The rebellion | Walter's War Ep 3

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Tortoise. My guest today, Oliver Lewis, is an advisor and former executive for Improbable, a British-based tech startup that recently teamed up with their British government to create arguably the most complete simulation ever of how the internet works.
It's October 2017. Oliver Lewis has just left Improbable, leaving the world of unicorns and simulations for somewhere rather less sexy, the British civil service.
He starts working in its digital wing, where old-time civil servants mix with developers and data scientists to transform online public services. But Oliver's interests remain the same.
Oliver is an academic and innovation advisor and British senior civil servant with interest in near future technologies,

institutional and corporate culture, diplomacy, and national security.

And he appears on podcasts, on panels, at conferences. He's just in his early 30s.

There are always these long, impressive introductions.

In this podcast, it takes the host, Ira Apfel, more than a minute to describe his work. Oliver Lewis, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you, Ira. Whenever someone describes me, it always sounds like someone I'd prefer to meet.
Yes, it definitely made you sound quite exciting and a bit of a polymath, so I definitely wanted to delve into all of that. But I wanted to start by talking a bit about...
Someone he'd like to meet.

If I were to meet you at a cocktail party and said, so tell me what you do, what would you say? Probably the main thing I try to do is understand what others have called the central drama of our time, which is the human-machine interface. how are technological innovations existing and potential future innovations

shaping and reshaping the social fabric of our societies? When did you grow intrigued by that interaction of the human and the machine? I think the truthful answer would probably be watching Star Wars when I was a kid, which I think many of us would share. For sure.
Even if someone in British intelligence knew about Oliver and his tissue of lies, as that text to his ex-girlfriend Charlie suggested, it certainly didn't seem to be hampering his career. For now, he was back in Whitehall.

At the same time, across the Atlantic,

a man called Chris Lynch was also working in government.

Walking the halls of the Pentagon in his hoodie,

Chris Lynch has been mistaken for a repairman.

But unlike Oliver, Chris Lynch was a true outsider, and proudly so.

This is the weirdest moment of my life. I never thought I'd show up in government.

I never thought that I'd be working at the Pentagon.

He didn't come from the world of government or the military.

He was a self-proclaimed nerd.

You know, if you were to go and visit the DDS office,

it looks like Star Wars threw up all over it.

There is that, but it's more than just the aesthetic.

It's sort of this hope and belief that we can change the future.

Chris Lynch was also into Star Wars in a big way.

We're kind of a SWAT team for nerds.

Bureaucracy busters.

His LinkedIn photo is an image of him flying backwards in the air

in front of what looks like a Jar Jar Binks model and a port-a-loo. And when Chris Lynch and Oliver met, it's not hard to see why they soon became partners.
They both appeared to be high up in government, trying to bring it into the digital age, both of them into Star Wars, both working with defence departments. Before long, they were in a coffee shop with a third co-founder, Nicole Camarillo, who had worked in the U.S.
Army Cyber Command, and they were hashing out the ideas that would become rebellion defense. I brought my laptop because I thought, you guys are going to keep talking about this, but if nobody starts committing it to paper, then it's not real.
They were at the very start of a remarkable rise, soon to attract some of the biggest names in venture capital, drawing on their deep connections in government and the military promising to transform war. But the funny thing about this story is, the deeper you delve into artificial intelligence, the more you come to learn about human intelligence, too.

Because I spoke to another woman, for whom the tissue of lies felt alarmingly familiar.

It became clearer to me what the central question of this investigation is

beyond the obvious one, who's checking this stuff.

Because if nobody else in the military, in government, in AI, in big tech, in investment,

was really sorting truth from fiction in a story like Oliver's,

if this was all about, in fact, who you knew and how you presented yourself and the strength

of a story, then what does that say about scrutiny in that world at all? A world where we know very

little about the people who are building the tech that could impact our rights and our safety.

