Every time I do anything of significance for humankind the targeting of me resumes. It always follows the same methodology and has the same core objectives: to stop me or failing that, to slow me down. To manufacture a false record, a false history of my life. To divorce me from key relationships and support. To distract me from what else I otherwise would have been doing, had I not been forced to respond to the attacks.

I have been sent a .pdf of what purports to be a research article about me that has been sent to my project Panquake’s endorsers, donors, supporters and friends. It is packed full of audacious lies about me. I say audacious, because the most rudimentary research of my publicly available work shows up every single claim to be false. I’m not kidding. Every single claim is false. This means the smear merchants are relying on people’s laziness or people being sufficiently off-put by the negative energy of the document to not investigate further for themselves or to simply distance themselves from me to avoid a time-sink as it is less hassle than probing further.

The primary smear is that I was never targeted in New Zealand and am merely masquerading as a journalist or activist. Ironically, the fact that I’m being so voraciously smeared is in and of itself evidence that I am being targeted. 

As will become perfectly clear to any reader of this response.

Preamble

What else would I be doing, if I weren’t writing this right now? The same thing I’ve been doing morning, noon and night for half a year now: working on developing Panquake: a next generation short messaging system that will free us and everyone we care about from the ever increasing plague of shadowbanning, arbitrary account suspensions, ‘lost’ followers, removals of retweets and likes, invasive ‘personalisation’ algorithms, spying on us through microphones and cameras and the scourge of ‘targeted’ advertising.

If you know anything about Panquake, then I don’t need to tell you that Panquake is a threat to the status quo. It’s obvious. I don’t need to tell you the importance of Panquake either. You already know it. Nor do I likely need to tell you that Panquake is being targeted to try to prevent it coming to fruition – as many of our donors already predicted this would occur and indeed it is.

If you’ve read our latest campaign update then you know we’re being overtly targeted by the corporations too. On top of being targeted by toxic trolls, smear agents and those who operate behind them from the shadows.

Because I’ve been spearheading the public campaign to promote Panquake, my reputation, my body of past journalistic work and my professional relationships are presently target numero uno. If they can discredit me, they can discredit Panquake, and cause splash damage on anyone associated with it. So the level of motivation to destroy me is high.

The Smears

It is not only myself who is being victimised by the nefarious smears being circulated about me but also everyone else that has the misfortune to be drawn into it, through no doing of their own. The usurpation of everyone’s collective time is at best collateral damage and at worst a double victory in the eyes of the perpetrators.

Ironically, often the shoe has been on the other foot – I have been sent smear materials about several of our endorsers in the past but have recognised the patterns and seen the smears for what they are – malicious and unfounded attempts to break solidarity between legit activists.

The smears in the document being circulated are systematically numbered below, followed by the corresponding hard evidence that debunks them. I apologise in advance that this is going to be a very long list.

Ignoring the myriad small mistakes – such as them consistently spelling my name wrong throughout the document even though their own source links spell it correctly, or them misstating the original campaign goal as being $65,000 when it was $50,000 (I’m not going to bother splitting hairs), the major lies in their document are disassembled below.

Falsehood #1: That our fundraising campaign is “an ounce of facade” based solely on our endorsers via “this endorsement strategy.”

The inference is that there is “no substance” to our campaign. This is obviously a lie as we have produced monthly delivery events (here is February’s and here is March’s) which transparently detail advanced campaign metrics, provide complex architectural documentation and explain for our support community precisely what we have achieved, what we are working on, and what we will be doing next (and what we would be doing this very minute if we weren’t having to respond to smear attacks from nefarious people).

Interestingly, zero mention is made in the smear document of any of our delivery documentation or our architectural documentation (all of which is in the public arena). There is no mention made of the world renowned technical experts working at the highest levels of our project or their public testimonies about the veracity of our efforts.

The smear merchants reference our extended campaign goal of $167,000 as being tied directly to our endorsers via an “endorsement strategy”. In reality, the reason the goal was set to $167,000 is because that was the precise amount that we budgeted we would need in order to be able to pay full time staff to develop the back end of Panquake (the front end was budgeted into the original $50,000).

In Summary: The amount of money we need to raise and are raising is not reflective of who does or doesn’t endorse us. It is reflective of what we need to complete the build of the architecture which we have been very transparent about throughout.

