Intentional Consequences

by Charles Harris

  Ward said, “You have a lot going on. When you use the term ‘virtual assassination’ I assume you mean using social and traditional media to injure somebody’s reputation?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you using photos in any of your posts or planted stories?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “We deal with that stuff every day. Altered images are part of the fake news problem. They can be very effective. Most of altered photos are easy to detect once you look closely, but most people don’t look closely. Do you remember the image editing software we got as part of the CnEyeco deal?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “We’ve been testing it, in part to see if we can find a way to use it in reverse, to detect fake photos instead of creating them. So far, no luck on the detection side. But the software is amazing for creating fakes. If your Special Ops people need help with creative photos for their posts, we can deliver edited images hard for anyone to identify as fake.”

  “What about your people? Can you trust them?”

  “Yes. We’ll set it up as part of our internal program to test the software. If you can get someone to tell me what you need, we can even source some of the raw images. Let’s talk about it tomorrow night when I get back.”

  Chapter 41

  Thursday morning, Andy and Valerie Williams were sitting in her office at UT-A, trading theories and supporting materials about potential Chinese involvement in the 2020 elections. They spent several hours working through the details. Andy diagrammed all the companies, people and events they came up with and compared them against his matrix of Bernbach’s business and political activities. They pasted electronic questions and comments into the diagram, providing threads for additional follow up.

  Andy said, “I keep thinking PaprW8 is playing some intermediary role between Bernbach and the Chinese. It’s one of Bernbach’s portfolio companies and with the right additions to its technology it could be a much more powerful player in political marketing. Bernbach has close connections with Jason Chen, who has investments in a lot of Chinese tech companies. We know the Chinese are using personal data to control their people. They have the world’s best facial recognition tools and the strongest controls on social media. If I were Bernbach, I’d be packing all that into PaprW8 so I’d have a domestic vehicle to deploy everything.”

  “Have you talked to Eva about Chinese technology being deployed in U.S. elections?” Valerie asked.

  “No, why?”

  “I don’t want to betray any confidences, but I think she’d be interested. By the way, Eva and I are good friends. Does she know you suspect David Bernbach? Have you told her his name?

  “Not yet. I’m not sure she needs to know who I’m investigating, especially if there’s a chance Bernbach could be a client of JPAC.”

  After lunch on campus, Valerie filled Andy in on the attacks claiming her wealth biased her work. As she showed Andy some of the abusive tweets and comments, she said, “This is worse than it’s been. The comments are moving beyond the wealth issue to allegations about racism and making women and people of color uncomfortable in my classroom, which is nonsense.”

  Andy navigated through her Twitter feed and the comments posted to her blog and articles on other sites. “It’s definitely ugly and the pace has picked up. Have you looked at the photos on some of these posts?”

  “Not recently. I saw the earlier ones with the protests at Columbia, the signs and paint on my car here and the group outside our house.”

  “I saw those. What about these more recent ones with photos of you in your classroom and at political rallies?”

  She looked at the photos Andy pulled up. One showed her being confronted by students in class. Another showed her at a Trump campaign rally. Yet another placed her at a white supremacist meeting. “I don’t know what those are, but they’re not real.”

  Andy enlarged the photos on the laptop screen. “The quality of these is pretty bad. They could be fakes.”

  “I don’t want to sound like Trump, but they have to be fakes. Who would take the trouble to do that?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  ◆◆◆

  Valerie stepped out of the office to take a call on her cellphone. It was Sally Jones, the professor who had introduced her at the keynote speech she had delivered at the Columbia political science conference. Sally was president of the association that had co-sponsored the annual conference. Valerie said, “Hi, Sally. Good to hear from you. How are you doing?”

  Jones said, “I guess that’s my question to you. How are you doing with all this criticism?”

  Valerie said, “I’m OK, although I’ve had a hard time dealing with it all. As objective as I try to be, I keep trying to decide whether there’s anything to the idea wealth biases my views on political science matters. The other allegations about my being biased against immigrants or people of color are absolute nonsense.”

  “It has to be hard on you. We discussed your situation at the Association board meeting yesterday. The Board requested I ask you to resign as chair of your committee on Democracy in America.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. They just thought it would help you lower your profile for a while.”

  “Help me, or help the Association?”

  “Well, both, I guess.”

  “I see. Alright, I’ll email you my resignation today. Do you have any other good news?”

  “Not exactly good. There is one other thing. The Board members have received several letters about some of your articles on the Association website and the blog. I wanted to let you know the Board is looking at how to respond.”

  “What are they considering?”

  “Everything from taking no action to removing some or all of the articles and posts. In between, they are looking at adding a disclaimer at the top of each piece.”

  “What in the world would the disclaimer say? ‘Caution: This person is rich?’ We all bring our life experiences to our work. Where do we draw the line about what we declare or disclaim—and who decides?”