I'm Basia Cummings, and from Tortoise, this is Walter's War, Episode 3, The Rebellion. The Rebellion Defence website is impressive.
On the homepage, there's a black and white video that plays grainy footage from warplanes, and it sets the tone well. It looks slick.
The opening text says that this is a company that builds technology for defense and national security. There are these references to the warfighter and the modern mission stack, references to rebels and the rebellion.
The Star Wars theme is very evident. And in fact, it made me think of the opening text from the first Star Wars film, crawling across the screen and disappearing into deep space, where it reads, It is a period of civil war.
Rebel spaceships striking from a hidden base have won their first victory against the evil galactic empire. And like in George Lucas's 1977 film, Rebellion drops you right into the story.
The coming war, the modern adversaries, I guess in the company's case, the evil galactic empire means China. And the rebel spaceships are Rebellion's engineers, who, the company says, lead by quote, practicing transparency and leading with empathy and courage.
Rebellion Nova emulates adversary cyber campaigns to ensure that weaknesses are identified, critical missions are protected, and defense never stops.

Start by viewing your network like an adversary.

At its most ambitious, Rebellion Defense was proposing to automate decision-making in military settings.

Which I understood to mean a range of things.

Yes, at one end, weapons that can think for themselves, or killer drones and intelligent unmanned guns. But it also means the tech to feed decision making, AI that helps politicians and generals choose targets or develop combat strategy.
And the questions that all of this raises are huge. One expert in his book, I Warbot, asks us to imagine what will happen when a military force consists of technicians and thousands of robots rather than pilots and sailors and soldiers.
But you wouldn't get a sense of any of that from Rebellion's website. It's showing us the opening titles or a trailer at best.
This isn't the film itself. Nova automatically assesses the mission risk of each discovered vulnerability based on whether it's exploitable, if adversaries are actively using it, and which segments of your network are exposed, so you can quickly fortify your most critical assets.
And I knew that I wasn't alone in trying to decipher what

all this means. This is new to almost all of us, and that's part of the problem.

Nova delivers cyber readiness for institutions that protect us. the scale of what AI could do in our daily lives really hit the public's bloodstream in November 2022 with the public launch of ChatGPT.
Suddenly, we were all asking this mega chatbot questions, watching it write essays, watching it solve complex problems and prompts in seconds.

But how AI was being developed for warfare, that I knew very little about. And neither,

it turns out, did our leaders. This is what Palmer Luckey, who founded Anduril Industries,

one of the most successful new AI and defence companies, said in an interview about ChatGPT. ChatGPT has probably been more helpful to Anduril with customers and politicians than any technology in the last 10 years.
All of a sudden, you'll have congressmen who will go and use ChatGPT, and he'll type some stuff in, and he's able to use it. And he's able to see that it does things that he never imagined a computer could do.
And then when I see him next, he says, you know, I think I really understand what you guys were talking about with AI being a big deal. This seems like it's going to be really important.
It sounds crazy, but it's just been so true. And just to keep going with the fantasy theme, it's worth knowing that Palmer Lucky's company takes its name from a different franchise, after a sword in Lord of the Rings, and Jorill, that translates from the Elvish to mean Flame of the West.
AI quickly became like a magic pixie dust, everything and nothing. The future of modern warfare, the killer of the human race, the way to save British and American lives on the battlefield, and the way to win the next big war that was surely coming with China or Russia.
But how it actually worked, who could actually build it, and who was checking if any of this was true, well, those were the questions that I wanted to answer. Chat GPT was a public turning point.
But Chris Lynch and Oliver and a whole gang of other startups, like Andrew Hill, had seen an opportunity years before we were all introduced to the mega chatbot. We need a new breed of defense technology companies to reboot the arsenal of democracy.
What is going to make that happen? Right. It's going to take experiments.
It's going to take disruption. And by disruption, I want to be very clear.
I started contacting engineers and academics, military commanders and venture capitalists. And what I learned very quickly is in the meeting of defense, not known for its openness, and tech, which is also a highly guarded industry, I was going to need someone to show me the way in and to give me a starting point.
Who would how, after many, many conversations and dead ends, I was introduced to Laura. I'm Laura Nolan.
As you can probably tell from my accent, I'm Irish. I've been a software engineer for, well, all my professional life.
In the mid-nought-teens, I was working for Google, and I guess the interesting part of this story is when I learned about Project Maven first. Laura lives in Ireland, but back in 2017, she was working at Google, where she was a tech lead responsible for part of the company's cloud infrastructure.
And one day, she was called into a meeting room at Google's HQ in Mountain View, California, to talk about a new project. I was having a meeting with a senior colleague, and he said, well, so there's this Project Maven thing happening, and we need to figure out how to build some air-gapped data centres.
And I wasn't given a lot of information about it at the time, but what we did understand was that it was related to machine learning processing of defence drone wide area motion imagery, so basically analysing drone footage using machine learning. Quietly, Google had taken on a contract with the US Department of Defence