This conversation with a supporter reinforces that our campaign focus has not been about endorsers but about providing constant, transparent facts, detail and disclosure about our build and delivery process:

Falsehood #2: The smear document claims “The Panquake idea is not new” and then says our “launch material was lifted from SoMee video tutorials” – another alternative social media product.

The smear document then shows a screenshot of Somee’s video tutorial. Note the description of the video, which doesn’t have a single word that reflects any attributes of Panquake:

Every word of the Somee video tutorial description is about a financialised blockchain and all the various mechanisms related to that. But the Panquake blockchain is not a financialised blockchain. None of the functions described in the Somee video are relevant to our model, or to our blockchain architecture. 

Somee’s branding does say “Social media redefined” – a fact I was completely unaware of until it was brought to my attention post-Panquake launch. (In fact, I knew nothing about Somee’s operation in recent years, nor had I ever watched their videos). A Panquake team member, who similarly knew nothing of Somee, had suggested we use “Redefining social media” as one of our campaign messages for Panquake and we hadn’t thought anything of it, until this was brought to our attention by a Somee staffer in late January. We immediately eradicated all references to the term “Redefining” in our marketing materials and apologised out of respect and a wish to maintain good relationships across the space, even though we weren’t really at fault. The staffer accepted our explanation and apology and said there was no further problem.

Panquake’s unique product innovations are Panquakes, Cupquakes, Lovequakes and Thunderquakes, none of which have anything to do with Somee (or any other social media product) whatsoever. 

Any claim that our architecture, commercialisation and subscription model (which very much went against the grain of established social media enterprises) or our product design are derived from any other existing solution, is completely false, defamatory and eerily akin to the routinely baseless accusations of plagiarism levelled at dissident journalists around the world.

The smear article claims that Panquake is a “two year, million dollar development timeline“. The two year timeline is a claim that has been invented by the smear authors. The million dollar reference is possibly a badly regurgitated misquote of a comment I made on Jimmy Dore’s show that we had already achieved a million dollar’s worth of software development progress by comparison with what it would have cost in the commercial space to get to the point that we are at with respect to our development.

Falsehood #3: That “there’s nothing but Suzi’s own tweets in evidence” to prove I was targeted for my journalism

The smear author writes:

In the video, Bioletti says about me: “It was no surprise whatsoever to me based on my experience of Operation 8 and the type of surveillance that occurred there that she would be a target.” When asked: “Is this a common thing to happen in New Zealand to activists and journalists?” Bioletti responded “Unfortunately, it is.”

In the same documentary my Russian asylum attorney Igor Kreslavsky talks about my asylum case and says “If a plain person would look into the case file, he or she would find that there [is] evidence, enough evidence to at least seriously consider.”

The existence of these obviously highly relevant interviews and testimonies are completely omitted by the smear authors when making their false claim that I was not targeted. 

So, could the smear author – who claims to have spent “weeks” investigating me – have somehow just not noticed any of this material?

I strongly doubt that the smear authors could have simply overlooked this evidence as the video that contains my New Zealand and Russian attorney’s testimonies is positioned front and center at the top of my website. What kind of researcher would miss that?

But that is not all. They have also ignored testimonies by eye-witnesses to the targeting of me, and affidavits in support of my asylum application submitted by high profile figures including known targets of New Zealand & US spy agencies like Kim Dotcom.

Just some of the publicly available testimonies the smear merchants have completely failed to mention:

Publicly Available Legal Documents About Suzie’s Case Omitted By The Smear Merchants

• Affidavit by Kim Dotcom
• Affidavit by Christine Assange
• Affidavit by John Kiriakou

Publicly Available Eye-witness Testimonies About Suzie’s Case Omitted By The Smear Merchants

• Video testimony by Occupy Auckland media team member Lyn Ny

Lyn says of me “She was driven out of the country” and says that she herself had been targeted and followed and that her house had also been broken into, just as mine was. Lyn recounts incidents of being threatened on the road while driving that are very similar to those that I have spoken of experiencing. Lyn says “The reason she is not in New Zealand is because she wasn’t safe here. She was targeted here and her life and her children’s lives were threatened”.

