded to Hatewatch’s request for comment via email, saying the “questions relate to old assertions regarding myself and my company. There are factual inaccuracies and these questions are irrelevant with regard to the myriad crimes we have assisted law enforcement in solving over the years.”

Ton-That did not respond to a follow-up request asking him to point out the purported factual inaccuracies in Hatewatch’s reporting.

‘Terrifying’ app

Clearview has links to the authoritarian hard right, and Ton-That associates with white supremacists, as HuffPost previously reported. Privacy experts have raised alarm about the company because it amassed a reservoir of over 3 billion images by scraping photos from the web, without the consent of those photographed.

Research shows facial recognition technology is prone to racial bias. One study found it produces “higher rates of false positives for [Asian, Indigenous and Black people] at a factor of “10 to 100 times,” depending on the technology.

Clearview AI began as Smartcheckr in 2017. Extremist Charles “Chuck” Johnson claimed involvement in the company’s facial recognition algorithm that January, HuffPost reported.

Hatewatch and others have documented Johnson’s activism in detail. An associate of reactionary billionaire Peter Thiel, he has repeatedly collaborated with white supremacists and helped amplify a Russian intelligence-backed plot to sway the French elections in May 2017 through his now-defunct website GotNews.

Johnson set up a far-right crowdfunding platform, WeSearchr, in 2017. Former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh shared messages from the WeSearchr Slack channel, a nexus for far-right figures including Ton-That, Johnson, neo-Nazi Andrew Auernheimer and more, with HuffPost and Hatewatch.

Johnson said in the messages he hired Ton-That to create facial recognition software and that the software could be used to “identify every illegal alien in the country.”

Johnson confirmed to Hatewatch that he views himself as a co-founder of Clearview AI. Ton-That has denied this. Johnson, who challenges his designation as an extremist, also told Hatewatch that Ton-That met with Kutcher in early 2019 about a possible investment in the company. Johnson was “against the meetings,” which he claimed led to Ton-That introducing Thorn and the NYPD.

Clearview AI began seeking funding from investors in 2018,The New York Times reported. The company secured an initial seed investment of $1 million in July 2018 from backers including “Thiel, the venture capitalist David Scalzo and Hal Lambert.” Lambert is the creator of MAGA ETF, an investment fund that tracks companies aligned with Republican beliefs.

Investors and Schwartz’s friends had versions of Clearview AI on their phone in 2018, according to The New York Times.

Kutcher referenced a facial recognition “beta app” on his phone during an appearance on YouTube program “Hot Ones” that premiered Sept. 26, 2019. He called the app “terrifying.”

Kutcher is a successful investor, and co-founded Sound Ventures and A-Grade Investments, two venture capital firms.

Hatewatch contacted Kutcher’s publicist and Sound Ventures for comment on the alleged meeting with Ton-That. Neither responded. Sound Ventures denied it invested in Clearview AI to Business Insider in 2020.

Hatewatch attempted and failed to find up-to-date contact information for A-Grade Investment. Thorn did not respond to a follow-up request for comment on Johnson’s claims.

NYPD connection

Clearview AI has ingrained itself in law enforcement culture by offering trials to departments and bureaus from local to federal levels. The FBI agreed to pay Clearview AI $18,000 for a licensing contract on Dec. 31, 2021, according to public records. The Army, Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have also signed contracts with Ton-That’s company.

The contract between ICE and Clearview AI, signed on Sept. 3, 2021, totals $500,000, records show.

The NYPD began speaking to Clearview AI about a trial period for its technology in October 2018. Richard Schwartz, a longtime New York political player and former aide to mayors Rudy Giuliani and Ed Koch, began arranging meetings with Deputy Inspector Christopher Flanagan. Schwartz mentioned his ties to former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton and former Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple when arranging meetings. Ton-That also attended.

Schwartz, Oct. 17, 2018, 5:55 p.m. ET: “Hi Inspector Flanagan, A pleasure meeting you. My partner, Hoan, and I would very much like to meet with you on our facial-recognition app, as Greg suggested. I am personally highly committed to the success of the NYPD as I served as Mayor Giuliani's Senior Advisor and introduced him to [Bratton] and [Maple]. Please let me if there's a date that's convenient for you.”

Flanagan, Oct. 18, 2018, 10:58 a.m. ET: I would be interested in meeting up. Does Tuesday Oct 23 work?

Schwartz, Oct. 19, 2018, 08:56 a.m. ET: Good Morning Inspector Flanagan. Just wanted to follow up on your kind email from yesterday regarding a meeting on Oct. 23. Hoan and I are free anytime that day between 10:45 am and 4 pm. What works for you? Look forward to getting together.

Flanagan, Oct. 19, 2018, 10:06 a.m. ET : 11:00 is good. Our office is at 300 Gold street [84^th Precinct] in Brooklyn or I can stop by your office on my way in. Either is fine with me.

Emails show Ton-That visited NYPD at least three more times before Ton-That signed a contract for an NYPD trial of Clearview AI that ran from December 2018 to March 2019.

Officers continued using Clearview AI long after the trial period ended, the emails show. NYPD Det. Damon Gergar wrote to Clearview AI to get a trial version in Dec. 2019.

Gergar, Dec. 17, 2019, 9:09 a.m. ET: Hi! I’m a detective with the NYPD and on a Homeland Security Investigations task force where I conduct mostly child pornography and pedophile investigations. Other members of my team investigate a wide variety of other crimes. I was wondering what I need to do to get a trial version of clearview? We would love to test it out, if possible. You can reach me at 914-[redacted], also. Thanks so much!

Clearview, Dec. 19, 2019, 10:37 a.m. ET: Hi Damon Gergar, you have been invited to Clearview! To active your account please click the button below”

Gergar and Clearview AI fostered a collaborative relationship that went beyond the NYPD. Gergar referred three ICE employees to Clearview AI, the emails show.

The first ICE referral was sent to Clearview AI on Jan. 6, 2020, at 1:32 p.m. ET. The next was a special agent, whose name is redacted, on Jan. 14, 2020, at 1:34 p.m. ET. Another came on Jan. 21, 2020, at 12:17 p.m. ET.

That same day, Gergar sent Ton-That his resume.

Gergar, Jan. 15, 2020, 10:54 a.m. ET: Hi, Hoan! Let me know if you receive this and what you think. Thanks so much.

NYPD officers continued using and requesting access as late as Jan. 2020, according to an email sent from NYPD and U.S. Homeland Security Det. Lynn McCarthy to Jessica Garrison, Clearview AI’s vice president of government affairs.

