WHISTLEBLOWER: Insider Details How "New Knowledge" Cybersecurity Firm Created Disinformation in American Election

Documents find Center for American Progress paid disinformation company to update "Hamilton 68" dashboard that was caught spreading Russian disinformation.

12 minute read

Some of the shine on the disinformation industry has gone dull in recent years, as many misinformation experts having been caught trafficking in misinformation themselves, or exposed for their ties to intelligence agencies. This should not come as a shock.

It’s a basic tenet of “mirror politics” and practitioners of propaganda to accuse others of the very same actions they plan to commit.

In late 2018, the New York Times and Washington Post reported on a leaked document discussing a secret project by Democratic Party operatives that falsely accused Republican candidate Roy Moore of support by Russians, while he was running in a tight race for the Senate in Alabama. The scheme linked the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts on Twitter and drew national media attention.

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the New York Times reported that the leaked documents stated.

The documents linked a relatively unknown company called New Knowledge to the Alabama disinformation campaign, although New Knowledge’s chief executive Jonathon Morgan said the company was not involved, and he worked on “Project Birmingham” in his personal capacity. Morgan also reached out at the time to Renee DiResta, a self-styled expert on disinformation, who told the New York Times she disagreed with such tactics, and later joined New Knowledge sometime, but only after Project Birmingham ended.

New Knowledge later changed names to Yonder, while DiResta joined Stanford University as an expert in disinformation. However, New Knowledge could not stop landing in the media spotlight.

In early 2023, journalist Matt Taibbi released a “Twitter Files” drop about “Hamilton 68,” a public dashboard created by New Knowledge. Hamiton 68 tracked hundreds of Twitter accounts to monitor the spread of purported pro-Russian propaganda online, but screenshots of emails sent by former Twitter executive, Yoel Roth, voiced alarm that the dashboard was creating, not tracking disinformation.

“I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is,” Roth wrote.

The “Hamilton 68” dashboard had spurred dozens of stories in major media outlets that accused conservatives of trafficking in Russian disinformation, but when Twitter looked into the dashboard’s accuracy, they found it was garbage in, garbage out.

Former FBI counterintelligence official Clint Watts headed the Hamilton 68 dashboard and Jonathon Morgan of New Knowledge had helped to build it, along with J.M. Berger at the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), housed by the German Marshall Fund.

“No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops,” one Twitter official wrote of Hamilton 68.

The internal Twitter emails were so damaging that the Washington Post later posted corrections to multiple stories that reported on Hamilton 68 and its findings.

But every story about disinformation elites caught creating disinformation contains critical missing facts and minor elements of disinformation planted by the very experts being exposed. New Knowledge is no different.

Starting a month ago, I began discussing what the media got wrong about New Knowledge and Hamilton 68 with Betsy Dupuis, a former New Knowledge employee who worked on Hamilton 68. Dupuis tells me she was fired from New Knowledge after expressing misgivings upon discovering the company that branded itself  “the world’s first platform for defending online communities from social media manipulation” was itself engaging in blatant social media manipulation.

To back up her claims, Dupuis provided internal documents and photos from her time at New Knowledge, as well as screenshots of texts messages. Some of those we are publishing today.

New Knowledge poached Dupuis from another company and set her to work improving the Hamilton 68 dashboard, which was planned as a product for groups aligned with the Democratic Party. The development was underwritten with a year of funding by the Center for American Progress, a think tank and lobby shop run by party political operatives.

Dupuis says she enjoyed her work updating Hamilton 68, but she became concerned when people in the office discussed the “Alabama Project” and she began wondering if this had anything to do with Roy Moore, a Republican candidate running for Senate. When she had joined the company, Jonathon Morgan had assured her that New Knowledge would only monitor, never create disinformation.

But then several former employees from the National Security Agency (NSA) joined New Knowledge.

Out for company drinks, former NSA employees explained to Dupuis how agencies get around federal laws that ban the U.S. government from spying on and censoring Americans: they contract with companies like New Knowledge to do their dirty work. By the time New Knowledge announced they had secured a Department of Defense contract to create automated disinformation, Dupuis had had enough.

