GitHub Wire Fraud
GitHub Wire Fraud is a set of tactics that people use to misrepresent the apparent authorship, labor and activity when viewed through GitHub blame and insights.
The intellectual property in OSDI specification is at the core of my complaint in federal court against Action Squared, Action Network, AFL-CIO, DNC, MoveOn.org, Civitech and Nathan Woodhull. The claims are copyright infringement, racketeering and violation of section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
The complaint can be found at this URL.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.611005/gov.uscourts.nysd.611005.29.0.pdf
The most important part is the unfair competition section, because Defendants' unlawful conduct in a market that constitutes essential resources for candidates running for election makes primary elections less fair, since Defendants used the proceeds of their racketeering to create gatekeeper powers.
One tactic used is making commits that include more changes that don't constitute authorship than those that do.
GitHub "blame" shows the last person to make a change to a line in a file. That's different from authorship. A recent committer can add a period, change indentation, or copy/paste, which will change the "blame" attribution.
When the OSDI specification is viewed in blame mode, the authorship appears to be that of Action Network's Director of Technology, Jason Rosenbaum, user "j-ro"
https://github.com/opensupporter/osdi-docs/blame/gh-pages/README.md
However, the underlying authorship for the essential IP in the specification is largely mine (joshco). Seeing the fraud in its entirety requires stepping through the commit history.
However, to see the highlights, here is an early version of the specification, which was sole authorship by me, emailed to the committee in 2013.
https://groups.google.com/g/osdi-dev/c/GxbZciz7dk4
Next, here is the version of the specification just before Action Network joined in November 2013.
https://github.com/opensupporter/osdi-docs/tree/precan
It can be viewed in "blame" view, which shows my underlying authorship:
https://github.com/opensupporter/osdi-docs/wiki/
At this point, it should be clear that anyone who has been led to believe that Action Network is responsible for the authorship should realize that they have been misled.
For those with the energy, here is an exhibit which lays out the evolution of the authorship for each section in the README, which is the core of the specification.
https://joshco-public.s3.amazonaws.com/exhibit_2_osdi_published.pdf
OSDI Person Signup Helper is the most commonly used part of the OSDI specification. OSDI uses Helpers to optimize common scenarios that would normally require multiple REST based operations. From the spec:
OSDI also allows a client to perform a number of operations at once that in a traditionally RESTful API would take multiple requests through the use of helpers. For example, helpers can be used to create a new Person resource and register that this new person also signed a petition at the same time, something that with REST would require two operations (first creating the person, then associating them with the petition).
The original authorship of Person Signup Helper is mine, beginning Apr 30, 2014. in the following two commits. The first is the original authorship, the second is a change to the hierarchical structure of the message.
https://github.com/opensupporter/osdi-docs/commit/e4f894def976ee35851d8bf70360ec5b9c0eee21
https://github.com/opensupporter/osdi-docs/commit/a1e290416326f5a9f604fbe4152c936359705b88
On Dec 29, 2014, Jason Rosenbaum (j-ro), copied and pasted the authorship, tweaked it, and placed it in a new file. In his commit message he states: "person signup helper first draft", which is an act of wire fraud.
https://github.com/opensupporter/osdi-docs/commit/8a50587649f12f37fcc25a76ccfc0ad2656b517a
Another tactic used was busywork activity. If you look at the insights page, it appears that Dan Ryan is a significant contributor to the work and its value.
https://github.com/opensupporter/osdi-docs/graphs/contributors
However, if his pull requests and commits are reviewed, there is little authorship. For example this pull request was to add a Ruby Gemfile, which is a build file unrelated to authorship. Within the pull requests there are 11 commits which pad his activity level.
https://github.com/opensupporter/osdi-docs/pull/324/commits
You may now be asking yourself, what made the specification valuable enough to put in the effort to engage in this fraud?
By 2017, the set of applications that were compliant with the OSDI specification was the largest REST based application ecosystem in the market for Digital Microtargeting Platforms. The platforms and applications are essential tools needed by people who run for elections and ballot initiatives.
Action Network wanted it for itself. The common wisdom at the time was that OSDI would fail quickly as previous efforts had.
https://joshco-public.s3.amazonaws.com/d565_i.pdf
When Action Network joined in 2013, it agreed to the following governance policy, stipulating that derivative works of the specification, and decisions would be made democratically, by majority vote.
The policy was adopted in August 2013:
https://groups.google.com/g/osdi-dev/c/pxHKkOGPNlc/m/PWYWbJOgwj8J
https://joshco-public.s3.amazonaws.com/D483.pdf
When Action Network joined they were provided with the policy, which was reviewed with them via a telephone meeting.
https://joshco-public.s3.amazonaws.com/D208_i.pdf
If that had been accurate, Action Network could claim OSDI as its proprietary API and the application ecosystem. However, instead of failing quickly, it became a success, functioning as a democracy until Defendant's racketeering destroyed it and misappraised its assets. Motions and other committee business are saved on the committee Google Groups.
