Plaintiffs in ongoing civil rights lawsuits are seeking redress for Operation Snake Doctor, a sweeping Chicago Police and federal investigation that ended in overturned homicide convictions, and allegations of torture, coerced confessions and fabricated evidence. But court filings show that the Assistant U.S. Attorney (AUSA) who coordinated the investigation went on to control the government’s response to requests for production of Snake Doctor wiretap materials and argued against their disclosure – meaning a key architect of the since-discredited operation was placed in charge of policing her own work and opposed production of materials that could raise scrutiny of her role.

Former AUSA Erika Csicsila played a leading role in Operation Snake Doctor from early 2012 to 2013 and worked extensively on wiretap efforts, but later argued against production of Snake Doctor wiretap-related materials in two civil rights cases stemming from the investigation. Csicsila successfully argued against disclosure in the first case in 2022. In a July 2025 filing for the second case, she took the same anti-disclosure stance, using the ruling from the first as legal precedent in her arguments, even though the wiretap materials at issue were already possessed by the plaintiff due to prior improper production by the Chicago Police Department (CPD) in his earlier criminal trial. The judge rejected Csicsila’s position, finding the government had “forfeited” its objections through “meaningful inaction” – failing to object when the protective order in the criminal case was modified to allow the materials into civil litigation. A protective order in this context is a court order restricting access to documents produced in the case and how they can be used.

Csicsila, who by this point was chief of the entire criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, withdrew from the case days later, and left the Department of Justice (DOJ) entirely that same month. Strikingly, Csicsila’s replacement took the opposite position on Title III disclosure and acquiesced to production of a new set of wiretap materials not previously produced to the plaintiff.

Taken together, it appears that a leading architect of Operation Snake Doctor and its wiretap surveillance component sought to block production of materials related to the investigation’s wiretaps in two subsequent civil rights lawsuits, even when in the second the plaintiff already possessed the materials from his prior criminal case. The fact that Csicsila’s replacement took the opposite position consenting to production under a protective order, even for additional materials the plaintiff had never seen, coupled with Csicsila’s abrupt withdrawal from the case and then the DOJ, make her anti-disclosure position all the more significant.

Multiple legal experts told Noir News that Csicsila’s dual-role was problematic given her extensive involvement in the criminal investigation.

“I would say it’s not best practices for a prosecutor who’s been immersed in an adversarial role in a criminal proceeding to then show up in a subsequent civil rights lawsuit,” said Abbe Smith, Director of the Criminal Defense and Prisoner Advocacy Clinic and Professor of Law at Georgetown University. “I think most careful, conscientious prosecutorial agencies, state or federal, would say this is a person – she has a dog in this fight. She has an interest. So she wouldn’t be the best person.”

Michael Cassidy, an expert on prosecutorial ethics at Boston College Law School, said Cscisila’s conduct could constitute a violation of Rule 1.7 of the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct (“Conflict of Interest: Current Clients”).

“A lawyer is not supposed to represent a client if there is a significant risk that the representation will be limited, materially limited by – and then there’s a list of things, and one of them is the personal interests of the lawyers,” Cassidy said. “So, the question is whether she could be hiding any of her misconduct in the wiretap by trying to withhold the wiretap materials. If she could be, then you could possibly have a 1.7 problem, and somebody else from the government should be representing the U.S. Attorney’s Office there rather than her.”

“It seems to be like she’s just trying to cover up for the mistakes that she’s done and protect the people that, you know what I mean, that she was helping do these bad things to begin with, honestly,” said Jill Cremeans, a San Diego criminal defense attorney who has confronted obstacles to disclosure from the federal government in an ongoing case against the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Operation Snake Doctor

Operation Snake Doctor was a joint local-federal homicide and narcotics investigation targeting the Spanish Cobras, a Chicago gang, following the December 2011 shooting of CPD officer Clifton Lewis. Lewis had been working an off-duty security shift at M & M Quick Foods, a convenience store in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, when two masked men entered the store, one of whom shot Lewis. Shortly after the killing, law enforcement figured members of the Spanish Cobras were responsible, and eventually concluded Alexander “Flip” Villa pulled the trigger, Tyrone Clay entered the store with him, and Edgardo Colon was the getaway driver.

Throughout Operation Snake Doctor, CPD, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the DEA used narcotics arrests and wiretaps to garner homicide evidence and secure federal narcotics convictions for Spanish Cobras not involved in the killing.

Csicsila was a leading architect of Operation Snake Doctor, exchanging hundreds of emails with CPD officers and federal agents, including some of the CPD officers named as defendants in the civil lawsuits, per emails and email metadata obtained by Noir. She also served as one of two federal prosecutors on narcotics cases against other Spanish Cobras. An attorney for the City of Chicago described Csicsila as “the lead on the Snake Doctor investigation,” in a hearing in one of the lawsuits.

A large share of Csicsila’s email correspondence obtained by Noir pertained to Title III wiretap efforts in the investigation (court-authorized electronic surveillance under Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968). From April 2012 through October 2013, Csicsila sent and received at least 146 and 296 emails, respectively, relating to wiretaps and other surveillance efforts. These communications spanned the full spectrum of wiretap and electronic surveillance operations, from initial pen register coordination in April 2012 (pen registers capture metadata on phone communications) through Title III wiretap applications beginning in late April and extensive active monitoring that continued through late 2012, with follow-up activity extending into 2013. The wiretap surveillance appeared to track at least 12 different target phones (designated TP1 through TP12), with Csicsila coordinating Title III applications, daily “line sheets” documenting intercepted communications, 10-day progress reports, and analyses of specific “toll hits” and voice identification.

Csicsila’s involvement peaked in the fall of 2012: from August through October, she sent or received over 250 wiretap and surveillance-related emails, with 116 in August alone. The email traffic reveals Csicsila functioned as the central coordinator between federal wiretap authorization and local police investigative execution, coordinating closely with multiple CPD Gang Investigations officers, including Sergeant Matthew Cline, Officer Edmund Zablocki, and Officer John Dolan – and fellow Assistant U.S. Attorneys Sarah Streicker and Matthew Madden, along with federal agents such as DEA Special Agent Robert Lukens.

The cops and feds’ efforts paid off in the short term. Cook County prosecutors secured state level murder convictions for Villa and Colon, and Clay remained in jail for over a decade. Meanwhile, Csicsila prosecuted at least seventeen federal narcotics and weapons charges on Snake Doctor affiliates. Csicsila was also involved in the state criminal cases, exchanging emails with state prosecutors in 2012 and 2013 about proffer sessions and the status of the state prosecution, per court filings. A proffer session is a meeting where a witness or defendant provides information to prosecutors, usually in exchange for potential leniency or immunity. In at least one instance, Csicsila directly coordinated, and potentially participated in, a proffer session in June 2013, alongside state prosecutors.

Then Jennifer Blagg, a post-trial attorney for Villa, started digging.

Blagg discovered a potentially exonerating cell tower analysis, conducted by the FBI in 2012 and provided to state prosecutors, hadn’t been turned over to Villa’s original defense team, per the National Registry of Exonerations. The analysis seemed to show Villa, Colon, and Clay were not at the scene of the crime, nor were they together that day. She also discovered the prosecution failed to turn over a potentially exonerating cell phone extraction report and information regarding alternative suspects. The sweeping nature of Operation Snake Doctor – which saw CPD and federal authorities interrogate over 100 people in relation to the homicide – also wasn’t disclosed.

Under precedent established by Brady v. Maryland, the state is required to produce any exculpatory or material evidence to the defense even if not explicitly requested. The Brady violations Blagg discovered were central to Villa and Colon’s convictions being overturned and their release from detention in 2024 and 2023, respectively, and Clay being freed from jail in 2023.

Csicsila was aware of the sweeping nature of Operation Snake Doctor, as she helped coordinate it. She may have also been aware of the cell tower maps, extraction report, and alternative suspect evidence, but determining this has been difficult. CPD has severely redacted correspondence between Csicsila and CPD officers released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And although she wasn’t officially a prosecutor on the homicide cases, her emails with state prosecutors suggest she was kept in the loop to at least some extent.

In addition to the undisclosed evidence, Blagg also discovered evidence CPD officers routinely told other Spanish Cobras during their interrogations that Villa was to blame for their arrests, to either entice them to implicate Villa in exchange for leniency, or provoke retaliation against him. This practice was so routine, it was internally dubbed the “Flip speech.”

Officers appeared to believe the strategy worked after Villa was stabbed by another Cobra. They seemed to celebrate the outcome.

“I believe Operation ‘Snake Doctor’ and 6580 has to take the credit for this,” CPD Officer Scott Dedore wrote in an email. “Cline and company tell each Cobra that every time a Cobra goes to jail its Flip’s fault. Unless I got the facts wrong (I often do), Flip was targeted by other Cobras. His associate was left unscathed. It sounds like [the] Cobras are getting the word.”

Csicsila exchanged emails with CPD officers about Villa in the days leading up to his stabbing, and continued to do so after the incident, according to emails obtained by Noir and court filings from Villa’s state criminal case. It’s unclear whether she was aware of the nature of CPD’s interrogations of other Cobras.

The Angel Perez lawsuit

Operation Snake Doctor targeted many individuals affiliated with the Spanish Cobras gang, both for collecting intel on the Lewis homicide, and for securing federal narcotics convictions. One such target was Dwayne Payne, whose phone was being monitored by CPD and the feds via a Title III wiretap. In October 2012, law enforcement noticed Payne was in contact with a man named Angel Perez.

According to the lawsuit Perez eventually filed in June 2013 against CPD officers and the City of Chicago, CPD officers pressured him to cooperate in the investigation of Payne – specifically, to set up a controlled drug purchase. After refusing to cooperate, Perez alleges officers took him to a second-floor room at the secretive and controversial Homan Square Chicago Police facility, where they handcuffed him to a bar and placed him in ankle shackles for several hours. He alleges that officers threatened to plant evidence on him and send him “to the Cook County jail to be raped by gang members.” Perez further alleges that the officers continued to physically and verbally assault him for hours, and that one of them sodomized him with “a cold metal object, believed to be one of [the] officer’s service revolvers.” After the alleged torture, Perez relented and agreed to buy heroin from Payne for the officers. Perez’s calls to Payne, unbeknownst to Perez, were also being monitored through a Title III wiretap.

Emails released under FOIA show Csicsila was aware of and helped coordinate the wiretaps and was familiar with Perez’s role in the investigation.

In the fall of 2020, the defense in the Perez case sought to reopen discovery with the aim of obtaining the Title III wiretap recordings of Perez’s calls with Payne, which they hoped would show he cooperated in the Payne investigation willingly. Per their filing, Csicsila had originally indicated to them in conversations that they could obtain the recordings “because the criminal case against Payne had concluded.”

But when the defense filed subpoenas to obtain the recordings from the DOJ, and then a motion to compel when it wasn’t provided, she reversed course. Though not a party to the civil case, the DOJ held custody of the wiretap recordings and was required to respond to the defendants’ motion. Csicsila, representing the government, argued Title III, as the Seventh Circuit Court has understood it, prohibits wiretap materials from being produced in pre-trial discovery in civil proceedings.

While the Seventh Circuit Court has been historically conservative on this matter, it doesn’t render Csicsila’s involvement in Operation Snake Doctor moot. The facts of the case, including Perez’s possession of what the defense described as essentially verbatim transcripts of the recordings, could have given another U.S. Attorney cause to interpret the application of precedent differently.

The judge largely agreed with Csicsila in the Perez case, and allowed the DOJ to withhold the recordings. Csicsila would go on to use this ruling as precedent in Villa’s civil rights case.

The Alexander Villa lawsuit

Villa filed a civil complaint against several CPD officers, state prosecutors, and other parties in February 2025, in which he alleged he was deprived of due process, maliciously prosecuted, and unlawfully detained and framed, among other counts.

In June 2025, an attorney for Villa filed a motion for permission to produce into discovery emails and email attachments containing information obtained from wiretaps, and thus covered under Title III. Importantly, Blagg, who was Villa’s post-conviction attorney and is now one of his attorneys in the civil case, had already obtained these materials – without a protective order or confidentiality markings. In response to subpoenas issued by Blagg in 2022, CPD’s tech department had sent over 287,000 internal emails directly to Blagg, without any internal review or confidentiality designations, and with no protective order in place.

In November 2022, a lawyer for the City of Chicago discovered CPD’s improper production to Blagg, as well as the Title III wiretap-related materials contained therein, and contacted Csicsila shortly thereafter, according to court records – meaning Csicsila was aware of the Title III materials sent to Blagg by late 2022.

Kristen Cabanban, Director of Public Affairs for the City of Chicago’s Department of Law, declined to comment, writing in an email to Noir that “ the City does not comment on ongoing litigation.”

Over the following months, federal prosecutors intervened to block further disclosure, with U.S. Attorney John Lausch sending letters invoking grand jury secrecy and state judges quashing defense subpoenas in deference to federal objections. To address the documents improperly produced to Blagg by CPD, the parties agreed to retroactive protective orders in all three criminal cases in April and May 2023.

After Clay and Colon’s cases were dismissed in June 2023 and Villa’s conviction was vacated in October 2024, the state criminal courts modified those protective orders to allow production of discovery material in the state criminal cases in subsequent federal civil litigation, first for Clay and Colon in late 2024, then for Villa in February 2025. Neither Csicsila nor anyone else at the DOJ objected to these modifications at the time, with Csicsila only intervening months later when Villa’s attorneys looped in the federal government to give it a chance to respond regarding their motion to disclose.

Csicsila filed a response arguing that the Seventh Circuit’s strict interpretation of Title III meant these materials couldn’t be produced in civil pre-trial discovery, citing the precedent of the ruling in the Perez case. Csicsila instead argued that any disclosure of Title III materials should occur “at the time of trial,” or “relatively close to” trial.

This time, Csicsila didn’t persuade the judge, who stated in an August 2025 court hearing that the government forfeited its objections by failing to intervene when the state criminal court modified the protective orders to allow discovery documents to be introduced in the civil cases. Csicsila said she did not recall if she was alerted to the protective order modifications at the time.

“If somebody knew about it at the time that the protective order was being modified to allow the production of materials received in the criminal case in civil cases and the government was aware that this Title III material was in there and said nothing about that, that is a meaningful omission,” Judge Matthew F. Kennelly said in the hearing. “If you don’t recall, that’s essentially – I take that as a concession that you were aware of it at the time – that the government was aware of it at the time and did nothing.”

Judge Kennelly also rejected Csicsila’s proposed remedy of producing the Title III wiretap-related materials close to the time of trial rather than during pre-trial discovery.

“It’s not a workable solution,” Judge Kennelly said.“The cat is so far out of the bag, the cat is in the next country at this point.” He then granted Villa’s motion, allowing production of the Title III materials.

Less than a week after this ruling, Csicsila withdrew from the case, and later that month left the DOJ entirely.

When Villa requested additional materials held by the City of Chicago that included Title III documents, the next attorney representing the United States, AUSA Ronald DeWald, did not object to pre-trial production of these materials under a protective order. Importantly, unlike the materials to which Csicsila’s arguments pertained, the federal government’s about-face on Title III disclosure can’t be solely attributed to Judge Kennelly’s ruling rejecting Csicsila’s arguments, as these documents had not already been produced to Villa in his state criminal case.

Erika Csicsila, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, attorneys for Villa, and attorneys for the CPD defendants in Perez’s civil case did not respond to requests for comment.

“[I]f one takes seriously the idea of prosecutors as ministers of justice, it arguably should apply in civil rights contexts too,” said Abbe Smith, Professor of Law at Georgetown University. “Prosecutors shouldn’t play the role of keeping evidence from parties in a civil lawsuit or from the public, especially where the public has a strong interest in understanding what law enforcement was doing.”

Note: Noir News is being represented by Loevy & Loevy in an ongoing FOIA lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department seeking documents related to Operation Snake Doctor. Loevy & Loevy are representing Alexander Villa in his civil rights lawsuit.

In 2015, The Guardian broke the story of Homan Square, a Chicago Police Department (CPD) facility where detainees were reportedly held and interrogated off the books and concealed from attorneys and loved ones.

The British newspaper relied on documents, activists, lawyers and former detainees to substantiate its reporting. But one kind of source The Guardian didn’t get an in-depth perspective from was that of police who worked at the facility.

Noir News is for the first time publishing an extended on-the-record interview with a former CPD officer who worked at Homan Square about operations at the facility. The interview is with Detective Michael Hammond, whose 20-plus years on the force included stints with two units that operated out of Homan Square: the now-defunct Special Operations Section (SOS) and Narcotics. He later became a homicide detective. After retiring, he founded the true crime podcast Detective Story: True Crime Insights with Mike Hammond and Chris Kafcas.

In his interview with Noir News, Hammond provides an in-depth, thoughtful, and first-hand perspective on Homan Square. Hammond challenges The Guardian’s use of the “Black Site” analogy to describe the facility, while simultaneously confirming much of the substance of the original Homan Square reporting. He confirms that police at Homan Square likely intentionally made it difficult for outsiders—including loved ones and attorneys—to find detainees, in ways that were unique to the facility. Namely, Homan Square’s secure nature made it challenging for outsiders to access, and the narcotics and gang units used paper arrest logs inaccessible even to other police officers checking the CPD’s electronic system. Still, he disputes The Guardian’s description of detainees being “disappeared” in the facility.

Hammond confirms the secretive and opaque nature of operations at Homan Square, as originally reported in The Guardian, which facilitated the CPD’s ability to acquire confidential informants in large-scale gang and narcotics investigations. He also confirms that police at Homan Square often worked with federal agents, such as members of DEA and FBI Task Forces, although he contends they were not frequently operating inside the facility. Noir News originally revealed the Department of Justice, and not just the CPD, worked out of Homan Square and was aware of its use as a covert detention center.