McCarthy, Jan. 22, 2020, 2:48 p.m. ET: Hi, I am hoping to obtain access to Clearview, the facial recognition program. The program assisted to identify a subject of a case that we are currently working on. Thank you in advance.

The NYPD spokesperson told Hatewatch, “A facial recognition match is merely a lead; no one has ever been arrested solely on the bases of a computer match alone.”

Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at advocacy organization Free Press, responded to Hatewatch’s request for comment on the email and Clearview AI’s relationship with the NYPD by saying it “was troubling from the start.”

Benavidez concluded:

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.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.”

A Series Of Troubling Hires

Bass was one of Ton-That’s guys. He had become interested in hacker culture as a young man, and he was arrested on a computer harassment charge in Virginia in 2013 that either the alleged victim or the prosecutor declined to pursue.

Bass later morphed into a committed racist. By 2017, he was asking around about a writing job with American Renaissance, a heavyweight white nationalist organization. He already belonged to a white nationalist crew called the “DC Helicopter Pilots,” according to McHugh, who dated him in 2017. The group was a Washington-area chapter of The Right Stuff, an influential pro-Trump organization that attracts neo-Nazis. Members of the DC Helicopter Pilots ? likely a reference to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of executing dissidents by throwing them out of helicopters ? met regularly, at least once to eat swastika-shaped cookies. One chapter leader was a State Department official assigned to the Bureau of Energy Resources who advocated for a nuclear-armed white ethnostate.

A few weeks after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017 ? which Bass told McHugh that he attended with his 8-year-old son ? he found a job as an “investigator” doing “remote software testing” at Smartcheckr.

HuffPost obtained five of Bass’s résumés spanning from May 2017 to the present. He claimed to have assembled “devastating opposition dossiers on open-borders figures and activists” while working for Johnson and said he created “counternarratives for third-party reporters to mold mass perception.” His résumés also say he helped Johnson vet candidates for the Trump administration transition team. The administration declined to comment.

Another early Smartcheckr hire was Douglass Mackey, an otherwise unremarkable Middlebury graduate who’d washed out of a job in finance and became an alt-right superstar in 2016 under the alias “Ricky Vaughn.” The advocate of “global white supremacy” was so effective at disseminating pro-Trump, anti-Semitic propaganda and Kremlin-originated disinformation that MIT Media Lab named his Twitter account on a list of top influencers on the election, ahead of NBC News and the Drudge Report.

A photo posted by neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell identifying Douglass Mackey, left.]

In 2017, Mackey and an unidentified partner pitched Smartcheckr to the racist Republican candidate Paul Nehlen, who was vying for the Wisconsin seat of retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan. Nehlen, another member of Johnson’s WeSearchr Slack channel, was quickly radicalizing from outlandish bigotry to white nationalist extremism. He’d soon appear on David Duke’s radio show to talk about machine-gunning migrant children.

In a proposal Mackey sent Nehlen, Smartcheckr promised to micro-target potential voters and donors for $2,500 per month. The company would do oppo research by tapping “unconventional databases.” Ton-That’s “proprietary search and facial recognition technology” would allow for analysis of voters’ social media and their views on various issues.

Nehlen said on a podcast that he gave Mackey access to his Facebook through Business Manager, a tool for managing pages and accounts, for three months. “He didn’t post anything,” he said. “He didn’t do anything. He was suggesting that he was going to be able to grow my audience or whatever. He did nothing.”

Ton-That told BuzzFeed that Mackey only worked “for 3 weeks as a consultant to Smartcheckr, which was the initial name of Clearview.” He denied any knowledge of Mackey’s Ricky Vaughn persona — even though Mackey was also a member of the WeSearchr Slack channel, where he used the handle “Richard Vaughn” and the same avatar that he did on Twitter. Ton-That claimed Mackey had been referred to him by a “liberal Democrat.” But Johnson posted a video in October 2016 in which he called Mackey a “friend of mine, a guy that I’ve talked to on the phone, a good guy.” Mackey did not respond to emails from HuffPost.

Ton-That also claimed Mackey sent an “unauthorized proposal” to Nehlen and that “the technology described in the proposal did not even exist.” And yet Johnson had been bragging about the technology for the better part of a year. Bass was already troubleshooting Smartcheckr’s “flagship product,” according to his résumé.

In early 2018, still angry about getting ripped off, Nehlen disclosed that Mackey was Ricky Vaughn — something that was previously known only to high-ranking members of the alt-right. One of them, Christopher Cantwell, posted the Smartcheckr proposal Mackey sent Nehlen on his website. Twitter and other platforms lit up with white nationalist chatter.

“[O]ne of my closest pals just got his life ruined,” Auernheimer said of Mackey in The Daily Stormer forum.

Andrew Auernheimer was upset after Mackey’s identity was revealed.

Smartcheckr employees and associates scrambled to hide their connections to the company and each other after the incident. Schwartz, the former Giuliani aide, sanitized his LinkedIn profile. Smartcheckr used a reputation management service to suppress information about itself and Schwartz by clouding Google search results with fake webpages, according to a source close to the company.

Richard Schwartz listed himself as a Smartcheckr co-founder on LinkedIn until it was revealed that Mackey was a white suprema

Richard Schwartz listed himself as a Smartcheckr co-founder on LinkedIn until it was revealed that Mackey was a white supremacist.

Schwartz did not respond to questions from HuffPost.

Eventually, the commotion subsided. Ton-That and Smartcheckr tightened up operational security. They’d incorporated Clearview AI in Delaware through a third-party registered agent the previous year and would shift to that name for the facial recognition business.

“Thank ... goodness the panicked speculation about Smartcheckr is dying down,” Bass emailed McHugh. “Still, it’s not going to be great. If you have any thoughts on how to tailor things going forward in light of Mackeygate, as you offered, please let me know.”

Clearview Hits The Bigtime

In January 2018, Ton-That surfaced at the “Night for Freedom” party Cernovich organized in New York. Up on stage, Gavin Mcinnes, the Canadian founder of the neo-fascist Proud Boys gang, joked about “faggots” and the genitalia of transgender women. Pizzagate-peddler and neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec turned up. So did Canadian cult leader Stefan Molyneux and James O’Keefe, who in 2009 made a Thiel-financed video that mocked people of color.

McHugh was standing in a cluster of people when Ton-That materialized out of the crowd. It had been almost two years since she’d seen him at the far-right dinner in Cleveland. They chatted briefly. “Hoan told me things were going well for him,” McHugh said. “Especially with his company.”