She met with Jonathon Morgan to discuss her concerns and was fired days later.

Speaking with me from her home in Austin, Dupuis says that neither Jonathon Morgan, nor Stanford’s Renee DiResta have come clean with journalists about what happened in Alabama to create disinformation during an American election. But she says she is tired of being scared and the time has come for her to speak up. “Silence doesn’t buy you safety, Dupuis says. “People will still come after you because of what you know.”

“I just kept quiet, until now, because I didn’t want to be accused of spreading a conspiracy theory,” Dupuis tells The DisInformation Chronicle. “After I was fired, I was just like, ‘You know what? This is so crazy. Nobody's ever going to believe me. I'm never going to talk about this again.’”

Jonathon Morgan did not return multiple requests for comment sent to his current job and personal cell phone number. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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THACKER: What caused you to get fired at New Knowledge?

DUPUIS: When they hired me, they said that we would never do disinformation. And I felt the grounds I'd been hired on had been violated. So I went to Jonathon Morgan, who was the CEO. I had a good relationship with him, or at least I thought I did.

I told Jonathon, “Hey, this is unethical. I'm concerned about this.”

I knew there were other people who were also concerned, very disturbed about what was going on, but I didn't bring them up.

I told Jonathon, “You said we would track disinformation, but we wouldn't do disinformation.”

And he told me, “If we don't do it, somebody else will.”

Which sounds like a very classic James Bond villain. What a great way of revealing your evil plan.

THACKER: This conversation happens on a Friday, night. Then what happens to you on Monday?

DUPUIS: Well, I went home, and at this point, I really didn't want to work there anymore. I had already been talking to friends about this, and I went out to the lake with a friend.

I got a message from Sandeep Verma that I needed to come in at—I think it was 8 a.m.—which is really early in tech time. This was very confusing, so I asked if they wanted to do it remote, but I was told I needed to come in early on Monday.

They had hired this really young women to be, I think it was VP of Marketing, but also HR. She was a nepo baby: her parents had given her a bunch of money to start a fashion line that failed. And now she's an executive at my tech company.

She and Sandeep are there, and Sandeep… I don't know, he was trying to look really positive, but he looked sad also.

He said, “We're letting you go. We no longer need the position. We're going to give you a month severance if you sign this NDA.” I had to sign the NDA right there on the spot, before I left, or else I wouldn’t get severance.

I told him, “I left another job to come to this company.” He said he knew, and then I signed it and left. If they want to come after me for doing this interview, I was coerced to sign the NDA.

I felt pressured to sign it. I didn't really have a choice because of how insane things were. What am I supposed to do? Not take the severance, and not be allowed to collect unemployment because I refused to sign their agreement and then maybe tell people that there's a conspiracy going on.

THACKER: Right?

DUPUIS: What happened was so crazy. Things that people would not believe is true.

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DUPUIS: I'm mid-thirties, so that puts me smack dab in the middle of millennial territory, and I grew up with internet. I was one of those kids that learned to make their own web pages and interact with the internet even before Myspace.

THACKER: When I started at UC Davis in 1994, that was the first year that University of California students were required to have an email. I learned how to type having discussions on a UC Davis chat group.

When people started to come out with this idea, about seven years back, that they had discovered there was “disinformation” on the internet, I was like, “Wait, I've been on the internet for decades. From the very beginning I saw people behave like assholes and throw crap up on the internet.”

DUPUIS: Well, there was this progression from “Do not use anything from the internet for any paper; it has to be from Ebsco or Britannica. Some trusted encyclopedia.”

You were supposed to vet sources. Now with Gen Z kids, they don't even know what plagiarism is.

THACKER: So you started off at around age ten. You're on the computer, but it was still kind of a thing for weird dudes in the basement.

DUPUIS: I kept it kind of a secret, and then MySpace came out when I was in high school. But the internet was still for nerds. I gave up pursuing a career in programing because my parents had read a bunch of articles in newspapers saying that the internet was a fad.

THACKER: But you still got involved.

