Bad Kitty Unleashed 🦁💪🏻
Bad Kitty Unleashed 🦁💪🏻

@pepesgrandma

9 Tweets 2 reads Nov 28, 2023
🔥 Part 10 - Bad Kitteh Exposé: The early history of New Knowledge that few know. Including:
🔹They advised both the Obama Whitehouse and State Dept.
🔹Their unusual and ALARMING data collection from the 2016 election while advisors.
🔹Ran a 2016 pre election, conservative monitoring, war room.
🔹Were the first, outside the IC, to claim Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Starting in 2015, Renee Diresta & Jonathan Morgan of New Knowledge (aka Popily, Yonder, & Primer) were both involved with the United Nations, State Dept, & Obama WhiteHouse.
The earliest official mention of Russia disinfo by them was in Oct 2015 by Renee Diresta to the Obama Whitehouse.
After the 2016 election, Renee said, “now I’m going to pay more attention!” (to Russia)
New Knowledges claim to fame is being the FIRST to identify 2016 Russian election interference.
Renee & Jonathan Morgan met up at the Obama Whitehouse in Feb 2016. Although they first met earlier.
🔥After the 2016 election, their Data For Democracy harvested all of the United States voter information FROM THE SECRETARIES OF STATE! Thats a huge task too! What did they do with all this massive data? They worked for the Obama Whitehouse, was this even kosher to do?🔥
Renee Diresta & Jonathan Morgan also operated an 2016 election disinfo war room that concentrated on conservative fake news. Once again, let me remind you that they were advisors to the Obama Whitehouse.
After the 2016 election, Jonathan Morgan was even invited to the Whitehouse to do a podcast with Obama’s Chief Science Officer.
♦️New Knowledge was founded in May 2015 in Austin, TX by Jonathon Morgan, a former adviser at the US Dept of State, NATO, & was a propaganda researcher at DARPA.
♦️Months later New Knowledge joined up with the Sustainable UN. (See linked video and thread.)
♦️Renee Diresta:
“Late 2015, the problem of ISIS on Twitter had gotten to be incredibly large, & I connected with a data scientist named Jonathon Morgan.”
“In late October 2015 & early 2016, gov acknowledge that social network manipulation was a real problem.”
“Russia was part of the conversation in the WHITE HOUSE AND in the STATE DEPT advising I was doing in Oct 2015.”
“Going back to Oct 2015, there was information sharing between the State Dept, the White House & companies like Facebook about thinking about the vulnerabilities of their system to foreign actors looking to spread misinfo or disinfo.”
“Russia was brought up by other people in the gov who were concerned about the potential for manipulation.”
“I did sit down with Twitter. Twitter was really much more concerned about harassment than disinfo & manipulation. “
(After the election - on Russia.) “I thought, now we're going to start to pay a lot more attention to this problem.”
♦️New Knowledge: “We were the first org outside the US intel community to identify Russia’s campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election.”
♦️The Obama admin, reached out to Renee Diresta in 2015
Renee Diresta claims she first met Jonathan Morgan at a White House tech meeting in Feb 2016. (Conflicts with PBS article date of late 2015.)
Senate & House staff members, who knew of DiResta’s expertise through her public reports & her previous work ADVISING THE OBAMA ADMIN on disinfo campaigns, had reached out to her & others to help them prepare for the hearings.
♦️In 2016, they monitored thousands of Twitter accounts that suddenly started using bots, or automated accounts, to spread salacious stories about the Clinton family. They watched as multiple Facebook pages, appearing out of nowhere, organized to simultaneously create anti-immigrant events.
When I put it all together & started mapping it out, I saw how big the scale of it was,” said Jonathan Albright, who met DiResta through Twitter. Albright published a widely read report that mapped, for the first time, connections between conservative sites putting out fake news.
To be continued in the next post, many sources to follow.
♦️Note: The above was Jonathan Albrights first introduction in my exposé series.
♦️Oct 2016:
“Much of the data Jonathan Morgan
looks at these days is not for the faint of heart. Armed militias, delusional belief in a rigged election, white nationalism, Nazi symbolism, and other alarming strains of radical right thinking have advanced from the far fringes into the mainstream in this election cycle.”
♦️Jonathan Morgan started Data For Democracy in Dec 2016 after Trumps win as an experiment.
(Recall this is where they worked on the election data.)
“In April 2018, it had over 3400 e-volunteers spanning a wide range of locations and timezones. A community where data people meet and collaborate. The community was based on Slack and Github.”
♦️Data For Democracy partnerships run the gamut from GOVERNMENT AGENCIES to private orgs such as Propublica, Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and Data World.