The hacker melted back into the party. McHugh never saw him again.

Things certainly were going well. By the time of Cernovich’s event, Clearview had found more investors, including Ton-That’s former boss at AngelList, Naval Ravikant, and Kirenaga Partners, a small venture capital firm in New York. The firm’s founder, David Scalzo, told the Times that “there’s never going to be privacy” and shrugged about the possibility that technology “might lead to a dystopian future or something.”

Another early investor was Hal Lambert, a Texas money manager and major GOP fundraiser who is close with Ted Cruz and claimed to be on Trump’s inaugural committee. Lambert had also invested early in Anduril, a Thiel-backed defense contractor that is building autonomous surveillance systems to police the southern border. Lambert has railed against the political left and the news media, most recently appearing on Fox Business Network to downplay the danger of coronavirus and accuse journalists of stoking fear.

When reached by phone, Lambert expressed surprise to hear about anti-democratic extremists associated with Clearview. But he admitted to knowing Johnson. He also said he’d known Ton-That prior to Clearview because the coder “worked on some data stuff” for the investor. Lambert declined to provide further details, citing “proprietary” work.

Throughout 2018 and into the following year, Ton-That worked with Schwartz to sign up law enforcement agencies for Clearview. The company claimed to have “mountains” of data in its “proprietary image database.” The Clearview team started aggregating every mugshot taken in the U.S. over the last 15 years, according to emails obtained by OneZero. Schwartz peddled the tech at law enforcement conferences. Ton-That set up bogus LinkedIn profiles to run ads that hyped the technology, according to BuzzFeed.

To help drum up more business, Clearview recruited Jessica Medeiros Garrison, a former executive director of the Republican Attorneys General Association and a Daily Caller contributor. The company also retained Paul Clement, the former U.S. solicitor general and perennial right-wing consideration for the Supreme Court, as its attorney.

Clearview brought on high-powered attorney Paul Clement to represent the company.

Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies were signing up for Clearview: the Indiana State Police, the New York State Police, the Chicago Police Department, the Atlanta Police Department, police departments in New Jersey and Florida, and the Department of Homeland Security. So did the Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division of the Texas Department of Public Safety, a contract that has not been previously reported. Clement sent a letter to the Atlanta Police Department last summer stating that “over 200 law enforcement agencies around the nation” were using Clearview. That number would triple within months, according to The New York Times.

Clement provided a legal cover for police to sidestep civil rights concerns, writing that Clearview didn’t violate the Fourth Amendment because the mere act of posting anything to social media removed any expectation of privacy.

Clement also anticipated the argument that facial recognition has baked-in racial bias problems. A majority of algorithms tested in 2019 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology falsely identify female and darker-skinned faces at much higher rates than white male faces. Clearview was simply more accurate than existing technology, Clement wrote. (The company appears to have shunned an independent audit of its technology and did not participate in the NIST test.) Moreover, he added, Clearview used “non-race-based algorithms” to minimize bias. Clement offered no evidence in his letter to support either claim.

On his April 2018 résumé, Bass wrote that he was identifying “prostitution and gang connections of subjects on 24-hour deadlines.” Clearview promotional materials state the company “began solving crimes using newly developed facial-recognition technology” in 2018, meaning that Ton-That and his employees may have had the ability to snoop on police searches and criminal investigations and harvest images of suspects for their database for almost two years.

The company also found a big client in Rudin Management Company, a multibillion-dollar real estate firm for which Bass did “background screenings of tenants and hires.” He started hiding his employer on his résumé. He worked, he said, for “Confidential.”

On his résumés, Bass took increasing steps to conceal his connection to Ton-That’s company.

On his current résumé, Bass highlights that he used his “familiarity with the Spanish language” at Rudin Management, an indication that Clearview and the real estate firm may have had a white nationalist vetting Spanish-speaking people for jobs and housing. Bass now claims to work directly for Rudin Management, which Rudin Management says is untrue.

“The individual in question was never employed by Rudin Management,” a spokesperson said. But Rudin did use Ton-That’s company to screen people, according to the spokesperson: “We utilized Smartcheckr’s services for a period of time to conduct routine background checks based on publicly available information.”

Rudin Management refused to provide further details, but the firm previously told BuzzFeed that it also used a surveillance camera system developed by Clearview that works with the facial recognition technology.

Bass declined to speak with HuffPost.

A Radical Liaison To Law Enforcement

As Clearview continued to sign up police departments, the far-right extremists at the company interacted more with law enforcement. In an email from December 2019 obtained by BuzzFeed, Clearview employee Marko Jukic pitched a free trial of the technology to a nationwide police listserv: “We invite you to test the limits for yourself.”

Jukic had for years used an alias derived from his surname to spread racism and anti-democratic ideas, praise Vladimir Putin and even write approvingly about a potential collapse of the United States government. Born in Croatia, Jukic identified as an extremist Catholic traditionalist and had spent most of his childhood bouncing around the world with his Croatian mother and American father, a political officer with the U.S. State Department.

He dropped out of Northwestern University in 2016. Soon enough, he went to work for Johnson and became an active member of the WeSearchr Slack channel. He coordinated with Ton-That on the Gawker-scraping project and tweeted about radical organizing with the former director of the Thiel-funded Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

Marko Jukic and Chuck Johnson in Cleveland during the 2016 Republican National Convention.]

In his early adulthood, Jukic, who just turned 24, published many thousands of extremist words on neoreactionary blogs. He declared that “diversity, equality, tolerance and the rest of the lot of contemporary progressive values are indisputably corrosive to civilization as they are today practiced.” He expressed homophobic, misogynistic and racist views. “[I]f you spend a few hours letting your disenchanted friends and family know that it’s OK to use the word ‘nigger’ [and] point out that democracy is a miserable failure,” he wrote, “you will have accomplished far more concrete good in the world than you would have by spending a few hours doing almost anything else.”

He was opposed to multiculturalism and wrote that Jews did not belong among people of European heritage. “The answer to the Jewish question,” he wrote, “is quite simple: segregation and separation. ... [U]nlike progressives, neoreactionaries do not believe one can abolish the laws of nature and turn diversity into a strength, least of all using the State. Diversity engenders animosity and eventually violence, and is thus a weakness.” Genocide wasn’t a solution, Jukic wrote, “unless you have the biggest bully around on your side.” By that, he meant the power of the state.

“In context that is a quote urging far right extremists to avoid Jewish people and to disavow anti-Semitic violence,” Jukic said.