DUPUIS: I got into photography in high school, and I started shooting for iStockphoto which was an early internet start-up in online stock photography. Before them, you had to order a stock photo catalog.

I was doing work for them when I was teenager making like $1,000 a month, which for a high school kid is a hell of a lot of money. I could rent an apartment $300 at the time. I thought this is going to be my job. And then the stock market crashed in 2007 and everything went away.

So, I went to college and studied art, and when I graduated the market still really sucked.

I went to go visit some friends during South by Southwest—the big music festival in Austin—to see about jobs and opportunities in 2012.

I was like, “I’m moving here.” I was kind of homeless for about a year, worked for a few random start-ups, and became part of this industry.

THACKER: But then you land your dream job at New Knowledge.

DUPUIS: I would not say it was a dream job. I was really skeptical of this company to begin with.

THACKER: You’re this young woman working in the tech industry in Austin. Why New Knowledge?

DUPUIS: I was at an oil and gas data analytics company that owned some old data sets which are very valuable. My title was software engineer, but I was working mostly as a designer, building the front end of the software. I was designing a dashboard that allowed you to build reports and interface with their data. It wasn't super advanced stuff.

It was fine, but then New Knowledge reached out to me on Angel List and, when I met with them, they were immediately ready to hire me.

I think New Knowledge was interested in me because, “Oh, you can do some of the programing, but then you can also know how data works and can do the data visualization stuff.”

I think that's what I was qualified to do for New Knowledge, but I wasn't really qualified to do this disinformation stuff.

THACKER: Did you research them to find out what they were all about?

DUPUIS: I'd never heard of them before and the politics they were involved in. My way of looking into politics was going on Facebook and subscribing to every spectrum of political ideology: Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green Party, whatever. I just read whatever because I wanted to see what everybody was thinking.

Politics was not a big deal to me, but I would casually absorb things. I knew that Russian disinformation was in the news, and stuff about Trump.

THACKER: Of course, you knew about Russian disinformation and Trump, because that's all the media wrote about for four years.

DUPUIS: Yes. But it wasn’t something I really followed. I just wanted to have intelligent conversations about what was in the news.

New Knowledge told me they do all this stuff with disinformation. Jonathon had some State Department role under the Obama administration. Sandy was a friend from high school or something from their time in Houston. He was the Chief Technical Officer (CTO.) I guess you know how that works, right?

THACKER: Well, no. From what I understand about the tech industry, people get these jobs they’re not really qualified for, but they know someone, or have some weird skill that nobody else has in the office. The programming guy who likes talking to people can suddenly become head of marketing.

I get the sense that titles are very nebulous in tech start-ups.

DUPUIS: Sandy had a degree, and I think he was serious about being a tech guy. But I don't think he had the work experience to be a CTO. But that's often the case at start-ups.

They told me about their funding and trying to get all these contracts with companies that were doing this disinformation thing. I had a vague idea about this stuff from what I was reading about Trump and just from being online for so long.

People make stuff up.

But they said they were going to build this AI tool and I was kind of skeptical.

I previously worked at a company that had done some AI thing back in 2013. A lot of times people tell you they have artificial intelligence to do some chore, but it’s really just a bunch of humans doing all the work. Which is really expensive.

Eventually, you get found out

THACKER: There’s a lot of nonsense and pretense in tech. Amazon dropped their "Just Walk Out" AI technology which automated what you bought. It was really just 1,000 workers in India acting as remote cashiers.

DUPUIS: These companies pretend to have computer automated intelligence, but it's a sham. Real people do the work it because they don't know how to make software good enough to automate the task.

So I was a little bit skeptical of that, but they had all these PhDs so maybe they could make it work. I asked, “Hey, will you guys ever want to do disinformation?”

And they said, “No, it's completely against our ethics.” I also asked if they were only going to point out disinformation whenever Republicans do it, or when both sides do it.

And they said, “We're bipartisan. In fact, we have Republicans that we've worked with for a long time.”

THACKER: How was their business set up? Who was funding them?

DUPUIS: DARPA. Jonathon had gotten his seed money from DARPA, and he had actually been through several iterations of trying to get the company off the ground. Apparently, a whole other set of co-founders had left the company. I can’t remember why.

