Patrick Ryan, a congressional candidate from New York, is leaning on his experience as a small business entrepreneur to establish his readiness for office, but he has curiously failed to mention the business he used to work in: domestic surveillance.

Seven years ago, Ryan, then working at a firm called Berico Technologies, compiled a plan to create a real-time surveillance operation of left-wing groups and labor unions, hoping business lobbyists would pay top dollar to monitor and disrupt the actions of activist groups across the country. At one point, the proposal included the idea to spy on the families of high-profile Democratic activists and plant fake documents with labor unions in a bid to discredit them.



The pitch, a joint venture with a now-defunct company called HBGary Federal and the Peter Thiel-backed company Palantir Technologies, however, crumbled in 2011 after it was exposed in a series of news reports.

Years later, Ryan pivoted to a startup called Dataminr, a data analytics company that provided social media monitoring solutions for law enforcement clients. Dataminr, which received financial support from the CIA’s venture capital arm, produced real-time updates about activists for law enforcement. For example, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of California and reported by The Intercept for the first time, Dataminr helped track social media posts relating to Black Lives Matter.



Ryan is one of several Democrats hoping to challenge freshman Rep. John Faso, R-N.Y., for a seat that is expected to be among the most competitive in the country. The Hudson Valley district contains both staunchly conservative and liberal pockets. Donald Trump won the district by a seven-point margin in 2016, but even when Barack Obama took the district by six points in 2012, Democrats failed to win the congressional seat. Republicans have held the 19th District since it was formed eight years ago. This year, as Democrats anticipate a wave of victories in response to Trump and the GOP’s wildly unpopular agenda, they hope that the 19th District, will finally turn blue.

The candidate has the backing of some of the more conservative elements of the Democratic Party. His campaign has won financial support from The New Democrat Coalition PAC, a group that supports business-friendly Democrats for Congress. The PAC is hoping to dramatically expand the number of moderate and conservative-leaning Democrats on Capitol Hill next year and, along with the Blue Dog PAC, is working aggressively to counter more populist and progressive candidates running in Democratic primaries for the midterm elections. Ryan, who served as an Army intelligence officer in Iraq, also won support from Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., who has helped raise cash and build political support for a group of veterans and mostly moderate Democrats running for office this year.

In a statement to The Intercept, Ryan’s campaign said he expressed “concerns with the nature of the work” at Berico Technologies:

Pat grew up in a union household. He knows the value of the labor movement, and has always been a strong supporter. In his first job after serving in the U.S. Army, Pat worked at a small software firm and was assigned to develop a proposal, but had concerns about the nature of the work, especially in relation to the protection of American citizens’ privacy and civil liberties. The project did not move past the proposal stage. Later in his career, Pat worked at Dataminr, a firm with a strong commitment to privacy and civil liberties. His work at the firm saved lives by providing real-time information to first responders and others in harms way. This is a critical area for national security as we work to find the right way to leverage digital intelligence and protect innocent Americans.

The candidate’s history of spying on progressive groups has been conspicuously absent from the personal history he has presented to voters.



The biography section of Ryan’s campaign website references only another technology business he helped found, called Second Front Systems. That company deploys “cutting-edge data analytics software to our troops on the front lines,” according to the site. Ryan continues to own a 10 percent stake in the firm, valued between $15,000 and $50,000, and has discussed his work with the startup as part of his experience of building a business and providing jobs.

But that business venture appears not to have been as successful as Ryan’s domestic surveillance work — at least not from a moneymaking perspective. His candidate ethics disclosure, which covers money made in 2016 and 2017, does not list any income from Second Front Systems — of which he is still a director — but it reveals that in 2016, Ryan collected $325,510 as a vice president of Dataminr.

In an hourlong presentation to local Democratic voters with Ulster Activists and Move Forward New York, Ryan stressed his experience as a small business entrepreneur. At one moment during the January 7 event, Ryan referenced his job at Dataminr, but did not mention the company’s name or the type of work it engaged in. In a question about whether taking a job in Congress would constitute a pay cut, Ryan said yes and that he had taken work at another “another tech company” in which he “leads the government team.” In terms of his business career, Ryan talked at length about his efforts to employ former veterans.