Jukic was prone to flights of wild-eyed neoreactionary fancy, imagining a future where a king ruled America and would tackle “welfare spending” by sending the military and heavily armed militias to “pacify” the “ghettos” with lethal force. Journalists who set foot in occupied zones would be assassinated. “[V]iolence most definitely is the answer,” he wrote. He supported the “generous use” of racial profiling to curb immigration, as well as a wall along the Mexico border equipped with high-tech cameras and drones.

In much of his writing, he looked to the ethnonationalism of Putin’s Russia for inspiration and speculated about a Russian empire that encompassed Hawaii and extended to San Francisco.

In his vision of a new geopolitical order, the first step, Jukic wrote, was to dismantle and balkanize what he described as the “uniquely evil” United States. To neoreactionaries, that meant replacing democracy with some form of authoritarianism. Two years later, however, he’d decided that balkanization or civil war in America was impossible because “America’s diversity problem is not regional, but national and ubiquitous.”

“This is not unwarranted pessimism but the sober reality that has to be accepted before any real goals can be achieved,” he wrote about a month later. “Just because the United States cannot Balkanize does not mean it cannot collapse into chaos, however.”

Jukic emailed HuffPost a statement in which he claimed his posts were “exercises in theatrical hyperbole and comedic satire.” He was, he said, a young man trying to shock his reader. His talk of balkanization was little more than an off-the-books 4chan-fueled college bull session. He said he no longer believed that “America’s severe societal problems” would lead to governmental collapse, although he still felt the political process remained “fundamentally broken.” And he’d “always disavowed” political violence, he said.

“I wrote a number of purposely inflammatory things as a teenager and young adult to test boundaries,” Jukic said in his statement. “I never meant any harm, but I admit my insouciance and prodigious imagination would not always give that impression. It’s something that I put firmly in the past many years ago already of my own accord, long before being contacted for this article, and I intend to keep it that way. Those quotes do not represent my thinking or views in the present day.”

But many of Jukic’s posts appeared about two years before he says he started working at Clearview. Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal syndicated some of his writing. Other far-right extremists took Jukic seriously and engaged him in long conversations about radical politics.

As far-fetched as Jukic’s vision seemed, he’d thought deeply about his tactics and eschewed the open activism the alt-right had embraced, most notably in Charlottesville. Instead, he endorsed the neoreactionary concept of “passivism”: lie low, create hidden networks, quietly build the “machinery” to subvert the system. “Victory will not be won at the ballot box,” Jukic wrote in 2016. “Donald Trump will need to build his own regime, his own state, and make it so good that the existing regime defects to it in fear and awe of his power. He’ll need his own NYT, his own State Department, his own CIA, his own Harvard.”

Three years later, Jukic was pitching Clearview to law enforcement.

Subverting Democracy

After the Times published its investigation into Clearview in January, New Jersey’s attorney general ordered all police in the state to stop using its tool. Two Democratic senators introduced legislation to put a moratorium on facial recognition use by government officials and contractors until Congress could regulate the technology. Other lawmakers questioned Clearview about the company having licensed its technology to organizations in authoritarian countries such as Saudi Arabia, Singapore and United Arab Emirates.

Social media companies fired off cease-and-desist letters demanding that Clearview stop scraping photos and data. The company was hit with multiple lawsuits by people who alleged that Clearview illegally collected their biometric information, including a class-action suit in New York federal court. Another class-action in Virginia federal court alleged that Clearview had violated the Virginia Computer Crimes Act, the same law Bass was arrested for allegedly violating in 2013 and for which he was never prosecuted. Vermont’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against Clearview last month, alleging that the company had broken state laws by collecting images of Vermonters, including children, without their consent.

Clearview raced to do damage control. A “user code of conduct” materialized on the firm’s website, along with a promise that the technology would have no consumer applications and be available only to law enforcement and “select security professionals.” But that wasn’t true ? Clearview was aggressively courting companies and private clients such as Macy’s, Bank of America and Walmart, according to a list leaked to BuzzFeed.

Clearview also allowed investors and Trump-affiliated elites to play around with its app and unregulated database.The company set up an account for the company of former Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller. His company has run almost 20 searches, according to BuzzFeed. John Catsimatidis, the billionaire Trump donor and owner of Gristedes Foods, the largest grocery store chain in Manhattan, tested the facial recognition technology at one of his supermarkets in an effort to catch shoplifters, according to The New York Times. But Catsimatidis, who is friends with Schwartz, also used the app to snoop on a man he spotted on a dinner date with his daughter.

And Johnson appears to still be involved with the company. On a flight to Boston in January, the far-right extremist befriended a passenger and showed off a facial recognition app that could only have been Clearview, according to BuzzFeed.

Ton-That bobbed and weaved through television interviews, letting more details slip while asserting a First Amendment right to access anything posted on social media. A number of banks were using Clearview, he told CNN, but he declined to name them. He admitted to meeting with legislators but didn’t say what they’d discussed. He declined to name them, too. Most of all, he downplayed the dangers of his technology.

“This is not a 24/7 surveillance system,” he said.

Another Clearview attorney, Tor Ekeland, emerged to field media requests. Ekeland was also Auernheimer’s lawyer and had made his name by getting the neo-Nazi out of federal prison. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Another round of damage control ensued after HuffPost reached out to Jukic with questions last week. Ton-That said through a spokesperson on March 27 that Clearview had severed ties with both Bass and Jukic.

“I was shocked by and completely unaware of Marko Jukic’s online writings under a different name,” Ton-That said. “As soon as those writings were brought to my attention, we took steps to separate him from the company.”

But Ton-That almost certainly knew Jukic’s neoreactionary pen name. In Slack channel messages and emails between the two that date back to 2016, Jukic used the same alias as he did on Social Matter, a prominent, now-defunct neoreactionary blog run by a former Daily Caller writer who later took a job at a Thiel-funded think tank.

In a statement to HuffPost, Ton-That professed his love for America ? in large part, he said, because of his adopted country’s diversity. He said he found white supremacist and anti-Semitic views “abhorrent.” He shared an insight into his background that could apply to many intelligent, wayward young men who stumble into hateful online echo chambers.

“I grew up in Australia, but truthfully, I grew up on the Internet,” Ton-That said. “I grew up without television or movies as cultural touchstones. I learned about the world, its inhabitants and ideas online. It’s where I learned my craft to program and code, and how to navigate the vast variety of information, thoughts and views. It had not always been a straight path, and it had not always served me well. There was a period when I explored a range of ideas—not out of belief in any of them, but out of a desire to search for self and place in the world. I have finally found it, and the mission to help make America a safer place. To those who have read my words in the Huffington Post article, I deeply apologize for them.”

