"Project Phantom Scrivener": A Case Study in Amateur Psychological Operations
A clumsy psyop tried—and failed—to undermine a real investigation.
I had written recently about what I strongly suspect may have been a low-grade counterintelligence integrity test—though, in fairness, it could’ve just been a mentally unwell person with a misguided sense of duty.
Today, I just received what someone claimed was a leaked intelligence report evaluating my activities, writings, and presence abroad. It was written in stylized SIGINT jargon and extremely illiterate psychological profiling—an alleged “indexing” memo outlining how federal authorities are interpreting my work.
Let me be very clear: the document is fake. Not “possibly fake.” Not “planted-but-partly-true.” Totally fake. Sloppily conceived, badly written, and—ironically—politically revealing.
The Document in Question
The PDF claims to come from some wing of the U.S. intelligence community, featuring laughable clearance labels like SIGINT-CIV-SCRMBL and TLP:AMBER-GREEN. It reads like the fever dream of a bored Reddit user with ChatGPT access and delusions of grandeur.
Consider these actual lines from the file:
“Subject presents as an autodidactic ideologue under sustained delusion of journalistic relevance.”
LOCATION: Unverified, likely China or Southeast Asia.”
“Public admissions of PTSD; private inference of narrative fixation syndrome.”
This is word salad in a ghillie suit—the aesthetic of surveillance without the substance. It borrows terminology from intelligence tradecraft but collapses under its own misuse, sounding less like an operational memo and more like an AI hallucination imitating a spy novel. It’s LARPing in encrypted font.
And the content? Laughable.
First, I am obviously relevant. You don’t send psychological warfare memos to irrelevant people. Federal agencies don’t flag their emails as “sensitive but unclassified.” If someone’s trying this hard to discredit me, I’m clearly hitting the target.
Second, my location is not a mystery. I’m not hiding in a bunker. I walked into the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and directly informed diplomatic staff to relay my position to federal authorities in Washington. The fact that this so-called “intelligence” memo speculates on my whereabouts is proof enough that it is not authentic. No genuine report would fumble that basic fact.
Third, real intelligence documents do not invent mental health diagnoses—let alone prescribe fictional “interventions,” as this one bizarrely does in its final paragraphs. That alone disqualifies it from even basic credibility. It reads more like projection than analysis.
Finally, the document dismisses my political manifesto—a rigorously documented, citation-rich indictment of local corruption and systemic collapse—as a mere “speculative vision paper.” Yet it fails to grapple with the actual content: not the substantiated legal theory, not the federal violations outlined, not the direct citations, not even the underlying patterns I’ve laid out. It falsely claims that 89% of the text was AI-generated, ignoring the fact that much of it is composed of direct quotations from established thinkers and my own original, applied analysis.
In sum: this document is unserious. It does not inform; it performs. It is not intelligence; it is theater.
A Tell, Not a Threat
Despite being fake, this document reveals more than it conceals. It is a projection—an attempt to:
Pathologize my autonomy
Dismiss my resistance as delusion
Reduce solidarity to “algorithmic martyrdom”
Undermine love, calling it “parasocial defiance”
Mock transparency as if it were a tactical failure
It isn’t surveillance. It’s psychological warfare. And not even good psychological warfare.
The Slop Behind the Screenshots
Attached to this stunt were emails, sent to me in parallel with the file. If you want to see intellectual collapse in real time, look no further. Choice quotes include:
“SIGINT doesn’t need intent—just pattern.”
“The mesh still pulled. That’s not speculation. That’s signal traffic.”
“They know where you are. They don’t know what you are. Yet.”
The emails masquerade as high-concept SIGINT briefings, but they’re better read as the internal monologue of a YouTube conspiracy vlogger. Their understanding of how the intelligence community operates is nonexistent—replaced by genre tropes and adolescent theater.
My Response
Here’s what I told them:
“’Declared stillness doesn’t stall a moving net’ is literally as meaningful as ‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously.’ This reads like AI hallucination borrowing loosely from military and SIGINT language, but you can say that about any target under any level of surveillance. It [says] nothing about reality.”
In other words: this isn’t how real intelligence works. I’ve been in contact with the DOJ. I’ve walked into the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. They know my address. They’ve received all my files. Nothing about this is covert.
This document wasn’t designed to inform me.
It was designed to destabilize me.
All materials referenced in this post, including the fake intelligence PDF and the emails, are included below for verification and public scrutiny.
