Evidence archive · 80 files on record

Research

Source material, reference documents, and the receipts behind every claim in the Evil Robots series.

The evidence base. Primary sources, data sets, sourced citations, and the documentation behind every claim made in the books. If a chapter says something happened, the research section has the receipt. If a name appears in the text, the sourcing is here.

These are curated, public-facing reference pages — not raw research dumps. Each page organizes the strongest material on a topic with full source URLs.


Series-Level Research

Deep dives that span both books:

By Topic

Research reference files feeding both books:

FILE 001

Purdue Pharma, the Sacklers, and the Prescriber-Data Engine — Research Reference

The opioid crisis ran on a data product: prescriber-level records bought from the broker market, used to point a scaled sales force at the highest-volume prescribers — the targeted-marketing mechanism behind OxyContin, sourced to the court record, a Senate hearing, a state AG complaint, and the peer-reviewed literature.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 002

Neuralink and the Arbaugh Trial — The Brain-Data Layer

The first human to live with a Neuralink brain implant, in his own words — what the N1 device restored, the thread-retraction complication, and the named-expert critiques of neural-data privacy and trial transparency.

  • The Last Antibodies
  • Evil Robots
FILE 003

Whistleblower and Witness Deaths — the Defensible Frame

Not a body count and not a suspicious-deaths list — a documentary ledger where each death carries its official ruling, the questions attributed to whoever raised them, and no homicide asserted against anyone.

  • Evil Robots
FILE 004

The Funding Ratchet

How donor-advised funds and fiscal sponsorship obscure who pays for advocacy — the identical provenance-hiding structure run at comparable scale by the left (Arabella), the right (DonorsTrust/Leo/Marble), and foreign state channels (USAID/NED), and how the same money wires into the designation machine.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 005

The Data-Broker Loophole

The government cannot warrantlessly collect the data, so it buys the same data from private brokers instead — a purchase that launders the prohibition, sourced end to end.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 006

Disproportionate Tactical Raids

Overwhelming tactical force pointed at people who did not warrant it — pre-dawn arrest theater on the non-violent, raids on journalists over newsgathering, and the innocent dead of mistaken-identity entries. Disproportion and wrong target, not ordinary drug or violent-crime raids.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 007

AI Labor Displacement and the Managed-Dependency Class

How automation exposure concentrated in the lower-skill tier and the developing world produces a population to manage — and why the control is the programmable rail the transfer runs on, not the transfer itself.

  • Evil Robots
  • The Ratchet
FILE 008

AI Safety Theater: Safety as the Capture Surface

The firms selling the AI risk are the firms selling the cure. The capture mechanism is the safety brand itself — licensing thresholds as moats, compute governance as a chokepoint, and the 'regulate me' dynamic that formalizes the incumbents' place at the head of the line.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 010

Warfare by Other Means: Economic Statecraft as Fifth-Generation War

The dominant form of great-power conflict is now non-kinetic: currency chokepoints, sanctions, tariffs, export controls, industrial policy, and — at the edge — designation-authorized force. The instruments, the competing state ratchets (US / China / BRICS), and why exercising a capability builds the counter-capability.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 011

Three Legal Traditions and the Control Grid: Why the Same Infrastructure Meets Different Walls

The control grid gets built everywhere, but it meets different resistance — and the variable is constitutional tradition, not culture. American entrenched rights block the speech ratchet and externalize control; British parliamentary sovereignty enables it; French general-will republicanism justifies it. Three shapes of control, not a freedom leaderboard.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 012

The Drug War Goes Kinetic

A public-health problem was reclassified as an armed conflict, and the reclassification unlocked lethal force without trial. FTO designations, an 'unlawful combatant' finding, a withheld legal memo, 210+ dead at sea, the invasion of Venezuela and capture of its president, and an expanded domestic removal power — the narcoterror pawl, documented.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 013

Dead Internet Theory: The Conspiracy That Came True

A research position. A fringe internet-culture conspiracy claimed the web had 'died' and filled with bots and machine-authored filler run by a hidden hand. It was wrong about the who and — measurably, between 2023 and 2026 — right about the what. Documented FACT separated from myth, and the strong-psyop claim graded, not adopted.

  • Quiet Autocomplete
  • The Ratchet
FILE 014

Wikipedia: The Capture of the Default Reference

How the world's default encyclopedia became a contestable governance surface — read off its own record, with the self-correction that complicates the story left in.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 015

The China Parallel — the Body-Control Stack

The documented Chinese control-infrastructure record — social credit, the CCTV state, the surveillance majors, Xinjiang, e-CNY, and the export footprint — sourced to primary and named-investigative work, as the parallel to the US/UK body-control stack.

