Defendant, Censor, Politico, Spy

**Patrick McKenzie** (0:02)
Welcome to Complex Systems, where we discuss the technical, organizational, and human factors underpinning why the world works the way it does.
Hi, everybody. My name is Patrick McKenzie, better known as patio11 on the Internet. Defendant, censor, Politico, spy. The United States does not have a uniformly happy history with domestic intelligence services. They sometimes become obsessed with the enemy beyond reason. They sometimes develop perverse internal cultures which justify the next incremental step, no matter the cost. They sometimes scorn any form of oversight. They sometimes begin to treat democratic accountability itself as a problem to be managed.
The people they nominally serve could vote for the enemy. In 1975, the Church Committee documented these exact patterns at the FBI, CIA, and other places and produced reforms that the federal intelligence community has lived under ever since. But enough of the history lesson. Previously, in Bits about Money and Complex Systems, we covered the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a well-respected civil rights organization for donor fraud, money laundering, and bank fraud. Defendant. The indictment focuses on an SPLC unit that the SPLC itself calls the Intelligence Project. SPLC describes the Intelligence Project in its own materials as monitoring and exposing domestic terrorists and hate groups. SPLC published what it calls intelligence reports through that unit. SPLC has, in its own post-indictment statement, described a multi-decade paid informant program. SPLC has offered, in its defensive motions, that it frequently liaised with law enforcement. So to recap, runs covert assets, partners with law enforcement on an anti-terrorism brief, produces intelligence estimates, communicates recommendations to policy makers. There is a word for this kind of org, intelligence service. In this case, a private intelligence service, spy.
From 2017 through 2023 and continuing, the private intelligence service ran an operation in concert with allies against private companies mostly in tech and finance in the United States. Many of us around during those years in the tech industry were there to see it, but we didn't always appreciate what we were seeing in real time. That operation's declared goal aims included interdicting incitement to violence and also what it calls hate, which largely encompassed lawful but distasteful speech.
Censor. This piece is a history and public interest reporting about that operation. Bits about Money usually covers financial infrastructure. When we record a transaction, we have retained the receipts. Since some of the details sound so far-fetched that they border on unbelievable, this piece is extensively sourced to mostly the statements of the architects of the operation. We will quote extensively from primary sources and have linked and mirrored them in the show notes. I'm aware this piece is quite out of character for me, and I'm aware that it has political ramifications. That is, unfortunately, unavoidable when private intelligence services interfere with democratic elections. Politico, and spoiler alert.
The operation as experienced by industry. One coalition of non-profit organizations ran an organized pressure campaign against industry for years. It started in 2017 with the SPLC and other non-profit informally coordinating. It intensified and formalized in 2018 under SPLC co-leadership. It escalated sharply in 2020 and 2021 The campaign had two main components. The first was public advocacy and communications work. The second, less visible but more consequential, was a series of meetings with industry. Hundreds of meetings with a specific target set of companies. Campaigns declared aims were three. To convince those companies to censor more communications the coalition characterized as hate. To blacklist organizations and individuals the coalition characterized as promulgators of hate or violence. And to interdict the flow of funds to those blacklisted parties. The coalition claimed to be nonpartisan. Be on the lookout for mentions of nonpartisan because it is a word the coalition understands differently than I do. The coalition calls its targets, quote, Internet companies, and relies on government, media, and the public to not redefine print. In it, they define Internet company mendaciously to include banks, credit card processors, and other financial infrastructure their enemies could touch. The coalition was going after posts, but it was also, and primarily, going after money. I will use the language industry participants going forward to identify who they met with. Industry participants included Facebook, Twitter, JPMorgan Chase, Visa, MasterCard, and many other firms. Some were among the largest companies in the world. Others had fewer than 10 employees. I estimate had count based on published reporting and industry experience. Stripe was an industry participant. I was employed at Stripe continuously from late 2016 through early 2023, covering the entire period under discussion. I remain an active advisor to Stripe. Stripe does not necessarily endorse what I write in my personal spaces.
This series of hundreds of meetings involved hundreds of employees from industry participants. Those employees included C-suite executives and managers and individual contributors across a host of functions. Those functions included communications, legal, government affairs, trust and safety, and compliance professionals.