  “It’s actually a penetrating question. One of the things that resonated with some of the Board members was your use of your maiden name in your professional work.”

  “You know why I did that 25 years ago. I just wanted to be able to carve my own way. I can’t believe it’s being turned around on me, especially in the current social environment. I feel like I’m being mistreated because I’m a woman who tried to maintain a professional identity separate from my husband.”

  “One idea the Board is looking at is adding a brief bio that would at least deal with the maiden name issue. When you think about it, a bio on all our authors might be a good place to provide context as well as disclosures of potential bias.”

  “That’s not a bad idea conceptually, but how would it work? Do we list everybody’s marital status or list it only if the partner is wealthy or otherwise presents some kind of partiality burden? How much wealth is too much? Do we list everybody’s net worth or only if it exceeds some threshold?”

  “I hear you. For what it’s worth, I voted against the action on your committee chair position. I also voted not to remove any of your articles or blogposts. I honestly don’t know what my reaction is on the idea of adding disclosure, but I don’t think you should be the only one singled out.”

  “Thanks for the support. Maybe I’m the only political science professor married to a billionaire. I am feeling kind of lonely.”

  She went back into her office and told Andy about the call. “It never ends,” she said.

  Andy said, “I got ahold of Eva and sent her a few of those photos. She’s going to run them through her company’s software. In the meantime, I’d like to trace some of these threads back to see when and where they appeared.”

  Later that afternoon, Eva called Andy with the news. He put her on speakerphone. “They’re all fakes,” Eva said. “I’ll email screenshots of the inconsistencies VA
DS detected.” She didn’t volunteer what else she knew: Whoever altered the photos didn’t use the VADS decoy.

  Chapter 42

  Friday afternoon, Rakesh was making his first online presentation of his reunite America ideas to some senior corporate executives scattered around the country. Speaking from his office in Austin, Rakesh welcomed the 10 participants and logged into www.repaintamerica.com. “This is a pilot website we’ve set up. As it’s still a work in progress, it’s protected with a generic passcode. If you want to go back to it or share it with your colleagues, the passcode is ‘preservedemocracy’, all lower case.”

  Based on design principles Apple had made popular, the site was clean and simple to navigate, highlighted with vivid photographs of America and the diversity of its people and places. He walked the group through the site, noting several videos he would come back to later.

  As he clicked into the Resources tab, he talked about the site’s educational material. “We’re using a historical perspective to show how America has used its democracy to improve our country over time—working toward a ‘more perfect union’.”

  The site used a simple call to action: Sign up and join hands to reunite America.

  Rakesh said, “When you peel away all the politics, all the partisan bitterness, what holds us together is our belief America is a special place—not a perfect place, but a unique place—that’s worth preserving and improving. The goal of this project is to rekindle that pride and that shared commitment to make America even better.

  “As a naturalized citizen, I believe assimilation has been essential to America’s success. Assimilation doesn’t mean giving up who you are or where you came from. It means celebrating your role in your new land. Despite our challenges over the years, we’ve been able to persuade our diverse population to be Americans first, and to be proud of the contributions all of us have made to our past and future. We want to tell that story.”

  Navigating to the videos, Rakesh said, “I’d like to play these three videos to give you an idea of the messaging we could use, not only here on the website, but, with editing for content and length, also in social media and television advertising. These are examples, still at pilot stage. All are intended to be non-partisan. For the lawyers present, we don’t have all the music and visual rights locked down yet, but we’re closing in on it.

  “I look forward to your reaction.”

  The first video used a theme of diversity and equality, America as a melting pot of people and ideas. The music was Neil Diamond’s America, with its driving refrain “They’re coming to America…Today!” The video was a collage of people, some immigrants across the past 100 years, some born here, going to school, working the fields and factories, building roads and planes, fighting wars, shooting into space, living together, voting, protesting, serving in office, becoming part of the American fabric. The tagline was “We are all Americans. We made this country together. We’re not done yet. Join us. We still have things to do.”

  The next video focused on America’s freedoms. The background music was America the Beautiful, with each verse sung by a different ethnological group in a different style—soul, country and a Latin version with the words in Spanish. The video collage included inspirational shots of the Capitol, the White House, Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery and school students reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The collage morphed into a sequence of photos overlaid with key freedoms in the Bill of Rights: Freedom of Speech with books in the Library of Congress, a public speaker and an internet screen, Freedom of Assembly with protesters at the national mall and a college campus, Freedom of Religion with houses of worship and worshipers of five faiths, Due Process of Law with court rooms, Equal Rights with Americans of all colors, sexes and ages working and going to school and voting. The tag line was “As Americans, we have rights most people in the world can only dream about. Those rights are worth protecting. Join us.”