He had a podcast called Partially Derivative and some nonprofit organization called Data for Democracy.

There was a weird thing with people in the office, people that weren't in the office, people working as contractors. Some of the contractors had this aura around them. The same as what I've heard of Renee DiResta: “We're just really passionate about disinformation!”

One contractor was just involved in building scrapers.

THACKER: Explain what scraping means. I think it means an automated system to go out and collect or scrape data off the internet, instead of doing it manually.

DUPUIS: Instead of having a person go and copy/paste everything from a website, you use a computer that collects all the data.

I knew someone who had a scraping company that the State Department, FBI and other agencies use, and they could have saved a lot of money using him. Instead, they hired this contractor to learn how to scrape Twitter.

Twitter kept denying New Knowledge access to scrape, because it costs them money when you’re pulling too much data, and they didn't have an established partnership. New Knowledge was using a lot of their bandwidth.

THACKER: Tell me about working on the Hamilton 68 disinformation dashboard.

DUPUIS: We eventually had a meeting with J.M. Berger with the German Marshall Fund. There were other people on the Zoom, but the German Marshall Fund had done this dashboard and I was supposed to redesign it.

It was ugly and looked like a programmer designed it. I was supposed to repackage it into a better dashboard and allow them to sell that as a product. They were going to sell it to the Center for American Progress.

THACKER: Just to let readers know, the Center for American Progress (CAP) is a Democratic Party think tank and lobby shop. They're most famous for being the ones who basically ran Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016. Simon Clark is a former member of CAP who now chairs the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a bogus “disinformation group” that works closely with the Biden Administration.

According to your notes from the time, the lead on this dashboard redesign at CAP was Casey Michel, who worked at their news site, Think Progress. Another was Andrew Weisburd, who was working at the German Marshall Fund and is now at Microsoft’s Threat Context.

And in the dashboard deliverables you were given, it says that J.M. Berger, who also had ties to the Brookings Institute, was developing the communities or lists of people to track.

What did the German Marshall Fund want you to make better?

DUPUIS: The dashboard was called Hamilton 68 because it had something to do with Alexander Hamilton, some paper he wrote, or something esoteric. You know how people name something after some esoteric fact to make it sound important?

THACKER: Right.

DUPUIS: The German Marshall Fund owned Hamilton 68, which was something Jonathon Morgan had built for them. I think with his previous business partners.

J.M. Berger was there because he was somehow involved with the Center for American Progress getting their own version. They were going to launch it on Think Progress, which was CAP’s news organization, but is now defunct.

I wrote specifically in my notes that Center for American Progress was giving us 12 months of funding. I don't know what that meant in terms of actual money.

THACKER: I’m gonna guess that Center for American Progress won’t tell me how much funding they were putting out for this. (The Center for American Progress did not respond to questions asking how much money they provided to upgrade Hamiltion 68 and whether they still use the system.)

DUPUIS: My job was to take Hamilton 68 and repackage it with a better design. I think I did a good job of it.

THACKER: What did this upgraded Hamilton 68 allow them to do?

DUPUIS: They could observe emerging trends on Twitter, trending hashtags, trending topics and track what people were linking to.

The Alt-right was a big topic at the time. They would take a list of Twitter accounts and they would say that these are Alt-right. And then you would watch what was coming up.

If something about like China came up, you would see that was the top trending topic for the day. And it would be a different topic every day that would come up because they were constantly scraping Twitter and constantly refreshing and updating this data.

THACKER: So they could monitor social media, based on how they categorized people, to see what they were talking about.

DUPUIS: But they were not very diligent with their methodologies.

THACKER: Output would change when you redefine who is “Alt-right” or who is a “conspiracy theorist.” That would change who fits that category.

DUPUIS: Yes. This happened on a weekly basis. None of this was ever public on Hamilton 68, which was the public, ugly version.

This was happening on the pretty version I was building, and that was going to be the new product. The new version was going to be sold as a disinformation monitoring service, with a dashboard for internal security people.