Just as worthwhile is Hammond’s explanation of why he believes these practices were necessary. He explains that Chicago was a city mired in gang violence and drug trafficking, and that the covert interrogations performed at Homan Square were crucial tools in combatting these ills. Hammond argues the facility’s secretive nature served to protect cooperating witnesses from retaliation in Chicago’s violent gang environment.

The following interview with Hammond has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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Journalist:

How was it working in Narcotics and SOS in the early days of Homan?

Interviewee:

Working in SOS was a really good experience for me. I was there—got to ’95 or ’96—it was a citywide unit, which was nice because I came out of the academy, worked in the 11th District on the West Side, and for a short time in the 25th District. We were much smaller at that time. We worked out of Harrison and Kedzie. We’d get requested from district commanders as a supplemental kind of force when they were having issues—mostly it was gang violence issues, right? So it’s all over the city, and that was cool. I really loved that environment. Then they moved us over to Homan Square, and they got a federal grant and tripled the size of that unit, and kind of became two different entities. We arrested people in the districts and went to the district lock-up. So I never took any prisoners back to Homan Square.

Then I go right from there to Narcotics. I worked there for a year, and that was a different experience. We were doing longer-term investigations. We would bring arrestees in there, we would bring informants in there sometimes. We did more work out of Homan Square directly. Then I made detective in September of 2000, went to Area Four Homicide and worked there for several years, and then got the opportunity to go to a citywide Cold Case Homicide Unit funded by a federal grant. And I got the opportunity to go there in 2003 or 2004, and because one of my buddies worked there, his partner got promoted, he needed a partner, so I got assigned there. That unit never brought anybody into Homan Square.

Journalist:

Did you see the reporting about Homan Square in 2015 from The Guardian? One of the interesting things about it for me was the absence of Homan officers’ perspective on the “black site” description. What was your take on the reporting and the way Homan operated?

Interviewee:

I did read a couple of those articles, and I thought this is just absolute nonsense. This is all clearly taken from the perspective of gangbangers being interviewed. The Homan story is mainly talking about narcotics and gang intelligence in that whole black site thing. There’s a lot of units in there, but you’re actually talking about a small group of small units that actually bring prisoners in there. So the way that works is: you’re doing your narcotics, right? All the arrestees come to Homan Square first and they’re processed, and then, once they’re processed, they’re taken to a lockup in a district. Here’s how this becomes a problem: gang and drug activity are hand in hand. When you take somebody down in narcotics, the whole game is you’re trying to work up the ladder. You’re grabbing the guy who’s got the dope, see if he will walk you up the ladder—who he got it from, where it comes from.

So do they really disappear? No, they don’t disappear. You’ve got them. You documented they’re there. The rooms up there—you always have an officer sitting outside watching, so as to make sure that they don’t hurt each other, to make sure that everything is legit, because it just has to be, right?

Now, if you’re a guy on the street and you know your people are being taken down, and they go to Homan Square—you can’t get to them. And that’s a big problem. Because you don’t know who’s talking to the police, who’s giving you up, who’s laying out your thing. And that’s really how that gets started.

It sounds like I’m doing the anti-conspiracy thing, but that’s just the truth. They call their attorneys and say, “I cannot get access. How can they just hold them?” You know, “I need to talk to him—I need to talk to him.” And so the attorneys start beefing to judges and saying, “Wait, what?” You know, filing habeas corpus, this and that. And so we’d sometimes go to a judge and say, “You know, subject is—we’re still talking to them. We’ve got 48 hours.”

The idea of Homan Square being the black hole where people disappear—that’s a game that the players and defense attorneys are trying to play to get access to these people faster. How do you make somebody freaking disappear? I mean, we’re not the Outfit in 1970.

Journalist:

Was there a policy of not allowing attorneys to enter the facility?

Interviewee:

We did have attorneys come up there, and certainly if you had an attorney there, we would let them talk to people in the room. But I can’t think of any specific examples of that.

But I recall that when you had a civilian on the floor, you let everyone know: “Hey, there’s a civilian on the floor, civilian on the floor,” or “attorney on the floor.” That way the undercovers stay in their office, right? So they’re not all walking around, and the civilians aren’t seeing people that are potentially undercover officers. If an attorney’s on the floor, and is there to speak to somebody specific, as hard as it might be to believe—not all attorneys are 100% legit. So he comes up and says, “I want to speak to my client. He’s here,” whatever. You want to make sure whatever other arrestees are behind closed doors, because, like anybody else there, they may be checking to see who’s who and who’s up there.

But to answer your question directly, I don’t recall it being a policy, because I’m certain that we did have attorneys come up and speak to clients up there. But I can’t give you a specific example. So I’m giving you kind of a half-assed answer there. I don’t ever remember anybody telling me, “Never bring an attorney up,” or “Attorneys don’t speak to arrestees here.”

Journalist:

Do you remember there being many federal agents in Homan? Did it have more federal agents than, say, a district or something like that?

Interviewee:

So we always—we often worked with federal agents, right? DEA task force, FBI task force would be involved in investigations. I don’t remember feds being at Homan Square all that much. I mean, mostly if it was a federal operation, it would go to—especially if it involved the FBI—it would go to the FBI headquarters, and everything would be done there.

I think the DEA may have occasionally had a guy or two up there as part of an investigation. I mean, there just aren’t that many DEA agents, right? That’s one of the common misunderstandings—that the DEA is a really strong organization and does very good investigations—but they’re not that big. I think there’s only 2,000 agents or something, right? So they work across the country, and they work predominantly with task forces—local officers, local detectives, local narcotics people—which makes sense both logistically and also like, you know your area, right?

Journalist:

Would you say it was more difficult for attorneys and loved ones to find a detainee at Homan than at other facilities? What I’ve heard, at least, is that most of the time, an attorney can either find out where they’re being detained through central booking, or they can call the district station and eventually persuade someone to let them know someone’s been taken there. Would you say it was different at Homan Square? I remember reading that officers at Homan used paper logs instead of an electronic system, so other police might not know that someone was being detained at Homan. And that also made it more difficult to find detainees. Any thoughts on that?

Interviewee:

That’s certainly possible. When we would bring someone up to the area as a homicide suspect or witness or whatever—so people and attorneys know to call the lockup, the 11th District desk, and they have them or they don’t, right?

And now, in the area upstairs—attorneys especially are sharp enough, and even families—they know that if someone’s picked up for something serious, they know enough to call upstairs and see if we have them. And you’ve got to answer that honestly. “Yep, he’s here.” “Can we talk to him?” “No, not until we’re done processing him.” “Can his attorney talk to him?” “If he wants his attorney—yes, he can talk to him.”

It could be a point of contention sometimes. Because you’d have attorneys show up and say, you know, “I’m representing this guy, this guy, and this guy. I want to speak to all three of them.” Okay, counselor, wait here—you go in and say, “Do you have an attorney?” “Yeah.” “What’s his name?” “Yeah, he’s here.” “You want to talk to him?” “Yep.”

But it’s a very fluid, dangerous environment on the West Side of Chicago. I can’t tell you how many times I’d say to someone—even a suspect—like, “Do you have an attorney?” and they’d say, “No.” “Okay, do you know this guy? There’s an attorney here saying he’s representing you.” And they would tell me, “I don’t want to talk to that guy. He is the bad guy’s attorney. He wants to front me off. He wants to know what I’m saying. I don’t want to talk to him.” Right?

Well, then that attorney doesn’t have a right to talk to that guy. You know what I mean? It’s not his guy. He doesn’t want to talk to him. It’s just that simple. Now, of course, attorneys scream and they go to court and say, “Oh, they kept him from me.” But then we just go and tell our side of the story. Like, “They wanted to speak to the guy. He didn’t feel safe.” You know what I mean? I can’t force that on him, right?

But now, on the other hand, if the guy says, “Yeah, that’s my attorney. I want to talk to him,” you gotta let him do it. You’re causing yourself a big problem if you don’t.

Homan Square has a different dynamic in exactly that—not everybody knows who or where to call. And there are multiple agencies over there, and you’re always dealing with the covert nature of narcotics investigations or gang intelligence investigations, where you either know someone’s cooperating, believe they’re going to cooperate, or you have audio—wiretap information—of them talking. You’re at play for them, you know. You want to give them an opportunity to respond to that.

You still read them their Miranda warnings, and they still have the right to all those things. And if they do it, they do it, and that’s that. But often in those investigations, they want to cooperate. Especially in those conspiracies, which they jack everything up significantly—you know, minimums of 10 years, 15 years sometimes—those small players are like, “No, no, you got me. I’ll tell you exactly. What can you do for me?”

Well, then we have to get the State’s Attorney. I can’t do anything for you, but we can talk to the State’s Attorney and see what they’ll do. And then that’s based on a lot of factors: their culpability and their background, all kinds of things. But that becomes the State’s Attorney’s decision at that point as to how they’re going to play that game.

Nobody really walks out the door unless—any time anybody walks out the door—it’s if they agree to be an ongoing cooperative witness. You still run it by the State’s Attorney.

In the meantime, could people be looking for them? Probably. Certainly. Are they harder to find sometimes over there? Yeah. Is that by design? Probably. You know what I mean? Tacitly, at least. Because you want to keep people safe, you want to garner information, you have to protect people’s rights all the time. Don’t care what The Guardian says—we have to be aware of that. Because ultimately, we’re the ones looking at lawsuits and prison and all that stuff if we violate people’s rights. So it is not the Wild West that they would like to paint, you know?

So is somebody at Homan Square harder to find than somebody in the district lockup? Yeah, probably, right? Because it was paper logs back then. Maybe that’s changed. I don’t know. But I don’t know why you would change that. I mean, you have to do the job. You know what I mean?

You always have to walk this line between doing these jobs and conducting these investigations, trying to make communities safer, and respecting the Constitution and people’s rights, right? It’s a real thing that you have to be aware of all the time. You can’t just do what you want.

If a person is cooperating, and the investigation is a little harder for the bad guys to find, there’s no downside to that. The downside is that the family’s worried, trying to find them—yeah, that’s a legit thing. But, you know, they don’t know it necessarily, but they’re as safe as they can be if they’re up there with us. You know, nobody wants to believe that, but that’s the truth.

The data tranche, covering the period April 1, 2024 to March 31, 2025, was published this week by the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ICJIA). The Freedom From Drones Surveillance Act, the principal statute dictating Illinois law enforcement agencies’ use of drones, requires police departments in the state to annually report data on the time, purpose and location of each of their drone flights to the ICJIA for public release. Last year’s report was the first time Illinois law enforcement agencies were required to report this detailed flight log data, but CPD did not comply. Thus, this is the first time the public is seeing precise data on CPD drone usage. Noir News has created maps and graphs to visualize this data (click here for an additional interactive map of CPD’s drone flight data).

The data shows CPD used drones at least 566 times during the reporting period. Per the data, 256 drone flights were conducted to assist in responding to emergency calls, 152 to surveil special events, 80 for assistance in executing search warrants, 53 times for training, seven to find missing persons, six for traffic crash photography, five for public relations, five to prevent harm to life, and two to prevent the destruction of evidence. Unfortunately, precise information on the nature of the drone usage beyond these categories isn’t included in the data.

While the takeoff time for each flight is listed in the data, flight duration is not. Nor is flight trajectory. Instead, a single address is provided regarding each flight’s location, rendering it difficult to determine what drones were examining and how they were being used in each case.

It isn’t specified in the report, but the locations and times of the flights suggest the 2024 Chicago Pride Parade, NASCAR Chicago Street Race, Fiesta del Sol, Lollapalooza, Bud Billiken Parade and Festival, Magnificent Mile Lights Festival, and 2025 Chinatown Lunar New Year Parade and Shamrock Shuffle were likely surveilled by CPD drones.

Oddly, the data doesn’t list any drone flights until June 3, 2024, even though the reporting period begins April 1, 2024. This either indicates that CPD didn’t fly any drones during those two months, or that the department didn’t report the flight data. Also, there was a surge in drone flights responding to emergency calls around the time of the Democratic National Convention near where protests were held in August 2024. It is unclear whether there was simply an uptick in emergency calls coinciding with the protests, or whether this category was used for flights that surveilled the protests.

The report provides the greatest insight into CPD’s drone usage to date. Still, the lack of more precise telemetry and timing data means it doesn’t entirely assuage fears around broad surveillance and other abuses of drones. CPD did not immediately respond to questions about the data.

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Illinois law, namely the Freedom From Drone Surveillance Act, spells it out quite clearly: all law enforcement agencies in the state are required to report annually the time, location and purpose of each of their drone flights.

But for the 2024 reporting period, between April 1, 2023 and March 31, 2024, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) didn’t provide any of this information to the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ICJIA). The ICJIA is the body responsible for publishing reports on law enforcement drone usage.

Asked if CPD submitted a drone usage report or any materials at all related to drone ownership or policy for the period, ICJIA Public Information Officer Cristin Evans said “The answer to each of those questions is no.”

CPD’s lack of compliance for this period is concerning. Illinois law is intended to afford the state the added public safety of law enforcement drone usage, while checking the potential for unnecessary surveillance — an anxiety raised by the ACLU and other activists.

CPD wasn’t the only law enforcement agency that violated state law. The report states that only “312 agencies responded,” out of the 955 law enforcement agencies ICJIA contacted in Illinois.

CPD did not respond to inquiries related to its lack of compliance.

It’s unlikely CPD’s lack of reporting was accidental or a case of a bureaucratic mix up. The report states that “In March 2024, an email was sent to these agencies requesting reports on agency drone ownership, usage, and policies….Agencies that did not respond after the initial email was sent up to two reminders prior to the April 1 deadline.” Moreover, CPD provided drone data to ICJIA for the 2023 report — notably, Illinois law didn’t mandate law enforcement agencies to report drone location data at that time.

There is some good news: Evans told Noir that CPD has provided ICJIA with data, including drone location data, for the 2025 report. A version of the report without detailed location data has already been posted.

Per the 2025 report, CPD has 16 drones and conducted 566 drone flights during the 2025 reporting period. As Noir previously reported, CPD email correspondence with the billionaire Crown family suggest they may have recently helped fund the purchase of more drones for the department.

Sam Carlen contributed to the editorial process for this article.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the Democratic National Convention occurred during the time period covered by the 2024 Report. The Convention occurred during the time period covered by the 2025 Report.

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Two of the most troubling recent allegations of abuse by the Chicago Police Department — one involving a botched murder investigation and apparent revenge plot, the other involving torture — are directly linked, Noir News has found.

In late 2011, off-duty police officer Clifton Lewis was shot and killed while working as a store security guard. CPD quickly came to suspect that Spanish Cobra gang member Alexander “Flip” Villa was the shooter, and that fellow Cobras Edgardo Colon and Tyrone Clay were his accomplices. In response, CPD, with help from federal authorities, launched a sprawling investigation aimed at convicting the suspects and dismantling the Spanish Cobras. It was named Operation Snake Doctor.

As a result of the investigation, Villa and Colon were eventually convicted, and Clay spent years in jail. Other Cobras were hit with federal drug and weapons charges. But years later, Villa’s attorney, Jennifer Blagg, uncovered disturbing details about how the investigation was conducted. CPD and prosecutors failed to turn over exculpatory evidence to Villa’s defense team — including FBI cell phone tower data that indicated Villa, Colon, and Clay were not at the scene of the murder, and weren’t even together when it happened.

Just as concerning, internal emails surfaced showing CPD officers told other Cobra members that Villa was a snitch — apparently to provoke retaliation against him. Officers appeared to believe the strategy worked after Villa was stabbed by another Cobra. Rather than raise alarms, they seemed to celebrate the outcome.

“I believe Operation ‘Snake Doctor’ and 6580 has to take the credit for this,” CPD Officer Scott Dedore wrote in an email. “Cline and company tell each Cobra that every time a Cobra goes to jail its Flip’s fault. Unless I got the facts wrong (I often do), Flip was targeted by other Cobras. His associate was left unscathed. It sounds like [the] Cobras are getting the word.”

Officer Christopher Kennedy replied with a winking emoji.

Eventually, Villa and Colon’s convictions were overturned and Clay was freed. All three men are now suing the City of Chicago and several individual CPD officers.

But there’s more to Operation Snake Doctor. Noir News has found that the same investigation led to the detainment — and alleged torture — of a man named Angel Perez.

Perez was taken to Homan Square, a warehouse in Chicago’s west-side Garfield Park neighborhood that, as originally reported by The Guardian, has allegedly served as a secretive, off-the-books CPD detention center rife with abuse. Noir News previously reported that the Department of Justice has also used Homan Square as a hub for joint operations — and was well aware of its use for extrajudicial detention.

As Snake Doctor expanded its reach, two father-and-son drug dealers — Johnny Chaparro and Johnny Mendez — came into investigators’ crosshairs. A customer of theirs, Dwayne Payne, who bought drugs from them to sell, also became a target of the operation, according to a DOJ press release.

As Noir previously reported, CPD obtained a federal wiretap on Payne’s phone as part of the investigation. That’s how they discovered he was in contact with Angel Perez.

According to a lawsuit Perez filed against the City of Chicago, CPD officers pressured him to cooperate in the investigation of Payne — specifically, to set up a controlled drug purchase. Perez said officers took him to a second-floor room at Homan Square, where they handcuffed him to a bar and placed him in ankle shackles for several hours. He alleged that officers threatened to plant evidence on him and send him “to the Cook County jail to be raped by gang members.” Perez further alleged that the officers continued to physically and verbally assault him for hours, and that one of them sodomized him with “a cold metal object, believed to be one of [the] officer’s service revolvers.”

The Chicago Police Department has denied Perez’s allegations of abuse.

Regardless of whether the allegations are true, the legal handling of Perez’s case has raised new concerns. Jason Epstein, the attorney representing Perez in his civil suit against the city, told Noir News he had no idea his client’s abuse allegations stemmed from Operation Snake Doctor.