Governance decisions made by motion happened in the Governance Committee:
https://groups.google.com/g/osdi-governance
A subset of governance was the executive committee of officers including Chair (myself) and VP of Outreach (Jason Rosenbuam)
https://groups.google.com/g/osdi-exec/
Technical work occurred in the tech committee:
https://groups.google.com/g/osdi-dev
In digital platform markets, which this market is, an app stores model (vs the WWW) results in concentration. Like the mobile space, there will likely be a few dominant app stores and new app stores will be unlikely to gain a critical mass.
In 2017, Reid Hoffman entered the market. His political director, Dimitri Mehlhorn disbursed Hoffman's money. In August 2017 Mehlhorn pitched me to fund OSDI but use it as a proprietary asset by what would become VC Higher Ground Labs. I refused because I was only interested building a level playing field.
https://joshco-public.s3.amazonaws.com/D676_i.pdf
https://joshco-public.s3.amazonaws.com/D672_i.pdf
https://joshco-public.s3.amazonaws.com/D1873_i.pdf
In the end, Higher Ground Labs' portfolio ultimately used OSDI for their own proprietary benefit. How that happened was trough racketeering using predicate acts of wire fraud, extortion, and copyright infringement.
The extortion scheme began in summer 2016, trying to coerce me to abandon my copyrights by concealing the fact that I am gay, framing me as an example of sexual harassment and violence towards women. This allowed Defendants to apply "the man's side doesn't matter" to a gay male's property rights, and disguise a robbery by extortion by portraying themselves as holding another man accountable.
Their scheme used deception to inflict serious unjust harm to my economic viability and created a foreseeable risk if inciting violence against me. This scheme can be used as a pretext for a third party to commit a hate crime against a gay male.
Defendants' engaged in reckless endangerment in plain sight.
I chose to endure the extortion, and in summer 2017, the window for Action Network to gain dominant control of the ecosystem was about to close. Defendants conspired to provoke a false-flag lawsuit that they could misrepresent. Action Network and others used that as a pretext to gain control of OSDI and try to coerce me to resign. I insisted that Action Network keep its agreement to democracy as a governance structure. If they wanted me out, they could make a motion and secure majority vote, which they had the power to do. Instead they resorted to coercion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy9jQYpJ9rY
The participants in the racketeering conspiracy also engage in other, sophisticated fraud:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/us/reid-hoffman-alabama-election-disinformation.html
Misappropriating the essential IP in the specification allows the recipient to use the OSDI application ecosystem to get a head start on their proprietary ecosystems. In order to do that, Defendants engaged in copyright infringement. Defendants engaged in racketeering conspiracies to gain control of OSDI, operate it, and invest the proceeds of their racketeering into their own enterprises. RICO laws are designed to prevent this type of criminal behavior. The two main enterprises places this IP ended up was the portfolio companies of venture capitalist Higher Ground Labs and Action Squared, a joint effort between Action Network and AFL-CIO.
Action Network's use of the OSDI IP can be found at:
- https://web.archive.org/web/20201216013651/https://actionnetwork.org/docs/v2/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20201216022013/https://actionnetwork.org/docs/v2/person_signup_helper
In Summer 2022, ActionBuilder released their API, which is published at:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220914003447/https://www.actionbuilder.org/docs/v1/index.html
Civitech's infringement is the most harmful to the fairness of primary elections, so I've focused on that. Civitech's API definition copies parts of the OSDI specification. Defendants also used a shell game to essential launder the IP. The original product was called LightRail, funded by VC Acronym, renamed Shadow, divested and renamed Bluelink, then acquired by Civitech.
Reviewing their documentation shows copying of OSDI Person. Though it is obfuscated, their API spec is OSDI person signup helper.
Since filing my complaint, Bluelink has deleted their API specification, which is destorying evidence to prevent discovery. However, in 2023, I archived the page on the Internet Archive. It's URL is
https://web.archive.org/web/20230528101658/https://bluelinkdata.github.io/docs/BluelinkApiGuide
The Internet Archive doesn't preserve the rendering of Markup, so it is text based. I took screenshots (prior to their deletion) and paired it with the parts of the OSDI spec they copied. Bluelink's API copies parts of OSDI and includes small, incompatible changes. This facilitates exploitative behavior. With little extra coding, Bluelink can be compatible with OSDI implementations, allowing it to get a head start. By adding proprietary, incompatible changes, developers who write code according to Bluelink's documentation will be incompatible with OSDI and locked in to Bluelink's proprietary API (which is really obfuscated OSDI). Developers will not know that they are using OSDI.