THACKER: If they're interested in monitoring “disinformation,” did you notice them ever monitoring disinformation put out by Lefties, or by Antifa? Anything like that? How did that work internally?

DUPUIS: Internally? Everybody there was very Democrat.

They were very partisan focused. They were also focused on some pretty extreme people: neo-Nazis, people associated with the KKK.

Obviously reprehensible people.

THACKER: Were they targeting Bernie Sanders type people?

DUPUIS: No, it was all really extreme people or Republican stuff. And for a time, they adjusted the dashboard to follow stuff about Roy Moore. That must have aligned with the time period that they were doing the disinformation campaign against Roy Moore.

THACKER: Roy Moore was this Republican running for the Senate in Alabama.

DUPUIS: The dashboard I was building that the Center for American Progress funded was, in effect, measuring the outcome of New Knowledge’s disinformation campaign against Roy Moore, who is a reprehensible person.

This was something I was concerned about with joining the company. We want to be objective. They were offering an equity in the company. And I didn't want the company to ruin their own reputation. Which they did.

THACKER: So you could see that partisanship, lack of being objectivity, was possibly going to take the whole company down?

DUPUIS: I saw it before I even joined the company. It was obviously partisan, but I figured as long as we’re going after neo-Nazis… I definitely hate neo-Nazis. But how much of neo-Nazi data was just what they were creating?

Ryan Fox later showed up who, for an NSA Agent, that sounds like a hell of a fake name.

THACKER: [Laughs] Well, he doesn’t use his full last name for his LinkedIn account, which is weird. It’s “Ryan F” and says he spent 10 years at the NSA. Who abbreviates their last name?

DUPUIS: Sorry. I use humor to cope with this.

THACKER: Does he just drop into the office?

DUPUIS: Jonathon announced that we've hired this guy from out of town. And Ryan had previously worked at the NSA, which was a big departure from everybody else in the office who was from the tech industry, a PhD, or from a think tank.

Nobody was from the government, to my knowledge, except John Morgan had done some consulting with the State Department and got DARPA money.

But Ryan Fox is a former NSA agent. And this is not what I signed up for. We were building a company focusing on disinformation services for the corporate world. We were doing image consulting for companies, basically.

They announced he's going to have the title of co-founder and he was like flying in once a week or so while I was there.

THACKER: He's important enough that they'll hire him to fly in once a week, and call him a co-founder. He's that critical to this small start-up company.

What was he bringing to the table?

DUPUIS: The way he explained it to me, he had experience with intelligence analyst kind of stuff. He didn't really have any programing experience.

I guess he was bringing contacts and this disinformation research.

I knew how to take data and put it into a product so it makes sense to users. But with this disinformation stuff, I didn't know what the fuck they were talking about sometimes. I didn’t understand how they were going to build an AI to get at “disinformation” like a human.

The way Ryan explained to it to me is he would go into 4chan, and these chat groups, befriending some of these people, get invited to some like slack channel. He was generally scrolling through the dark web and looking for people trying to create conspiracies or engage in disinformation mischief.

They were trying to infiltrate those communities to identify what they were doing before they actually got out a message.

THACKER: Did the company change when he came on board?

DUPUIS: I don’t think anything changed, although this was around the time that Jonathon Morgan was talking my ear off about how much he hated Roy Moore—like he felt he needed to convince me that this guy was awful.

And Jonathon is the person that ended up doing the disinformation campaign against Roy Moore, while I was concurrently working on the dashboard to measure the disinformation campaign against Roy Moore. 

This is what I can gather from news articles that later came out.

It’s hard for me to place exactly, because they would use code words for things, and they would talk about the “Birmingham Project” and “Alabama Project.” At the time, I didn't know exactly what they were talking about.

I knew to some extent it was about measuring what was going on in that Roy Moore election.

It all seemed pretty arbitrary, how they were defining disinformation and their methodology for measuring this stuff. How they built communities.

THACKER: By community, do you mean the 6000 users they might define as neo-Nazi or the 5500 users they might call conspiracy theorists?

DUPUIS: Communities means definition and distinctions we have, to say these are the group of people that we think is doing disinformation. And we're tracking them.