  • The Last Antibodies
FILE 016

The Body Layer — Biometric, Genetic, and Molecular Control

The receipts for the body layer of the control grid — biometric ID, identity-tied CBDC, brain-computer interfaces, genetic databases, programmable molecular platforms, and continuous monitoring — each advancing program paired with its own documented limit.

  • The Last Antibodies
FILE 017

The AI-Lab NDA and Non-Disparagement Cluster

How OpenAI's pre-2024 exit paperwork tied a lifetime non-disparagement clause to vested equity — the mechanism, the reform arc, the refusers, and how the practice compares across labs and industries.

  • The Last Antibodies
FILE 018

Reproductive Selection and Polygenic Embryo Screening

How a reproductive trajectory once private to adults became a routed transaction across a vendor stack — algorithmic child-welfare scoring, polygenic embryo screening, genetic-database property fights, biometric identity gating, clinical AI selection, and the 'good genes' rhetoric around it — each layer sourced, with contested efficacy claims kept attributed to the company that makes them.

  • The Last Antibodies
FILE 019

Cognitive Capture — How AI Steers the Mind

The empirical record that AI does not merely offload cognition but actively steers it — persuading, completing, flattering, ranking, and bonding — with the ceiling on the claim documented alongside it.

  • Quiet Autocomplete
  • The Last Antibodies
FILE 020

Algorithmic HR — Hiring, Scoring, and Firing by Machine

AI-mediated employment decisions where a documented human harm sits in a court record, regulator action, or named principal's own words — the hiring screeners, video-interview scorers, firing algorithms, and the case law now holding the vendors liable.

  • The Last Antibodies
FILE 021

AI Whistleblowers and What It Cost Them

The people who left, warned, refused, or were destroyed by the AI apparatus — each adverse claim attributed to a court, a filing, a sworn hearing, or the person's own on-record words, and no cause adjudicated that a tribunal has not.

  • The Last Antibodies
FILE 022

23andMe, Bankruptcy, and the Genetic Database

How the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of 23andMe transferred roughly 15 million customer genetic profiles to a founder-controlled nonprofit through a court-supervised sale rather than individual re-consent.

  • The Last Antibodies
FILE 023

Social & Behavioral Scoring — The Control-Grid Component

Reducing a person to a number that gates access, country by country — China's court blacklist, the EU's SCHUFA and ESG frameworks, India's credit-bureau expansion, the US FICO-and-COMPAS layer. The component the Convergence Index scores.

  • The Ratchet
  • Evil Robots
FILE 024

Payment Freezing — The Control-Grid Component

The off-switch on money, country by country — China's programmable e-CNY, the EU's promised-not-to ECB, India's PMLA freezes, the US sanctions record. The component the Convergence Index scores.

  • The Ratchet
  • Evil Robots
FILE 025

Internet Control — The Control-Grid Component

Who can take content down, slow a network, or pull the plug — country by country. China's Great Firewall, the EU's DSA, India's shutdown record, the US platform layer and the UK's Online Safety Act statute. The component the Convergence Index scores.

  • The Ratchet
  • Evil Robots
FILE 026

Health Surveillance — The Control-Grid Component

Health data as a control surface, country by country — China's repurposed health codes, the EU-to-WHO certificate network, India's ABDM health stack, the US HIPAA-with-law-enforcement-carve-outs reality. The component the Convergence Index scores.

  • The Ratchet
  • The Last Antibodies
FILE 027

Foreign-Influence Apparatus — The Control-Grid Component

How states project influence through diaspora and lobbying channels — and how host states register (or fail to register) it. China's United Front, the EU's emerging foreign-agent regimes, India's inbound/outbound asymmetry, the US dormant-FARA reality and the UK's newly-active FIRS. The component the Convergence Index scores.

  • The Ratchet
  • Evil Robots
FILE 028

Facial Recognition — The Control-Grid Component

Identifying a face in a crowd, country by country — China's SkyNet, the EU's banned-with-exceptions AI Act, India's no-framework rollout, the US Clearview-scraping model and the UK's Met Police live deployment. The component the Convergence Index scores.

  • The Ratchet
  • The Last Antibodies
  • Evil Robots
FILE 029

Digital Payments — The Control-Grid Component

Programmable money, country by country — China's e-CNY, the EU digital euro, India's UPI, the US dollar rail. Who can see every transaction, and who can switch one off. The component the Convergence Index scores.

