Kamala Harris, Christopher Dorner, Backpage.com, and How Kamala caused an innocent 71-year old woman to be shot in the back.

“There was no warning, no orders, no commands, just gunshots” ¬-Emma Hernandez, 78

One of the low points of Kamala Harris’s term as California’s Attorney General was the 2013 Southern California Manhunt for LAPD officer Christopher Dorner. What is less well-known is her personal involvement in the case. Trigger happy cops engaged in a Southern California manhunt that saw two innocent bystanders get shot in the back in Southwest Los Angeles before Dorner was burned alive in a Big Bear vacation home a hundred miles away. In the process, police checkpoints were set up across hundreds of miles and door to door searches were carried out under Harris’s authority with no probable cause or warrants issued. The authorities intervened to have the helicopters cut the media feeds right before the fire and to not broadcast the Sherrif’s radio audio, which showed the Sheriff deputies laughing at Dorner’s death but also clearly giving orders that nobody is to even get close enough to Dorner to ever let Dorner speak.

It's clear the sheriffs were deliberately killing Dorner and deliberately lit the house on fire:
“Burn it down! Burn that f***g house down”

It is clear someone didn’t want the public to hear what Dorner had to say and he was hunted and killed, and then post-manhunt a story was concocted replete with an unverified manifesto full of contradictory statements and hearsay evidence of an informant named Jason Young. It was impossible for the press at the time to verify the alleged motive – revenge against Dorner’s LAPD colleagues Keith Lawrence and Monica Quan in an LAPD intelligence unit for alleged police brutality leading to Dorner’s termination when complained, leading to a “rampage” against all cops backed by an illegal weapons arsenal he had allegedly intended to sell on the website backpage.com, target of a prosecution personally initiated by Harris for which Young’s unverified statement would become the grounds for obtaining an otherwise unobtainable search warrant in that case.

What is possible to verify is the story has since fallen apart: in 2018, California opened up its long-concealed police discipline files, and in 2019 a secret memo of the USDOJ dated from 2012 was released in litigation. I made a public records request for them and they show Dorner never made a police brutality complaint, also meaning the statements in Dorner’s alleged “manifesto” posted to Facebook (when he was also on the run and didn’t have access to a computer which would have given away his location). It was also possible evidence was taken: on February 11, 2013, LAPD Chief Chris Beck issued an order to re-examine the evidence behind Doerner’s termination – pretext to access and perhaps change or delete records.

The best explanation for the known and verifiable facts is that the same force that led to Dorner’s manhunt and immolation was also behind the double homicide of Quan and Lawrence. Given they were police detective colleagues, it is probable they came upon information in the course of an investigation that caused them to be silenced and for Dorner to initially be terminated.

The AG’s involvement in the case remains a little-known part of a news story that never made much sense. In the aftermath of the manhunt, the AG’s office served a warrant on the Dallas, TX offices of Backpage, as well as on the offices of Facebook for all of Dorner’s private messages. Police also asked for an order barring anyone to revealing the existence of the search warrant. Even less is known about the backpage.com search warrant – its existence is limited to one NBC news article.

Thanks to Harris’s prosecution and the discovery that emerged, we know that Backpage.com never was a website for selling weapons and ammunition, but the media were told this was how Dorner accumulated an “arsenal.” Photos of this alleged arsenal provided by Young were shown to the media by an informant – but there is no way to verify Dorner ever owned such an arsenal or met by Young. However, a photo of random firearms produced by an informant to subpoena Backpage’s business records could have been pretext to find what Harris was really looking for in a prosecution involving so many constitutional violations and misconduct, Reason Magazine’s reporter Elizabeth Brown recently made an entire documentary about it.

The allegations against Dorner got Kamala the subpoena for Backpage’s records she really wanted – and couldn’t get otherwise. In 2019, two leaked USDOJ memos revealed in 2012 two federal prosecutors had sent a memo to their boss in the Western District of Washington that “unlike virtually every other website that is used for prosecution and sex trafficking, Backpage is remarkably responsive to law enforcement requests and often takes proactive steps to assist in investigations.” The memo outlines that there were no grounds to obtain a subpoena of Backpage and that Backpage was very cooperative to remove advertisements that appeared to be of juveniles, often proactively. Backpage had assisted in several prosecutions.

In other words, shutting down backpage would enable human trafficking by directing women to sites that were less compliant, less likely to work with law enforcement, or directing women to traditional organized crime and pimping.  Harris’s alleged motivation of her crusade against Backpage positioning her as a pro-women campaigner against human trafficking – would accomplish the opposite.

What was Harris really after? Whom was she protecting? Young’s photo of Dorner’s alleged “arsenal” and hearsay story was likely cooked intelligence sent out to police departments in Southern California to create the illusion Dorner was armed and dangerous and therefore officers would be ordered to shoot to kill. In fact, eight LAPD officers in an act of mistaken identity fired 107 shots into the back of a 78-year old woman delivering newspapers because she was driving a truck with a similar (but not the same) model as Dorner’s. As California AG, Harris had the authority to prosecute the cops who violated every protocol rule in the book.

So much for being a champion of women’s rights.

Enter Aston Kucher

In 2009 along with his then-wife Demi Moore, actor Aston Kucher founded the DNA Foundation, which in 2012, the same year as the USDOJ’s secret backpage memo, would be renamed “Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children,” ostensibly an anti-child trafficking charity. Thorn partnered with a load of Silicon Valley companies (and donors to Harris): Google, Facebook, and Microsoft to create a Technology Task Force developing software to fight human trafficking. Thorn’s website states, “thorn creates products that identify child victims faster, provides services for the tech industry to play a proactive role in removing abuse content from their platforms.” The same year, Washington State, home of Microsoft, took its first anti-backpage action, soon thereafter joined by Harris and her anti-Backpage crusade.

As the FBI’s secret memo makes clear, Backpage was proactive fighting human trafficking and deployed traditional solutions such as human monitoring and reporting of potential abuse situations. Backpage was also very clear on what services could be advertised on its website, and publicity around the Silk Road and similar “dark web” sites showed there were far better options for selling contraband such as drugs or weapons.

Per journalist Whitney Webb, Thorn is “like a front – a way for Silicon Valley companies to give these experimental softwares they can’t legally sell to police. The team at Thorn sue a web app called Spotlight which uses algorithms to automatically send law enforcement officers information. It is now used by officers in all 50 states and Canada.

So, the backpage prosecution effectively automated the process for law enforcement nationally to scan the internet with black box software. Was that the point? Or is it something worse and perhaps darker?

In 2021, Buzzfeed news reported also starting in 2012, the CIA’s office of the Inspector General started to discover staffers engaged in a pattern of abuse of sex crimes involving children and that prosecutors repeatedly decided not to hold agency personnel accountable. The recent (and not so recent) revelations about Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell indicate that intelligence agencies have used the internet to recruit and groom minors for sexual entrapment and blackmail operations as well as to recruit loyal spouses of assets the intelligence agencies

As a website that proactively identified potential human trafficking and informed law enforcement, is it possible Backpage occasionally bumped up against this intelligence activity, and by both getting rid of Backpage and installing software between the internet and law enforcement, the intelligence community could protect some of his activity?

Kamala Harris would be in a position ask questions – as a freshman Senator from California she was immediately selected for the Senate Select Oversight Committee – a position requiring a high-level security clearance? When did she acquire it? What was its original purpose?

In any case, it’s clear there is a-lot more to the Backpage and Christopher Dorner stories than the public was ever told, and Kamala Harris is at the center of it.