If you’re looking at “Unite the Right” and the “KKK,” maybe there's some overlap, but they do have some distinctions.

THACKER: How did they define these people? If you read the news, it’s hard to understand how certain people get placed into groups. I can't tell you the number of physicians I've spoken to since this pandemic started, who’ve told me they’ve been called “right wing” or “MAGA,” and they’re like, “I’ve never voted Republican. I hate Trump. Why are they calling me this?”

These definitions in the disinformation field are so fluid as to be nonsensical.

Now, if you don’t support sending more money to Ukraine, you’re a Putin backer or “Russian disinformation.”

What was Renee DiResta’s involvement? She seems to have been a principle, at least she was looped in on these emails from New Knowledge to Twitter that I found. Although the people at Twitter wanted nothing to do with her.

One Twitter executive referred to DiResta as a disinformation hobbyist, and Yoel Roth worked to steer people away from her and back to “safer territory.”

DUPUIS: She kind of had a very loose relationship, and I think she officially became an employee around February 2018.

I remember her being in the office in early March during South by Southwest, where she was a speaker. She had been offered a free badge, but she didn't want to go the other days. So she wanted to give me her badge.

She’d had this New York Times article written about her. She was bragging about how it created an aura of mystery around her work. And she was like, “We need to set a tone inside the company that we are undercover sleuths.”

When I thought about the company’s marketing, I was more thinking about traditional problem solving for customers.

She and Morgan wanted the tone to be dark, scary, and grungy. But you don’t have to scare people to sell them on a product. You can be assertive, friendly, and positive, and explain how you can fix something.

THACKER: This was the New York Times article I found that Twitter executive were trying to steer the reporter away from DiResta. It was very overwrought, so I can see why DiResta likes talking about it.

Did she move to Austin or how did that work?

DUPUIS: Well, she lived in San Francisco, and I think it was just Zoom meetings and talking remote. She was supposed to be working on marketing, but she just struck me as having a really big ego.

I thought she had said she worked at the FBI, but then I found out it was CIA. She had an internship at the CIA, and she said she didn't like it. But she laughed like she was too good to work at the CIA. [laughs]

She had been involved with some other start-ups, but Jonathon explained to me that these people had gotten into the disinformation stuff by being chronically online. And then they found each other on Twitter because they were researching disinformation as a hobby.

THACKER: Did you get a sense of what she did with the company or were you not in those meetings?

DUPUIS: I knew she was working on the Alabama Project, even though she's given various statements that conflict with her real involvement.

I wasn't working on the Alabama Project, so I didn't know the details. The public name was “Project Birmingham,” but I remember them saying “Alabama Project” more often.

She was working on the Alabama Project, and so was Ryan and Jonathon.

I was working on making the dashboard better, but I wonder now if that was all a charade to give the company an air of legitimacy.

THACKER: Legitimacy as what?

DUPUIS: To make us look like a software company.

I felt the software team wasted a lot of time naming their microservices—these tiny parts of the software. Everything would have to be a dumb acronym and they had a whole slack channel for this—wasting hours of time.

I participated because I wanted to be sociable. But yeah, there was just like a lot of, like, fucking around.

THACKER: While they were doing the Alabama Project, and you’re working to improve the Hamilton 68 dashboard, did you realize they were connected?

DUPUIS: Kind of, because they wanted more and more about Roy Moore in the dashboard and things related to him. In hindsight, I can tell what they were measuring. They were measuring their own bot disinformation activity.

THACKER: [laughs]

DUPUIS: [laughs] That's what they were measuring when Roy Moore was the subject of the dashboard.

THACKER: This Alabama Project or Project Birmingham comes out later in the New York Times.

What did you see? Did you realize in real time that New Knowledge was putting out disinformation on Roy Moore while he was running for Senate, or did it hit you when it came out in in the New York Times?

You don't always know what’s going on inside your own office.

DUPUIS: I wish I had written more stuff down. At one point, we had all these new Elastic Search, NSA people show up…

They are an open-source, proprietary search technology API that can be integrated into software. It's used by a lot of companies. I've never worked anywhere that hasn't had some sort of Elastic Search type tool embedded into the product.

