Intelligence Tools Developed for Use Against US Adversaries Weaponized Against US (US)

The Core Allegation

The central thesis of Shadowgate is that military-grade psychological warfare and surveillance tools — originally built with US taxpayer dollars to target foreign adversaries — were deliberately turned inward and used against American citizens, politicians, and a sitting US president. Two whistleblowers, Patrick Bergy and Tore, both former government contractors with firsthand operational experience, provide the documentary’s primary testimony.

The Weapon: Shadownet & Interactive Internet Activities (IIA)

Shadownet is described as a commercial spin-off of a military tool called Interactive Internet Activities (IIA) — the Pentagon’s official framework for social media psychological warfare. According to Bergy, the tool was originally developed starting around 2007 under Department of Defense contracts with the 4th Psychological Operations Group to help US forces understand how to conduct micro-targeted, social media-based influence operations against foreign populations — replacing the old tactic of “dropping flyers from planes” with AI-assisted behavioral profiling and narrative control.

Bergy explains that Shadownet functions like an enterprise project management platform, but instead of managing construction projects, it manages what he calls “the most malevolent operations you can imagine” — coordinating networks of media assets, social media influencers, fake personas, and disinformation campaigns simultaneously.

How It Was Turned Against Americans

The documentary lays out a specific sequence of events where these tools migrated from foreign theaters to domestic use:

• Privatization of the technology: Bergy alleges that General James L. Jones, Obama’s National Security Advisor, took the intellectual property rights to the IIA/Shadownet technology — developed at taxpayer expense — and commercialized it through his company Dynology, without authorization from the military.
• Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012: The documentary argues this legislative change removed longstanding protections that had previously prohibited the US government from directing propaganda and psychological operations at its own citizens, effectively “opening the floodgates” for domestic IIA.
• Targeting of US elections: Bergy states directly that after watching this technology reshape elections and trigger color revolutions abroad (including Ukraine), he returned to America and found the same tools being used to “alter the outcomes of our elections in America”.
• Media and narrative control: The documentary alleges that Shadownet was used to coordinate talking points across major mainstream media outlets through embedded intelligence “assets,” including journalists and news personalities, creating a unified narrative across ostensibly independent news organizations.

Specific Domestic Operations Alleged

The documentary catalogs several specific instances where these tools were allegedly deployed against Americans:

• Russia Collusion / Trump Dossier: Bergy alleges the Steele Dossier was itself an IIA product — fabricated disinformation weaponized as part of a coordinated influence operation designed to destabilize the Trump presidency, involving individuals directly connected to the Shadownet network.
• BLM Riots & Ferguson: Bergy claims IIA operations — traceable to servers in Ukraine — were used to foment and escalate the 2014 Ferguson riots and the broader Black Lives Matter movement by psychologically targeting vulnerable communities through free data-enabled smartphones (the “Obamaphone” program).
• Congressional Surveillance: Dynology received contracts for the Congressional Knowledge Management System (CKMS), which managed scheduling, documents, and addresses for all of Congress — and the documentary alleges this data was hosted on servers in Germany, giving private contractors the ability to monitor and potentially blackmail elected officials.
• NSA Data Twinning: Tore alleges that under John Brennan’s direction, a covert “data bridge” was created to duplicate the NSA’s upstream surveillance stream into private contractor servers — effectively privatizing mass surveillance of all Americans outside any government oversight or FISA court regulation.

The Blackmail Architecture

A key element of the documentary’s argument is that the ultimate purpose of combining surveillance data with behavioral profiling tools was political control through blackmail. By building comprehensive behavioral and personal profiles on politicians, judges, and public figures using NSA-derived data, contractors could identify “the buttons to push” to coerce compliance. Tore states: “If I want to blackmail you and put you under my thumb, not only will I know everything, but I will know your deepest, darkest fears”.

Summary of the Weaponization Chain