to build AI to help improve drone targeting.

It's fair to say that Maven is not in itself an autonomous weapon,

although it's very possibly something that you might use

to create the inputs to build your autonomous weapons.

So really what Maven was trying to do was it was trying to enable them

to do more of this trying to enable them to

do more of this drone video surveillance, analyse it more thoroughly, get more data out of it. The former head of Project MAVEN said that initially they had approached Google because they wanted to process high-res footage of entire cities taken from MQ-9 Reaper drones.

And although he claimed that this was all purely about surveillance,

Project Maven's official title was the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team,

whose goal was specifically increasing lethality.

And it was made clear that the Pentagon wanted to start using this tech in the war against ISIS and in Syria.

Certainly, even at the outset, we knew that this was a departure from what Google had typically been involved in, or at least openly involved in, and we were concerned. Laura was specifically asked to build air gaps, a way to allow Google to run code for the Pentagon, but without Google engineers being able to see the classified data.
It would basically allow for the separation of government computers from other computers on a network, and it could allow Google to pitch for many more sensitive military contracts. It was never an official policy, but for years Google recruiters had been going around telling people that they were talking to, as prospective employees, that Google didn't do defence contracting and didn't do war stuff.
It wasn't what Laura had signed up to do, and she wasn't alone. In around February 2018, suddenly it was all over the internal Google Plus messaging platform and people were asking, started to ask questions about it on big internal mailing lists and at big internal meetings.
That was when it all got quite intense. A few months later, Google erupted in scandal.
More than 3,000 employees wrote an open letter to the Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, requesting that Google cancel the contract.

Its opening line, we believe that Google should not be in the business of war.

And what all of this did, really, was expose a culture clash.

Laura, like many others, resigned. I think ultimately it was a decision that I had to make.
I was not sleeping well at night with the thought that I would be contributing to, you know, something that would lead to people being blown up in their beds. So, I mean, it's the end of it, really.
After the protests, Google announced that it wouldn't be renewing its contract on Project Maven. This was a big moment in the relationship between Silicon Valley and the military.
The head of Project Maven had said himself, This was the pilot, the pathfinder, the spark, he said that kindles the flame for the use of artificial intelligence across the rest of the Defence Department and he was right because in the wings were smaller, newer companies who saw great opportunity Companies run by people whose credentials and whose values and ambitions

we don't really know. Companies whose names most of us have never heard of.
Anduril, Palantir, Shield AI, Epirus, and Rebellion Defense. If your job at a health We'll see you need them.
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In early pitch documents circulated widely in Silicon Valley to raise capital,

Rebellion Defense described itself as, quote, an unconstrained Project Maven.

And Chris Lynch had been openly critical of the Google staffers who had protested the Maven contract.

In an interview with Wired magazine, he said that AI technology is too important not to have America's greatest minds on it. And I guess he had a solution to that, of sorts.
It all kind of starts with this gentleman, Chris Lynch, who's a kind of Seattle, Silicon Valley adjacent founder guy. I could never really figure out how he got into the kind of inner circle of the Obama White House.
Like, it sort of doesn't or didn't make sense. Chris Lynch's background was in developing internet sites and games.
After a stint at Microsoft and a company called Adaptive, he had run a men's gifting website, thoughtful.co. Then, from 2013, he ran Celeb Hookup.
The game's blurb read, Choose from the sexiest, famous celebrity men and women from Hollywood movies. Create and share your ultimate celebrity hookup list with celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber, and Miley Cyrus.
And then he ran SparkWord, a word game. It wasn't until 2015 that he performed something of a handbrake turn.
After an infamous pitch to the Pentagon, during which he wore a hoodie, Chris Lynch became director of the

department. formed something of a handbrake turn.
After an infamous pitch to the Pentagon, during which he wore a hoodie, Chris Lynch became director of the Department of Defense's digital service, the DDS. It's sort of like, I don't know, a crack team of technologists trying to solve problems within the Pentagon that reported directly to the Secretary of Defense.
So he had this kind of immense buy-in from the most important military leader.