When HuffPost contacted Johnson in late March, he pretended to be an undercover U.S. intelligence operative who’d been recruited out of high school. “Would prefer being kept out of whatever you are doing,” he said. “Nearly got me killed by a foreign government last time.” Johnson said his government contract prohibited him from talking to the press. He then spoke at length with HuffPost, and said if this article ran, “you’ll wind up hurting our country as China, Russia, Israel, and Britain all roll out facial recognition products which curtail our liberties.”

The next day, a man using the pseudonym “John Smith” called from a VoIP line with a West Palm Beach number after HuffPost insisted that Johnson have a credible person verify his claims. “Smith” refused to say where he worked but offered vague reassurances that the government had vetted “the DNA” of the Clearview team and found no “red flags.” That team, according to Smith, included Johnson, whom Smith described as “not a significant equity holder” in Clearview. When asked again if Johnson had a stake in Clearview, Smith said, “I believe so. I don’t know for sure.”

Johnson later texted HuffPost. “I’ve done my part,” he wrote. “Marko and Hoan do good work on behalf of our country.” Johnson refused to answer any questions about his involvement in the company or his relationship with Ton-That, who did the same when first contacted by HuffPost but eventually distanced himself from Johnson.

“Charles Johnson is not an executive, employee, consultant, and doesn’t have a board seat at Clearview Ai,” Ton-That told HuffPost a week after his first statement. He refused to disclose whether Johnson had an equity stake in the company.

But the money behind Clearview and the company’s opaque origins are bound to raise more eyebrows, especially during a health crisis in which a hard-right Trump administration could expand domestic surveillance in ways that would be hard to unwind. Clearview’s secretive founders have already shown a callous disregard for the privacy of American citizens. Even more concerning are their connections to a dark strain of political extremism now coursing through Silicon Valley and Washington.

In April 2016, Johnson announced himself as an extremist in a GotNews video. “What is the alt-right?” he said. “I guess I’m sort of on the ground floor here given that I’m friends with Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug.”

To read Yarvin is, in the neoreactionary godfather’s own words, to find “instructions” for a quiet “fascist coup” in America, one that might take 25 years, maybe 50. What Yarvin calls a “reboot” of America would dissolve the government and “terminate democracy.” All in the name of a stable new world order.

If you squint, you can almost see it underway, as techno-authoritarians who openly deride modern America as an obsolete operating system build-out, through their own companies and the complicity of law enforcement, an all-seeing eye unbound by the statutes that constrain the government’s use of personal data. Does the Trump adviser behind many of these efforts — the German-born American billionaire with a third citizenship quietly purchased from New Zealand ? really have the best interests of every American in mind?

More than a decade ago, Thiel committed a statement to print that should adjoin his every mention in the press.

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” the Clearview investor wrote in a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute.

He meant it.

==

Chuck C. Johnson, a former Breitbart reporter who ran a far-right conspiracy site and was banned from Twitter for threatening to “take out” Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson, is best known for a 2017 rant in which he said, “I do not and never have believed the six million figure. I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic … I agree with David Cole about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real.”

When confronted about the interaction, Harris said, “I am unaware of his previous associations, but we had a discussion involving his business with genetic sequencing. Of course I disavow and condemn white supremacy and anti-semitism.” But there is little excuse for GOP lawmakers to not know who Johnson is anymore, given that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and ex-Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) repeatedly got into troubleassociating with him as well.

==

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/dana-rohrabacher-matt-gaetz-chuck-johnson

Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) previously drew scrutiny for hanging out with Chuck C. Johnson, a far-right Internet troll and Holocaust denier, and both have tried to explain away the occurence.

But according to *Mother Jones*, both congressmen somehow ended up fraternizing with him a second time this summer.Specifically, Johnson was on board a yacht fundraiser in Newport Beach, California, on behalf of Gaetz's re-election campaign, at which Rohrabacher gave a speech in support of his colleague. The fundraiser was hosted by public relations executives Alfred Balitzer and Rod Wilson, the former of whom Johnson has referred to as a "mentor."

In January, Gaetz, one of President Donald Trump's closest kindred spirits in Congress, faced controversy and a letter of condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League for providing Johnson a ticket to attend Trump's State of the Union Address as his guest. Gaetz argued that Johnson had simply "showed up at my office" and the invite was not an endorsement of his views, but bizarrely, added in an interview on Fox Business that Johnson is "not a Holocaust denier, he’s not a white supremacist."

Rohrabacher, another Trump ally and Congress' most notorious apologist for Russian President Vladimir Putin, allowed Johnson to sit in on a meeting between himself and Sen. Rand Paul, after Johnson had helped him secure a meeting with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in August and donated $5,400 in Bitcoin to his campaign. Rohrabacher maintains that Johnson was not invited to the meeting with Paul, but admits that he was not asked to leave it either.

Johnson, a former Breitbart reporter who has spent years promoting fake news through his GotNews web site, and who wasbanned for life from Twitter for inviting people to raise money to help him "take out" Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson, came out as a Holocaust denier in early 2017.

"I do not and never have believed the six million figure," he told a commenter on an alt-right Reddit thread. "I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic. I think the Allied bombing of Germany was a ware [sic] crime. I agree … about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real."

He has since tried to claim that he does not actually deny the Holocaust, and only said this to see what a reaction it would get.

==

==

DC jud watch benghazi bs ? ross?

mma

Right-wing “journalist” Laura Loomer was de-verified on Twitter in 2017 after she exploded in an unhinged anti-Muslim meltdown, which prompted her to compare the site to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler. Today, she joined other conspiracy theorists—including Alex Jones—on Capitol Hill and made her presence felt at hearings featuring Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

Allegations that Twitter and other major social media platforms have discriminated in the enforcement of their terms of service to target conservatives have for the past year been bubbling out of the conspiracy theory fever swamps of the internet—where right-wing activists have been subject to suspensions and bans as platforms move to combat misinformation—into the GOP mainline, where they have inspired Congressional hearings. Aside from a handful of anecdotal stories about terms of enforcement errors, no tangible evidence exists to prove that tech companies are actually doing what the conspiracy theorists—and now GOP members of Congress—have claimed.

Today, representatives from Facebook and Twitter were called to testify before the House and Senate about misinformation on the platform and the way enforcement is carried out. The hearings attracted a swarm of right-wing media figures who work in the conspiracy theory media market, including Infowars’ Jones, One America News’ Jack Posobiec,alt-right troll Chuck Johnson, and Gateway Pundit’s Cassandra Fairbanks. These conspiracy theorists did not go quietly.