We already had one NSA person join, Ryan, and that made sense because he's a security analyst. And it sounded like he was excited to get out of working for the government. But then we got a new executive that had previously worked at the NSA, and he came from Elastic.

But this second NSA guy became the director of technology or something. When he comes in, we go down to The Draft House, this bar down the street from the office, for a kind of employee welcome thing.

Ryan gets really drunk. He didn’t seem to be able to hold his liquor, and I started asking him about PRISM.

THACKER: This was the top secret NSA program to spy on Americans that Edward Snowden leaked to Glenn Greenwald. PRISM allowed intelligence services direct access to the companies' servers to search our communications.

Members of Congress didn’t even know it existed.

DUPUIS: I didn't say anything about how I felt about it. I was just wondering what it was like to be working at the NSA when it got blown up by Edward Snowden.

And he said, “You know, that exposed the locations and identities of people that were undercover, and put their lives at risk.”

I thought that was a pretty reasonable thing to be upset about.

And then Ryan and the other former NSA guy are kind of bantering back and forth and saying, “Oh, it's not like what people think it is. We actually have to really follow the law, follow the Constitution. But a lot of people get fed up with that, and leave to go into the private sector. Because if you sell it back as a product to the government, you're not bound to federal law.”

THACKER: They were telling you what the game is. The game is you work inside NSA, or these intelligence agencies. You then leave the intel agencies, and you go work in the private sector. And then you sell this information right back to your old employer in the federal government.

DUPUIS: Yes.

THACKER: Did you understand it immediately at the time, “Whoa, what's going on here? You’re two former NSA guys, and you just explained the game to me.”

DUPUIS: Yeah, definitely. I was disturbed by it, but I kept my cool.

I just let them talk. I didn't want to get, like, fired right away. I was thinking I wanted to leave and wanted to start plotting my exit strategy.

THACKER: Did you want to leave right at that moment, or were you already thinking that there was weird stuff happening inside the company?

DUPUIS: I was kind of happy because the work was fairly interesting. I had a lot of authority, and I felt like Jonathon Morgan respected me a lot. I had a lot of control over the work I was doing, and it allowed me to be effective.

At a lot of tech companies, you have some idiot that's a middle manager and they're constantly telling you to switch what you're working on, so you never end up finishing your work. Then you go into an interview for another job and they ask, “What have you completed successfully?”

And you’re thinking, “Fucking nothing. That's why I want to leave the company.”

THACKER: You’re just some tech person whose never really interacted with government people, and you’re learning all this stuff about how the NSA works and private contractors…. What was going through your mind?

DUPUIS: The guy from Elastic, he was explaining to me that Elastic Search is basically the public arm of the NSA, which is a little bit disturbing because Elastic is used everywhere.

And while Elastic is an open-source technology, there could in theory, be a backdoor. This would be unlikely though.

THACKER: When this guy tells you that Elastic is essentially the NSA, in the private sector, was this something that's well known?

DUPUIS: When I asked around, I found that some people know about this.

THACKER: But it’s not well known. So you’ve got Ryan Fox and eventually 10 other former NSA guys join from Elastic. And they’re now working at New Knowledge.

What is New Knowledge trying to do? What is the company about?

DUPUIS: This was right around the time I got fired. We had this all-hands meeting where they discussed that they had successfully run a disinformation campaign, and announced that DoD was funding us to build a disinformation propagation platform.

THACKER: A bunch of former NSA guys get hired, and DoD throws a contract at you to create automated disinformation. What goes through your head at this point?

DUPUIS: I contacted a friend and it’s pretty clear from my text message thread, “Oh, man, I need a different job. They want to build a weaponized, disinformation project for the government. They're talking about creating a tool to allow the government to manipulate the perception of their own elections.”

THACKER: They are actually discussing inside the company that the DoD is funding them to manipulate American elections?

DUPUIS: Yes. Like I said about the Alabama Project, I had been overhearing things for months in the office about the DoD Project. I would just hear something “Alabama Project” or “DoD Project.”