“I should not be hearing this for the first time from a reporter,” Epstein said. “This should have been made part of a supplemental answer. They should have told me in discovery.”

CPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sam Carlen contributed to the editorial process for this article.

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The Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN), an influential Dutch polling firm that employs unorthodox survey methods to “extract the (real) opinions of Iranians about (sensitive) social and political topics,” routinely calls itself an “independent” research foundation. News outlets and researchers citing GAMAAN have echoed this refrain when discussing the organization’s headline-grabbing findings, which portray the Iranian citizenry as far more secular and regime-critical compared to other polling research. GAMAAN asserts that its survey results can be generalized to the entire population of “literate individuals over the age of 19 residing in Iran.”

However, an investigation by Noir News reveals extensive ties between GAMAAN and U.S. government-funded organizations, many of which openly advocate for regime change in Iran, casting doubt on the polling group’s stated independence. Further, GAMAAN’s findings are not applicable to the entire Iranian populace due to biased survey methods that lead to an unrepresentative sample, according to multiple polling experts.

“[T]hey know what they think, and they want to use the language of social science to demonstrate that those claims are actually truth. And of course, that’s a problem,” said Daniel Tavana, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Penn State who was a Principal Investigator for Princeton’s Iran Social Survey.

“[T]hey’re just ideological,” Tavana said. “They are very opposed to the regime, want to embarrass the regime in whatever way they can, and are happy to say… whatever they think will most effectively do that in any given point of time, regardless of whether or not they have evidence for it.”

While Iranian state-owned media has discussed some of GAMAAN’s ties to Western-funded organizations and regime change proponents, and the limitations of its survey methods, Noir is the first to report the full scope of GAMAAN’s numerous connections with U.S. government-funded regime change operatives, and the severity of its methodological issues.

Given GAMAAN’s rapid rise to prominence, with its findings often cited by Western governments and prestigious news outlets, the group’s numerous ties to U.S. government-funded supporters of regime change in Iran, and the organization’s dubious survey methods, warrant scrutiny, especially given the anti-Islamic Republic bent of its survey results (with one survey finding 81% of respondents opposed the Islamic Republic), which are used by critics as a cudgel against Iran’s government. GAMAAN founders Pooyan Tamimi Arab, an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University, and Ammar Maleki, an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at Tilburg University, who could not be reached for comment, are themselves outspoken critics of the Iranian regime. Maleki refers to himself as a “pro-democracy activist,” and is a vociferous critic of the Islamic Republic and proponent of regime change.

Indeed, GAMAAN has relied on U.S. government-funded VPN and anti-censorship software providers like Psiphon to disseminate its surveys; collaborated with the USAID-funded, pro-regime change Tony Blair Institute; and collaborated with and received funding from historian Ladan Boroumand, co-founder of the Iranian regime-critical Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, which is in turn supported by the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Likewise, for a February 2023 report on Iranians’ attitudes towards the anti-regime street protests, GAMAAN enlisted the help of U.S. government-linked Iran International and U.S. government-funded Voice of America Persian in circulating survey questions.

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Founded in 2019, the logic behind GAMAAN’s founding was that, in the context of state repression, traditional survey approaches based on random sampling and in-person or telephone interviews fail to capture the population’s true beliefs regarding sensitive religious and political topics, because “individuals often censor their true views or even actively alter them to avoid scrutiny by authorities,” per GAMAAN. Instead, the group distributes its surveys via social media, VPN platforms like Psiphon, and encrypted messaging platforms like Telegram, with respondents able to participate anonymously.

Unlike traditional polling based on probability sampling – random selection of respondents from the target population, and persistent follow-up with those selected to minimize non-responsiveness – participation in GAMAAN’s surveys is voluntary (respondents “opt-in”), and respondents are not randomly selected from the broader target population (literate Iranians over the age of 19). Instead, respondents are reached “through random sampling via the popular Internet censorship circumvention provider Psiphon VPN, as well as ensuing sharing by respondents on social networks (Telegram, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter).” Prior to its use of VPN platforms like Psiphon for sampling, GAMAAN exclusively relied on its surveys being shared on social media, or “multiple chain-referral sampling,” also referred to as “snowball sampling.”

To account for methodological issues with non-random sampling inherent to opt-in surveys, GAMAAN tries to circulate its polls across a range of channels “representing radically diverse social layers of society and political perspectives,” and adjusts response data using statistical methods meant to render the final polling data more representative of the target population (literate Iranians 19 years and older with Internet access). Circulation of the group’s surveys has at times been aided by social media virality.

Using this unorthodox methodology, GAMAAN’s survey results have often surprised observers and contradicted the findings of long-established pollsters like Pew Research and Gallup, which employ conventional face-to-face and telephone polling methods. The group’s 2020 survey on Iranians’ religious beliefs made waves for its findings showing less religiosity among the Iranian population than was generally believed (and indicated in prior polling). Among other surprising results, GAMAAN’s survey found 22% of respondents did not belong to any religion, 9% identified as atheist, and 47% reported “having transitioned from being religious to non-religious.” In contrast, Pew Research has reported that 99.4% of Iranians are Muslim (though this finding is from a decade earlier).

But according to polling experts, GAMAAN’s findings cannot be generalized to the broader Iranian public due to significant bias in who its surveys reach. GAMAAN relies chiefly on the Psiphon VPN platform to circulate its survey questionnaires, with about 66% of respondents in its latest poll participating through the platform, and the remainder reached through Telegram (13.1%), Instagram (8.5%), WhatsApp (4.6%), Twitter/X (1.5%), and the remaining 6.7% through other undisclosed channels. According to polling experts, these methods suffer from “coverage bias” in that they fail to reach large swathes of the Iranian population, including Iranians who do not use the internet, or do not use VPNs or encrypted messaging.

Nor do GAMAAN’s methods account for the fact that Iranians who use Psiphon or come across its surveys through social media are different in important ways from the Iranian population as a whole, to which GAMAAN claims its findings can be generalized. Indeed, GAMAAN’s survey links are frequently shared by vocal critics of the Iranian regime, and demographic data reported by GAMAAN shows respondents are disproportionately urban (93.6% of respondents in its latest survey, vs. about 80% of the total Iranian population), college-educated (70.9% of respondents, compared to 27.7% of literate Iranians 19 years and older, per labor force statistics cited by GAMAAN); and high-income (54% of respondents had a “household monthly income above 13 million Rials,” compared to 40% among the target population, per GAMAAN’s methodology section).

“[F]or that inference that GAMAAN is making to be true, that this sample represents the Iranian population, the adult age population, we would have to assume or believe that Psiphon users are reflective of the Iranian population as a whole, which… just could not possibly be true,” Tavana said.

GAMAAN’s surveys have a high rate of repeat participation (i.e., a large share of respondents to a given survey participated in previous GAMAAN polling), with 26% of respondents in its most recent poll having participated in previous GAMAAN surveys, which GAMAAN interpreted as “indicating that the random sampling method was effective in distributing the questionnaire among a wide range of demographic groups, reaching far beyond networks familiar with GAMAAN.”

“The authors’ claim that this number provides evidence that their methods reach a random sample is a vast misinterpretation,” according to Kevan Harris, an Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA who was a Principal Investigator for the Iran Social Survey along with Tavana. “Indeed it is the opposite. This number, if true, is evidence of how this organization’s methods are reaching a relatively small, interconnected group of people who are predisposed to take their surveys.”

Harris highlighted that, per GAMAAN’s own methodology section in its most recent survey report, 5-11 million Iranians use Psiphon daily (the main source of survey participants), meaning the “refined sample” of 77,216 (which excludes “random or bot-entered responses,” per GAMAAN) constitutes approximately 0.7-1.5% of daily Psiphon users in Iran, yet GAMAAN reported that “26% of respondents had previously participated in GAMAAN’s surveys.”

“When you have a 26% repeat rate from what’s already less than 2% of your potential sample pool of Psiphon users (and less than 0.2% of all adult VPN users), that’s a major red flag about how representative your sample really is,” Harris wrote in an email to Noir. “[I]t shows they’re not really getting a random sample of all Iranians, just likely a small, enthusiastic subset who regularly take their surveys. Indeed, the 26% number, given this relatively large sample size, is telling.”

Sunghee Lee, an Associate Research Professor at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center, wrote in an email to Noir that “without further information,” she would agree with Harris’ assessment of the problematic nature of the high repeat-response rate. “Based on my quick search, the adult population of Iran appears to be around 70 million. The sample of 77K from the 2024 June report accounts for 0.1% of the adult population. This means that, if a true probability sample is used for 77K, you are likely to be sampled 1 out of 1000 studies. The fact that 26% of the sample is a repeat group suggests that the sample is likely to represent a group much narrower in scope than the adult population.”

While GAMAAN purports to use “various balancing methods such as weighting and the sample matching method” to derive a representative sample from its raw survey data, survey experts interviewed by Noir said these methods can’t make up for the unrepresentative nature of GAMAAN’s underlying data.

“[W]e use weights when we don’t know what the probability is that any given person will enter into a sample, and so we weight certain respondents in our sample more or less if we think that they were more or less likely to be chosen to be on our sample, we don’t have any way to assess that,” Tavana said. “So what they call weights is actually just refining the sample so that on key demographics, the sample looks more like the Iranian [population]. But it’s not a probability sample to begin with[.]”

Stanford University social psychologist and survey methodologist Jon Krosnick concurred, writing in an email to Noir: “[T]he phrase ‘matching and weighting’ without disclosing the details also sounds like a snake oil salesman. There have been lots of claims that ‘matching and weighting’ have improved the accuracy of non-probability samples, but lots of published papers have shown that such methods failed rather than succeeding. I don’t know of a single one showing improvement in accuracy.”

Lee likewise expressed doubt that GAMAAN’s weighting and sample matching adjustments can yield a representative sample: “I am not entirely convinced that for a population with less than 30% with college education can be examined by a sample with more than 70% with college education even after the weighting is applied.”

Lee also noted that the Pew Research study GAMAAN links to in its June 2024 survey report when discussing the “raking” weighting method for adjusting online opt-in samples, which used over 30,000 online opt-in survey responses to evaluate weighting procedures and their ability to reduce bias, concluded that “[e]ven the most effective adjustment procedures were unable to remove most of the bias.”

Lee also highlighted that GAMAAN’s “sample is representative only on the dimensions that the study attempted to balance on. They are five demographic variables used in raking: age group, gender, level of education, residential area (urban or rural), and provincial population. Therefore, whether results on the study outcome variables (e.g., expected election turnout) are representative is debatable.”

“The bottom line for me is that abandoning random sampling in Iran or the U.S. leaves a researcher with no basis for generalizing the results of a survey to any population,” Krosnick wrote. “It’s fine to talk about the obtained results as describing the people who participated. But not to generalize.”

According to the survey experts interviewed by Noir, a chief issue with GAMAAN’s approach is the inappropriate generalization of its survey results to the entire Iranian adult population, rather than the (likely meaningfully different) participants in its surveys.

“This doesn’t mean [GAMAAN’s] surveys are useless, but their results should be presented much more cautiously, with clear acknowledgment that they represent opinions of a specific, self-selected subset of internet-using, politically engaged people - not the general population,” Harris wrote in an email to Noir. “This is especially crucial when the surveys cover sensitive political topics that might influence US/European policy or public opinion.”

“I have no doubt in my mind that with the data GAMAAN has, we could make inferences to Psiphon users, and frankly, that would be fascinating to know what Psiphon users think and believe about the Iranian government,” Tavana said. “It’s an incredibly important constituency we could generalize their findings to, and make inferences about, the activist population, maybe even the online population, right? That would be fine, but to say that it’s representative of the whole country… we would have to believe [all] of these things that we know are false. We would have to believe that Psiphon users in particular, but also Twitter and Telegram users are reflective of their population, and we already have substantial verified information that they are not.”

“GAMAAN tells us to believe that their findings are generalizable to the entire adult population, right? This is invalid,” Tavana said. “That conclusion does not follow from, even if we had their data, even if we knew what procedures they were following, how they were recruiting subjects and so on, that scientifically does not logically follow from what they are doing.”

Even the central premise of GAMAAN’s approach, that citizens of a country with a repressive, authoritarian state will not give honest answers to questions pertaining to sensitive political or cultural issues when an interviewer is present, is dubious, Krosnick wrote.

“[M]any studies have surprisingly shown that removing interviewers rarely causes responses to change much,” Krosnick wrote. “In general, if a person is going to participate in answering questions, why bother if the person is going to lie – it’s obviously easier just to decline to participate at all from the start or to break off mid-interview.”

GAMAAN has also drawn criticism for a lack of transparency in its methods and – with one exception – a failure to subject its work to the rigor and scrutiny of publishing in peer-reviewed academic journals.

“Because they don’t document carefully enough for scientific standards what they do, none of what they produce is replicable,” Tavana said. “This is compounded by the fact that their data is not publicly available. I cannot go and download their data and analyze it for myself, right?”

The only article based on GAMAAN’s survey work that has been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal to date, “Survey Zoroastrians: Online Religious Identification in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” primarily focuses on a single finding from GAMAAN’s 2020 survey on Iranians’ religious beliefs (which was “financially supported by and carried out in cooperation with Dr. Ladan Boroumand” of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, an Iranian regime-critical organization supported by the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy) – that 8% of respondents identified as Zoroastrian (a far higher share than reported in previous research). The paper does not use GAMAAN’s more controversial findings (such as those concerning Iranians’ political beliefs). Moreover, a note appended to the journal article states “[t]he raw data used for this research can be shared with researchers under a confidentiality and collaborative agreement with GAMAAN,” which Tavana characterized as “unusual.”

“Typically, we do not require these kinds of agreements for access to this type of data,” Tavana wrote in an email to Noir. “I have seen it before when the data is proprietary, or owned by a private company. But not data an academic has collected on their own. This means that no one - not the reviewers, the editorial staff, or anyone else - has verified the claims made in the article.”

“[B]ecause we cannot replicate what they do, because their data are not available, we don’t know whether the inferences [] they are making on that data are valid, and so we have to take them at their word, and there are many reasons why we probably should not take them at their word,” Tavana said.

GAMAAN’s methodological shortcomings may account for substantial differences seen between its findings and those of long-established pollsters using traditional probability sampling. For instance, in a 2022 survey on Iranians’ political beliefs, GAMAAN reported far lower approval ratings for then-president Ebrahim Raisi compared to those reported by Gallup in a 2021 survey. GAMAAN itself highlighted this divergence (illustrated in the graphic below), but wrote that “both surveys are substantially similar… if Gallup’s results are compared with only the Principlists and Reformists in GAMAAN’s sample” (meaning, responses from more conservative and incrementalist participants in GAMAAN’s survey align with Gallup’s findings across its entire sample).

GAMAAN’s ties to U.S. government-funded, pro-regime change orgs

Chief among GAMAAN’s ties to U.S. government-funded groups is the organization’s recent “partnership” with the Tony Blair Institute. GAMAAN “exclusively provided” the U.K. nonprofit with detailed survey data gathered in June 2020 (regarding Iranians’ religious beliefs), and February & December 2022 (regarding political systems and the Mahsa Amini street protests, respectively). The Tony Blair Institute used GAMAAN’s survey data for a series of articles depicting the Iranian populace as eager for regime change, with one article titled “The People of Iran Are Shouting for Regime Change - But Is the West Listening?”.

Founded by former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Institute has received millions in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), at least some of which were Cooperative Agreement grants “characterized by extended involvement between recipient and agency.” The Tony Blair Institute is also funded by the U.K.’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (akin to America’s State Department), and private entities such as the French consulting firm Altai Consulting; Altai boasts the European Commission, USAID, and French Development Agency as clients.

GAMAAN’s widely-discussed 2020 survey of Iranians’ religious beliefs was “financially supported by and carried out in cooperation with” Dr. Ladan Boroumand, co-founder and research director of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, a nonprofit focused on Iranian human rights abuses and critical of Iran’s Islamist government. Named after her father Abdorrahman Boroumand, an Iranian lawyer and pro-democracy activist who was allegedly assassinated by Islamic Republic agents in 1991, the Center’s ‘Omid’ project documents cases of executions and assassinations in Iran in a searchable electronic database. The organization isn’t shy about supporting regime change, stating that its “goal is to prepare for a peaceful and democratic transition in Iran and build a more just future.”

The Boroumand Center has received substantial funding from the U.S. government-financed National Endowment for Democracy (NED), of which the Boroumand Center is a “partner.” Ladan Boroumand has held multiple positions at the NED, including as a former Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow researching “secularization in Iran,” a current member of the editorial board for the NED’s Journal of Democracy, and a current Research Council Member at the NED’s International Forum for Democratic Studies. She has also served on the Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy, of which the NED serves as the “secretariat.”

Ladan Boroumand is also on the advisory committee for the Atlantic Council’s Iran Strategy Project, which convened various experts and former officials “to develop a holistic US policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran for the next four years.” The Atlantic Council is an influential international relations think tank with extensive ties to U.S. lawmakers that receives large sums from the U.S. government (with FY 2023 grant obligations totaling over $6 million). The group’s October 2024 Iran Strategy Project report recommends a policy of continued pressure against the Islamic Republic, including through “enhanced support to the Iranian people” with the “long-term goal of supporting the Iranian people’s ability to change their system of government if they so desire.”

Ladan Boroumand was invited along with her sister Roya Boroumand to a July 2018 speech by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the Reagan Library, amid the Trump administration’s pivot to a hardline posture towards the Islamic Republic. The two sisters likewise joined 12 other Iranian diaspora women in signing an August 2019 open letter calling for a “transition from the Islamic Republic.”