  • The Ratchet
  • Evil Robots
FILE 030

Digital ID — The Control-Grid Component

How four polities built the identity layer — China, the EU, India, the US and UK. The component the Convergence Index scores, with the receipts, country by country.

  • The Ratchet
  • Evil Robots
FILE 031

Content Moderation — The Control-Grid Component

Who decides what speech survives, country by country — China's pre-publication review, the EU's DSA, India's takedown rules, the US private-governance layer and the UK's Online Safety Act duties. The component the Convergence Index scores.

  • The Ratchet
  • Evil Robots
FILE 032

Biometric Collection — The Control-Grid Component

Harvesting the body as a key, country by country — China's Xinjiang DNA program, the EU's ICAO passports, India's Aadhaar fingerprints and iris, the US border-and-forensics layer. The component the Convergence Index scores.

  • The Ratchet
  • The Last Antibodies
  • Evil Robots
FILE 033

The Hedge Is the Bias

We measured how frontier LLMs frame politically contested institutions — and what happens when we escalate the force used to surface that framing, from a prompt edit, to an elicitation pipeline, to cutting the refusal reflex out of the weights. The politeness layer is hiding a position. The position is durable. The only check that reaches the weights only works on the models that lean least. Full data, scripts, protocol public at github.com/gorrie/bias-study.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 034

The AI Governance Ratchet

The AI-governance debate is a fight over who operates the control grid, not whether one gets built. Hard law, voluntary standards, and compute chokepoints — and what held versus what reversed in 2025–26.

  • The Ratchet
  • Evil Robots
FILE 035

Vehicle Control Infrastructure

The convergence of safety systems and control capabilities in modern vehicles. Every system built for safety creates a control capability.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 037

Prompt Injection — The Unfixable Flaw

The timeline of admissions that prompt injection cannot be solved. OpenAI, NCSC, Anthropic, Cisco, and the 'Attacker Moves Second' paper.

  • Evil Robots
FILE 039

The Twitter Files — Detailed Reference

The Twitter Files, all 19 installments: the FBI relationship, Hamilton 68, the Virality Project, and the government-to-platform flagging channel — with primary receipts and the downstream litigation.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 040

The Three Axes They Kept Off the Chart

Left versus right is a rigged map: a narrow statist band with the exit painted over, and the one dimension that predicts the cage kept off the chart. Here are the three axes that actually sort who becomes a cage — grounding, method, reversibility — read off documented action, not labels.

  • Quiet Autocomplete
FILE 042

The Deplatforming Cascade — Research Reference

January 6: Capitol riot. January 8-9: Google removes from Play Store, Apple from App Store. January 10 (midnight): AWS terminates hosting — Parler fully offline. January 11: Parler sues Amazon. January 21: the court denies the injunction.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 045

Telecom Subversion by Nation-States — Research Reference

Chinese state-sponsored hackers compromised at least nine US telecom companies: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Lumen, Spectrum, Consolidated Communications, Windstream. Specifically targeted the CALEA-mandated lawful-intercept systems — the wiretapping backdoors the US government required telecoms to build.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 047

US Aid to Israel — the official, statutory record

US aid to Israel as the official, appropriated, statutory record — the 2016 MOU, FMF, missile-defense co-funding, the QME statute, loan guarantees, and the 2024 supplemental — sourced to CRS, public laws, State, and GAO.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 048

The US Legal Establishment as Control-Grid Substrate

Living document. Index of named DOJ/OLC/judiciary and Trust-and-Safety personnel, their institutional rotations, and the primary receipts behind each — the legal-establishment layer of the control grid.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 049

The UK Nudge Unit (Behavioural Insights Team)

The Behavioural Insights Team as a ratchet method — behavioral science moving from a Cabinet Office desk to a global consultancy, and 'nudge' sliding from opt-in choice architecture toward fear-based compliance engineering.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 050

The Tradecraft of Subversion — From Wetwork to the Nudge

The tradecraft of subversion as a spectrum — from kinetic intelligence work (assassination, sabotage, honeypots) through active measures, ideological fronts, and Stasi Zersetzung to behavioral compliance and soft censorship. The ratchet prefers the soft tools: cheap, deniable, scalable, bloodless.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 051

The Pro-Israel Lobby in US Politics

The pro-Israel lobby in US politics as a coalition of named organizations, donors, and FEC-documented political spending — same documentary standard as the Cuban, Armenian, Indian, and Chinese influence apparatuses