• Video testimony by Occupy Auckland member Jesse Vawdrey

Jesse states, of the targeting of me, “I saw it with my own eyes” and goes on to detail being present in my vehicle during an episode of dangerous intimidation by other vehicles that were following us.

There is no plausible explanation for anyone claiming to have “investigated” me to exclude any mention of the above evidences – all of which are available on the website ProtectSuzie.com and have been repeatedly referenced on social media and in online events.

Anyone disclaiming the established fact of my having been targeted, while omitting the above evidences, is a bad faith actor.

I have prepared a helpful table of 15 pieces of publicly available hard evidence of my targeting that is ignored or omitted by the smear author:

Additionally suspicious is the smear author’s instructions to readers to watch my 2016 documentary “Diary of a Person of Interest” but to: “Watch a few minutes from the one hour mark to capture the essence”

Why do they want you to skip to the one hour mark? Because the first hour details all of the movements I was involved in and shows proof of my record of activism work – a record that the smear author seeks to eradicate.

Falsehood #4: The smear authors claim “According to Occupy Auckland Suzi wasn’t on the media team.” This is provably false.

They use a screenshot of a list from the Occupy Auckland organising committee to claim that because my name wasn’t on it that I therefore was not a member of the media team.

Who is listed? “Cosmos, Rogan, Ben and Winston.”

I met both Cosmos and Rogan at Occupy Auckland. Ben is Benjamin Cooney, the Occupy Auckland Media Team Coordinator, who has repeatedly spoken out about the targeting of me and who himself was harassed by police (among others). ‘Winston’ is a pseudonym for another of my media team members, Merlin, who has also repeatedly made public statements in support of me.

The reason my name does not appear in the smear author’s Occupy Auckland screenshot is because I did not put my name down immediately at the October 15th founding of Occupy Auckland, however I was present on that day and was working in the media tent shortly thereafter, donating goods and coordinating with the social media team. I remain a Moderator of both Occupy Auckland and Occupy New Zealand on Facebook to this day, albeit inactive because I hate Facebook and refuse to give that corrupt corporate platform more than 2 minutes a month of my time.

Not that any of this matters given that there are countless public records of me being a member of both the Occupy Auckland and Occupy New Zealand Media Teams dating back to 2011 & 2012. 

As just one example, here I am participating in the Occupy Auckland media team teach-in at Aotea Square in Auckland – the home site of our original Occupy Auckland occupation.

As everyone knows, my Twitter account at that time was @endarken, and I am repeatedly referenced on both the Occupy Auckland Media Team blog and on the official Occupy Auckland Facebook page in those years.

Note that the above screenshot is from the official Occupy New Zealand Facebook page from 2012.

But you are not supposed to know that. You are supposed to just believe that I was never a member of Occupy just because some smear merchant author presents one irrelevant screenshot and then fabricates an entire narrative around it.

Occupy Savvy, the internationally-known Occupy Auckland & Occupy New Zealand media team blog (for which I was registrar and frequent author) has comprehensive details about our activities including an overwhelming number of references to my livetweeting, photojournalism and video journalism, organising and live event coverage throughout the period of 2011-2015+.

Just as some examples of what I was involved in/covered, and which feature my photographs, videos and writing:

• This 2012 action at the home of then-New Zealand Prime Minister John Key
• Massive 2012 rallies in the middle of Auckland against the sale of state assets
• Documenting 2012 protest actions with enormous police presences where I routinely collected evidence of police numbers vastly outnumbering that which mainstream media and the police themselves were reporting. I took and published photos evidencing completely over the top policing like this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this –  which turned out to be the diplomatic vehicle of none other than US Attorney General Eric Holder, secretly present at one of our protest actions at Sky City in Auckland, during the height of the US & NZ illegal spying on Kim Dotcom.

So please, tell me more about how I did nothing of significance and was not targeted.

Moving along, the smear article from this point onwards begins to take positions that are blatantly self-contradictory and disproven by other portions of the same smear article. Which is frankly bizarre, but reminiscent of other such past attempts to smear me. (It amused me greatly when one recent smear video about me opened by claiming I’m a relentless self-promoting narcissist and ended by complaining that I only do appearances once in a blue moon).