♦️Data For Democracy:
“So a team of 20 volunteers went around calling all the secretaries of state on the phone and getting them to fax the voter information to them, then scanning that data into PDFs, running them through software that tried to extract the relevant data, and then putting that into a usable machine format that could be shared with other data scientists,” says Jonathan Morgan.
“For months they hammered that process out and made it available to other researchers. It led to some interesting insights about changes in voter behavior, but more importantly led to a level of transparency that isn’t afforded to the public about election outcomes.” 
♦️“SHORTLY AFTER THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN 2016, Morgan and a couple of friends began Partially Derivative, a popular data science podcast. They were invited by Patil, at that point the soon-to-be-outgoing chief data scientist of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, to interview him at the White House.”
In one of the podcast episodes, right after the election, the mood was somber, as each announced the alcoholic beverage they were drinking.
Consider this forshadowing for the 11th part of my exposé.
♦️New Knowledge identified approximately 800 social media accounts affiliated with known and suspected Russian propaganda operations directed at US citizens since the 2016 presidential election. Also recall Jonathan Morgan worked with Hamilton68 Russian bot hoaxers.
♦️Renee DiResta was elected to membership of the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018, for a five-year term.
Sources will be listed next.
New Knowledge Sources
Let’s go straight to the Partially Derivative podcasts done by Jonathan Morgan.
♦️This one was days after the 2016 election where the large crowd present drowned their sorrows in booze.
It was called:
“Decision Boundary 2016
Margin of Terror”
Intro page pictured
archive.is
You can listen to this here:
open.spotify.com
♦️Here’s the podcast Jonathan Morgan did Dec 2016 at the Whitehouse.
“White House Special with DJ Patil, US Chief Data Scientist”
Here’s the pictured page
archive.is
And here you can listen to the WH podcast.
web.archive.org
New Knowledge Sources
Data For Democracy
They got all of this election info from the entire country by phone call. We have folks that still can’t get it for a single state 3 years after 2020.
♦️“Around the 2016 elections, there was a lot of talk about the vote being “rigged.” But it is incredibly hard to get local voter data: even though they’re public records, each state has different guidelines for submitting that information, and leaves it up to each individual district to figure out how to best comply with reporting requirements. The result is a jigsaw puzzle of unstandardized guidelines, making accessing the data incredibly arduous. 
“So a team of 20 volunteers went around calling all the secretaries of state on the phone and getting them to fax the voter information to them, then scanning that data into PDFs, running them through software that tried to extract the relevant data, and then putting that into a usable machine format that could be shared with other data scientists,” says Morgan.
“For months they hammered that process out and made it available to other researchers. It led to some interesting insights about changes in voter behavior, but more importantly led to a level of transparency that isn’t afforded to the public about election outcomes.” 
♦️Jonathan Morgan’s podcast with the Whitehouse Chief Science Officer is what sparked Data For Democracy.
“SHORTLY AFTER THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN 2016, Morgan and a couple of friends began Partially Derivative, a popular data science podcast. They were invited by Patil, at that point the soon-to-be-outgoing chief data scientist of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, to interview him at the White House. 
The attention Morgan and his friends received as part of the interview, and the platform the White House had given them, made it seem like the best time to launch Data for Democracy. Morgan doesn’t see the project as partisan in any way, but he recognizes the 2016 election may well have been a catalyst for other people to get involved.”
♦️“The organization is focused on creating an extensive decentralized community of data scientists, allowing them to collaborate on data-related problems. It allows technologists to partner with institutions or individuals working on solutions to pressing, complex problems. Since its launch in December 2016, the organization has blossomed into a network of over 3,400 volunteers from across the world, working on a wide range of issue areas and projects. “
“DATA FOR DEMOCRACY DOES MOST OF ITS WORK via Slack, the communications application, and GitHub, where scientists and others can collaborate on open-source projects. Each of the 77 GitHub repositories it has developed corresponds to a project.”
archive.is
New Knowledge Sources Continued
♦️New Knowledge was founded in May 2015 in Austin, TX by Jonathon Morgan, a former adviser at the United States Department of State and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a propaganda researcher at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and a publisher at the Brookings Institution, The Atlantic and The Washington Post. Morgan is also the founder of an associated organisation, Data For Democracy.
archive.is
♦️The gist of this next lengthy article is that Renee Diresta makes the argument for censorship and narrative integrity.
She also discusses a phase in her work with teaming up with Jonathan Albright.
She also discusses Russiagate, Facebook, Crowdtangle, and working with Congress etc.