GAMAAN has also consulted with Dr. Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize recipient who has long worked with the U.S. government and NED-funded Tavaana, a project of the E-Collaborative for Civic Education (ECCE) founded by staunch Islamic Republic opponents Mariam Memarsadeghi and Akbar Atri. Tavaana, which describes itself as “Iran’s premier civic education and civil society capacity building initiative” aimed at ushering in democratic governance, creates and disseminates regime-critical media and information on anti-censorship tools, and has an extensive social media following. Memarsadeghi was also a signatory to the August 2019 open letter calling for a “transition from the Islamic Republic.”

Memarsadeghi is also the founder and director of the Cyrus Forum, an organization that supports ousting the Islamic Republic and works to “reverse engineer an Iranian government that upholds security, the rule of law, and individual liberty.” Ladan Boroumand is one of only two advisors to the Cyrus Forum, and was previously listed on Tavaana’s website as a teacher.

Ebadi also appears to have been invited to the U.S. State Department’s 2017 Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) Implementers’ Conference, organized by the Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, Office of Assistance Coordination (NEA/AC). Ebadi’s name and role as President of The Centre for Supporters of Human Rights – a U.K. NGO Ebadi founded focused on human rights issues in Iran – appear on a guest list circulated by the State Department in September 2017.

GAMAAN has also relied on U.S. government-funded virtual private network (VPN) providers Psiphon and Lantern for assistance disseminating their surveys and bypassing Iranian government internet censorship. Since at least 2021, GAMAAN has collaborated with Psiphon, an open-source tool for circumventing internet censorship (using VPN and other technologies) that was developed at the University of Toronto and publicly-released in 2006. Psiphon has received millions in funding from the Open Technology Fund, which “receives the majority of its funding from the U.S. government via the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM).”

Psiphon, the Tony Blair Institute, and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center did not respond to requests for comment. Shirin Ebadi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Context

GAMAAN co-founder Ammar Maleki’s ire against the Islamic Republic is more than ideological, it’s personal. His father, Mohammad Maleki, who served as the first president of the University of Tehran, was a well-known critic of the country’s human rights abuses and use of the death penalty. In 2019, the elder Maleki joined 13 other Iranian activists in signing a pair of open letters calling for Iran’s Supreme Leader to step down and a “complete and peaceful transition” away from the Islamic Republic. Ammar Maleki told Univers, the student newspaper of his employer, Tilburg University, “my father was imprisoned regularly until old age. Almost all the milestones in my life he missed.”

He makes his views on the Islamic Republic clear on X (formerly Twitter): “To understand/analyze the #Islamic_Republic of Iran, 3 golden rules should be kept in mind: 1- I.R. [Islamic Republic] cannot be reformed by dialogue but will surrender to pressure 2- I.R. officials lie unless proven otherwise 3- when I.R. officials/supporters say #Iran, they mean the I.R. only!”

Hardline politics are not unusual among academics. More unusual, and concerning, is Maleki’s willingness to accuse those who call into question GAMAAN’s findings and methodology of carrying water for the Islamic Republic. Daniel Tavana experienced this firsthand when he criticized GAMAAN’s methodology online.

“I understand that you have a hard time these days selling your data by IRGC-initiated IranPoll, so you attack GAMAAN to take attention. I cannot waste my time answering nonsense on GAMAAN’s method for an apologist! Our results were corroborated by external checks & field evidence,” Maleki wrote, referring to Tavana and the Iran Social Survey’s use of IranPoll to conduct surveys within Iran.

Noir couldn’t find evidence of IranPoll having ties to the Islamic Republic, and Maleki did not respond when we asked him to elaborate on the allegation. Tavana likewise stated “IranPoll has no connection to the government [of Iran].”

Nonetheless, Maleki seems to allege that IranPoll’s work is evidence that Western universities “are under the control of the regime’s thugs,” as he wrote on X.

If mainstream media citations of GAMAAN’s findings are any indication, Maleki’s tenacity seems to be paying off. Whether you’ve seen it in reports published by the State Department, the American Foreign Policy Council, the government of the United Kingdom, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, FiveThirtyEight, the Guardian, the Economist, CBC, Al-Monitor, the Jerusalem Post, Voice of America, the Wilson Center, DW News, Tablet Magazine, the Hill, the Washington Times, or Christianity Today, there’s a good chance that if you live in the West, GAMAAN has helped shape what you think is happening in Iran. GAMAAN’s rise shows no signs of slowing: the organization announced in January that Maleki had been “selected as the country representative for Iran (2025-2026) in the prestigious World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR).” The Washington Post described WAPOR as “the leading professional association of pollsters working outside the United States.”

For Tavana, GAMAAN isn’t merely worsening academic and mainstream conversation around Iran — it’s potentially even raising the prospect of war between the Islamic Republic and the United States, by inflating perceived anti-regime sentiment among the Iranian populace.

“It wasn’t a very long time ago where, you know, the U.S. invaded another country, largely on the assumption that people who lived in that country wanted the invasion and [welcomed] their liberation… And so I think that, like, trafficking in these half-baked ideas is actually quite dangerous, and it’s going [to], if unchecked, get a lot of people killed,” Tavana said.

Scandals don’t get much more disturbing than that of Homan Square. In 2015, the Guardian revealed Chicago Police had allegedly employed torture and days-long unlawful detention at the secretive “black site”-like Homan Square facility, a nondescript warehouse located in Chicago’s west-side Garfield Park neighborhood. Outraged and alarmed by these revelations, politicians and activists clamored for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate human rights abuses at the facility, which still operates today.

Despite the pleading, the DOJ elected not to investigate Homan Square, and instead conducted a broad investigation of Chicago Police Department use of force practices.

The DOJ’s failure to specifically examine the alleged abuses at Homan left onlookers scratching their heads. Investigating the CPD’s use of force was important, of course, but why wouldn’t the DOJ also investigate the Homan Square facility given the severity of the allegations? One of the main figures pushing for a DOJ probe of Homan Square was then-Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin, who sent letters to the Department asking them to investigate the facility. Asked whether he ever received an explanation as to why the DOJ didn’t investigate the facility, Boykin said: “I did not, which is surprising right?”

Noir News has examined an element of the Homan Square story that provides important context regarding the Department’s decision: the Department of Justice was inside of Homan Square all along, well aware of its use for extrajudicial detention, conducted its own interrogations in the facility, and is implicated in at least one of its most egregious abuse cases, that of Angel Perez.

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Perez alleged CPD officers took him to Homan Square1 and pressured him to act as a cooperating witness in an investigation of alleged drug dealer Dwayne Payne. Namely, the officers wanted Perez to set up a drug purchase with Payne. Perez said he was taken to a room on the second floor of Homan Square and handcuffed to a bar and placed in ankle shackles for several hours. Officers allegedly threatened to plant evidence on Perez and send “him to the Cook County jail to be raped by gang members.”

After refusing to cooperate in the investigation, Perez alleges he was physically and verbally tortured by the officers for hours and that they refused to grant him access to a lawyer. One of the officers told Perez “‘I hear that a big black nigger dick feels like a gun up your ass.’” Then an officer “inserted a cold metal object, believed to be one of [the] officer’s service revolvers, into the plaintiff’s rectum causing the plaintiff severe pain and humiliation.” Finally, Perez relented and agreed to buy heroin from Payne for the officers.

Importantly, Perez’s lawsuit and the Guardian’s reporting on it solely implicated the CPD. But as Noir News has discovered, a 2022 court order reveals the investigation that resulted in Perez’s detention and torture at Homan Square wasn’t just a CPD operation. Rather, the investigation of Payne was a “joint investigation with the USAO [United States Attorneys’ Office].” The United States Attorneys’ Office is an arm of the Department of Justice.

Payne was eventually charged alongside other defendants, as the DOJ announced in a 2013 press release that states the DOJ’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was also involved in the investigation.

If Perez’s allegations are true (and surveillance footage released by the Guardian indeed shows Perez being escorted into Homan through a door titled “Prisoner Entrance”), the DOJ built the case against Payne, in part at least, via torture. But even if Perez’s allegations are false, this case alone indicates the DOJ was aware of and implicated in the use of the Homan Square facility, where multiple other individuals reported being physically abused and illegally detained without access to an attorney. Moreover, the DOJ failed to disclose to the public its awareness of and involvement with Homan Square when activists and elected officials pressured the DOJ to investigate the facility.

“That’s terrible. That’s terrible,” Boykin said when Noir informed him that the DOJ was aware of Homan Square’s use as a detention facility and participated in the investigation that led to Perez’s detainment. “Then the DOJ failed the community. They failed the person who made the allegation. And they failed the country. They failed to do their job.”

Boykin said he had been under the impression the DOJ was unaware of Homan Square’s use as an off-the-books detention facility prior to the Guardian reporting.

The DOJ did not respond to inquiries asking for clarification about their operations in Homan Square. The CPD did not respond to specific inquiries about its operations in Homan Square, and did not comment on the DOJ’s use of the facility. Instead CPD responded with an unspecific denial: “These claims are unequivocally false. The Chicago Police Department's operations within all police facilities are rooted in lawful and constitutional policing. The Homan Square facility currently houses specialized units within the Bureau of Detectives and Bureau of Counterterrorism. It also houses the Evidence and Recovered Property Section, which is accessible to the public.” CPD did not respond to further inquiry.

Other aspects of the Perez case further demonstrate the DOJ’s knowledge of Homan Square. In a 2019 court order denying Perez’s “motion for class certification,” a U.S. District Judge wrote that federal law enforcement officers “regularly visited Homan Square” around the time of Perez’s detainment.

Perez is far from the only Homan Square detainee who has alleged mistreatment in the facility. As the Guardian reported, multiple detainees also alleged being: handcuffed for hours, kept in Homan Square for days with minimal food, punched and stepped on, threatened with a knife to the throat, and caged. Per the Guardian, at least 7,000 people were detained in Homan Square between August 2004 and June 2015, while “only 68 of those held were allowed access to attorneys or a public notice of their whereabouts.”

After the Guardian’s initial reports, the news outlet filed a Freedom of Information Act request for CPD records of detention and interrogation at Homan Square, the denial of which led to a lawsuit by the outlet against the CPD to compel disclosure. In a November 2015 deposition taken for the lawsuit, the late CPD officer William Kilroy — a member of CPD’s Homan Square-headquartered narcotics unit — was asked questions about practices in Homan Square. While the Guardian cited parts of Kilroy’s deposition as evidence of Homan Square’s secretive nature and capacity to disappear detainees, his testimony regarding federal use of the facility has gone unreported.

Kilroy is asked about Homan Square interview rooms: “Are there ever situations where someone brings a camera into an interview room?”

Kilroy replied: “When we’re doing joint operations with the federal government, it’s generally — it’s under the supervision of an Assistant U.S. Attorney and they’re merely using our facility because it’s more convenient. They will set up their own audio-visual recording and they will conduct interviews that are part of a federal case but not part of anything that we take state.”

Additional evidence indicates the DOJ long knew of and exploited Homan Square’s use as an off-the-books holding facility unconstrained by constitutional protections. Beyond its role as a CPD “black site” as initially reported by the Guardian, Noir’s findings reveal Homan Square served as a crucial nexus for major federal investigations into gang activity and drug trafficking.

The feds and CPD’s use of Homan Square as a detention facility hasn’t stopped. A Homeland Security special agent filed a criminal complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois describing how Jauan Brown was taken to Homan Square in October 2024 as part of a federal investigation.

In 2021, U.S. congressman Mike Quigley, who represents Illinois’ 5th congressional district (covering most of north-side Chicago), secured approval from the House Appropriations Committee for $500,000 in fiscal-year 2022 federal funding to “support the equipment to increase capacity, accuracy, and coordination of intelligence gathering with other law enforcement partners, including the FBI in particular,” and “support the Strategic Decision Support Centers (SDSC) that occur in districts with the goal of passing more intelligence to aid enterprise investigations at Homan Square and inform command staff via Crime Prevention and Information Center (CPIC).” Representative Quigley’s funding request, which specifically mentions supporting “enterprise investigations at Homan Square,” was put forth several years after the alleged abuses at Homan Square first came to light, and after years of calls from activists and politicians to close the facility.

Representative Quigley could not be reached for comment.

Other Cases

A 2017 court order upholding the jury verdict convicting several members of the crime ring “The Hobos,” reveals an FBI agent, Bryant Hill, interrogated a suspect in the Homan Square facility on October 22, 2008. Per the order, one of the defendants, Gregory Chester, “contends that this Court erred by allowing the government to present evidence of his statements to police on the night he was seized along with Walter Binion and interviewed at the Homan Square police station. He contends that his statement was fruit of an illegal seizure and therefore should have been suppressed. This Court denied Chester’s motion to suppress the statement, after a full hearing at which Chester testified, as did (then) Sergeant James Sanchez of the Chicago Police Department and Special Agent Bryant Hill of the FBI.”

Chester was brought to Homan and interrogated, according to the order. While detained, Chester “said he told the FBI (Agent Bryant Hill) that ‘I don’t know nothing about no Hobos, no robberies, no shootings, no murders, no nothing.’”

Whatever Chester actually said to Agent Hill, the 2017 court order shows that an FBI agent interrogated Chester at Homan Square. This is further evidenced by an appeals court opinion which states that: “Before trial, Chester moved to suppress his October 22 statements, arguing that they were the result of an illegal detention that was not supported by probable cause… Officer Sanchez testified about the stop, and both Sanchez and Agent Hill testified about the interview that followed.”

The case of United States v. Chaparro, in which Johnny Chaparro and Johnny Mendez “were charged with conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute and conspiracy to distribute large quantities of cocaine and heroin,” stemmed from an “extensive investigation by the Chicago Police Department (‘CPD’), the Drug Enforcement Administration (‘DEA’), and the U.S Attorney’s Office.”

A 2014 court order in the case describes how, on November 29, 2012, after CPD officers questioned Chaparro and Mendez at Mendez’s residence, an officer identified as Lt. Cline “felt that a change of venue would impress the gravity of the situation upon Mendez… Accordingly, Lt. Cline ordered the other officers to arrest and relocate Mendez and Chaparro to the Homan Square police station so that they could be interviewed there.”

The joint nature of the investigation likely means that the Department of Justice was well-aware of the use of Homan Square for detainment and interrogation during the course of the investigation itself. The opinion also states that Lt. Cline had “continuous contact with the U.S. Attorney” throughout the investigation. But even if Cline or other CPD officers failed to inform the Department of Justice about the use of Homan Square, the court opinion outlining this course of events was written in 2014, months before the Guardian first wrote about the facility.

Federal agents’ knowledge and use of Homan Square is further demonstrated in the case of United States v. Xavier Elizondo & David Salgado, which centered on CPD officers Elizondo and Salgado’s use of their positions to embezzle money and drugs. The 2021 appeals court opinion upholding the officers’ convictions describes how, as part of the FBI’s investigation into Elizondo and Salgado, federal agents planted a vehicle containing $18,200, and had a confidential informant tell the two officers “that a drug dealer was storing drugs and cash in a vehicle near Midway Airport.” Elizondo and Salgado traveled to the vehicle, removed the cash planted inside by the FBI, and ultimately only inventoried $14,000 of the $18,200. The court opinion describes how the next day, “CPD Internal Affairs Lieutenant Timothy Moore—who was detailed as an FBI task force officer—and FBI Special Agent Robert Leary went to CPD’s Homan Square facility to recover the inventoried $14,000 and the rental vehicle used in the previous night’s operation.”

The 2008 case United States of America v. Francisco Mendez-Nunez, et al., is described in a court document as stemming from an investigation that included the participation of “agents from various federal agencies [including the FBI], as well as officers from the Chicago Police Department.”

Meghan C. Morrissey, an Assistant United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, wrote that, following the execution of a search warrant during the investigation, DEA Special Agent Dick Mah “transported all of the recovered evidence to the Chicago Police Department’s Homan Square facility, where he turned it over to DEA Special Agents James Walsh and John Kennelly for processing.” The document suggests the DEA not only visited Homan Square and was aware of the operations within it, but also that the agency itself has used the facility in the course of some investigations as a base of operations.

A court document likewise describes U.S. v. Van Sach as stemming from a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) investigation. The document, dated August 16, 2006, states that a “CI [Confidential Informant], ATF agents, and task force officers from the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Unit met at Homan Square, which was near Van Sach’s [the defendant’s] house, to plan the operation” in which the Confidential Informant would purchase a firearm from the defendant. The ATF agents and the Confidential Informant returned to Homan Square following the successful operation. Thus, the ATF, another arm of the DOJ, has used Homan Square in a similar manner to the DEA.

More on the ATF: a little-noticed paragraph at the end of a September 2020 Patch news article states that firearms seized in an Evanston police traffic stop were brought “to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives offices at the Chicago Police Department’s Homan Square facility for test firing. ATF staff told police that results of the testing would be available within 24 hours, police reported.”

Noir could not verify the existence of an ATF office in Homan Square by the time of publication.

It’s likely, if not guaranteed, that the DOJ has conducted other interrogations at Homan Square and that it had even more intimate knowledge of practices at the facility than is indicated by these court cases.

Corruption Investigation

From 2006 to 2012, the FBI conducted an investigation of corrupt officers assigned to the CPD’s narcotics unit, Unit 189, headquartered in Homan Square. The FBI recruited two Unit 189 officers to work for the bureau undercover, Shannon Spalding and Danny Echeverria.

Spalding and Echeverria’s investigation and willingness to blow the whistle was widely-celebrated by a number of media outlets.

However, the positive coverage of these whistleblowers missed the implications of these officers’ undercover work for the FBI. Two members of Unit 189, the narcotics unit alleged to have committed so many of the abuses in Homan Square, were working undercover with the FBI throughout 2006-2012. This likely means the FBI had intimate knowledge of the inner workings of Homan Square, and that two of its undercover assets were participating in — or at the very least had knowledge of — the detentions and interrogations at the facility.

Aside from the implications these facts have regarding the DOJ’s complicity in alleged abuses at Homan Square, they may also reveal an interesting dynamic in Chicago politics. During his campaign, Mayor Brandon Johnson promised to shutter Homan Square. The author of the original exposés on Homan Square, Spencer Ackerman, publicly pleaded for Johnson to do just that.

