Ken Klippenstein reports that Task Force Raider, a CYBERCOM election security unit in San Antonio, has the American public as its real target.
His evidence for a missing foreign threat is the absence of a visible foreign hand. But that invokes a mistake we already have covered here as the Spanish police standard. Spain’s interior ministry announced it found no foreign amplification behind the Ceuta unrest. The European Commission then found Russian amplification from day one. Ken would be wise to read the European Commission tea leaves.
The Russian method puts the hand inside the target country, where it produces exactly the kind of mistake that Ken makes. Farmers, anarchists, ransomware crews and disposable recruits signing with a cover name coded wrong for their milieu carry the operation. Fragmented attribution is the Russia hypothesis. A reporter who reads scattered domestic voices as proof of a purely domestic story has described exactly the Russian warfare operation and then announced its absence.
Klippenstein’s own record settles whether foreign services reach American audiences. In September 2024 he published a document on JD Vance that Iranian intelligence had taken from the Trump campaign, and he said so in his subtitle. A hack-and-leak needs a publisher. He was the publisher. The column arguing that “influencing the influencers” answers a phantom threat comes from the influencer who was influenced.
His DCleaks example gives us the same. He describes the Obama administration taking DCleaks offline as a restriction of free speech. The 2018 GRU indictment identifies DCleaks as a persona and site created and run by officers of Russian military intelligence.
Removing a military intelligence front is counterintelligence. Calling it censorship hands the audience’s rights to the operator instead.
Klippenstein is not all wrong, so let’s give credit where it’s due. His documents describe three million messages sent to countries of interest, 56,000 PSYOP posts and a cellular blackout capability built in Afghanistan. The claim that the same tools now point inward rests on anonymous officers. We also know that Palantir has been aiming to do to America what its self-licking ISIS cream cone did to Iraq (generate domestic terror groups it wants money to destroy).
The precedent concern is sound and also more than a century old. Walter Nicolai’s service burned American factories in the First World War and got Wilson to investigate his own left. Vienna’s secret police built a card index of residents between 1849 and 1868 to track enemies of the state and ended with a file on everyone. Persona operations and a “best athlete” roster of cutouts are that index in cyberspace.
A foreign operation and a state using it as cover to police its own dissent are the sides of a single coin. Klippenstein reports only one side of it.
The foreign threat is documented on his own byline.