FOIAengine: Homeland Security Report, Media Requests Highlight the Issue
When a deepfake photo of an explosion near the Pentagon caused investor panic in 2023, the hysteria caught authorities off guard and stymied investigators. The photo spread like a contagion through millions of Twitter accounts, and was amplified by the Russian state-controlled news network RT as well as the financial news site ZeroHedge. The stock market swooned. The Securities and Exchange Commission investigated but took no action, its efforts quickly hitting a dead end. The perpetrator left no clues.
It was the first instance of an AI-generated image moving the market – but not likely to be the last, according to a warning issued last month by the Department of Homeland Security’s science and technology staff. The DHS alert, in a 99-page report titled “Impacts of Adversarial Use of Generative AI on Homeland Security,” came out in the waning days of the Biden Administration and used the Pentagon deepfake as a case study. It received scant media attention at a time when generative artificial intelligence is being heralded as a boon to productivity, rather than a threat from foreign adversaries.
The DHS authors, led by then-Under Secretary Dimitri Kusnezov, issued a blunt call to action about the government’s lack of preparedness for repulsing deepfake attacks: “U.S. Government officials across relevant agencies and departments need to define respective roles in the event of a real-time, foreign adversary launched GenAI attack.” You can read between the lines in that carefully worded bureaucratese: there is no plan, and there ought to be one.
That DHS warning happened to coincide with the Pentagon’s release last month of fiscal 2024 Freedom of Information Act logs from the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff. The DOD logs stand out for their comprehensiveness and usefulness. Two weeks ago, the logs enabled us to reveal the extent to which the conservative initiative Project 2025 used massive numbers of FOIA requests to identify Pentagon personnel for potential removal in a new Trump administration. (Click here to read our January 22 story, “How Project 2025 Targets Pentagon Leadership,” and here to search our database of all federal officials targeted by Project 2025.)
This week we’re returning to those Pentagon FOIA logs to highlight a few of the hundreds of requests made to the Pentagon last year by media outlets. The Pentagon logs are noteworthy for the scope and variety of those media requests – journalists writing the first draft of history – as well as the multiplicity of news organizations seeking documents. Media outlets making requests included legacy brands like the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Bloomberg, NBC, CBS, CBC, and CNN, as well as digital-first and specialized outlets such as Al Jazeera, Punchbowl News, Pacifica Radio, Capitol Forum, NewsNation, MuckRock News, Vox News, Federal News Network, War Horse, and Type Media Center. A lot to cover. Log in to see everything, or contact us for access.
Readers of this space know that we view FOIA requests in PoliScio Analytics’ competitive-intelligence database FOIAengine as possible signals of future developments. FOIA requests from the media can reveal ongoing investigations, or negative coverage to come. Among the 3,832 requests received by the defense secretary’s office last year were 373 from the news media, including one from Bloomberg that spotlighted the deepfake-preparedness issue recently highlighted by DHS. We’ll start there.
Bloomberg has been front and center on the market-moving Pentagon deepfake from the outset; its reporter Davey Alba originally broke the story. But Jason Leopold, a Bloomberg investigative reporter whose specialty is FOIA reporting, has run with it since. FOIAengine shows his request to the Securities and Exchange Commission on the same day as the Pentagon deepfake scare, May 22, 2023, for “all records, such as talking points, memos, letters, reports, emails, text messages referencing the May 22, 2023 Tweet that claimed an explosion near the Pentagon.”
According to Leopold’s story posted last Friday, it took a while for the SEC to get back to him. “The SEC put me through the wringer,” Leopold wrote. “The agency responded to my request saying they only had one page. Yeah, right. I filed an appeal and said the search was inadequate. I won that part of the fight, and the agency searched again. On New Year’s Eve, the SEC sent me 20 more pages.” Leopold’s story linked out to the SEC documents, which revealed how the SEC jumped on the market-moving deepfake. The documents were heavily redacted. “But it was totally worth the fight. Viva transparency!”