Falsehood #5: That “Penny Bright who did become a target but it was Suzi Dawson launching the attacks” and “By 2013 Suzi focused on Penny Bright”

Penny Bright systematically attacked members of Occupy Auckland and our media team throughout the period of 2011-2014. When we spoke to organisers of past movements and groups that she had been involved in, there was a two-decade history of sabotage, infiltration and co-optation of movements by her. One famous New Zealand activist who is a household name and ex Member of Parliament (not Laila Harre) told me that they and their supporters had stayed away from Occupy Auckland explicitly because of Penny Bright’s presence.

Subsequent to her troublemaking at Occupy, she was repeatedly thrown out of and banned from other activism groups including the Aotearoa Is Not For Sale movement against asset sales and banned from the group Socialist Aotearoa. The November 2012 article by the Occupy Auckland media team calling her out for her sabotage of the movement came after a full year of attacks from her and her collaborator, ex-New Zealand Police Prosecutor turned Private Investigator Grace Haden.

They targeted a slew of Occupiers including me and I documented their harassment of me, with evidence. Haden harassed me at home so often that the phone company (who she refused to obey the cease and desist notices of) ended up changing our home phone number for free and I had to trespass her from my home address. Penny Bright openly took public credit for Haden’s attacks.

I would have been inclined to put it down to being two batshit crazy older women, until our discovery that Haden wasn’t the only one with an NZ Police background. When we dug through the Council Library archives we discovered that Penny Bright herself had been giving lectures to the NZ Police on protesting.

Note the title of the archived publication was: “Activists give police tips” and referenced Penny Bright by name.

This is deeply ironic as Penny’s primary claim was that I was a police informant. Yet when I complained to the Police about her publishing my and my children’s private contact information and photos of our house and vehicle on the web, the Police refused to remove them and they remained online for years. (Had I been a police informant or officer, they would have been removed post haste.)

In the years since her stalking me, there is a long and sordid and very public history of Grace Haden losing defamation cases brought against her, breaching name suppression orders, setting up shadow organisations mimicking the names, domains and identities of a variety of NGO’s and eventually losing her license to practice as a Private Investigator. Searching “Grace Haden NZ court” is more than sufficient to send you down a rabbit hole you’ll wish you’d never been down.

As far as what I was doing in 2013, it had nothing to do with Penny Bright – I was organising and promoting a slew of movements, primarily the movement against the 2013 GCSB Bill (NZ’s international spy agency) which has conveniently been left out of the smear article entirely. I also provably provided event coverage at the following Occupy New Zealand actions in 2013, several of which I personally organised:

(The only exceptions are those listed as being in Wellington, at which I was not present and did not cover)

Falsehood #6: That other people weren’t targeted for their media or affiliations

This entire section of the smear document makes little to no sense. They claim people weren’t targeted for various affiliations while also claiming they were targeted.

As one example, it reads:

Chris Hedges has been repeatedly smeared with false allegations of plagiarism.

If Alexa O’Brien was targeted with a plot to use terrorism laws against her, as the smear authors claim, then that is certainly indicative of state level targeting, contradicting their point entirely.

The smear author simultaneously claims that the group Anonymous were “the primary targets of the Obama Admin 2011 to 2015″ and then makes repeated reference to mainstream media having reprinted my video and journalistic coverage of the Anonymous movement and various related events. Which strangely means that the smear author is reinforcing the notion that I would be a target while simultaneously claiming that I am not a target.

Falsehood #7: The smear author obscures the true reach of my work

The author references a couple of random uploads on my You Tube channel and presents it as being the totality of my reach. This is disingenuous. They say about my work on the 2014 Moment of Truth event, for example: “Did four videos with 143 views put a target on Suzi’s back? In fairness 9 min of video from the closing of #MoT event is not Dawson’s only source of association. She also has a 1min 2sec video where she asks Dotcom a question at the open invitation #SwimWithKim event launching Internet Party.”

Meanwhile back in reality, here is me on the day of the Dotcom/Greenwald/Assange/Snowden Moment of Truth event circulating the media resources to journalists and activists all around the world.

Media resources that were viewed by over 6,000 journalists/activists in just a few hours of me authoring the doc.

Downplaying my level of access – as well as my reach – is a constant theme for the smear authors.