Given the feds’ use of the facility, the mayor of the City of Broad Shoulders wouldn’t just be contending with the forces of Chicago politics if he wanted to close down the facility. He’d be tangling with the DOJ.

“Ultimately we hope we get justice and we hope that those abuses aren’t taking place today. At Homan, or at any police facility,” Boykin said.

The Chicago Police Department wants more drones — expensive drones — priced at $33,000 a pop. Luckily for Chicago’s Finest, one of America’s wealthiest families may be willing to help them out: the Crowns.

Per the Sun-Times, CPD only had five drones as of September, which is far lower than New York City’s 55 and San Diego’s 47. Emails recently exchanged between CPD and Crown Family Philanthropies, obtained by Noir News, describe CPD’s desire for “20 to 30 as we expand the drone program. $33K each (discounted to $16K each).” The emails also list CPD’s funding requests for special vehicle forensics training at a cost of $104,000 and continued access to the services of the controversial digital intelligence firm Cellebrite.

The emails confirm that, following an application by CPD, the Crowns agreed to provide a grant for “$150,000 over 1 year for technology to support CPD investigations” in July 2024, and that the Crowns provided a similar grant in 2023. It’s not clear from the emails how the money would be allocated between CPD’s technology wants. Per the award letter, “Crown Family Philanthropies (‘CFP’) will be assisting in the oversight and administration of this grant,” potentially providing greater sway over law enforcement decisions to one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in Chicago.

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The Crowns are famed billionaires whose legacy is hard to miss, especially in Chicagoland. Per the family’s philanthropy website, “At the end of the 19th century, Arie and Ida Crown emigrated from Eastern Europe and settled in Chicago.” One of their children, Henry Crown, founded Material Service Corporation and began amassing the family’s wealth. Forbes put the family’s current net worth at $14.7 billion, which includes a large amount of equity in the weapons manufacturer General Dynamics and myriad other holdings. The family is also known for its political donations and for its philanthropy, often aimed at reducing gun violence, promoting Jewish life and the state of Israel, and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Many a building is named for the Crowns.

The family’s funding of CPD tech isn’t surprising. Late scion James Crown made no secret of his ambitions to drive down crime in the Windy City prior to his passing.

CPD and the Crown family could not immediately be reached for comment.

Drones in Chicago have thus far mostly been used to surveil large public events like the Democratic National Convention and Lollapalooza, per the Sun-Times. Presumably, more drones would be used for this purpose, and, as CPD has advocated for, to be dispatched to aid officers responding to 911 calls.

“With our workforce being lower and the struggles with recruiting officers, this is really a force multiplier,” CPD Sgt. Marcus Buenrostro previously told the City Council per the Sun-Times. “We’re able to utilize it and cover a lot more area than any patrol car can. We do it with nobody getting injured and no complaints.”

CPD’s drone dreams aren’t without critics. Per the Sun-Times, American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois spokesperson Ed Yohnka said: “Drones have an enormous capacity to surveil people without their knowledge — to look into buildings, into cars, into apartments — and we ought to move very slowly with that kind of surveillance technology without having in place the appropriate privacy regulations to guard against peoples’ rights being violated.”

CPD’s use of Cellebrite — which may already or may going forward be funded by the Crowns — has been known for some time. Cellebrite, an Israel-based and Pentagon-funded digital intelligence firm, provides clients the ability to “unlock” digital devices. The firm’s tech is equal parts competent and controversial. As reported by Drop Site News, Cellebrite helped Chinese officials break into the phones of pro-democracy Hong Kongers, Botswana police break into the phones of journalists, and Russian authorities crack opposition figures’ phones. Cellebrite also helped the FBI break into the phone of would-be-Trump-assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks in only 40 minutes and is used by other police forces throughout the country.

CPD’s special vehicle forensics training, which may be funded by the Crowns, would be provided by a Maryland-based and Department of Homeland Security-funded company called Berla. The emails state that CPD would need $104,000 to train “26 additional ATC officers who have not been trained in this process. This training is $4,000 per person.” Lots of information is stored in the computers within modern cars, and Berla claims it can help clients learn to garner location data, data from connected devices, routes, and vehicle event logs, such as door opens, ignition cycles and gear shifts.

Sam Carlen contributed to the editorial process for this article.

Like most Americans, I had never heard of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. That was until their announcement on the Chicago Red Line roused me from a fast food-induced slumber.

“Chicago gives millions in taxes to Israel to fund their genocide of Palestinians! We need to come together to stop it. The Party for Socialism and Liberation is hosting a meeting on Wednesday, October 16, to do something about it,” one of the Party members said sternly (or something like that, I was pretty groggy).

They and their comrade sheepishly walked up and down the train car, half-heartedly holding up fliers for passengers to take. I don’t blame the Party foot soldiers for looking discouraged — most commuters seemed too tired, high, or bewildered to hear out these subway-sojourning radicals.

But I thought the event might make for a good story, and I didn’t have anything planned for Wednesday night other than a rendezvous with a half-empty bottle of bourbon. I took a flier.

Huh. What was the Party for Socialism and Liberation anyway, I wondered? Well, as the name would suggest, it advocates for socialism and against capitalism in America. Also, per its website, it advocates against U.S. imperialism and for equality across the axes of race, gender and sexuality. As outlined on its Wikipedia page, the Party has written sympathetically about actions taken by North Korea and Russia’s annexation of Crimea — pretty spicy for American normies, but not all that unusual for leftists.

Whatever your thoughts on all that, there’s no doubting it sticks with you a bit more than Trump or Harris’s platforms. This would be fun.

Come Wednesday night, I stepped into Stage 773, the venue at which the meeting was held. I came to learn the space was put together by a nonprofit to support Chicago’s starving artists, and my goodness, were I an artist, I’d have felt supported. There was a little bar where the crystalized light reflecting off ornate glasses reminded you drinking was more than an exercise in slow suicide. To the left of the bar was a lounge filled with tastefully curated chairs and booths arranged for artists to give each other much-needed encouragement. Beyond this was another room where I could see members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation ushering potential recruits through the door.

Not wanting to intrude on the event without fair warning, I let a bespectacled Party veteran know that I wrote for Noir News, and that they and other party membership might know Noir from our reporting on Stanford’s Mapping Militants Project removing the Azov Battalion from its list of extremist militant groups, which was republished by The Grayzone and other outlets. There wasn’t much trepidation to begin with, but what little there was melted away by mention of the article. They ushered me in.

The room had chairs arranged in a giant circle in front of a stage. The Party members and the potential recruits trickling in looked like what you might expect: lots of tattoos and piercings, heterodox but coordinated dress, keffiyehs, cropped or swooping hair, some of which was dyed. Given Chicago’s segregation and Stage 773’s location in the affluent Lakeview neighborhood, I expected most everyone to be white. But it was a diverse crowd — it looked like what a midwestern liberal arts college wants to look like.

Leftists, especially those sporting hair dye, are often stereotyped as emotionally unstable and juvenile. But the crowd assembled by the Party for Socialism and Liberation seemed very polite, calm, and focused on their aim for the night: combatting the city of Chicago’s aid to the state of Israel.

After most of the chairs were filled, I noticed a party veteran strap on a striking red semi-hollow body electric guitar. He introduced himself, and quickly taught the room how to sing “Which Side Are You On?”, the famous union song written in 1931 by Florence Reece about the Harlan County War: a bloody struggle between a miners’ union and mine owners.

He taught one side of the room the melody and the other the harmony — a bold move when you don’t know the musical aptitude of a crowd. But either the Party lucked out and recruited people who’d spent an inordinate amount of time in church choir, or the weight of the American politique in 2024 was too great to let us slip out of tune. The room sounded like angels tired from a long day toiling in the mines.

“Come all of you good workers, good news to you I’ll tell, of how the good ol’ union has come in here to dwell,” they sang. “Which side are you on? Which side are you on?”

The song ended and was replaced by something sharper and more topical.

“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free! From the Sea to the River, Palestine will live forever,” the Party veterans and recruits chanted.

This is where I’m supposed to explain the phrase “From the River to the Sea.” To oversimplify, some Zionists and Jewish people at large consider the phrase to be antisemitic, either because they think calling for an end to the state of Israel in and of itself is antisemitic, or because they think the phrase calls for the killing or expulsion of some or all Jews in Israel/Palestine. The slogan does arguably call for creation of a single state in the land of Israel/Palestine, and by extension, an end to Israel as a Jewish state.

Now, I’m a Jew, and I’d try to give you a definitive answer on the implications of the phrase, but I can’t even figure out whether my circumcision was a good idea. You don’t want my consultation.

With regard to how the room was using the phrase though, while they were definitely calling for an end to the state of Israel, I doubt most were advocating for the killing or expulsion of Jews in Israel/Palestine. Half the people there would probably balk at eating unethically-sourced chocolate, let alone slaughtering Yitzhak the IT professional in Tel Aviv.

Party veterans spoke one by one on stage, each advocating for an end to American, and thus Chicagoan, aid to Israel. They linked America’s spending on wars abroad to a lack of resources for Chicago’s schools and homeless population. It was variations on this theme for most of the night, but right when things were getting a little repetitive, one Jawahir Sharwany, the special guest of the evening, took the stage.

Sharwany, who later told me she was an Arab Israeli born in Jerusalem who relocated to the States in the mid 90s, bounced around with a half-happy, half-angry jig as she pleaded with the crowd to free Palestine. She loved the Party for Socialism and Liberation, she said, because it understood that the issues of homelessness, racism, imperialism, and genocide of the Palestinians were all connected. Her speech was a bit disjointed, but that only made it more charming.

After Sharwany finished, the Party veterans hurriedly explained a fact I’d have thought would be a bit more front and center: the Party for Socialism and Liberation is running a presidential ticket of Claudia de la Cruz and Karina Garcia, both long-time leftist activists from New York City.

The candidates are great, and it’d be great if they won — but they won’t, the Party veterans explained. The point of their running isn’t to win, but to build a long-lasting political movement that could create real change and actually represent “The People.”

I took a look around the room and the potential recruits were nodding their heads and snapping their fingers. I thought again about the way the recruits were dressed and their general demeanor. Yes, they sort of looked like socialists. But they also just looked like… Gen Z kids or millennials working a shift at a coffee shop. Whatever this was, it looked a lot more representative of “The People” than did the cerebral cats at the Republican or Democratic National Conventions.

And here The People, or some of the people, were ready to toss their votes like coins into a hopeless well rather than succumb to America’s sad political duopoly.

You can only break so many promises.

I asked a Party veteran, Yasmine Dukan, about whether they thought their strategy of building a long-term movement was effective.

“I think that being in [the Party for Socialism and Liberation], we’re definitely making a difference in both raising consciousness among working class people and we’re making that effect across the city,” Dukan said.

“We need to organize among neighbors, coworkers too and build socialism and a better world for the masses, the working class,” Dukan added.

Anyway, the speeches were over and like any smart political organization, the Party for Socialism and Liberation had gotten the recruits pizza. I was tempted to stuff my face, but instead I took the time to interview Sharwany.

I asked Sharwany what got her involved with the Party for Socialism and Liberation and what brought her there that night.

“As a Palestinian, as a human being, I love when I come in to a protest or to a meeting or to volunteer and see everybody together to see everybody with different identities with different agendas, with different religions, with different backgrounds and we’re all in the same thing,” she said. “We’re all agreeing in one thing, we want, the freedom of the Palestinians, we want the freedom of human beings.

“That’s how I cope. I can’t cope all by myself in the house. I only cope when I go to an event or to protest or volunteer or talk to people in the street — regular people.”

She added that it was wrong the United States was giving large amounts of aid to Israel while offering insufficient assistance to those affected by the recent hurricanes in Florida. 

Sharwany told me that, even as an Arab Israeli citizen, she didn’t feel like she had any meaningful political representation when she lived back home, and that the separation of Arab Israelis, and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, was oppressive and disenfranchising. 

“I’m a Palestinian. Everybody that’s there [in the West Bank and Gaza] are my family. I have people in the West Bank. A lot of them have been martyred.”

The situation of Israel/Palestine should go back to the way it was before 1948, she said.

People mean a lot of different things when they say this, so I asked her what exactly she wanted. Two states without the Nakba? A binational state in which Jews and descendents of Jews who’ve arrived in the late 19th century onwards get to stay? A binational state in which most of the Jews are made to leave?

She clarified that she wanted a binational state in which Jewish people are not forced to leave.

“My position as a Palestinian is we all live together [like] before. I mean, I was born in Jerusalem, so my neighbors are Jewish and Christian. My best friend is Jewish, and we don’t have any problems. We have a problem with the government, with the soldiers, with the military. But I do not have a problem with individual people. I’m not saying I’m going to go around saying ‘Are you a Zionist? Are you Jewish? You need to go back.’ No. I’m not saying that.”

After convincing myself not to have any pizza or drinks, I stepped out of Stage 773 into the darkness of the cool autumn night.

Whatever your thoughts on the platform and idealism of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the veterans and recruits all seemed to know exactly what they were doing at the meeting, what they wanted for the country, and like they weren’t going to have any trouble sleeping that night. 

Sam Carlen contributed to the editorial process for this article.

Emails obtained by Noir News reveal the Chicago Police Department (CPD) has made extensive use of Dataminr, a social media analysis tool criticized for providing law enforcement agencies with Big Brother-esque surveillance of global social media activity.

Dataminr, founded in 2009, processes massive amounts of social media data to rapidly generate summary reports of current events for its clients, which include government agencies, corporations, and newsrooms, using a combination of artificial intelligence and human labor. The company has plenty of data to work with, as it has access to X (formerly Twitter)’s “firehose data” — essentially anything and everything posted on the platform, per TechCrunch. At one point, Twitter owned a five percent stake in Dataminr, but has since divested. The surveillance tool also counted In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital entity, among its early investors. As of March 2021, Dataminr was valued at $4.1 billion.

The company has been under scrutiny for years. In 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported that Twitter pressured Dataminr to stop providing its social media analysis services to U.S. intelligence agencies, for the sake of combating bad optics around government surveillance. In 2020, The Intercept published a series of reports detailing the company’s work on behalf of local police agencies, including its reportedly haphazard and racially-biased approach to gang surveillance and its monitoring of protests following the killing of George Floyd (not just the protests that included violence and looting, but those that remained peaceful as well). In April 2024, the Brennan Center for Justice and Data for Black Lives revealed that D.C. police used Dataminr to track planned protests against police brutality and COVID-19 restrictions; this revelation was particularly chilling given that the report claims Dataminr included personal information about individuals planning protests in its emails to the police.

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Noir filed several requests for email communication between Dataminr and CPD using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a law that requires government agencies to provide requestors any and all desired documents in their possession, with some exceptions. We wanted to determine whether CPD was using Dataminr and the extent to which it was using it. It turns out CPD has used Dataminr — a lot. 

In a letter denying a FOIA request dated April 15, 2024, CPD told us that the Department and Dataminr had emailed each other “more than 254,316” times between January 1, 2022 and March 30, 2024, and that providing these emails to Noir would prove too burdensome. While some of these emails consist of correspondence between Dataminr’s customer service professionals and CPD officers, the vast majority likely resulted from Dataminr’s provision of its First Alert reports for its clients — the same service it provided other law enforcement offices that resulted in the sloppy gang monitoring and protest surveillance.

Scope Of Dataminr Email Correspondence

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CPD and Dataminr did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding how CPD used Dataminr’s services.

In fact, Dataminr provided so many First Alert reports to CPD that the Department was usually able to deny Noir’s requests for Dataminr emails for time periods as small as one day, stating the requests were too burdensome. We tried only requesting one hour’s worth of emails, but CPD stated that was too small an increment of time for the Department to process.

This has made it difficult to discern more about CPD’s use of Dataminr. We did manage to obtain one slow day’s worth of Dataminr emails from October 24, 2023, which included 92 pages of First Alert emails. Recipients of these alerts included Superintendent Larry Snelling, a police captain, a detective, and a CPD intelligence analyst.

First Alert Emails

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We also obtained email correspondence from June 2022 between several CPD officers and a Dataminr Illinois government client specialist. This revealed that intelligence officers for CPD and the Chicago-based Crime Prevention and Investigation Center (CPIC), a Fusion Center based in Chicago, also received First Alert reports. Fusion Centers are specialized centers of collaboration between local police departments and the Department of Homeland Security.

This correspondence also revealed Dataminr First Alert reports were sent to CPD Director of Community Policing Glen Brooks, CPD Deputy Chief Duane DeVries, a CPD media liaison, a deputy director of CPIC, non-specialized officers, and a police sergeant.

Customer Professional Correspondence

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As mentioned previously, the sheer scope of CPD-Dataminr emails has made it difficult to determine the degree to which concerns around privacy, bias, and surveillance of First Amendment-protected activities are relevant for Chicago. One finding that could be worrying was the rejection of a FOIA request trying to determine whether CPD had used Dataminr to monitor pro-Palestinian protests. In its denial, CPD said it had exchanged 11,573 emails with Dataminr that included the keywords “Palestine,” “Palestinian,” “Pro-Palestine,” and “Pro-Palestinian” from Oct. 15, 2023 to August 2024. The request was denied for being “unduly burdensome.”

Palestine Dataminr FOIA Denial

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Noir has submitted more FOIA requests aimed at uncovering the what, where, when, why, and how regarding CPD’s use of Dataminr. We are particularly interested in whether the Department has used it to digitally surveil lawful protest activity.

What we do know is they used Dataminr, and they used it a lot.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) swiftly dispatched a special counterterrorism team to monitor potential pro-Palestinian demonstrations outside of a Chicago office building — despite there being no threats of violence against it.

