The Department of Defense has allocated millions of dollars to create phony social media profiles the government could turn against Americans.

The Department of Defense funded a “large scale social deception” program, according to public spending disclosures. The Federalist has uncovered documents showing how the federal government used “social engineering” programs to develop networks of fraudulent social media accounts capable of violating Americans’ rights to speech and privacy online — and, potentially, psychological warfare.

The DOD awarded more than $9.1 million for Thomson Reuters Special Services (TRSS) for “ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE… LARGE SCALE SOCIAL DECEPTION” starting in 2018, according to government funding disclosures. Of the total amount promised, the federal government reportedly paid — or “outlayed” — more than $268,000 for the project.

TRSS is a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters, which owns the leftist media outlet Reuters. According to the company’s website, it offers “scalable solutions to governments and global institutions,” and its leadership “leverages real-world experience in the US Intelligence Community, Department of Defense, law enforcement and the private sector.” The Air Force awarded the contract, and the DOD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — the military’s shady research branch — funded the work in “large scale social deception.”

A DARPA funding document shows the Air Force’s 711th Human Performance Wing, Human Effectiveness Division, enabled this project in 2018 — initially promising just $1 million before increasing the obligated amount to more than $9.1 million. The division, according to its website, is “composed of a diverse group of scientists and engineers studying developing technologies specific to the human element of warfighting.”

Many other contracts were part of the same project, dedicated to building a network of phony online accounts, which the government would supposedly use to defend against “social engineering” attacks. While this may seem harmless, the mechanics of the system leave it open for potential use against Americans.

Funding ‘Social Engineering Defense’

The $9.1 million contract was for “Active Social Engineering Defense” — a DARPA program that is “now complete,” according to its webpage. It aimed to “develop the core technology to enable the capability to automatically identify, disrupt, and investigate social engineering attacks.” It professed to target mainly scam and phishing attempts.

The contract’s “program manager” was DARPA scientist Joshua Elliott, the documents show. He was a DARPA program manager from 2017 to 2023, according to his LinkedIn. Beforehand, he studied things like “socio-technical change,” and worked in academia for 10 years on things like “computational climate economics.” At DARPA, he was allowed to “program” $600 million in federal research and development funding, according to the Federation of American Scientists. Afterward, Elliott worked for the radical group Quadrature Climate Foundation, and more recently, Renaissance Philanthropy — started by a former staffer for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Also in 2018 as part of the “Active Social Engineering Defense Program,” the government promised funding for other contracts — also under Elliott — including $2.5 million for HRL Laboratories, $8.5 million for SRI International, $7.1 million for the University of Southern California, $4.2 million for Raytheon BBN, $455,000 for the MITRE Corporation (which was part of a larger $507.9 million contract), and $2.4 million for the Canadian Commercial Corporation (the nation’s government contracting agency).

In 2019, according to the DARPA document, the government promised funding for “active social engineering defense” from additional groups, including nearly $1 million for Carnegie Mellon University, $9.5 million for Northrop Grumman, more than $774,000 for Purdue University, nearly $1.9 million for the State University of New York Research Foundation, and $1.3 million for the infamous University of California, Berkeley.

Elliott was the program manager in fiscal year 2018, but government records show DARPA Program Manager Walter Weiss took over in fiscal year 2019. A 2021 Georgetown study said the “active social engineering defense” program would “build systems that can detect social engineering attacks and respond autonomously to trick adversaries into revealing identifying information.”

Many of these groups played integral roles in the “active social engineering defense” project, which enabled a massive network of fake, government-controlled online accounts to ensnare scammers, sometimes collecting information for further investigation. But there is apparently nothing to stop these networks from violating Americans’ rights to privacy and speech.

Networks Of Phony Online Accounts

HRL created “defense systems against social engineering attackers” as part of DARPA’s “Active Social Engineering Defense” program. In a webpage from 2018, the group boasted its system (“CHESS”) would “exploit attackers’ methods by drawing them in with automated responses” to capture their data, operating “across various media, including email, social media, and text messages.”

“CHESS seeks to activate virtual bots that act on behalf of victims and control communications with the attacker across all media,” the webpage reads. Its system would “gather as much personal information on an attacker as possible, including identifying individual bad actors and any agencies that might be behind them.”

While this may appear benign, it is a shocking admission — the government sponsored a massive network of fake social media accounts that it could manipulate, capable of capturing users’ data.

“This DARPA contract involved the development and deployment of technology to create and manage fake social media accounts at scale,” The Federalist’s CEO Sean Davis posted on X. “This is far more insidious than a simple government payment to a news agency.”

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