Which is why when mentioning Moment of Truth they failed to include this famous video that I took from the front row of the restricted-access Moment of Truth press conference.

Note that my video has 1,000s of views yet the videos the smear author references are irrelevant entries by comparison.

When granting me an exclusive interview at the tail end of the Moment of Truth press conference, then-Leader of the Internet Party, and household-name politician Laila Harre (ex Minister for Women, Youth Affairs and Associate Minister of Labour and Commerce) audibly mutters to me “good to see a real journalist here!” as she hugs me and kisses my cheek. You can actually hear the kiss on the tape.

How would someone like Laila Harre:
a) know that I was a journalist,
b) regard me so favourably as to be literally kissing my cheek, or
c) grant me her only exclusive interview of the night, if I was some irrelevant nobody with no access or significance?

And on what planet are you supposed to believe that I would somehow be immune to state targeting, being in such a position at such an event, full to the brim with established intelligence agency targets? The suppositions of the smear author are frankly laughable in light of the facts.

Calling the invitation-only #SwimWithKim event at Kim Dotcom’s mansion “open invitation” is just another false claim by the smear author. As if Kim Dotcom is going to let anyone in a city of 1.5 million people just show up at his home!

My interview with Kim which she is derisive of was the only interview Kim granted on that day. Similarly, I was the first media person of the entire national press pack that Hone Harawira granted an interview to at the Internet-Mana National AGM that same weekend.

You may recall that name Internet-Mana. It is the precise group (but not the only group I was connected to) referenced in the 2018 State Services Commission Report into state spying on activists.

Falsehood #8: That Nicky Hager & Martyn Bradbury’s situation is somehow reflective of mine and that The Daily Blog NZ is an “open posting site” and therefore that my articles published there are irrelevant media credits

Firstly, both Nicky Hager and Martyn Bradbury are proven, established targets of the NZ Police and related agencies. Which should have obvious implications where I am concerned as I was in communication with both and in close contact with the latter.

However, both are infamous, established public figures in New Zealand with huge support communities and audiences and both, frankly, are men.

In 2011-2014 I was nowhere near as high profile as their towering statures. I was a solo mother living in the suburbs with no such resources, public profile, academic media qualifications, awards or professional network of support. While it is flattering that Hager and Bradbury’s names are mentioned in contrast with mine, any comparison between us is inherently unequal and unfair.

The Daily Blog NZ is not an “open posting site” as the smear author claims. It is one of the top political news websites in New Zealand and all authors are handpicked by Martyn Bradbury.

It is not the only major political news website in New Zealand on which I have been published, yet another fact erased by the smear author while trying to diminish my publishing credits.

The mention of Martyn Bradbury is additionally curious because Martyn has been outspoken about his having been present with me in New Zealand during the period of time in which I was being targeted there, spoke about witnessing that I was being targeted and the impacts on me of the targeting. The smear author once again ignores this firsthand evidence.

Falsehood #9: That my “use of high profile figures is designed to leverage their audience reach and add credibility to fund Suzi’s lifestyle” and that my departure from New Zealand was “exotic luxury vacations“, that I was in “unimaginable luxury”, that in Berlin I had “a full time nanny who tends to her kids“,  and that I was “globe trotting starting with her Hong Kong trip in April 2015 just over 90 days after fleeing to Berlin.“

How they managed to get every single count above wrong, is stellar in its incompetence or malevolence.

I’ll work backwards: I was not in Hong Kong in April of 2015 and I did not go there after going to Berlin. Hong Kong was the first stop after leaving New Zealand. Yes I did book my trip under the guise of a vacation because funnily enough, telling the authorities who had been persecuting me that I was planning on escaping the country didn’t seem like a very good idea.

From Hong Kong we went to Malaysia and stayed for free in an apartment owned by a long-time friend of mine from New Zealand. He, his wife and children, generously put us up as guests and took care of us – in their so-called “luxury apartment” which they lived in!

No, I did not have a full-time nanny in Berlin. That is a flat-out lie. I did on occasion hire a babysitter, including when I – for free – covered major activism events in Berlin, including my coverage of the 250,000-strong Stop TTIP rally which was a continuation of my years of work on the #TPPANoWay movement in New Zealand – a hashtag which I co-founded and which trended at #2 worldwide.