Jones spent a brief moment lambasting CNN’s Oliver Darcy, whose reporting on Infowars’ de-platforming has led Jones and his colleagues to target him with a smear campaign alleging that Darcy is anti-American and working on behalf of the communist Chinese government. [pix twit]When Twitter’s Dorsey exited the Capitol after the morning meeting, he faced a scrum of reporters intermingled with conspiracy theorists. As Dorsey entered his vehicle, Loomer yelled at him: “You unverified me and called me a white supremacist! I’m Jewish!You violated my First Amendment right.” Jones rambled about something to do with CIA and Barack Obama.

When Dorsey returned in the afternoon, he headed to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce for a personal grilling from Republicans based on the unsubstantiated claim that his website is systemically censoring conservative voices. While Dorsey repeatedly denied that his site discriminates against conservatives, he received a second dose of Loomer’s antics.

About an hour after the afternoon session began, Loomer interrupted the House hearing by bellowing that President Trump must “help us before it’s too late because Jack Dorsey is trying to influence the election, to sway the election so that Democrats can steal the election.” Rep. Billy Long of Missouri began rattling off like an auctioneer while Capitol Police escorted Loomer out of the chamber[pix]

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But as HuffPost’s Ashley Feinberg rightfully pointed out, while Rep. Long and his GOP colleagues may have enjoyed ridiculing Loomer, the conspiracy theories pushed by Loomer and her ilk are the basis of today’s largely pointless meetings.

Tags: Alex JonesCassandra FairbanksCharles JohnsonJack PosobiecLaura Loomerconspiracy theoriesMediatech companiesGateway PunditInfoWarsOne America News

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The Rise and Fall of Twitter's Most Infamous Right-Wing Troll

My journey into the mind of the 26-year-old who's blurred the line between trolling and journalism.

TIM MURPHYDEC. 16, 2014 7:00 AM

Y"ou may decide, for instance, what many people on the left and the right think—that I'm a sociopath and blah blah blah," says Charles C. Johnson. Peter Duke

Update, 5/26/2015: On Monday, Twitter permanently suspended Chuck Johnson’s Twitter account, as well as another account, @citizentrolling, he set up in response to the initial suspension. The suspension came in response to a tweet Johnson sent out asking for help “taking out” activist civil rights activist DeRay McKesson.(Johnson has said he was merely referring to his reporting and was not making a physical threat.) You can read his lawyer’s letter to Twitter demanding immediate reinstatement here. Read the original piece below:

Hours before I was due to hop in a rental car to drive to his home last week,Charles C. Johnson laid down a new ground rule: He would talk only if I promised not to mention he lived in Fresno. The internet was full of crazy people, after all.

We'd originally arranged to meet weeks before he launched a one-man crusade to out "Jackie," the woman at the heart of Rolling Stone's flawed investigation into campus rape at the University of Virginia. There were already many other examples of his antagonistic brand of online dirt-flinging to discuss. Johnson, a tireless self-promoter, seemed eager to speak—or spar—face-to-face; he even offered to let me stay at his place in California. Now he was asking for privacy.

It was an odd request, considering that the Washington Post had just reported where Johnson lived? and his location was posted on his Twitter page at the time. Not to mention that he had recently published the home addresses of two New York Times reporters? and he'd just spent two days gleefully airing personal information about a woman he'd never met. ("I'm giving Jackie until later tonight to tell the truth and then I'm going to start revealing everything about her past," he'd taunted her on Twitter.) Johnson was asking for a degree of respect that he relishes in denying others.

I didn't agree to Johnson's ground rule, but he agreed to see me anyway. After five hours in the car, I arrived at my motel to find a fresh set of emails. We could talk, but only if we didn't go anywhere near his house. On second thought, we couldn't meet in person at all—he'd traipsed off to LA for some meetings and was planning on staying for another day to do a TV interview. I'd already rearranged my flights after he had forgotten I was coming. Now I'd been snubbed for Larry King.

"I suppose there's some people who think it's ironic or whatever," Johnson said about his desire to conceal his whereabouts when we finally spoke by phone. "I'm just trying not to make it easy on people. There's a reason I own several guns."

Johnson had almost immediately called BS on Rolling Stone's investigation after it was published in late November. ("That UVA story about that gang rape never happened. We all know it. Why can't we say it?" he tweeted.) Like most of the story's skeptics, Johnson zeroed in on its central anecdote, in which a student named Jackie described a brutal gang rape at a fraternity. Johnson hammered the article's author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, searching for holes in her previous reporting and wondering whether she was friends with her former University of Pennsylvania classmate, journalistic fabricator Stephen Glass.? After RS conceded that it had found "discrepancies" in Erdely's reporting, Johnson offered a cash reward to anyone who could tell him who Jackie really was.

Two days later, Johnson published what he claimed was Jackie's full name at his website, GotNews.com. Then he published photos from her "rape obsessed" Pinterest page. He told me that he paid $200 for the information that led to her.

"It'd be very easy to write a 'Fuck Charles Johnson' piece, and in many respects, however you write the story, it doesn't hurt me either way."

It was a characteristic performance from the 26-year-old provocateur, who is impatient with journalistic ethics and possessed with an insatiable appetite for personal destruction. He is a subject of mockery on the left and the right due to his blustery self-promotion ("I'm making a list, checking it twice, gonna find out who is naughty…"), baseless speculation (he thinks Barack Obama may be secretly gay), and regular face plants. Last week, he mistakenly claimed to have found a photo of Jackie at an anti-rape rally; it was someone else. Still, he defended his "batting average." (The woman in the photo says she will sue Johnson.) But he is adept at digging up dirt on public and private figures, and even when he's at his most egregious, he's hard to ignore.

His other recent antics have included suing for access to Mike Brown's juvenile records, making the unproven claim that the Ferguson police shooting victim had once been charged in a second-degree murder.? Citing police sources, he accused "street thug" Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who died after being put in a chokehold by a New York City police officer, of domestic abuse. He incorrectly reported that New Jersey had an Ebola case; he then reported that a nurse quarantined in the state was a "left-wing Democrat." He hijacked the Mississippi Republican primary by offering $1,000 for photos of Sen. Thad Cochran's wife, who was in a nursing home. And he's trained his sights on other journalists, such as Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post, whom Johnson said was "obsessed with race" and had shown "overt friendliness in his reporting about Michael Brown." Johnson revealed that Lowery had once received a speeding ticket."We are going to use auctions to set the price on the head of each journalist we take down," he tweeted.