Greenberg Traurig, a law firm and tenant of 77 W. Wacker Dr. on Chicago’s downtown riverfront, is representing several victims of Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel, in a lawsuit alleging that two pro-Palestinian activist groups, American Muslims for Palestine and National Students for Justice in Palestine, are propagandists for Hamas. Greenberg Traurig’s participation in the lawsuit spurred security concerns for the building’s head of security, Andrew Franzen, who emailed the DHS on May 2.

“This obviously could put our building at risk of being a potential target of protests/demonstrations or even terrorist acts,” Franzen wrote to DHS professionals Chip Buckley and James Ford. “This seems like the type of information that we should be sharing with our partners like yourselves to be aware of and monitor closely.”

Franzen went on to request that DHS distribute “this information to the proper fusion centers like CPIC.” Fusion Centers are specialized, state-operated centers of law-enforcement collaboration between DHS and local police forces, with a focus on counterterrorism efforts. CPIC — or Crime Prevention and Information Center — is a Fusion Center based in Chicago.

Without asking for evidence of any danger, or for any clarification, Buckley thanked Franzen for his outreach, and told him “I passed your information to the counterterrorism section at CPIC; in addition to having a counterterrorism mission, that team monitors suspicious activity reports throughout the city. They’re now tracking the additional context described below [a description of the lawsuit and its parties]. I’ll also keep an eye out in my agency’s holdings about potential acts of violence targeting firms and organizations affiliated with the Oct 7 victims.”

Franzen clarified in a May 7 email to a Chicago Police Department (CPD) officer that Greenberg Traurig had “not received any specific or direct threats that we know of.”

DHS, CPD, 77 W Wacker Email Correspondence

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American Muslims for Palestine, founded in 2006, is an activist group “dedicated to advancing the movement for justice in Palestine,” per its website. The October 7 lawsuit alleges that the organization was “founded from the ashes” of the now-defunct Islamic Association of Palestine, which was “found civilly liable for providing material support to Hamas,” per the lawsuit.

Christina Jump, an attorney representing American Muslims for Palestine, told Noir News that the group “did not derive from [Islamic Association of Palestine], or any other organization.”

She added that “[American Muslims for Palestine]’s two founders, attorney Munjed Ahmad of Wisconsin and Dr. Hatem Bazian of California, held no positions with [Islamic Association of Palestine] (an Illinois corporation) when it did exist.”

Jump has previously acknowledged that Osama Abuirshaid, Executive Director of American Muslims for Palestine, ran Islamic Association of Palestine’s internal newspaper, but contends that efforts to link the two organizations via this connection are overblown, per USA Today.

“He ran the newspaper, because he’s a journalist, and he was paid to operate the newspaper, and he was paid by [Islamic Association of Palestine],” she told USA Today. “He was not a decision maker for [Islamic Association of Palestine].”

National Students for Justice in Palestine is one of the best known academy-focused pro-Palestinian advocacy groups, consisting of chapters across the globe. The group has come into focus in the past year due to its involvement in supporting student encampments pushing universities to sever ties with the state of Israel. The group supports the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The Anti-Defamation League has alleged both American Muslims for Palestine and National Students for Justice in Palestine have promoted antisemitism, which the groups have denied.

Regardless of the allegations, made as part of a civil suit, the emails obtained by Noir do not provide an explanation as to why law enforcement was so quick to task a counterterrorism team with monitoring potential demonstrations despite the lack of any threat. The rights to speech and assembly are protected by the First Amendment. As such, a demonstration wouldn’t be criminal, let alone terroristic.

It’s also unclear what kind of “tracking” CPD, DHS and CPIC engaged in. The emails insinuate that law enforcement would be vigilant against pro-Palestinian protests or attacks targeting the building. As the “context” Franzen provided DHS included a press release describing the lawsuit and its parties, it’s possible the CPIC counterterrorism team began targeted monitoring of members of American Muslims for Palestine, National Students for Justice in Palestine and other activist groups with sympathies toward the Palestinian cause.

This possibility is supported by another fact revealed in the emails. In the lead up to a May 8 visit to Chicago by President Joe Biden, Secret Service Special Agent Robert Norman emailed members of CPD noting that he’d become aware of a planned pro-Palestinian protest against Biden. He went on to request that CPD conduct social media monitoring of groups involved in the protest.

“If your department has any analytical or social media awareness capabilities, I put together the following list of questions that we would be interested in,” Norman wrote on May 7. “Are the accounts making the post or commenting known to your Department? If so, what are their histories? Are there any follow-up posts to announce the time & location of the demo? How many participants plan to attend? What method(s) of demonstration do they plan to use? What equipment will they have? E.g., megaphone, banners, signs, etc. Has it attracted any media attention? Any other information you feel may impact the visit of POTUS to Chicago.”

The groups CPD was tasked with monitoring, per a subsequent May 8 email from Norman, included American Muslims for Palestine and Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as the U.S. Palestinian Community Network and Jisoor USA.

The degree to which social media surveillance of groups protesting near the President is warranted, or at least understandable, is a matter for debate. But the tracking revealed in the May 2024 emails does demonstrate American law enforcement’s willingness to monitor American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine and other pro-Palestinian activists without evidence of a specific threat.

DHS and CPD did not comment when asked for specifics about and the reasoning behind the monitoring.

For Jump, the attorney representing American Muslims for Palestine, the revelations in the emails, which Noir provided her to review, were disappointing.

The specter of law enforcement engaging in direct monitoring of American Muslims for Palestine is “a real possibility,” Jump said, which is especially disconcerting given that law enforcement acknowledged in the emails that, since 2009, American Muslims for Palestine’s protests have “been peaceful and have not led to arrests or incidents.”

“I’m both disturbed and disappointed to see this string, because I think it shows a very clear path of how all it takes is an allegation to get someone, a person or an organization, or people associated with an organization, under pretty serious clouds, without having to prove a single thing,” Jump said, referring to how the accusations in the lawsuit, without being proven in a court of law, seem to have caused law enforcement to treat American Muslims for Palestine like potential terrorists.

She continued, “Pro-Palestinian individuals and organizations are presumed by a lot of government officials, by a lot of law enforcement officials to have bad intent until proven innocent. That’s not how it’s supposed to go, and that appears to be what happened here.”

Chip Gibbons, Policy Director at the civil liberties nonprofit Defending Rights and Dissent, said the emails align with a long history in the United States of law enforcement efforts to chill pro-Palestinian political speech.

“Historically, a significant amount of counterterrorism has been directed at monitoring political speech,” Gibbons said. “Attacks on Palestinian speech and Palestinian organizing has been key to driving this revival of the McCarthyite project under the label of counterterrorism.”

National Students for Justice in Palestine could not be reached for comment.

Andrew Franzen could not be reached for comment.

Stanford University’s Mapping Militants Project (MMP), a U.S. Government-funded initiative that conducts research on “violent militant or extremist organizations,” quietly removed their profile on the Azov Battalion early last month. The Azov Battalion (now known as the 12th Special Purpose Brigade “Azov”) is a Ukrainian National Guard unit infamous for its use of neo-Nazi insignia, recruitment of far-right foreign fighters, and alleged war crimes. The Stanford MMP’s mysterious removal of its Azov profile was followed about a month later by the U.S. State Department lifting its ban on military assistance to the unit, raising questions about the motives behind removal of the webpage.

MMP’s removal of Azov is significant in that it could be used to guide U.S. foreign policy. Though MMP was created and has operated with funding from the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, the papers written by its researchers are cited in academic research, reports and testimony to Congress, government-funded institutions and initiatives, and federal agencies. The website functions as an authoritative source for information on militant and extremist groups, and their interactions and connections over time. At the very least, Azov’s removal means MMP’s list no longer contradicts the State Department’s decision allowing U.S. military assistance to the group, and therefore cannot be used to criticize it.

The Stanford MMP’s takedown of its Azov profile also may have occurred in part due to pressure from Ukrainian diplomats. Late last week, Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova published a post on Facebook celebrating the MMP’s removal of its Azov profile, with a screenshot of the “Page not found” message that appears if one navigates to the Azov MMP profile’s URL. Curiously, Markarova thanked Stanford for its “response,” and thanked her colleagues at the Ukrainian Embassy and the Association of Families of Azovstal Defenders “for constantly drawing attention and joint fight against Russian propaganda and disinformation,” according to Facebook’s automatic translation of the post. Markarova’s mention of Stanford’s “response” and her diplomats’ “constantly drawing attention” raises the possibility of a Ukrainian pressure campaign, spurred by Ukrainian diplomats, to get the MMP to remove its Azov profile.

The State Department and Markarova could not immediately be reached for comment.

Asked about the removal of Azov’s profile, one of the academics behind MMP, Professor Martha Crenshaw, told Noir: “we plan to update that profile, but I don’t know when the update will be complete.” When asked for more details, including whether militant group profiles are typically taken down during an update process, when the update would be completed, what kinds of updates were being made, and whether Azov’s profile would eventually again be visible on the MMP website, Crenshaw and the other MMP academics provided no specific answers. They also did not clarify whether Ukrainian Ambassador Markarova contacted the MMP about removing its Azov profile.

Founded in March 2014 as a volunteer unit to fight pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Donbass region, Azov was subsequently incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard, and gained international attention for its role in re-taking the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol from separatist forces in June 2014. During this engagement, Azov also received scrutiny for its neo-Nazi iconography, in particular an inverted Wolfsangel superimposed over a Black Sun (the former an ancient runic symbol appropriated by the Nazis, per the ADL, the latter “based on a design commissioned by SS leader Heinrich Himmler, and overwhelmingly used by neo-Nazi and esoteric National Socialist movements,” according to the MMP’s now-removed Azov Battalion profile).

Azov is part of the broader “Azov Movement,” a network of far-right Ukrainian groups that also includes a political wing, the National Corps (led by Azov founder and notorious white nationalist Andriy Biletsky), which the U.S. State Department called a “nationalist hate group,” and a paramilitary faction, the National Militia, which has attacked Roma and other minority communities in Ukraine.

Azov came to renewed prominence following Russia’s February 2022 invasion due to its high-profile defense of Mariupol that spring. The destructive battle, during which large swaths of Mariupol’s residential infrastructure were damaged or destroyed, ended in a drawn-out siege of the Azovstal steel plant, beneath which surviving Azov and Ukrainian servicemembers retreated until their May 2022 surrender. The battle for Azovstal garnered substantial international media attention due in part to Azov’s use of Starlink terminals to publish videos about the conditions of the Ukrainian defenders.

Azov’s reputation for combat effectiveness and stubborn defense of Mariupol, coupled with a desire to counter Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claims of nazism in Ukraine (with one stated goal of the invasion being “denazification”), has motivated many pro-Ukrainian commentators to whitewash the unit’s far-right extremism, claiming the unit has been depoliticized and is now entirely distinct from the volunteer battalion that first emerged a decade ago.

This line has also made its way into mainstream media, exemplified by the Guardian’s reporting that: “The 5,000-plus strong [Azov] brigade has shed any far-right associations, relentlessly emphasized in Russian pre-invasion propaganda.”

This is false. As reported by the Nation, many of Azov’s current leaders, including its Commander Denys Prokopenko and Deputy Commander Sviatoslav Palamar, have years-old ties to far-right groups, and the brigade continues to don Nazi symbols on the battlefield and social media. Indeed, Azov has never stopped using the Wolfsangel symbol, which is still part of its official logo and featured on its X/Twitter page. Azov’s founder, Andriy Biletsky, a blatant white supremacist who reportedly said Ukraine’s national mission was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans],” remains closely connected to the unit despite his supposed departure in fall 2014. In his 2022 book From the Fires of War: Ukraine’s Azov Movement and the Global Far Right, author and journalist Michael Colborne argues Azov has not divorced itself from the far right, writing that “[d]espite unconvincing efforts to separate the two, it’s clear that the Azov Regiment is part of the broader Azov movement and should not be treated as something distinct from it.”

The extremism of Azov was essentially undisputed among Western institutions and media outlets until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. That was true for MMP too. Prior to its removal, MMP’s Azov profile documented in detail the force’s far-right ideology, ties with foreign white supremacist organizations, and use of Nazi symbols.

MMP’s removal of Azov’s profile came a little over a month before the State Department’s decision to lift the longstanding ban on the provision of American weapons to the brigade. The State Department, which originally banned arming Azov due to concerns over its far-right extremism, rescinded this policy because the brigade recently “passed Leahy vetting as carried out by the U.S. Department of State,” as reported by the Washington Post on June 10. While a Congressional ban on military assistance to the “Azov Battalion” remains in place under appropriations laws, the State Department said it didn’t believe the congressional ban applied to the group as it exists today, per the Post.

In fact, the State Department has maintained since at least April 2023 that Azov as currently constituted is a different group from the “Azov Battalion” targeted in the Congressional ban, according to comments from a State Department spokesperson quoted anonymously by the Washington Post. The State Department official said the “Azov Battalion” was a non-state “militia group” that has not existed in over five years, and that Azov is now “a different unit.”

“Leahy vetting” is in reference to the Leahy Law, which prohibits the United States from funding “foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights,” per a State Department fact sheet. In reality, not only is the State Department’s original concern around Azov’s ideological extremism still germane, but the force’s human rights record has remained checkered since its founding as a non-state volunteer militia in 2014. Indeed, Azov has been credibly accused of torture, forced disappearances, and extrajudicial killing, all of which are “gross violations of human rights” that would disqualify a military unit from receiving U.S. military aid, according to the State Department’s interpretation of the Leahy Law. Many of Azov’s alleged human rights abuses, which also include the use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes and looting of civilian homes, occurred after the unit was formally integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard in late 2014.

The proximity of the State Department announcement and the removal of the Azov profile could be coincidental, but MMP’s close ties to the U.S. Government cast doubt on an innocuous explanation.

Stanford launched MMP in 2009 and operated the project until 2012 using funding from the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation. In 2019, MMP received funding from the Department of Homeland Security, per the project’s website. The academics behind MMP also have deep ties to American defense. 

Professor Martha Crenshaw, Senior Fellow of Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor Emerita of Government at Wesleyan University, has overseen MMP since it launched. She also served as “lead investigator with the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, funded by the Department of Homeland Security” from 2005 to 2017, per the Stanford website. 

Iris Malone, who co-directed MMP from 2019 to 2022, simultaneously served as Principal Investigator for a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence, the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE). Professor Kaitlyn Robinson, who has served as a researcher with MMP since 2022, formerly worked as a research assistant for the Department of Defense, per her website. Curiously, Robinson described MMP itself as “a member of” NCITE on her website.

The first thing I noticed was the music. I don’t speak Arabic, but every so often I could make out: “Falastin… Falastin… Falastin.” It was a soothing groove. 

One thing was clear right away, the five-piece band playing at the University of Chicago encampment protesting the war in Gaza was pretty good.

Two members of the band were singers, and each time I heard them sing “Falastin,” I heard pain, frustration, sorrow, and hope. One thing I didn’t hear, curiously, was a lust for violence, or even rage. Given the nature of the conflict, I expected some bitterness, some bite.

But there was no bite. The encampment wasn’t just peaceful in the sense that I didn’t hear anyone calling for violence. You could actually feel the peace in the music, in the conversations, in the hugs exchanged by students and faculty. It was tranquil, meditative, utopian. This was the closest thing I’d seen to what I’d read some late 1960s hippy gatherings were like – but with less sex and drugs and more keffiyehs.

There was a sign in the encampment that read “Globalize the Intifada,” a slogan that may make people nervous or feel threatened — perhaps not entirely unreasonably given the violent resistance associated with the Second Intifada. But, at least given the conversations that I had in the encampment, I don’t think the Global Intifada most of the students had in mind was one of explosions. It seemed they were advocating a nonviolent struggle to push the University of Chicago and the United States to stop supporting the war in Gaza and to stop supporting the state of Israel as it currently exists.

After enjoying the music for a while, I approached a young man toward an opening of the encampment. He was tall and wore a black gator mask. Given where he was standing and his serious demeanor, I assumed he was gatekeeping the entrance. But when I asked him about whether I could go in and who I might be able to interview, he looked confused. I interpreted his look as conveying: “why the hell are you asking me for permission to do anything?”

He gestured toward a group of people who looked chatty, and I met Andrew, a Jewish, anti-Zionist student in the encampment. Andrew explained to me that anyone was allowed to enter and exit the encampment, including Zionists, so long as they weren’t there to “cause trouble” or take pictures of people’s faces without their consent.

While I do think the contemporary expectation of many activists that they can’t be photographed or recorded is unhelpful and contradictory (you want to protest publicly, but you want the luxury of privacy?), this was by no means the Soviet-style “Are you a Zionist” checkpoint entry questioning system I had heard was in effect at other campuses. The encampment effectively allowed freedom of movement, and it looked to me like it hadn’t impeded access to the University’s buildings.

Andrew, who didn’t want to provide his last name or be photographed, said he was a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University studying Jewish History and that he’d been involved in activism for Palestine for a few years.

Asked why he was participating in the encampment, Andrew said: “The University of Chicago is very very deeply complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. Through its investments, through its various research connections to universities in Israel and corporations that function in Israel, study-abroads. There’s a real network of support that it offers for the Israeli Settler-Colonial project.”

He added that he wanted the University to divest from its investments in Israel and all weapons manufacturers, disclose all of its investments, and reparate the Palestinian people for the University’s role in harming them.

“It’s been great, a really wonderful community has emerged,” Andrew said.

I asked Andrew for his views on the Israel-Palestine conflict at large and whether, as some advocate for, Jewish people who came to Israel/Palestine in Zionist waves of immigration and their descendants should be made to leave. 

“I speak for myself, not for the encampment. I think I see a single multi-ethnic, multi-national democratic state in the future,” Andrew said.

He did add that it would be hard to know what kind of solution would ultimately be feasible as Israel would likely have to suffer some kind of military or diplomatic defeat for any solution to be on the table.