Here she makes the argument for the creation of some sort of third-party oversight body. But also mentions the creation of a detection FRAMEWORK. 🧐
“So there's a number of—we have to create a FRAMEWORK for monitoring and addressing this problem, and that does require the companies to do some things that they really don't want to do. “
She also points to the date that she first connected with Jonathan Morgan (late 2015).
“In late 2015, the problem of ISIS on Twitter had gotten to be incredibly large, and I connected with a data scientist named Jonathon Morgan.
Jonathon had done an “ISIS Twitter Census,” is what it was called. It was released by the Brookings Institute, and it looked at automation, and it looked at—The same types of tactics that I had seen in the anti-vax community, he was observing with regard to ISIS.”
archive.is
Here New Knowledge says they were the first organization outside the U.S. intelligence community to identify Russia’s campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election.
🔹They have testified before Congress, advised the State Department and the NSA, and worked in counter-terrorism.
🔹Jonathon Morgan
Chief Executive Officer - State Dept. advisor, computational propaganda researcher for DARPA, Brookings Institution
🔹 Renee DiResta
Director of Research - Adviser to Congress, State Dept., ARCYBER, former Wall Street trader
🔹 Ryan Fox
Chief Operating Officer - Counter-terrorism expert, US Army and intelligence experience.
archive.is
🔸Obama reached out to Renee Diresta late 2015.
🔸Renee Diresta previously worked advising the Obama administration on disinformation campaigns.
🔸Renee Diresta claims she first met Jonathan Morgan at a White House tech meeting in Feb 2016.
🔸In 2016, they monitored thousands of Twitter accounts.
🔸 Renee recalled a meeting with various tech companies at the White House in February 2016. It was during that time that she first met Jonathan Morgan, a fellow social media disinformation researcher.
🔸 “Before the sun came up on Oct. 31, 2016 Renee DiResta sat in bed in her pajamas and logged into a virtual WAR ROOM.”
archive.is
This is important so you understand the dark place New Knowledge comes from.
Part 11 will take us to the dark place the Silicon Valley went to post 2016 election.
Oct 2016 Jonathan Morgan discusses monitoring the “radical right”, using the word, Nazis, and comparing their operations to ISIS. Recall their Whitehouse work began with ISIS. He also discusses militia groups.
They also work with the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Much of the data
Jonathon Morgan
looks at these days is not for the faint of heart. Armed militias, delusional belief in a rigged election, white nationalism, Nazi symbolism, and other alarming strains of radical right thinking have advanced from the far fringes into the mainstream in this election cycle. Jonathon’s analyses examine social media’s role in this disturbing trend, and he’s recently posted some of the underlying data to data world.”
“The Southern Poverty Law Center counts 276 such militia groups. A closer look at militia activity across Facebook reveals that, while many restrict their activity to closed, private communities, over 240 militia groups keep active, public Facebook pages.”
“Our work on the extremist far right looks at the problem from two angles. First we’re interested in understanding how these groups operate in relation to other extremist groups, like ISIS, that have successfully used social media to recruit and spread their ideology. The second is to understand how these groups have responded to the current election, and the extent to which they’ve moved from the political fringes to the mainstream.”
archive.is
More on Data for Democracy
“This began as an experiment in December 2016, when people from around the world began to collaborate on data-related problems solely through Slack messages and GitHub commits.
With no rules or formal organizational structure, the focus was on getting real and impactful work done with minimal delay.
As of April 2018, the community is based on Slack and GitHub. It has increased to over 3400 e-volunteers spanning a wide range of locations and timezones, and continues to grow every day. These volunteers apply their diverse skills and interests to an equally varied array of projects.”
archive.is
WHO WE PARTNER WITH:
🔸Propublica
🔸Data World
🔸International Displacement Monitoring Center
🔸Domino
🔸Mode
🔸Eventador dot IO
🔸Various cities
“Our partnerships run the gamut from government agencies to private organizations. For instance, we have one group working closely with the City of Boston to help develop a model aimed at predicting car crashes while another team is working with ProPublica analyzing congressional spending.”
web.archive.org
This Council On Foreign Relations doc lists all of their members!
Here it shows that Renee Diresta was elected to a 5 year term membership beginning in 2018.
“Members have in-person access to world leaders, senior government officials, members of Congress, and prominent thinkers and practitioners in academia, policy, and business, many of whom are members themselves.
CFR members participate in nearly one thousand events each year, including history-maker interviews, CEO forums, expert panel discussions, symposia, town halls, and film screenings.”
web.archive.org

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