Besides Twitter, Johnson's primary platform is GotNews, a crowd-funded startup he launched in early 2014 after denouncing the "stenography" of traditional insider media. "I don't do the 'being a bitch for the establishment' thing which a lot of Republicans do," he told me. "I go where the story leads." While he claims to be an "equal opportunity debunker," Johnson's stories often lead back to familiar targets—lefty activists, "lying women and thuggish black men," elitist journalists, and the mainstream conservatives he believes have screwed him over.

"It'd be very easy to write a 'Fuck Charles Johnson' piece, and in many respects, however you write the story, it doesn't hurt me either way," Johnson told me. "You may decide, for instance, what many people on the left and the right think—that I'm a sociopath and blah blah blah. Or, on the other hand, that I'm 'working on some new entity that's going to be controversial.' There's a degree to which, however you turn the lens, both things will be true."

The Rolling Stone-UVA debacle is the perfect scandal for Johnson, he explained on Twitter, because it combines his "three favorite types of frauds: college administrators, campus feminists, & fake journalists."? It was a clue to Johnson's evolution: His current role stems directly from his days as a campus gadfly, the conservative kid who was obsessed with tweaking political correctness and fixated on grudges and gossip.

The chip on his shoulder dates back to at least high school, when Johnson, the son of two teachers from a working-class part of Boston, attended prestigious Milton Academy on a scholarship. He gravitated toward politics, and when someone on a Young Republicans online forum posted a quote from former Education Secretary Bill Bennett positing that aborting black babies would drive down the crime rate, Johnson sprang to his friend's defense. "Despite being called a Nazi repeatedly, I defended free speech and said that given what I had read about the African subcontinent and the successes of black Americans (despite their high crimes [sic] rates), I found myself rather privileged to be living in America," he later wrote.

In the ensuing controversy, which drew the attention of the Boston Globe, minority students took a vow of silence, classes were canceled, and the school held a special assembly to screen the movie Crash. It had all the trappings of a Johnson controversy—an inflammatory comment involving race, his own sense of persecution, and an empty threat of legal action (he believed the school had not treated him fairly, but opted not to sue).

Johnson came into his own as a right-wing enfant terrible at Claremont McKenna College, a Southern California liberal-arts school, which he attended between 2007 and 2011. He wrote a blog called the Claremont Conservative, where he pilloried campus figures in increasingly hostile fashion, getting himself named "Most likely to take over the world" by the student newspaper and becoming infamous enough to inspire a Twitter account? dedicated to ending his "reign of terror."

"On Twitter, like, I have a certain kind of personality, a pugnaciousness, like an alter ego… like when Spider-Man puts on the costume."

I spoke with several former classmates who knew Johnson but were afraid to go on the record for fear of becoming his next target. Those concerns were probably not misplaced. Last week, Johnson posted an open letter on Facebook to his fellow Claremont alums, telling them to bug off: "Now that I have some measure of notoriety and success, I do not owe you phone calls or responses to your condescending 'concern' for me. Please know that most of these emails will be deleted or archived. Some will be openly mocked. Others may be retweeted or written about in future things."

In one typical dustup, the editor of the student newspaper, Ross Boomer, deleted a comment Johnson had left on a pro-gay-marriage article. In a subsequent comment, he said he'd been censored because Boomer was gay. At the time, Boomer had come out to his college friends but not to his family, and he believed that Johnson was trying to out him. Johnson told me the incident has been "exaggerated," and that he didn't realize Boomer's sexuality was private because he had been "like running around being gay on campus."

Another student newspaper editor named Michael Wilner got it even worse. Johnson published a series of posts rehashing Wilner's run-ins with the law over a couple of misdemeanors. (His record has since been expunged.) Even after they had both graduated, Johnson wouldn't let it go: In 2013, Johnson wrote an article for the Daily Caller? in which he reprised his claims against Wilner, who had since become the Washington, DC, bureau chief of the Jerusalem Post. In March, he tweeted that Wilner should be banned from Saudi Arabia due to his past. Wilner declined to comment for this article.

Johnson's biggest target at Claremont was Bassam Frangieh, a professor of Arabic best known for teaching poetry.Johnson accused him of supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, based on a trove of writings and petitions that Johnson had "translated by three different translators at considerable personal expense.?" He added that all of his allegations had been reviewed before publication by his mentor, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, for whom he had worked as a researcher when he was in high school. Asked about Johnson, Dershowitz responded in an email, "We disagree about many issues but I admire his principled opposition to all things politically correct and his determination to be heard and to make a difference." Frangieh, who is still at Claremont, declined to comment for this story.

The lesson from Johnson's college years was a valuable one: Vendettas go viral. His stories, which fit neatly into the conservative narrative that diversity and political correctness are concealing the truth about campus leftists run amok, got him noticed. He wrote about Frangieh for National Review? and Breitbart, and landed an internship at the Wall Street Journal on the strength of his Claremont Conservative scoops.

Johnson's post-graduation freelance pieces for Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and Glenn Beck's the Blaze were united by a promise that somewhere out there existed some piece of dirt—a video, a thesis, a long-lost gay roommate—that, if revealed, would knock down the facade of lies created by the liberal establishment and its media allies. His biggest scoop was a report suggesting that then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker didn't actually live in Newark. Booker knocked the story down by releasing corroborating documents, and theCaller took a hit for not disclosing that Johnson had been a paid opposition researcher for a PAC supporting Booker's opponent in the New Jersey Senate race.

Johnson's investigations often hinged on race. He reported that Obama had told his law school students there is "institutional racism" in American society. He dug up an essay that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro wrote about his mother, Rosie, a Chicano activist. Johnson discovered that United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice had once argued at Stanford that white people should have to study black history. He uncovered that Mo Cowan, an African American lawyer who had been temporarily appointed to Sen. John Kerry's vacant Senate seat in 2013, had once helped organize "takeovers" in which black people would go to Boston bars and restaurants and…buy drinks.

Johnson boasts that he wants to do for conservatives what Romney's "47 percent" comments did for the left in 2012.

He also continued to take on other journalists. He penned a report for the Daily Caller on David Kirkpatrick, after the New York Times reporter published a lengthy investigation into the 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. According to Johnson, Kirkpatrick had been busted for public nudity while he was a student at Princeton. That was true, but much of the rest of the piece, which detailed Kirkpatrick's collegiate hijinks and an appearance in Playgirl, was cribbed from a satirical Daily Princetonian story. Johnson told me that he has trouble recognizing satire because he is mildly autistic. Though he personally wasn't worked up about Benghazi, he was smart enough to know, as a contractor getting paid by the click, that the Caller's audience was.