He was only there for three years before he was launching his own defense company.

It was quite the leap from celebrities to national security.

From the information that's publicly available about Rebellion's origins,

the three co-founders raised over $10 million in seed funding from two investors in 2019. One of them was a woman called Ling Wong, a scientist, entrepreneur and investor, whose website describes her as linging across industries, fueling multi-billion dollar funds and creating multiple firsts.
And the second investor was the well-established venture capital firm Venrock, which was built in 1969 on the Rockefeller family's money. Two years later, in an exclusive to the website Axios, the company announced a host of new investors with incredible CVs.
They'd secured $150 million, and Rebellion was bringing Nick

Sinai, the former deputy chief technical officer under Barack Obama, onto its board, alongside the

former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the former Fox Corp CEO James Murdoch. These were the big guns,

and Rebellion was just two years in already a good news story. But what was happening inside the walls of the company was much harder to find out.
Oliver had already decided not to speak to me. We'd had a conversation on the phone, emails back and forth, but the exchanges had become increasingly difficult and it became clear that he didn't want to meet.
And I'd approached the other two co-founders, but no response. So I started speaking to former staffers, mostly engineers and developers.
And I soon learned that for a company claiming that

one of its key values is transparency, the reality was rather different. Most people who had left the

company had signed a non-disclosure agreement and were really nervous about speaking. Nearly

everyone spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. Nine months that I was working on it, and then I learned about Rebellion and was inspired and intrigued by the mission, and it's just that simple.
One former staffer had worked in the company's Seattle office, working on AI product management and simulation, and he largely felt positive about his time there. Similarly, of like, we need to come in and we need to try to shake things up, but we need to also bring the government with us.
We can't come in and just be adversarial. That's never going to get it done.
So, and I think Chris and Ollie just got connected because they figured out they were kind of doing the same thing across the Iran. He had understood that Oliver was Chris's counterpart in the British government.
They both seem well-qualified and well-connected, and they had a simple message to the engineers and developers that they were hiring. One former engineer described it like this,

do good for your country, but get paid well for it too.

It was new and exciting, and at that early stage, the mission was all they had.

Whether they could fulfill it was a different question altogether.

The best thing about it for me was this mix of people like me

who'd only ever worked in industry, and mostly in startups and small companies, going from zero to one and not knowing a damn thing about how it's all going to work and being very comfortable with ambiguity. Rebellion needed those people.
Another former engineer said that after he joined, he realized that everyone was reading the same book. They were really into this book called The Kill Chain.
And in the case of AI, you know instantly, it was all about collapsing that kill chain. That book, The Kill Chain, is written by Andrew Rill's chief strategy officer.
And it opens with this terrifying scenario. And it's the story that Rebellion and others have been building on.
The celluloid from which they projected their mission to investors and to governments. Because the book says there is a reality that's been hidden from us, the public, that America is failing as a tech power, that it's falling behind China and Russia who are rapidly developing advanced weapons.
And that in the many war games that have been conducted by the US Department of Defense, simulating wars against China and Russia, the US has, quote, a nearly perfect record. We have lost almost every single time.
And the way to avoid these simulations becoming real, to avoid an American defeat, well, it's simple. You have to improve the kill chain.
And that means three things, really. Improving the military's understanding, improving its decision-making, and making it act faster.
And it seemed that in 2019 and 2020, it was what everyone in this world was talking about. These are people who are saying that, you know, it's our obligation to innovate the kill chain, to make the military more agile.
But also to go extraordinarily hard at the enemy's kill chain as well. An integral part of this is the cyber kill chain developed by Lockheed Martin.
Rebellion set to work. One way to improve the kill chain? Well, one former engineer told me, fusing data from satellite and drone imagery.
One of the products was a dashboard where they took information from everything from drone footage to security cameras, and they'd look for patterns. For instance, one tool would use security cameras to track a quad cab Toyota pickup, which is the favorite pickup of terrorists.
So they would say, OK, here's a pickup. And then it would follow that pickup around.
I mean, if people got out and met a person and showed deference to that person, if there was a person that other people showed deference to and was dressed a certain way, then that's someone we track. So then they would be tracked.
They're putting together two pieces of information, a pickup truck and deference. Put that together and they have a high value target.
I mean, were the video feeds real? Was any of the data real? I don't know. Another project the engineer told me was seeking out adversaries closer to home.
Tracking social media posts. They are really big in tracking social media.
So they would track a person. They post about dog shows or blah, blah, blah.
But they also post some anti-government screeds. Then who are they talking to or who are they connecting to? We had extensive communications from certain people.
It was pretty amazing how much information we got about people and the patterns we saw. It sounded sophisticated, to be sure.