To see more of my supposedly non-existent journalism, check out my writing, pictures and videos from Berlin here. A history of the #TPPANoWay hashtag in New Zealand can be found here. (A movement which the NZ Police deemed a ‘threat to national security‘).

My “lifestyle” was one of being tracked, surveilled, threatened and terrorised as I leap-frogged from New Zealand to Berlin via Asia. And the targeting did not stop there. I continued to be harassed throughout my travels and even had a particularly scary incident of targeting in Russia during the Unity4J movement, as well as repeated email threats.

And yup, that is all completely ignored/omitted by the smear author in their “research” and “investigation”.

Falsehood #10: That Sabu didn’t target me

Despite having earlier tied me directly to the AnonymousIRC group Sabu was engaged with, the smear author casts shade on me having outed Sabu for his disgusting activities against me as if somehow exposing a known (and despicable) FBI informant was a bad thing. 

My post about what Sabu had done did not have incidental timing. Sabu, who had been rightly universally loathed to that point, was attempting to launder his tainted reputation, shopping around mainstream media interviews and public events to try to make himself somewhat publicly acceptable again.

Knowing what I knew, there was no way in hell that I was going to sit silent and let him weasel and lie his way into making himself more palatable to the very community that he had so badly betrayed.

The smear author mentions Sabu having probed me for information, including about a blogpost and he did.

What that blog post was, is relevant. It was this.

Falsehood #11: “She makes no mention of Anonymous as the source of analysis and did no reporting of additional findings or #OpTrapwire actions.“

This is yet again false. I tweeted about TrapWire many times and over many years. I also wrote other blogposts about it, not just the single one referenced. To find this, all the smear author would have had to do is type “@endarken Trapwire” into Twitter or “Trapwire” into Occupy Savvy.

In my lengthy 2012 article “Cointelpro and Occupy: The War Within” I wrote:

In November 2012 I tweeted:

Falsehood #12: That I have misrepresented mainstream media credits of my work. The smear author writes “Both of the RT credits were for Anonymous 2014 Million Mask March in Auckland included with footage and pictures globally.”

One minute the author is referencing RT’s coverage of my work on Million Mask March and the next minute they’re claiming “Any mention of anonymous is a glaring omission in Suzi’s body of work.” Go figure.

So they’re simultaneously claiming I don’t acknowledge Anonymous yet referencing my work covering Anonymous. All within the same smear document.

“…included with footage and pictures globally” is a very interesting observation by the smear author. Given that it was me that authored this massive aggregation of Million Mask March footage and pictures globally, posted on Occupy Savvy and widely shared on social media. Which yet again, the smear author doesn’t credit me for.

The smear author tries to again paint a picture diminishing the reach of my work, by claiming the RT coverage was the only examples of my work reaching a mass audience.

Because the smear author has conveniently omitted others.

#NZ4Gaza was a hashtag I co-founded to promote anti-war events in New Zealand against Israel’s bombing of Palestine in early 2014.

This RT article features tweets by me, my pictures and my video coverage of the events.

Similarly, my video of the Palestinian flag being raised above the US Consulate in Auckland was picked up by broadcast media.

Falsehood #13: “Suzi never supported FreeAnons, not the events or fund raisers or anyone of the two dozen arrested and faced with hacking charges. It wasn’t until Lauri Love became a quasi-celebrity, as an official spokesman for Julian Assange, that Suzi showed any interest at all in the ordeal Laurie faced.”

The smear author’s claim that Lauri Love – a prolific and public supporter as well as a friend of Julian – was “an official spokesman for Julian Assange” is untrue as Lauri would happily tell anyone who asked I’m sure, and the rest of the above paragraph is just more flat out lies by the smear author.

Here is a March 5th, 2012 blogpost by me celebrating the band Atari Teenage Riot having contributed to a FreeAnons fundraiser.

A search of “@endarken FreeAnons” on Twitter tells a completely different story from what the smear author is selling, and is in fact incredibly revealing.

And this does not even include the hundreds if not thousands of times that I amplified support for jailed activists, as well as for @freeanons which is why their official account follows me to this day.

In researching the above, I stumbled across an incredibly significant exchange between one Pamela Drew, myself, @freeanons and one Ray Johanson.