"I was with Charles when he was right (which was usually) and with him when he was wrong (which was more frequently than is optimal)," writes Tim Cavanaugh, Johnson's former story editor at the Caller, in an email. Cavanaugh, now at National Review Online, does not hesitate to praise Johnson: "He is a constantly interesting journalist who is worth paying attention to more often than not. He was well worth the effort and cash the Caller put in for his work." In an email, Daily Caller founder and Editor in Chief Tucker Carlson confirmed that Johnson had a freelancing arrangement and was not a full-time employee, but otherwise declined to comment.

But Johnson increasingly felt like he was being constrained by his editors at the Caller and other sites, who encouraged him to tone down his tweets. In early 2014, after the Caller stopped publishing him, he devoted himself to working full time on GotNews. His first big project was in Mississippi, where Republican Sen. Thad Cochran was facing a tough primary against a tea party challenger in the summer.Johnson paid a black pastor to allege that Cochran had illegally relied on black Democratic voters in the Republican primary. The pastor later recanted; Cochran was reelected in November. Johnson's still pissed off about it; he told me he'd like GotNews to "curb-stomp" mainstream Republicans like former party chair Haley Barbour, with whom he'd clashed with in Mississippi.

Those attitudes and tactics have alienated Johnson from his conservative colleagues. A Washington Examiner story last Wednesday featured a half-dozen conservative writers venting about the damage Johnson is doing to right-wing journalism. The Daily Caller's Matt K. Lewis has argued that writing about Johnson would only encourage "more bloggers threatening to expose the identities of an alleged rape victims [sic]." Yet perhaps no outlet has done more to encourage Johnson's habits than the Caller, which recently published a rambling speculation about Lowery's racial identity that was inspired by the GotNews report on his speeding ticket.

It's a mistake to think that Charles Johnson came out of nowhere. He honed his style as a regular contributor for the Caller and Andrew Breitbart's website. His first book, an ode to President Calvin Coolidge, was blurbed bySen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Fox News pundit Michelle Malkin, and torture-memo author and University of California-Berkeley law professor John Yoo. His stuff was featured on Fox News, and he spoke at the Heritage Foundation. At first, when he started scoring Drudge links and embarrassing Democrats, Johnson's escapades were very useful to a lot of people in conservative circles. Now no one knows how to make him go away.

In a series of phone conversations, Johnson was civil, trying, perhaps a little too hard, to frame his work as a nonpartisan quest to "disrupt" the powers that be. This was not the unhinged Johnson of Twitter, who had justified doxing Jackie by noting that a friend of his had called her a "lying bitch." He had a ready explanation for this—it's performance art. "On Twitter, like, I have a certain kind of personality, a pugnaciousness, like an alter ego," he said. "You know, like when Spider-Man puts on the costume, for instance, he's no longer a mild-mannered photographer. He has an attitude. I do that because I want my content to really go viral."

But even a put-on online persona can have real-life consequences for the people sucked into its maw. Twitter's policies state that users who "engage in targeted abuse or harassment" are subject to permanent suspension. Johnson's Rolling Stone-UVA tweets and the stories they link to have prompted a calls for his account to be suspended. It's happened three times already, if only temporarily. His most recent suspension came after GotNews published the home addresses of Campbell Robertson and Julie Bosman, New York Times reporters who had sinned in Johnson's eyes by publishing the name of the street on which Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson lived. After the GotNews story went up,both reporters received threats and had to leave their homes. (An Illinois woman named Julie Bosma also received threats.) Johnson's defense was that he didn't directly post the reporters' information on Twitter, but only linked to it on GotNews. The stunt prompted New York Times media columnist David Carr to dub Johnson a "troll on steroids."

"I'm just trying not to make it easy on people. There's a reason I own several guns."

While Johnson's rise was made possible by new and old conservative institutions, he now exists in the no-man's-land occupied by Gamergate trolls and fellow troublemaker James O'Keefe. That's fine with him. GotNews functions as a mash-up of Reddit and TaskRabbit, with Johnson offering his network of "independent researchers" cash bounties for solving "puzzles" he throws at them—like taking down Jackie. "You get all these hobbyists and amateurs and people out there who have a lot of time on their hands, many of whom are retired, or they're a mother, their kids are sleeping while they're researching, they're stay-at-home moms, or they're college students, or they're unemployed, or this is their moonlighting thing," he explained. "All those people are starting to find one another, and many of those people are starting to find one another through me." (He runs a side business, CCJ Strategies, which does oppo research for companies and campaigns. He hopes to integrate it with GotNews in the future.)[how?] mech turk?

When we spoke, Johnson was thinking about how to turn his current momentum into something more sustainable. He was in Southern California for a series of meetings with potential investors. He sounded almost drunk on success, boasting that he wanted to do for conservatives what Mitt Romney's "47 percent" comments had done for the left in 2012. "The day Jeb Bush announces for president is the day I publish his mistress's name," he promised on Twitter. (He considers Cruz the "least dirty" of the 2016 field.)

With his site's traffic spiking and the Rolling Stone story crumbling more every day, Johnson's head was spinning with possibilities. "I wanna do a Kickstarter for leaks," he told me. "Right now there's essentially no mechanism to financially reward whistleblowers…Basically there's no mechanism to reward those people for giving up the information. And I want to kind of fix that." It sounded almost altruistic. But Johnson's vision would essentially monetize the kinds of privacy invasion and harassment that mark the dark side of citizen muckraking and have made the internet such an unwelcoming place for many people—particularly young women.

And the kind of petty score-settling Johnson specializes in goes both ways. On Tuesday, Deadspin floated an old college rumor that Johnson had once defecated on a dormitory floor at Claremont. When Johnson tweeted on Friday that he's considering a run for Congress, the first reply suggested his campaign slogan could be "Outing rape victims and pooping on the floor since 2014. Vote for me." Of course, I had to ask him about the allegations. "For the record, I did not shit on the seventh floor, but I wish I did," he told me.

And sometime after he revealed Jackie's name, he began to worry about the deranged critics who had begun doxing his family and sending him threatening messages. For a moment, Charles Johnson had gotten a taste of what it's like to feel the wrath of Charles Johnson.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/12/charles-chuck-johnson-gotnews-rolling-stone