More than a year after the deepfake scare, Leopold was still dogging the story, this time with a request directly to the Pentagon. Last August 1, Leopold asked for “disclosure from the Department of Defense Force Protection Agency [of] the following records: (1.) Final reports of investigation referencing the Deepfake tweet posted to X, formerly Twitter, on May 22, 2023 that contained an AI generated photograph depicting an explosion at the Pentagon. (2.) Emails, memos, letters, referencing the Deepfake AI generated photograph posted to X, formerly Twitter, depicting an explosion at the Pentagon. The timeframe for the search for part 2 of this request is a single day: May 22, 2023.”
Among the media requests to the Pentagon were some others from Leopold, including one related to a shadowy Taliban operative named Abdul. That request, dated September 16, was for “all records, including emails, photographs, intelligence assessments and intelligence bulletin and briefing documents, referencing President Donald Trump sending a photograph to ‘Abdul,’ (who is widely believed to be Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of the Taliban’s negotiators with the United States) of Abdul’s house. This alleged exchange took place while Trump was president.” The backstory on this one: Trump has boasted on numerous occasions that, during Trump’s first term, he sent the Taliban leader a satellite image of the Taliban leader’s home as a veiled warning of America’s long reach to eliminate terrorists. Leopold made his FOIA request six days after Trump repeated the claim during the 2024 presidential debate.
Still another FOIA request from Leopold, on August 5, sought “emails, memos, [and] letters sent to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin by the families of victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks that reference the plea deal to remove the death penalty [that] was agreed to and announced by the military with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants accused of plotting the 2001 terror attacks, [and] emails, directives, memos, reports, letters, intelligence briefs, referencing the decision by Austin to rescind the plea deal and to . . . reserve such authority to himself.” Background: Austin rescinded the plea deal three days prior to Leopold’s request, and it’s not clear whether Mohammed’s guilty plea stands. Further proceedings in the case are scheduled for Guantanamo Bay beginning on April 23.
Among other recent media FOIA requests to the Pentagon: New York Times investigative reporter Mark Walker on July 24 sought “all email correspondence to or from U.S. Brigadier General William H. Seely III from January 2, 2020 through the date of the search regarding a now-leaked unsigned letter appearing to inform Iraqi officials that the US would be pulling out of the country, or the drafting of that letter.”
Walker’s request concerns events that unfolded during the first Trump Administration after the U.S. drone attack that killed Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani at the Baghdad airport. Seeley was the Marine Corps officer commanding the U.S. coalition against ISIS. After the Iraqi parliament responded with a resolution demanding that American forces leave Iraq, Seeley drafted a straw-man letter, quickly repudiated by Pentagon brass, to the effect that U.S. troops would depart. Walker is seeking more details.
On September 5, Walker also asked the Pentagon for “salary data for all federal employees broken by year, for the last 10 years. Please include the following fields: Name, Agency/Sub-Agency, Accession/Separation Indicator, Effective Start Date, Date of Termination (if applicable), Pay Plan, Pay Grade, Level of Service, Occupational category, Classification, Duty station (Location), Positional occupied (Title), Salary (Basic or base pay), Bonuses (Or any additional pay beyond base), Total compensation, Type of Appointment (Political or no), [and] Government email address.”
As to those and other requests, the Pentagon logs don’t indicate whether any records were, or will be, provided.
FOIAengine access now is available for all professional members of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of journalism. IRE is the world’s oldest and largest association of investigative journalists. Following the federal government’s shutdown of FOIAonline.gov last year, FOIAengine is the only source for the most comprehensive, fully searchable archive of FOIA requests across dozens of federal departments and agencies. FOIAengine has more robust functionality and searching capabilities, and standardizes data from different agencies to make it easier to work with. PoliScio Analytics is proud to be partnering with IRE to provide this valuable content to investigative reporters worldwide.
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Next: Hedge fund requests to the FDA, SEC, and FTC.
John A. Jenkins, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington journalist and publisher whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. He is a four-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit for his legal reporting and analysis. His most recent book is The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist. Jenkins founded Law Street Media in 2013. Prior to that, he was President of CQ Press, the textbook and reference publishing enterprise of Congressional Quarterly. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a new venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Jenkins and Washington lawyer Randy Miller. Learn more about FOIAengine here. To review FOIA requests mentioned in this article, subscribe to FOIAengine.
Write to John A. Jenkins at JAJ@PoliScio.com.