Intrusive, certainly. But also incredibly difficult to build.
So I contacted the company itself. They were four years into their rebellion, and I thought they must have some pretty impressive demos to show.
But if those demos exist, they didn't want to share them with me. I spoke to two people from its PR team.
And at first, I was offered an interview with two senior leaders and a demo of a cybersecurity product, which the press officer joked on the phone was the only commercially viable product they have. And then the offer was rescinded.
No one would be available,

they said. So much for that value of transparency.
This was a different kind of air gap. In fact, the more I reported, the shakier it all started to seem.
at the end of the summer, 2023,

rumours began circulating that, in fact,

none of the original founders, Chris, Oliver or Nicole,

were even working at Rebellion anymore.

That they'd been ousted.

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Grainger, for the ones who get it done. I said that this is a story about human intelligence as much as it is about machine learning, even if on some level, artifice is what links it all together.
After speaking to Charlie and hearing her story, I contacted other friends and

acquaintances from Oliver's life. And I was really careful about how I approached them.
I didn't want to pull the rug out from anyone, and I didn't want to be unfair to Oliver either. I thought, what if Charlie had been a one-off? That is, until I called Alexandra.
I was 23 when I moved to Cambridge in October of 2011. Alexandra isn't her real name.
And when we spoke, she explained that she's from New York and she had arrived in Cambridge to start a postgrad in international relations. And she met Oliver in early 2012, before Charlie did, after they caught eyes at a gym at Cambridge University.
And soon after, Oliver messaged her on Facebook, inviting her to meet up. Almost all of the sort of big ones he introduced in our first date, which included that he had gone to Harrow, that he had done two bachelor's degrees, one at Oxford at Trinity College, because he had graduated early from Harrow.
He was able to become an officer in the military without having gone to Sandhurst and was deployed in Afghanistan in a combat role. and I don't remember if he said this on our first date.
He told me at some point that someone had died underneath him, had been killed, and that it affected him so much that he left the military early. Alexandra was clear when I spoke to her.
She's not an Anglophile. She's not particularly interested in the royal family.
And she didn't apply to Cambridge to get close to class or privilege or bask in that particular flavor of Britishness. And so a lot of what Oliver told her went over her head.
They were just curious details, his father being a baron and his military background. None of it kind of rang any alarm bells for me.
I mean, it seemed like a very impressive resume, but it didn't seem out of step with the way that he presented himself or the way that he talked about, you know, his work or what he was interested in. So, yeah, I mean, I'm sure that if I had met him after having been in the UK for several years, or if I was British, then maybe it would have rang some alarm bells, but certainly not at that time.
Alexandra and then Charlie were presented with almost identical stories by Oliver. But with Alexandra, his combat background seemed to play a much bigger role.
He told her explicitly that he'd been in Afghanistan fighting. In fact, it's what he told many people in their circle of friends.
It was certainly woven into kind of how he presented himself, and I think maybe particularly presented himself to me. We shared a lot of friends and we had a lot of people in common, and everyone sort of had the same understanding of him.
He told her that he'd been on a fast track to becoming an officer, so he hadn't needed to go to Sandhurst, the famous military academy. So he had a lot of kind of like military accoutrement.
Like he had this big military backpack that he carried around.

