Strike Labs Effort Supporting Afghanistan Extraction Sunsets
It has been over a year since Strike Labs was asked to rapidly develop some technical capabilities to help out with the Afghanistan extraction.
GetEvacuated - a powerful resource for the coalition of organizations who are coordinating evacuation efforts and humanitarian support for anyone fleeing danger or who are displaced.
OSINTMapCOP - Built a open-, crowd-sourced, peer reviewed, map-based, common operating platform for the AFG Extraction.
Strike Sentinel - Strike Sentinel provides the technical infrastructure and AI automation to conduct professional in-depth background checks and personal verifications.
Strike Evidence Vault (retired) - securely built to collect, store, and document potential human rights violations in Afghanistan, Ukraine and other areas.
The past year has been fulfilling. At one point or another I think everyone involved loved & lost, cried tears of joy & sadness, crushed it & crashed hard, and came up short & over delivered.
In August 2021, we were contacted via LinkedIn by a stranger who wanted to talk. His craggy voice over Signal was so telling I could hear his sleeve tattoos, trucker Black Rifle Coffee Company hat, and graybeard. He was ex-SF, had done a lot of interagency work, was very much involved in the Afghanistan Extraction before the fall of Kabul. He had somehow learned Strike Labs was 1) conducting rapid application development for SMU’s in the DoD and 2) tracking aircraft behaviors. He asked for a list of all runways in Asia Minor. Upon delivery a few hours later, which turned out to be a test, Mr. Greybeard returned with "What I am really looking for is the coordinates of all runways in AFG with a min length of W, min width of X and a surface type of Y or Z."
We returned that to him, putting it on a GIS map instead of a spreadsheet and made it interactive instead of a simple spreadsheet. "Can you add border crossings? Can you add these embassies? I have a list of roadblocks from my ‘guys on the ground’, can you add that too?" There may have been something about a Black Gate as well. The resulting response was OSINTmapCOP.com - an open-, crowd-sourced, peer reviewed, map-based, common operating platform, one of the coolest apps we have spun up, and the one that taught us the most about the common operating procedures of the intel community. PIR, EEI, IIR were confusing acronyms before we started to work with an unofficial intel task force.
Because of the OSINTmapCOP.com work, we were invited to the Truman Foundation EOA Casework Management Workshop in Washington DC on September 29th, 2021. The extraction had become a complete mess. It was a sandwich with NGO's on both sides of the Department of State, and no info flowing well. The Truman Foundation organized thought leaders and practitioners to tackle the problem. After blasting through many packs of Post-It notes, the leaders of the workshop said Google was going to answer the call to build something. Strike Labs offered its support, but we didn't want to get in the way and only offered to be a compliment, not competitive.
On October 8th, 2021, two weeks after the Truman Foundation Workshop we were yet again called into another meeting by active duty professionals from Fort Bragg--asking for help. The portal others claimed to be working on was not progressing. And new mid-level bureaucrats within the DoD were building a consortium of large tech firms (Google, Amazon, IBM, etc.) to build a portal to help out.
After 30 minutes, the conversation became uncomfortable. I explained this was a rapid application development need and for each new company you add to the mix you slow the process exponentially. “You don't send a 10k person army on a tactical special mission, you send a small team of special operators. If you want help, I am happy to do it, but you need to ask, and my team and I work best alone". I hung up the phone and went for a run to calm down.
Two hours later I received a call from the lead. “If you really think you can do it, we would love your help.” GetEvacuated.com was launched 4 hours later.
The platform is not free from having its detractors. The DoS was not a fan, nor was #AfganEvac. I always wished that we were partners rather than them seeing GetEvacuated as a threat. We would have moved mountains for them.
Because we were not doing this for money, or for marketing purposes, we kept our name out of it for a while. It is laughable to see people assume it was built by Isis, a big prime in the DC Beltway, or Russia. “Don’t use GetEvacuated, it is hacked!” This was both alarming and funny because we had some people with some unique abilities from intel agencies kick the tires hard and it was never hacked. “Don’t use it, they are just in it for the money.” was something else we heard. Those comments hit close to home because I spent over 6 figures building the application per request without the promise of any funding, and have never received a dime. In their defense, there have been many people who mentally broke over the past year and you would be very hard pressed to find one person involved in th AFG Evacuation who is free from unjust condescension on Signal.
In fact, GetEvacuated is (was) nothing more than an altruistic endeavor which
has cost me well over 6 figures without the request or promise of any financial support,
had over 2,000 active daily users from over 200 NGO’s, 75,000 evacuees, over 150,000 documents and biometrics, abd
was relied on by people who trusted us with keeping the information of their friends and loved ones safe.
I think it has been a success. Frankly, its true impact is not measurable, and my heart still breaks for the one family I personally tried to help. Now that one year has gone by, we are sunsetting this tool over the next few days. It is very bitter sweet, but unfortunately it is necessary. We did all we could afford, and more.
We are always looking for friends, partners, colleagues and clients. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if I—or others at Strike Labs—can help you.
Sincerely,
John Casano
CEO of Strike Labs LLC