  The third video was based on community. The background music started out as an instrumental of This Land is Your Land. The video collage showed shots of every part of America, rural and urban, glamorous and less so, with a wide cross-section of people going about their daily lives. Toward the end, the photo collage was replaced by a video of young people singing the words, each one adding a voice to the song in his or her native or ethnic language, then all singing a verse together in English. The tag line was “We are America. Whatever our differences and challenges, we’ve built this country together. Join us. We’re not done yet.”

  Rakesh said, “Those are our first three pilots. We are working on several others with similar topics. We’re also looking at ways to evolve the tag line text as the program moves forward. Comments?”

  Almost everyone spoke at once. Most of the initial comments were complimentary. A few were technical questions. As the conversation went on, the enthusiasm moved on to more practical concerns.

  The EVP of a large bank holding company said. “Very impressive work. How much have you spent on this so far?”

  Rakesh said, “About 1.5 million, including the marketing teams and the lawyers. I’ve set up a non-profit, but I’ve contributed all the funds so far.”

  The CEO of a big consumer products company said, “You have a solid start with the website. It looks good. The videos are a little edgy, but aspirational. You need some edginess to attract attention. Are you considering different versions for different target audiences?”

  Rakesh said, “Yes. The videos I played are intended for broad audiences. We’ve talked about a number of derivatives that would be more narrowly focused for social media targeting.”

  The COO of a tech company said, “Your tag lines and the call for action all focus on ‘Join Us’. How do you see that?”

  Rakesh said, “We want people to feel they’re part of a movement. We want to collect their email addresses so we can reach out to them and hopefully mobilize them. If things go well, we can do a lot with those names. Build an app. Target them for follow up on social media. Maybe even give them some membership benefits if our sponsors want to offer some things. We won’t sell or commercialize the personal information without consent.”

  The Chairman of a health care company said, “I like the concept and agree it’s needed. I can also see it causing some controversy, especially from politicians who think the message is aimed against them or for their opponents. We can’t risk being accused of taking sides.”

  “Rakesh said. “With all the Democrats likely in the presidential race, we’re not going to please all of them, not to mention President Trump. We need to strike a balance that appeals to a broad cross-section of Americans and accept the reality that we’re going to be criticized by the extremes on both sides.”

  A senior vice president of Alice Harper’s packaged foods company said, “That sounds good, but we’ve already had calls from four of the presidential candidate campaign teams expressing concern about supporting a program like this. Given the progressive agendas for change in 2020, they’re claiming any corporate support for a unification message would effectively be an endorsement of Joe Biden and his policies.”

  “Who’s been telling you that?” Rakesh asked.

  “I don’t feel comfortable revealing the candidates,” the SVP said. “I will say we haven’t heard from Biden.”

  “That’s the kind of reaction I’m concerned about,” the health care Chairman asked. “It’s not the support for America that will kill us, it’s the implementation.”

  “Were the concerns general or did they specifically mention what I’m proposing to do?” Rakesh asked.

  “All of them started out as hypotheticals, but your name came up in three of the four conversations,” the SVP said.

  Rakesh said, “That’s quite a coincidence. Have any of the rest of you received any calls like this?” One of the other CEOs said that his office had received calls from two campaigns.

  “What would you want from us?” the tech company COO asked.

&
nbsp; Rakesh said, “I’m looking for three things. First, we need you to sign on as sponsors to add credibility to the message. Second, we need your advice and input on making this project successful. Third, we need your help with financial support.

  “If we determine this thing has legs, I’m prepared to put tens of millions of personal dollars behind it. That kind of investment alone should be enough to create impact, but we could do much more together. I’m hoping your companies would be willing to add some sponsorship dollars at levels you’re comfortable with and help us attract some funds from wealthy individuals and foundations.”

  The EVP of an entertainment company said, “Have you thought about how we would justify these expenditures?”

  Rakesh said, “This needs to be more than just a public service announcement. It needs to be part of your sponsorship budget. Leading American companies collectively spend hundreds of millions of dollars on sports and entertainment sponsorships. For that money, they get exposure, shared affinity and a variety of other benefits, some more ephemeral than others. We need them, and each of you, to sponsor America.”

  The consumer products CEO said, “We do a lot of sponsorships. I’m not sure our marketing people would see the benefits in this that they see in sponsoring the NFL, Major League Baseball or even tennis.”

  The SVP of a global beverage company said, “No suite seats or passes. Different kind of affinity, but it’s hard to argue sponsoring America would be a bad investment. We tie ourselves to America in some of our Super Bowl ads. There may be some risk in sponsoring America instead of some football team, but there’s also risk in standing on the sidelines, especially if this thing takes off.”

  The SVP of another health care company said, “True, enough. But we don’t need a negative return on that sponsorship investment. Going back to our earlier discussion, my question is whether we can avoid getting hammered by every activist group who wants to criticize some photo or phrase we use. The extremes on both sides are unforgiving these days.”