In the above exchange I am defending Free Anons and Free Anons is calling out Ray Johanson. Pamela Drew is on the thread.

Why is this so interesting?

Because Pamela Drew is the name claiming responsibility for the smear document about me, that is being circulated to Panquake staff, endorsers and donors.

You can read the entire load of bollocks here: Being Suzette Dawson

And thanks to a brave whistleblower, I know that Ray Johanson is the person behind the whole smear operation.

I have been supplied with this screenshot evidencing an active plot against me, and more broadly, against Panquake by targeting its endorsers – a plot organised by Ray Johanson.

“just Ray” in the above screenshot is Ray Johanson, bragging of an endorser pulling their endorsement for Panquake after being sent smear materials about me and boasting that he is “working on a few more doing the same.”

His collaborator in his smear operation @raincoaster is seen plotting to “Putinjacket” me.

Helpfully, the smear author alludes to the exact timeframe in which this smear document was authored – “a few weeks” after the launch of the Panquake campaign, which would be early to mid February.

That means this document has been sent around back channel by the plotters for somewhere in the region of 6-8 weeks before finally filtering into the public sphere.

They have colluded to prevent me from seeing their false allegations against me until now, thereby depriving me of the opportunity to answer to them. This further evidence that their intent all along had nothing to do with the truth and everything to do with causing maximum possible damage to our Community and project.

You can draw your own conclusions about why a group of people might behave in such a way.

Enter Raymond Johanson

My earliest memory of Raymond Johansen is of a giant red flag. It was shortly after I arrived in Moscow, only to discover that my bank had frozen my funds in transfer, leaving me unexpectedly penniless. I reached out for NGO help and tried to explain to people what was happening to me and Ray offered assistance.

Ray Johanson told me to take my children and cross the border to Norway ON FOOT in the middle of winter, illegally. 

Which is about the stupidest idea that anyone has ever suggested to me. 

He told me that after said border crossing, that he would put me up in “a safe house” in Norway.

The border in question is literally inside the Arctic Circle.

Ray was talking to me in the capacity of his having claimed to be a Board Member of the Courage Foundation.

Subsequently, I found out that this was a lie. He was not, and is not a Board Member of the Courage Foundation, as was confirmed to me by other people who actually are.

Because of this, not only did I keep him at arm’s length for quite some time, but remained suspicious of him to the current day. His bizarre border-crossing plan was such a profound red flag to me, that I also repeatedly warned people that he had done something in the past that I felt would have seriously endangered me, and to be wary of him.

Yet he always sold himself as being connected to good people or good things and would invite me and others to be a part of various projects that good people were affiliated with, only for some nefarious agenda to eventually emerge. In my experience, the man is toxic, frankly.

I tried to give him another chance during the Internet Party Campaign’s AntiSpyBill series because his then-girlfriend was a long term activist who I greatly liked and respected. She was in a significant position with Pirate Parties International, and Internet Party and the Pirates had obvious political/ideological synergies. For Ray’s ex-girlfriend’s sake I won’t regurgitate what she’s been saying publicly since then about her experiences with him – they’re her business, not mine and I respect her right to privacy and want to protect her feelings.

I was exposed to more of Ray’s shenanigans during the Pursuance Project. When Julian Assange called out the expulsion of me from that project, Ray took an immediate opposing position in private while mostly trying to appear neutral in public. He accused me of being behind Julian’s comments on the matter – I was not.

Since Pursuance, I have stayed away from Ray like the plague. Unfortunately he hasn’t stayed away from me. I have had constant back channel aggravations from various people who, when I subsequently visit their timelines, have Ray and his associates all over them.

Ray’s schtick is to manipulate others into doing things to advance his agendas so that those people are tarred with any inevitable fallout while he maintains deniability.

I believe he is behind a number of existing beefs between independent media figures, activists and related organisations. If those people wake up and begin comparing notes about him I think they will be shocked at what they discover.

I believe that there have been multiple avenues by which Ray Johansen has been attempting to sabotage both myself and Panquake as a whole.

I believe this because I have been experiencing out-of-character open hostility and/or resounding silence from people who I believed I had good relationships with. People who do not know each other and are from a number of different otherwise unrelated quarters. In each case, I have discovered that those people have had recent contact with Ray and his off-siders. 