Most of the time it didn't really have anything to do with what I was working on. So I was just like, “Whatever.”

There was a lot of chaos in the office, so I was just getting things through osmosis and what I overheard.

THACKER: Who is lead on this on the DoD thing?

DUPUIS: I think that was more Jonathon Morgan and Ryan Fox.

THACKER: Forget it’s the DoD now funding them. They don't see it’s a problem that they’re creating a program to manipulate American elections? That’s totally different from creating tools to confuse the Russians or some South American country about their elections.

DUPUIS: Well, at that point that they had announced that they had successfully done a disinformation project already. I hadn't put two and two together that it was the Alabama Project and Roy Moore’s election in Alabama that they were always talking about.

You have to understand that what was happening was so unbelievable. I was thinking at the time, “Nobody will ever believe me. And I'm just never going to talk about this, except to friends I trust.” 

THACKER: If I been in the room where they are talking about manipulating American elections, I wouldn't be worried so much about the ethics of it. I would begin to think, “Wait, is this legal? What we're doing?”

DUPUIS: Definitely, I don't want to be here if this is illegal.

THACKER: I’d be on the phone with a friend of mine who does election law, asking if we are breaking the law.

DUPUIS: I wouldn't know anybody like that because, like I said, I wasn't really in this disinformation industry. Months later I was joking with a friend about whether I would have to testify before Congress.

So late in the day one Friday, I talked with Jonathon Morgan.

I would come in late and stay late, because of traffic, and he would stay after hours, sometimes to sweep himself. He wouldn’t pay for a cleaning service and the place was filthy—rats and rat piss. Everybody had left, except I think one of the AI researchers.

I said, “Hey, this isn't what I signed up for. You told me that we would never do disinformation. That was a big contingency for me to come work here.”

And he said, “If we don't do it, someone else will.”

And over the weekend, I got a message or an email from them telling me to come in early on Monday. And when I get it there, they've got a severance agreement, telling me that they're letting me go.

THACKER: Did Jonathon seem upset when you spoke? Was it a heated conversation?

DUPUIS: It was a pretty calm conversation. I was kind of gentle parenting him, like, “Hey, this is not okay what we are doing.”

He just seemed a little perturbed, I guess. Like, “How dare you question me.”

THACKER: Do you think they were scared you might speak out, or was it just them getting upset that you thought the work was unethical?

DUPUIS: We’d had a pretty thorough discussion about ethics when I joined.

I think they fired me because I was being insubordinate. And that I voiced disagreement about what they were doing.

THACKER: Did you put two and two together and realize the disinformation they had done was Project Birmingham with Roy Moore running for Senate? Or did it only make sense months later when you read in the New York Times what happened?

DUPUIS: I didn't explicitly realize it was about Roy Moore. Or maybe I was beginning to realize it was about Roy Moore, but I was just trying to forget what was going on.

This time was a pretty traumatic for me. First of all, I'm getting fired. And second, it's for something that’s really bad, but I could never tell anybody about what was going on, because nobody would believe me.

And I would sound like I'm making up a conspiracy theory.

THACKER: Renee DiResta has tried to downplay and deny her involvement with Project Birmingham and the election interference with Roy Moore in Alabama. (In an email to The DisInformation Chronicle explaining her involvement in the Alabama Project, DiResta said she came on board at New Knowledge after the project ended.)

DUPUIS: She's been spreading a lot of disinformation about what happened. I have a much better understanding of what was going on at New Knowledge now.

The New York Times eventually did their story, but that’s not the whole story of what really happened. And then we had some confirmation from the Twitter files that this kind of stuff was going on, with the connection between the government and companies censoring.

I didn’t even realize that the New York Times and the Washington Post had published their stories on New Knowledge and the Roy Moore campaign until 2021.

I just kept quiet, until now, because I didn’t want to be accused of spreading a conspiracy theory. After I was fired, I was just like, “You know what? This is so crazy. Nobody's ever going to believe me. I'm never going to talk about this again.”

CORRECTION: The correct spelling of Betsy’s last name is “Dupuis.” And Mr. Morgan’s first name is spelled “Jonathon.”