I feel like he had combat boots, like sand-colored combat boots.

He also sent me a photograph of him in kind of like what looked like to me a military dress uniform.

They dated throughout the spring and the summer of 2012. But then Oliver explained that he was being deployed to Afghanistan, to Helmand, this time as an academic.
And it was while he was there that he began to withdraw. He stopped calling and emailing.
While he was in Afghanistan, like a friend of his asked me how he was. And I said, oh, he's fine.
He's in Afghanistan. And he said, are you sure? And I said, yeah.
What? And I was like, yeah, yes. And he was like, oh, well, he lies a lot.
She didn't really understand what was going on, and she didn't know how to make sense of that comment. Instead, she tried to keep in contact.
But when Oliver returned from Helmand in the autumn of 2012, he refused to see her. While I was home for Thanksgiving, he sent me an email.
He ended the relationship, and she was, as Charlie was, heartbroken and confused. I got in touch with Alexandra when I was a few months into this story.
She said that she'd suspected that a lot of what she'd been told was untrue, and that she was relieved to discover that her own fact-checking had been right. And she was relieved, as Charlie was, to know that she wasn't mad, that something significant and painful really had happened to her.
But after digesting that first call, her thinking shifted. It's also destabilizing to think of him in these ever higher and more powerful circles with access to decision-making power.
So that also felt really destabilizing, and frankly, with the potential to be pretty dangerous. I had told her about the world that Oliver was now occupying, how his career had progressed since leaving Cambridge.
It's a really scary concept to think of someone who has manufactured military experience, be involved with influencing the way that money is spent, the use of AI, in particular within the military, the role of sort of actual expertise within these very, very high stakes sectors. There is a lot of harm and a lot of violence, and there has been done onto the world

by the British and American militaries. And recklessness or manufactured expertise is something that I find truly frightening in these arenas.
she was surprised that he hadn't stopped. It's one thing to exaggerate and simulate and tell stories when you're at university, she said, but it's another thing entirely to do it professionally out in the real world.
I think that if he was not a sort of semi-public figure and had not put himself, like, in the career that he's in now, this would remain a dinner party story that I tell about my early 20s. And it didn't stay that way because Alex and Charlie could see there's more at stake.
And so it matters like who's in the room. It matters who is in the room when decisions are being made that impact people's lives, particularly when you're talking about military and warfare.
It matters who's in the room. That's why I think that this is actually, this is not just a story of, you know, I had a bad ex-boyfriend.
This is a much bigger story than that. In many ways, I'd come to feel pretty sympathetic to Oliver.
He'd projected a version of himself that he'd wanted to become, and he'd made it. It worked.
And that was a reflection on the worlds that he was moving in as much as it was a reflection on him. And I believed the numerous people who told me, he's kind, he's not malicious.
But some things do feel unignorable. Like, why is there more scrutiny by friends and former lovers than there is in his professional life? Isn't that just the wrong way around? And I don't know what he's told Rebellion or Improbable or the Civil Service about whether the persona that he'd honed at Cambridge has continued.
What I do know is that it's worth checking. It matters, particularly as I learned what happened next.
Next time on Walter's Wall. It's a real Tinkerbell effect that takes hold.
The rebellion is the least competent, in their words, company that they've ever worked with. But as soon as you stop believing and stop clapping, Tinkerbell starts fading away.
And that is the story of all of these technologies. They basically got pushed out of their executive roles sometime after that story came out.
And then now they got pushed off the board entirely. Walter's War is reported by me, Basher Cummings.
The producer is Gary Marshall. Additional reporting is by Jack Paulson.
Additional reporting and producing is by Xavier Greenwood and Imogen Harper. The sound design is by Carla Patella.
With thanks to Elka Schwartz, Kenneth Payne, Jathan Sadowski, Jack Paulson and Tech Inquiry. we hope you're enjoying this series.

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