Ray is the thread that connects.

In many cases the relationships that he is targeting pre-date Panquake, but his attacks are in the context of breaking potential avenues of support for Panquake. In each instance, people are being led to believe that I am somehow acting in disservice to Julian or WikiLeaks, or that I was never of significance to either.

There is never any mention by the smear merchants that Julian shared my work yearly from 2014 until he was arrested in 2019, or that my work appeared repeatedly on his timeline in the very weeks immediately prior to his arrest.

In my estimation Julian didn’t so consistently promote me for any other reason than because he knew what I write is true. That in itself made my reporting stand out. We also have a shared interest in examining the prolific misdeeds of intelligence agencies.

The last thing Julian said to me from the Embassy prior to his arrest was “history is fake news all the way down.”

Julian was talking of course about official, retrospective historical records, being curated bullshit.

Between the narratives of warmongers, the narratives of victors and the activities of censors, human history is a fabric woven to the morbidly beautiful and intricate design of those with an agenda and believe the ends justifies the means.

And in an activism context, that’s precisely what Ray and his cohorts have been trying to do to me. Manufacture a fake Suzie and sell it to my friends and supporters – manufacture a fake history for me, that they hope to one day be able to launder into an ‘official’ biography.

This is also what was done to Julian. They created a fake Julian, with a fake history then sold it to the gullible and attacked all his relationships and projects to stifle and choke them, to put a lid on him.

Ray and co want to replace a decade of my life with their fake history, a history that suits their narrative, their agenda and their objectives. Ray’s timeline is filled with attacks on me.

He intersperses his attacks on me with (incredibly) his own flaccid attempts at fundraising for… wait for it… none other than Somee Social. The very same project the smear document he has been circulating falsely accuses Panquake of copying.

Yup, you heard that right. Ray Johanson calls me a grifter and attacks me for raising funds for a software project… while attempting to himself raise funds for a software project.

If they were allowed to do that it would be a disservice greater than just to myself, but to us all.

For it is not just me that is being harmed by their activities. Good people’s time is being wasted. They are being actively confused by a known methodology, well oiled and routinely practiced by power centres the world over. It is the method by which they destroy promising projects across the globe, be they technological, activist, social, political projects or otherwise.

The strategy is death by 1,000 cuts. Whether or not Ray and his collaborators are behind them all, we have had myriad threatening messages, emails, targeted smears by fake accounts, impersonation attempts and other digital harassment techniques levelled at us since launching this project. Here are just a few examples:

From my DM’s: the same person/account has also been smearing us on public threads as well

Targeting Jimmy Dore and Stef Zamorano with smears of us:

Impersonating Stef Zamorano: the below tweet contains a fake tweet by her, from someone who has screenshot Stef’s profile picture and handle then made a fraudulent tweet pretending to be her, in order to attack Panquake

Panquake is under attack, and this is the plot against us:

1. Deny us our truth
2. Degrade our numbers in a war of attrition
3. Distract otherwise productive people
4. Disrupt our relationships
5. Deceive by all and any means, to sow confusion and discord
6. Deter our support base and our potential recruiting pools, from participating or donating
7. Destroy the only hope we all have at a real lifeboat on which to bring our family, friends and everyone we love and paddle away from big tech censorship and their corrupt corporate control of our communications infrastructure, our eyeballs and ultimately our relationships.

We aren’t going to let the bad guys win. Are you?

There is so much more that I would like to say. I’m still sitting on piles of evidence of Ray’s innumerable misdeeds and those of others as yet unnamed with which he has been proven to be affiliated.

There will be a Part 2 to this article at a time of my choosing and it will be even more devastating than Part 1. But I have a loving and large team wanting to accelerate real change for us all, so I will take a breather from calling out the liars, and we will all get back to work for now.

If you would like to stick it to the smear authors attacking Panquake – it’s super easy to do. Donate to help us deliver Panquake faster.

We totally understand that many can’t donate right now, but being our voice is equally as important. We don’t have corporate backers and therefore you are our media team. So please tell everyone you know to support Panquake.

See you soon!

[This post was live-blogged over the course of a day. Thank you for your attention and please support Panquake here!]