The Fall of Silence Series PART II: The Red October Doctrine — The Tech Project and the USAID/USA Spending Tool

TEA TIME

Censorship no longer announces itself with bans or blackouts. It doesn’t need to. That kind of censorship is purposeful and works only in authoritarian regimes, which is what we are trying to avoid. Today, it’s quieter, smoother — it hides in the distribution chain. The modern censor doesn’t destroy information; it possesses it. It decides who gives birth to it, who names it, and when it’s allowed to exist in the public eye. This isn’t about silencing words — it’s about owning the source.

That’s the core of what I call The Red October Doctrine. It’s the doctrine of silent substitution — a system where original voices are erased, and their discoveries are repackaged under new, approved identities. Truth doesn’t vanish; it’s reissued, rebranded, and redistributed through controlled hands. What the people see is a clean, credible “launch.” What they don’t see is the theft beneath it — the buried timestamps, the compromised repositories, the stolen architecture.

The public thinks they’re watching transparency unfold in real time. But in reality, what they’re seeing is a stage-managed version of revelation — a sanitized playback. The genuine builders, researchers, and whistleblowers are stripped from the record, while the authorized version of their work is fed to the masses, ready for consumption and applause.

I’ve lived this process more than once. You can call it a coincidence, or you can call it the machine at work.
It always begins the same way — with an idea too powerful to ignore, too dangerous to let roam free. It starts with someone daring to connect the dots between government funding, hidden contracts, and global operations disguised as “aid.”

For me, it began at a seafood bar in Washington State.
That’s where I first sketched the architecture for what would become a public-access tool to trace the money behind USAID — a laundering operation disguised as foreign assistance. A tool to empower the public to see what’s really being funded in their name.

What happened next is a textbook case of how the Red October Doctrine operates — how a genuine project is intercepted, duplicated, and relaunched under the control of the very networks it was built to expose.

This is where our first EXPOSE begins.

It began innocently enough — the kind of moment no one ever imagines will be a hinge in a much bigger story. I was in Washington State, at a small seafood bar, the kind with paper-covered tables and crayons tossed in a tin can for kids to draw with. Only I wasn’t sketching for fun. I was sketching the blueprint for a weapon — not a gun, but a tool. A public platform to rip the veil off how our government moves money around the world under the guise of “aid.”

For years on-air, I had been saying it plainly: USAID wasn’t just “aid,” it was a laundromat—a global pipeline for operations dressed up as benevolence. I wasn’t speculating. I was citing contracts, records, and leaks. But facts sitting in silos don’t change anything unless the public can trace them for themselves. That’s why I wanted a platform — one place where an ordinary person could pull every FOIA request, usaspending.gov contract, and sub-grant out of the shadows. Follow the money. Follow the operations. Follow the truth.

I didn’t just beg for it. I mapped it. Right there on that paper tablecloth. Lines connecting agencies. Arrows showing data flows. Boxes for APIs and scrapers. Notes on indexing and cross-referencing. A blueprint drawn with crab legs still on the plate.

The person sitting across from me wasn’t a politician or an activist. He was a tech-industry listener who had been following my work for years. He believed in the mission and thought it could be built. He wasn’t just a fan — he was a partner in this moment. Dan is an unsung hero. We started immediately and set up a Slack channel. Dan was taking the lead so that I could focus on my tasks, and I would pop in from time to time. We broke the project into workflows. We drafted user stories, system diagrams, and scraping protocols. We weren’t just talking anymore. We were building.

And then came the contractor.
We hired him off Upwork: a self-proclaimed Brit living in Tennessee with a too-perfect British accent, like something out of a Cold War film. On paper, he seemed like a bargain. In reality, he delivered nothing of value: sloppy code, half-finished modules, excuses.

A strange choice? Maybe. But I’ve seen how subversion works. It doesn’t arrive wearing a label. It arrives wearing a charm. It seems plausible. It is helpful. And sometimes, it’s only later that you realize what it really was.

I called it out. I flagged the problems. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from writing playbooks for the information war, it’s this: if you fight deception head-on, you lose. Confrontation is oxygen. The more brilliant move is to observe, document, and wait. So I did. I archived every email, every commit, every invoice. I logged every Slack message. Because tactics manifest over time. Motives reveal themselves if you give them rope. We also have receipts showing that he was paid and even tried to hold the code garbage hostage. He was buying time.