After chatting with a few other students, each of whom were bright-eyed and very polite, I got three more students to agree to an interview: Jeffrey Sun, a fourth-year, Lukas Borja, a second-year and another UChicago student who preferred to remain anonymous, who we will call the First-Year.

Borja pulled out plastic buckets for sitting on. When I was about to sit on one of the buckets, he stopped me and gave me the sole nearby steel folding chair. I appreciated the back support.

The three of them explained why they came to the encampment. Sun said Israeli airstrikes on Gaza back in 2020, coupled with learning about the nature of propaganda in a class covering Nazi Cinema spurred his interest in advocacy relating to the conflict. Borja said he’d been participating in community-driven resistance for years, which he attributed to his indigenous identity. The First-Year said he was motivated by the principle that humanity as a whole can’t be free if any group is oppressed. All of their explanations were variations on a theme of wanting to end Palestinian suffering.

“We’re here because the bombing is still going on, houses are still being destroyed, and it's really necessary to not lose sight of that,” Sun said.

“We can't treat it as normal. Normal life should not involve genocide,” Sun added.

Borja said the encampment has been able to offer students and faculty perspectives on the conflict that they may not otherwise experience.

“We’ve had visiting, pretty regularly, people who were forced out during the Nakba, and their direct descendants,” Borja said. “Which offers a radically different perspective than what you'll get on the news.”

Like Andrew, the three students advocated for a unified, multinational state. They added that they desire the full right of return for displaced Palestinians.

Many worry that a one-state solution, paired with unlimited right of return for Palestinians, would inevitably result in either a genocide or ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people in a unified state in which they would now constitute an ethnic minority. This is not a worry solely articulated by Pro-Israel activists. The scholar Norman Finkelstein, one of the most prominent advocates for the Palestinian cause, has expressed skepticism about a bloodless implementation of a one-state solution.

The students may be right or wrong about the implications of a one-state solution with a full right of return for Palestinians. But what is clear is that the solution, as they envision it, does not involve an ethnic cleansing of Jews.

“The Palestinian state, as far we all understand it, is not derived around a quote ‘Arab Ethnostate’, where only Arabs can live there. I think everybody here, including a lot of the Jewish people here, know, at least I'm very aware and it's been emphasized in teach-ins, that Jewish people do have ancestral ties to Palestine. But they are not the only people who have ancestral ties. So I can't imagine a world where another Israel in reverse pops up,” Sun said.

The First-Year added: “By showing the solidarity that we are showing here, we are also showing that we do not fall into that contradiction of saying that: ‘oh we want only one group to be free, and all the expenses on the other one’,” The First-Year said. “We want to show that it is indeed possible for all of us to be free, it is indeed possible for all of us to have justice.”

Some days, not every day, I wear a Star of David necklace given to me by my dearest friend. I usually keep it tucked under my shirt when I go out – Jewish anxiety, I guess. I didn't pull it out when I went to visit the encampment. But I could have if I wanted to and no one would have batted an eye.

You might think the students at the encampment were wrong, silly or delusional. Maybe you think their views are bigoted or dangerous. Argue as you like on that.

But if I could commit anything to the historical record here, it would be that I didn't perceive any violence at the encampment. I felt young idealism and serene music.

The only moments I felt breaking up the serenity were students expressing fear that the University of Chicago’s police force would come to clear the encampment, given the University’s president saying that the school would intervene. They were right to worry: the encampment was cleared, beginning early the next morning, May 7.

Sam Carlen contributed to the editorial process for this article.

By the accused priest’s telling, an Archdiocese of Chicago investigation of child sexual abuse had big problems.

Fr. Daniel McCarthy said that during an Archdiocese investigation of child sexual abuse allegations leveled against him, he was never directly questioned about the specifics of the accusations. And despite its child safety policy to remove a priest from his parish until it completes an investigation, the Archdiocese knew about an abuse accusation against McCarthy for around a year before it removed him from Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity Parish or told the public about the allegations.

Noir could not obtain a document verifying McCarthy’s claims, but sources familiar with the Archdiocese’s investigative process confirmed parts of his recollection. The Archdiocese did not respond to Noir’s multiple outreach attempts to get comment on McCarthy’s claims.

Asked about the Archdiocese’s unwillingness to comment on the situation, David Clohessy, former president of the Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), said: “This sounds like an absolute textbook case of how to act if you want to ignore abuse reports and discourage other abuse reports. It’s just unconscionable that they would do so little, so slowly, and so secretively.”

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This article does not attempt to uncover McCarthy’s guilt or innocence — rather it spotlights the potential failures of the Archdiocese’s investigation.

The public first became aware of an allegation against McCarthy when Cardinal Blase Cupich, head of the Archdiocese of Chicago, wrote an open letter on Oct. 17, 2020 to Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity Parish explaining that McCarthy would step away from ministry. The Archdiocese received an allegation that McCarthy committed sexual abuse against a minor “approximately 50 years ago while he was assigned to Angel Guardian Orphanage in Chicago,” Cupich wrote.

The Archdiocese pulled McCarthy from his parish pending an investigation in October 2020. Leah McCluskey, then director of the Office of Child Abuse Investigations and Review at the Archdiocese, contacted McCarthy to tell him about the child sexual abuse investigation process, McCarthy said.

There’s an outline of its investigative process on its website, but the Archdiocese declined to further detail the process, and it’s unclear whether the outlined policies are always followed in practice. Through interviews with sources familiar with the Archdiocese’s investigative process, and a review of documents the Archdiocese released on decades-old abuse investigations, Noir has come up with an outline of how things tend to work.

When a priest gets accused of child sexual abuse, the Archdiocese usually removes the priest from their parish pending an investigation, for the safety of children at the parish in case the priest is guilty. Then its Director of the Office of Child Abuse Investigations and Review contacts the priest to tell him about the accusation and how the investigation will proceed. 

Critically, at some point during their correspondence, the Director of the Office interviews the priest regarding specific details of the allegations, after doing the same for the alleged victim. Using the interviews of the accused priest and the alleged victims, as well as any other information the Director of the Office turns up, the Director compiles a dossier on the investigation and provides it to a group called the Independent Review Board.

The Independent Review Board is a group of mostly lay Catholics (some members have to be clergy) who vote on whether there’s sufficient evidence to suspect a priest’s guilt. The Independent Review Board makes determinations via simple majority, with a tie going against the priest.

Alarmingly, sources familiar with the Archdiocese’s investigative process had different things to say about the Review Board’s role in investigations. Some sources said the Review Board essentially looks at the Director of the Office’s dossier and takes a vote. But former Review Board member Mary Mulhern said the group is deeply involved in the investigative process.

“And that’s why it can sometimes take weeks or months, you know, to dig up all this historical information,” Mulhern said. “So that we are satisfied, we’ve looked at everything possible before we decide whether or not we think it occurred.”

Regardless of how involved the Independent Review Board is in the investigation, the sources were under the impression that the Director of the Office, or at least somebody, always questions the accused priest about the allegation.

But that’s the thing. McCarthy told Noir he never faced direct, specific questioning from anybody, aside from broad questions unrelated to allegation specifics he fielded from the Independent Review Board shortly before they took their vote. The only communication he had with the Archdiocese regarding the specifics of the allegations were written statements he crafted with his lawyer.

McCluskey departed her role a couple of months into McCarthy’s investigation having never questioned the priest, he said. Her temporary replacement, Moira Reilly, also never questioned McCarthy, hardly kept in contact with him and came across as generally disorganized and incompetent, the priest added. A source familiar with the Independent Review Board process also described Reilly’s tenure as marked by disorganization and incompetence.

“She wasn’t, clearly, wasn’t qualified for a position like that,” McCarthy said. “So things got very stalled for quite some time. I went for a number of months without hearing anything from anybody.”

A source familiar with the Archdiocese investigative process told Noir that they thought they recalled Reilly questioning McCarthy with the priest’s Canon lawyer present, but they weren’t sure. The source had difficulty recalling specifics about the McCarthy investigation.

McCarthy told Noir again that no such call occurred when Noir asked him about this possibility.

The months of silence were anxiety-inducing and bewildering, McCarthy said.

“I mean after all this ended, I forget who made the suggestion, somebody suggested I should see a counselor,” McCarthy said. “So I did. And I’ve seen a psychologist ever since. And at one point, he just said, you know this is PTSD. And I could understand that now — I’m healed now — I’m recovered. But you know, there was adjustment time coming back to ministry.”

A source familiar with the Archdiocese’s investigative process said that a lack of contact with an accused priest for this duration of time is not unusual, as the first months of an investigation are typically reserved for investigating the details of the allegation and the accused priest is questioned toward the end.

After the Director of the Office questions the priest, the Director compiles a dossier on the investigation, including the priest’s defense, and provides it to the Independent Review Board, a source familiar with the Archdiocese’s investigative process said. If the Independent Review Board feels the evidence is sturdy enough to make a decision, the Director’s investigative work concludes. If the Independent Review Board feels it needs more information, the Director will continue their investigation.

Regardless of these details, there may have been issues with how the Archdiocese conducted the McCarthy investigation during the months of radio silence with McCarthy. A source familiar with the Archdiocese’s investigative process said that people present at the orphanage at the same time as McCarthy were questioned by the Archdiocese about their impressions of the priest and their experiences with him. But they weren’t questioned about whether specific details regarding the investigation could have been true given the operation of the orphanage.

After months of not hearing from anyone, McCarthy’s lawyer “ranted and raved and yelled and screamed,” to the Archdiocese, which seemed to quicken the process, McCarthy said.

Shortly after McCarthy’s lawyer re-established contact with the Archdiocese, staffers informed him of something alarming, the priest said. There had been a prior accusation of child sexual abuse made against him around a year before Cardinal Cupich wrote the aforementioned open letter. The abuse allegedly took place at the same orphanage described in the letter.

“They never told me, they never told the lawyer, they never told anybody. And you know, the left hand and the right hand were blaming each other. ‘Oh yeah, we sent a message, and he should have called you.’ ‘Well he didn't.’ ‘Well, okay.’ And then he would say, ‘I never got the message, she never sent it,’” McCarthy said.

“Unconscionable, absolutely unconscionable,” David Clohessy, former president of the Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), said about McCarthy’s description of the Archdiocese’s sitting on the first allegation. “And almost certainly self-serving. I’ve been around this for a long long long time, and I cannot imagine any other possible motive.”

A source familiar with the Archdiocese investigative process confirmed McCarthy’s recollection of the described fiasco.

Setting aside McCarthy’s guilt or innocence, if the priest’s recollection is accurate, this means that the Archdiocese was aware of an allegation of child sexual abuse against him for about a year but left him in his post, contradicting their policy to protect children in case of a priest’s guilt. Moreover, it’s unclear whether this allegation received a thorough investigation, as the Archdiocese itself seems to have lost track of it — and the Independent Review Board issued a ruling on both allegations shortly after it told McCarthy about the prior one.

McCarthy said he is under the impression that both allegations were investigated. A source familiar with the Archdiocese’s investigative process said they could not recall whether one or multiple accusations were investigated.

If McCarthy’s telling is accurate, the Archdiocese never told the public that it made this mistake, and never clearly articulated the situation surrounding allegations against McCarthy. 

The Archdiocese then provided McCarthy with redacted written statements outlining the allegations of his accusers. McCarthy responded to the accusations in writing with help from his lawyer and canon lawyer, explaining where details of the accusations didn’t add up, he said.

Shortly after the Archdiocese seemingly recalled that there had been a prior allegation, the Archdiocese determined it had garnered sufficient evidence around the McCarthy case and decided to bring him to speak before the Independent Review Board before it would take a final vote, the priest said.

“My lawyer had prepped me for all kinds of things, you know, if they ask this, if they say that, you know, all that,” McCarthy said.

But his lawyer hadn’t needed to.

“I’m a big baseball nut, and so I described the meeting with the Board as a belt-high fastball. They were lobbing easy questions at me. So it sounded to me like they weren’t really taking — that they had already figured out that this was silliness.”

McCarthy doesn’t remember precisely what questions he was asked, “but I know that they were really simple. It wasn’t about like details of the accusation or anything like that,” he said.

Per McCarthy, the meeting was likely “a belt-high fastball” because the details of the accusations and the lack of witnesses meant the accusations seemed implausible.

The Archdiocese did not provide more details on the investigation. As the alleged victims of McCarthy have not gone public, Noir has not attempted to discern their identities to get comment. 

But even if all of the details of the allegations don’t line up, it’s difficult to discern why the Archdiocese wouldn’t have taken its opportunities to ask McCarthy specific questions about them.

Asked for his thoughts on McCarthy saying he didn’t face any specific questions from the Board or Archdiocese personnel, Clohessy, the former SNAP president, said: “I’m speechless. It frankly just confirms my absolute worst fears about these bodies being, maybe well intentioned, but completely amateurish, especially because these are crimes that involve shrewdness and savvy and cleverness. Again, I can’t imagine why a Board wouldn’t ask about the specifics. I have no law enforcement background and I’m not a psychologist. But common sense would suggest you would want to ask about some of the particulars just to see the body language.”

Cardinal Cupich wrote a second open letter to Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity Parish explaining that the Independent Review Board had found “insufficient reason to suspect Father McCarthy is guilty of these allegations,” on June 14, 2021. In the letter, Cupich writes that “late last year the Archdiocese received allegations of child sexual abuse against Father McCarthy,” omitting the fact, if the priest’s recollection is correct, that the Archdiocese sat on — or lost — the first McCarthy allegation for a year.

Lack of transparency

The alleged failures around the McCarthy investigation call into question the Archdiocese’s lack of transparency regarding their investigative policies and practices.

The Archdiocese will not provide a fleshed out evidentiary standard, investigative or deliberative process, publicly accessible investigative documents (save a tranche related to old cases that was released in 2014), or described reasonings for decisions. This means that assessing the soundness of Review Board investigations remains difficult for the public.

Child sexual abuse investigation experts told Noir these kinds of investigations benefit from transparency regarding policies and procedures, so long as victim confidentiality is preserved.

“There can’t be trust without transparency,” said Robert Peters, a Senior Attorney at the Zero Abuse Project and specialist prosecutor of sexual abuse and child exploitation criminal offenses. “It’s very difficult to heal as a community without a level of transparency.”

When asked why the Archdiocese hasn’t adopted more transparency around its investigations, former Independent Review Board member Mary Mulhern said: “I don’t know — I mean lawyers are obviously the worst case scenario predictors, and their job is to protect their client, the Archdiocese, and that’s not necessarily the same thing as doing the right thing.” 

“Because the lawyer’s job is to make sure that the Archdiocese doesn’t go bankrupt — I mean that’s not its only job, but you have to make sure that your client isn’t unnecessarily hurt financially,” Mulhern said. “And so there are so many factors to take into consideration as to whether or not we as an institution, the Church, publish all of our procedures.”

Sam Carlen contributed to the editorial process for this article.

IranWire prides itself on being an independent news outlet covering the Islamic Republic. The problem is, IranWire isn’t independent.

There are several ties between the regime-critical outlet and the United States government and organizations promoting western foreign policy. Moreover, IranWire draws the vast majority of its funding from the U.S. Department of State, per its affiliate company’s audited financial statements.

These ties have gone largely undiscussed, despite the meaningful perch IranWire has carved out to influence discourse around Iran. The news site garnered over half-a-million visits in October 2023 per SimilarWeb, earned flattering coverage of its work from the Washington Post, and scored a content partnership with the Daily Beast. IranWire articles are routinely used as sources in State Department reports, such as the 2022 Iran Country Report on Human Rights Practices and 2022 Report on International Religious Freedom. IranWire is also frequently cited by prominent media outlets like The New York Times, Reuters, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal, who at times characterize it as an “independent” news organization.

Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian journalist known for his documentaries, survival of torture at the hands of the Iranian regime, and writing for Newsweek, founded IranWire in 2013 “in response to ongoing and brutal assaults on freedom of expression inside the Islamic Republic of Iran,” per the outlet’s website. IranWire says it publishes articles from Iranian diaspora journalists and citizen journalists within Iran. Editorially, the publication “has a strong focus on documenting human rights abuses in Iran, fact-checking official claims and analyzing government competence.”

Bahari’s outlet publishes articles in “several languages including Persian, English, Arabic, Kurdish, Azerbaijani, and Spanish,” with the English-language website featuring only a fraction of the content appearing on the Persian-language version. IranWire has garnered a substantial global following, with approximately 120,000 unique visitors frequenting its website per month, and the outlet reaching a broader audience of 6.5 million monthly through its website and social media accounts, according to the outlet’s affiliate company.

IranWire is owned by Off-Centre Productions, a UK-based media and film production company owned by Bahari through parent company Gelsomina Holdings. Off-Centre Productions was founded in 2010 and has an affiliate relationship with non-profit partner Journalism for Change, founded in 2014 (with Bahari at the helm of its Board of Directors). Journalism for Change’s audited financial statements describe how it works together with Off-Centre Productions to “jointly bid for projects, manage projects, and assist one another in carrying out specific grants and projects.” In 2021 and 2022, Journalism for Change paid Off-Centre Productions approximately $1.96 million and $1.04 million, respectively, “for consulting and other expenses on grants and projects,” according to the nonprofit’s audited financials.

Journalism for Change – and, by extension, IranWire (which describes itself as a “project by” Journalism for Change) – draws the vast majority of its funding from the U.S. State Department: in 2021 and 2022, the Department of State provided 95% and 93% of the organization’s funding, respectively. Much of the funding came directly from State Department programs listed in the financial statements as “Public Diplomacy Programs,” “Regional Democracy Program,” and “International Programs to Support Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.” Other funding was routed through pro-western press freedom organizations, including NetFreedom Pioneers, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Media Diversity Institute, and the Siamak Pourzand Foundation.

The Department of State declined to comment on its relationship with IranWire and Bahari. Bahari could not be reached for comment after multiple outreach attempts. NetFreedom Pioneers, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Media Diversity Institute, and the Siamak Pourzand Foundation could not be reached for comment.