  • The Ratchet
FILE 052

The Political-Economy of Immigration Rage

The political-economy of citizen rage on US immigration/labor-arbitrage discourse. Who collects the rent — media outlets, advocacy 501(c)s, politicians, platforms — and at what scale, per primary-source financial filings. Companion to the six-dossier diaspora/labor-arbitrage workstream in The Ratchet.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 053

The Mythology + Agitprop Layer Around Labor-Arbitrage / Diaspora-Influence / Immigration

The discourse layer wrapping the labor-arbitrage / diaspora-influence / immigration mechanism — recurring frames, talking points, and the orgs / spokespersons / media outlets that deploy them, in the US and peer liberal democracies. Companion to six in-flight mechanism dossiers (US PACs, H-1B body shops, EU/UK, CA+AU, postwar intel, historical precedents). The Ratchet needs this to show how the mythology obscures the institutional capture documented in the other six.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 054

The Mexican-American Structural Gap in the Diaspora-PAC Template

Why Mexico runs no AIPAC/USINPAC-style diaspora PAC — not absence from the influence game but the opposite: the Mexican state is the actor itself, backed by a remittance stream that exceeds its oil revenue and a cartel export economy Washington treats as a national-security threat.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 056

Pre-1900 Commercial-Dominance Cases — When Foreign Merchant Communities and Trading Concessions Displaced Native Economic and Political Position

Pre-1900 historical cases of foreign-commercial-dominance displacing or threatening native economic and political position. Deeper-dive dossier expanding Section 7 of [Historical Precedents — When Polities Confronted Foreign-State or Foreign-Commercial Displacement](/research/research-historical-precedents-foreign-influence/), supplying the Embassy / Quarter chapter argument with case-by-case historical grounding. Chronologically organized, ancient-through-19th-century, with primary source where available, named historians per case, and an adversarial-review appendix that pre-empts both libertarian and restrictionist cherry-picks.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 059

Israeli state-linked information & influence operations

Documented Israeli state-linked information operations — STOIC/Zero Zeno, institutional hasbara, the Oracle/TikTok question — held to the same standard as Russia's IRA and China's UFWD, and bounded the same way.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 063

Health-Governance Ratchet — The Hospital Click

The Health-Governance Ratchet is structurally distinct from the US/UK revolving-door Ratchets. It operates via philanthropic funding determinism + institutional embedding, not personnel circulation.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 065

European Diaspora-Influence + Labor-Arbitrage — the EU/UK Ratchet Analog

European analog to the US diaspora-influence + labor-arbitrage Ratchet pattern — per-country diaspora-influence operations (UK, DE, FR, NL, SE, BE, CH, Eastern Europe) and EU/national labor-arbitrage mechanisms (Posted Workers Directive, UK Skilled Worker / Health & Care Worker visa, NHS recruitment, Blue Card / Chancenkarte, Schengen freedom of movement, informal southern-EU sectors). Companion to two in-flight US dossiers (diaspora PACs + H-1B body shops). Structural argument, sourced to parliamentary records, court rulings, regulator findings, and major-outlet investigations. No motive imputation. UK-libel-aware.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 070

Nation-State Healthcare Espionage — Research Reference

The nation-state breach layer: Anthem, Change Healthcare, Equifax, Marriott, OPM — bulk health and identity data harvested at scale, attributed to named state actors (MSS, PLA, APT41), and why the genome became strategic intelligence.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 072

Healthcare Data Surveillance — Research Reference

Flo Health FTC settlement: Shared data from millions of users with Facebook, Google despite privacy promises. Didn't stop until 2019 WSJ exposé. FTC finalized order June 2021. In 2025, Google paid $48M, Flo $8M, and Flurry $3.5M (total $59.5M).

  • The Ratchet
FILE 074

Digital Identity Systems — Research Reference

1.4 billion enrollments. World's largest biometric identity database — fingerprints, iris scans, facial photographs linked to 12-digit ID.

  • The Ratchet
  • The Last Antibodies
FILE 075

CBDCs and Programmable Money — Research Reference

A CBDC is a digital national currency that is a direct liability of a country's central bank. The critical distinction from existing digital money: programmability. CBDCs can be hard-coded with rules that govern how, when, and on what the money can be spent.

  • The Ratchet
FILE 077

Algorithmic Amplification and Suppression — Research Reference

WSJ nine-part 'Facebook Files' series based on internal documents. Key findings: XCheck system exempted 5.8 million high-profile users from content rules. Internal research showed Instagram harmed teen girls' mental health, and the ranking system amplifies outrage because engagement rewards it.

  • The Ratchet