Multiple members of IranWire’s leadership have spent years working for the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX). IREX, founded and sustained with the help of funding from the U.S. government (with U.S. government grants accounting for 90% and 81% of the organization’s funding in 2021 and 2022, respectively), describes itself as “a global development and education organization,” working “in more than 100 countries on issues such as education, leadership, information, and youth.” Off-Centre Productions’ website characterizes IranWire as “a project supported by IREX.”

A significant portion of IREX’s work revolves around supporting media organizations that serve western interests. Pro-western outlets, like Georgia’s Mtisambebi.ge and Netgazeti.ge, as well as Voice of Lebanon, count IREX among their backers. Moreover, in its many reports on the health of nations’ media landscapes, IREX labels various chapters of Radio Free Europe independent and reputable. Radio Free Europe was born as a propaganda operation of the C.I.A. and is still funded and controlled by the U.S. government.

IREX leaders’ professional history also evidences the organization’s pro-western agenda. Between the three most recent presidents of IREX, they boast former employers including the U.S. State Department, Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, Center for a New American Security, United States Institute of Peace, and NATO. The current CEO of IREX, Kristin M. Lord, sits on Radio Free Europe’s board of directors, per the IREX website.

IREX could not be reached for comment.

Prior to joining Bahari to co-found IranWire’s affiliate company Journalism for Change, Mark Whitehouse spent 17 years working for IREX. By his own telling, Whitehouse was an IREX lynchpin. As Director of Media Development, he “led geographic expansion of IREX’s media practice into Africa, Asia, Middle East, and Latin America,” according to his LinkedIn profile. Whitehouse remains President of the Board of Directors of ERIM, IREX’s European arm.

Whitehouse could not be reached for comment.

Whitehouse isn’t the only IREX veteran at the helm of IranWire. Michael De Villiers, board member and treasurer of Journalism for Change, grew “IREX Europe [now known as ERIM] into an innovative development organization with expertise working in support of human rights, freedom of expression, civil society, and education in closed and authoritarian societies and states in conflict,” per the Journalism for Change website.

De Villiers still serves as ERIM’s Director. He could not be reached for comment.

IREX isn’t the only organization complicating IranWire’s claim to independence. Mehrangiz Kar, another Journalism for Change board member, “teaches courses on women’s rights in Iran at the Tavaana E-Learning Institute for Iranian Civil Society,” per the Journalism for Change website.

Tavaana is a formerly State Department-funded organization founded by Mariam Memarsadeghi and Akbar Atri, two well-known advocates of regime change in Iran. Noir revealed that Memarsadeghi and Atri collaborated with the State Department and Mahmood Enayat, the general manager of the prominent Persian news outlet Iran International, to push Twitter to censor posts containing personal information and hateful speech about Memarsadeghi and Atri. Coincidentally, Enayat also founded the Small Media Foundation, an organization that describes itself as supporting freedom of expression and information access in “politically closed societies,” which designed IranWire’s original website.

Kar could not be reached for comment. Atri could not be reached for comment. Memarsadeghi declined to comment.

Another board member, Eric J. Novotny, has more direct ties to the U.S. government, having “previously served as a senior advisor for digital media and cyber security to the US Department of State, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs,” per the Journalism for Change website.

A spokesperson for American University, where Novotny is currently a professor emeritus, told Noir Novotny was “not available” for interviews.

Daily Beast partnership

From 2014 to 2020, the Daily Beast reposted IranWire content without making its audience aware of the outlet’s ties to IREX and the United States government, and described IranWire as a “partner publication.” 

“IranWire seeks to empower Iranian citizen journalists by creating a forum in which young Iranians inside and outside of Iran can discuss national and local news, learn the ethics of reporting, study the craft of writing and Web presentation, and work closely with professionals,” reads the Daily Beast’s description of IranWire.

The Daily Beast could not be reached for comment.

Bahari

Maziar Bahari, IranWire’s founder, comes from dissident stock, assuming he’s accurately relayed his family history. His father and sister were both arrested for their efforts as members of Iran’s Communist Party, per Bahari’s memoir Rosewater. 

Bahari chose a different kind of dissidence, instead becoming a reporter, who, given available evidence, seems to have been a truly independent journalist before founding IranWire.

In his memoir, Bahari paints himself a skeptical realist whose views on Iran lay between the dogmas espoused by the United States and the Islamic Republic. He is critical of the Iranian regime’s suppression of civil rights and self-serving application of Islamic doctrine, but he has no sentimentality for the Iranian monarchic regimes of yesteryear. He reproves the United States’ stalwartly hostile disposition toward Iran and its former colonial relationship with it, while also criticizing Iran’s saber-rattling. He censures Israel for its oppression of the Palestinians, while also condemning Iranian anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

It is within this independent frame, on Bahari’s telling, that he covered Iran’s 2009 election for Newsweek – which Bahari said was rigged in favor of the pro-Khamenei incumbent Ahmadinejad (the legitimacy of the 2009 election is debated). Bahari’s reporting for Newsweek got him arrested by the Revolutionary Guard and imprisoned for 118 days.

The Iranian government could not be reached for comment.

What ensued, on Bahari’s telling, were his interrogator’s tenacious efforts to break him, which included physical and psychological torture. Bahari calls his interrogator Rosewater, the namesake of the book, because that’s what his captor smelled like.

Rosewater attempts to force Bahari to admit to being a spy for the U.S., U.K. or Israel and name members of Iran’s reformist movement as his accomplices. But outside of pushing Bahari to make a nonspecific televised confession-under-duress to being an agent of western intelligence, Rosewater is unsuccessful.

As international pressure to release Bahari mounts and his usefulness to the regime becomes less apparent, Rosewater finally tells Bahari that he doesn’t think he’s a spy.

But Rosewater says he knows something is wrong with Bahari.

“Even though we know you’re not a spy in the classical sense of the word, you’re a media spy,” Rosewater tells Bahari.

Bahari points out what he sees as the logical inconsistencies of Rosewater’s arguments politely enough to his interrogator’s face, while letting the reader know how absurd he thinks Rosewater’s accusation is.

But Noir’s reporting about Bahari’s work with IranWire, the State Department, and IREX reveals something interesting. Caged and blindfolded, Bahari wasn’t who Rosewater thought he was – at least it doesn’t seem that way given available evidence. Since acquiring his freedom, however, Bahari has become something resembling what Rosewater suspected.

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Iran International, a prominent anti-regime media outlet that claims to be the most watched news channel in Iran, touts its editorial independence and lack of ties to any government.

However, emails released by the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveal Mahmood Enayat, General Manager of Iran International, has previously undisclosed ties to the United States government.

In a series of emails from Spring 2018, Enayat was dispatched by the State Department to press Twitter on its decision not to suspend certain accounts that posted hateful content towards the cofounders of a State Department-funded organization critical of the Iranian regime.

A State Department employee “escalated” this issue at the Department after Twitter only took action against a portion of the accounts, and encouraged Enayat to help get the organization verified on Twitter, writing that Enayat should let them know “what [he] might need from State on that.”

Enayat’s links to the U.S. government also include his time at the Small Media Foundation, the organization he founded in 2011 that “works to support the free flow of information in politically closed societies,” with a particular focus on Iran. Small Media has received funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to the tune of over $2 million. The funding came in the form of three separate Cooperative Agreement grants, which are “characterized by extended involvement between recipient and agency.”

Enayat was also director of the Iran Media Program at the University of Pennsylvania, which was "formed through a grant from USAID in 2010” and “ended when the grant funding ran out around the end of 2014," said Julie Sloane, Director of Communications at the university’s Annenberg School for Communication. As director, Enayat was “involved in giving general research direction on the grant,” Sloane added. The program produced several regime-critical reports on Iran's media and social media landscape.

Moreover, Enayat appears to have been invited to the State Department’s 2017 Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) Implementers’ Conference, organized by the Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, Office of Assistance Coordination (NEA/AC). Enayat’s name and role as Director of the Small Media Foundation appear on a guest list circulated by the State Department in September 2017, with Small Media listed as an “Implementer” that works with MEPI.

Iran International is a Persian-language, 24/7 television channel that broadcasts free-to-air over satellite, as well as via radio and on its website. The outlet has been criticized for its financial ties to the government of Saudi Arabia, with the channel’s parent company owned by a Saudi national. It has also faced scrutiny for its alleged promotion of forces for regime change, as exemplified by its spotlighting the eldest Shah scion Reza Pahlavi and coverage of a 2018 rally held by Mojahedin-e-Khalq, an anti-regime leftist and Islamist organization derided by critics as a cult and a terrorist group. The outlet briefly relocated its studio operations to the United States in February 2023 citing a warning from UK authorities that it was "under threat from Iranian agents." In September 2023, the outlet resumed broadcasting from London.

Before founding Small Media, Enayat researched internet filtering at Oxford University's Internet Institute in the late 2000s. Around the same time he covered Iran for BBC’s Persian service before becoming Iran country director for the BBC World Service Trust. In 2011, Enayat founded Small Media, where he worked as the organization’s director until 2018, and around the same time held a senior role at the USAID-funded Iran Media Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Enayat joined Iran International at least as early as October 2018 (we couldn't find a precise start date) as head of its digital department, before becoming its general manager in January 2019.

Enayat and Iran International did not respond to requests for comment.

The State Department dispatch

On March 28, 2018, an apparent State Department employee contacted Enayat regarding the decision by Twitter (now known as ‘X’) not to suspend certain accounts that posted personal information and hateful remarks about Mariam Memarsadeghi and Akbar Atri, the couple that founded the E-Collaborative for Civic Education (ECCE) and the Tavaana E-Learning Institute for Iranian Civil Society, organizations that describe themselves as promoting civic education in Iran. Memarsadeghi and Atri have worked on U.S. government-funded initiatives for years and advocate for sustained sanctioning of Iran and regime change.

State Dept Email Exchange, Mahmood Enayat

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The State Department employee asked Enayat if he could “assist ECCE and reach out to Twitter on this issue.” Enayat responded that he would “follow up with Mariam and Akbar directly,” and subsequently wrote to Memarsadeghi that “[w]e have just filed a report to our contacts at Twitter” seeking the permanent suspension of an account for their tweets targeting Memarsadeghi and other activists.

After Twitter responded and, according to Enayat, ignored the tweets he flagged “related to hateful content,” he subsequently “pushed back on their response,” and bemoaned social media platforms being “used by the regime supporters to spread hate and target Iranian activists.” Enayat wrote that this issue “requires serious attention by us and the [U.S. Government].”

Memarsadeghi wrote back to Enayat, cc’ing a redacted email address likely belonging to a State Department employee, asking “[w]hat can State do to get Twitter's attention? Surely [the National Security Council] and others must have a direct channel of communication.”

In response, a State Department employee wrote: “Concurrent with Mahmood's efforts, I escalated this for our leadership as well. I will keep you posted on who from the [U.S. government] will weigh in on this issue.”

The State Department official also recommended that Enayat “work to verify the Tavaana and TavaanaTech accounts with Twitter,” and let them know “what [he] might need from State on that,” confirming that the individual who first contacted Enayat regarding the allegedly hateful tweets was a State Department employee.

On April 4, 2018, Enayat informed Memarsadeghi that the Twitter account they reported had ultimately been suspended.

Given the redactions, it's difficult to tell which State Department employee or employees were involved in the effort to suspend the accounts targeting Memarsadeghi and other activists. However, two former State Department employees were cc'd in an email chain preceding the Department’s March 28 email to Enayat: Kiarash Ehfad, whose LinkedIn says he was a Team Lead at the State Department from October 2007 to October 2019, and Zakieh Shirafkan, whose LinkedIn says she was a Media Analyst and New Media Consultant at the State Department from September 2013 to March 2019.

State Dept Email Exchange, Ehfad, Shirafkan

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Ehfad and Shirafkan did not respond to requests for comment.

Enayat was again contacted by an apparent U.S. government employee in November 2018, regarding a sudden drop in Tavaana’s Instagram following and engagement. The official wrote to Enayat and Holly Kilroy, Executive Director at the Center for Digital Resilience (CDR), a nonprofit focused on digital security around the world, and formerly Senior Programme Manager at Small Media (Kilroy departed Small Media in May 2018). Kilroy was also cc’d in Memarsadeghi’s April 10, 2018 response to Enayat, at which point she was still working at Small Media.

Enayat, Instagram

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Memarsadeghi, Atri, and Kilroy did not respond to requests for comment.

Earlier ties between the U.S. government and Enayat

Years before the State Department dispatched Enayat to help Memarsadeghi and Atri, the U.S. government was bankrolling Enayat's work.

The first USAID grant to Small Media was approximately $1.1 million and ran from September 27, 2012 through September 26, 2014; the second award was approximately $600,000 and ran from September 16, 2013 through March 31, 2015; the third grant was also approximately $600,000 and ran from July 1, 2013 through March 31, 2015.

Small Media has published a number of research reports on the Iranian digital ecosystem in collaboration with other U.S. government-funded entities. For instance, Small Media produced a June 2016 report titled #IranVotes: Political Discourse on Iranian Twitter During the 2016 Parliamentary Elections in collaboration with Harvard University’s Internet Monitor, a research project focused on Internet content controls funded by the U.S. State Department. Likewise, Small Media published a 2015 report on internet governance in Iran (in which Enayat is quoted extensively) with the support of the Internet Policy Observatory (IPO), created by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication with funding from a State Department grant.

Enayat resigned as a director of the Small Media Foundation in August 2018, but remained a director of Small Media Consultancy Ltd. until its dissolution in March 2020.

Following Enayat’s departure, Adrienne van Heteren became the head of Small Media, about a year after being appointed a director in August 2017. Van Heteren serves on multiple board committees at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a nonprofit funded in part by the U.S. Department of State, as well as the European Commission and the governments of the United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Norway. Van Heteren previously held senior positions at USAID, the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE), the BBC, and elsewhere, and worked as director of development for B92 – a Belgrade-based radio station funded by USAID, the European Commission, and various European governments – during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s.

Van Heteren did not respond to a request for comment.

Organizational ties between Iran International and governments

It's not just Enayat. Several staffers at Iran International have ties to the United States government. They've worked for Voice of America and Radio Farda, which are run and funded by the U.S. government, respectively. One staffer formerly worked for the U.S. government-funded Freedom House, an American non-profit that works to “promote democratic change, with a focus on political rights and civil liberties,” per its website. Another staffer worked for NATO.

Beyond the connections of its staff, Memarsadeghi told government officials that Iran International was open to airing her organizations' U.S. government-funded and tailored content. Broadcasting on Iran International could be an alternative to using social media for her organizations' messaging, she said.

"One option is to not have social media,” Memarsadeghi told the Global Engagement Center, an arm of the State Department, at a meeting. "TV Station Iran International wants to air the documentaries. We can switch to a broadcasting option and only put out our own content, like the documentary series, PSA videos, etc."

Memarsadeghi, GEC, Iran International

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Iran International has come under scrutiny in the past for alleged ties to the government of Saudi Arabia and the alleged influence of the Kingdom on the channel’s coverage. The outlet’s parent company, Volant Media, has a director and majority shareholder named Adel Abdulkarim Alabdulkarim, a Saudi national with alleged links to Saudi executives connected to the Kingdom’s royal court, according to an October 2018 article in the Guardian. Alabdulkarim is also a director and secretary of Global Media Circulating, the entity that holds the broadcasting license for Iran International.

Volant was formerly majority-owned by Saudi national Fahad Ibrahim Aldeghither, reportedly the former chairman of the telecommunications company Zain Saudi. Aldeghither’s control of Volant ended in 2018.

The Guardian piece further reported that, according to an anonymous source, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was the force behind Iran International. The anonymous source also claimed Saud al-Qahtani, bin Salman’s “information tsar,” was involved in funding the outlet.

According to a source cited in the Guardian report, Saudi Arabia provided $250 million (approximately £197 million) to assist in the outlet’s 2017 launch. Iran International does not run online or television advertising, and parent company Volant Media reported operating losses of approximately £86 million and £60.3 million in 2022 and 2021, respectively, raising questions about the source of funds covering these shortfalls. Volant’s costs dwarf its reported income, with the company posting gross revenue of £474,000 and approximately £1.7 million in 2022 and 2021, respectively.

Saudi Arabia’s sway over Iran International was further evidenced by the Kingdom’s agreement to “tone down” the outlet’s critical coverage of Iran, per a March 2023 Wall Street Journal report, citing unnamed officials from both countries. The alleged concession on the part of Saudi Arabia came as the result of negotiations mediated by China that led to an unprecedented deal to restore relations between the rival Middle East powers. The Wall Street Journal had previously reported that some journalists at Iran International thought the outlet’s management pushed a pro-Saudi, anti-Iran editorial stance.

Iran International is among the most popular sources of news in Iran, with a 2021 GAMAAN survey reporting 33% daily viewership of the outlet among respondents, with over half of those surveyed also saying they trusted Iran International “a lot” or “to some extent.”

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That's why you should get your news here, from Noir.

I don't want you to trust me. I want you to heat up and inject the finest, uncut skepticism into your veins before you read my pieces. I want your eyebrows to furrow into angry question marks.

Too many journalists want the world to see them as sexy gallant knights worthy of having the impotent public's underwear tossed at them in admiration. They want to be the light that prevents democracy dying in darkness.

I don't know how to save a democracy. If the good Lord told me how to save a democracy, I don't think I could do it. Hell, I don't even know how to swim.

No journalist is the messiah, and I don't think they should try to be. I'm just another voice in a foggy sea of gray voices. Some people in the news business want to sell themselves as a ray of light shining out from the gray. But I want to sell to you that I'm a sloppy scuba diver. I dive deeper into the gray and I hear voices that get darker and darker and darker. Until I hear the sound of Noir.

Don't trust me. Just read me.

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