ActBlue is the online fundraising platform used by
US Democratic party candidates. It is the subject of a major scandal
that has gripped the congress. It has been linked to
Debianism, another disappearing developer and in a parody of other
Debianism scandals, there are possibly two people using the same name,
one being the wife of the missing developer and the other being a
US Senate candidate who claims to have exposed the
ActBlue scandal.
These Github screenshots confirm that
Decklin Foster was affiliated with
ActBlue and vanished in 2018:
Accusations have been made about the concealment
of illegal foreign donations and deception of Congress.
Chris Gleason has nominated to represent Florida in the US Senate.
Gleason registered using a post office box and created a domain name,
voteforgleason.com using an anonymous service in
Iceland.
Gleason's profile on
X/Twitter has no photo while their
Facebook profile is completely disabled.
A similar web site has been created at
https://chris4florida.com/
The phone number on
voteforgleason.com and
chris4florida.com goes to a pharmacy rather than a campaign
office.
Nonetheless, I was able to verify
Christopher Gleason submitted a nomination that is registered with
the state officials.
Gleason's web site tells us:
Chris Gleason built the forensic tools that exposed ActBlue's billion-dollar money laundering operation. His evidence ...
Therefore, the candidate
Gleason is not a pharmacist.
So far, Chris appears to be male, intermittently using the name Christopher and the
masculin pronouns like His.
At the height of the
Debian suicide cluster,
shortly before
Adrian von Bidder-Senn died on our wedding day
(
detailed report), another Debian Developer,
Decklin Foster put all his packages up for adoption.
Up to 2016, we can see that
Decklin Foster was listed in the public filings of ActBlue Civics, Inc
as either a senior engineer or at one point, as
Director of Information Technology.
Decklin Foster's activity on
their Github profile stops abruptly in May 2018.
ProPublic shows
the last salary payment to Decklin Foster's bank account was in
July 2018.
Decklin Foster disappeared at almost the exact same time as
Arjen Kamphuis, author of the book on Information Security for
Investigative Journalists.
I was one of the last people to see Arjen before he vanished.
Remarkably, Arjen had even
asked me for protection.
On 1 January 2015,
Decklin Foster's PGP key was removed because it was only 1024 bits.
Most developers had created stronger keys before this mass removal of
insecure keys took place.
In 2019, the
Debian Account Managers asked the keyring managers to completely remove
Decklin Foster from the Debian keyring. There was no
Statement on Decklin Foster so far.
Clicking the links to see the statements about the removal does not
work. An error message tells us the messages about
Decklin Foster's removal from
debianism are all private.
Foster's web site address is
https://www.red-bean.com/decklin and it is currently reporting
"The requested URL was not found on this server.". Thanks to the
Wayback Machine we can
find a snapshot from 2019 which reveals an inconvenient truth:
If you’re interested in me, I have started using Google
Plus. If you’re interested in my work, I’m on Github. I was a Debian developer for some time, but
I’ve mostly given that up. I currently work for ActBlue and live in Cambridge, MA with
my wife.
Clicking on "my wife", we find the web site of Chris Gleason at
http://cgleason.org/.
Reading
Gleason's about page, we find the pronoun "they":
chris gleason is a graphic designer, zine creator, and print maker in chicago, illinois. they love ...
Therefore, the Debian Developer
(
What is a Debian Developer?) who was Director of Information Technology
for
ActBlue was married to a female or transgender
Chris Gleason. Is this the same person as the elusive male
Chris Gleason who is now running for the US Senate in Florida on
claims about corruption at
ActBlue? Or is it simply a bizarre coincidence that two people so
closely connected with this scandal share the same name?
Remember the
case of Francois Thiébaud, the pimp who usurped the reputation of the
legendary boss of Tissot SA? They both have
the same name too but they are different people.
In 2017, the Trans Women Writers Collective published the book
Nameless Woman, written by trans women of colour. In the credits,
the trans women thank
Decklin Foster.
This anthology was made possible by the
generous support of hundreds of people. In
particular, we would like to thank Annaya Youkai, Kieran Todd, Sadie Laett-Babcock, Adelaida
Shelley, Jaime Peschiera, Kai Cheng Thom, Talon
Wilde, David Cope, Alex Meginnis, Decklin Foster,
and Eli Nelson for their help.
Here are photos from the respective online profiles of
Decklin Foster and
Chris Gleason.
Decklin Foster
Chris Gleason
They don't look too similar but who knows. Anything is possible in
America today.
In 2017,
Bitch Magazine included
Decklin Foster in a list of donors.
In 1999, at the time
Decklin Foster was recruited by
Debianism, they had a home page at
http://members.home.com/decklin/.
Shortly after, the page moved to
http://www.red-bean.com/~decklin/ and that eventually evolved to
http://www.red-bean.com/decklin/. The last good capture of the
site at the Wayback machine was 11 October 2019. It looks like
they disabled the web site after that date.
On 22 July 1999,
Raphael Hertzog, known for the
Freexian scandals wrote a message asking people to do unpaid work
on orphaned packages in the hope that their application to become a
Debian Developer would be approved more quickly:
To: debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org, debian-devel@lists.debian.org, debian-qa@lists.debian.org, debian-mentors@lists.debian.org
Subject: [New maintainer] Working for Debian and becoming a registered Debian developer
From: Raphael Hertzog <rhertzog@hrnet.fr>
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1999 18:06:26 +0200
[ Large crosspost to start the discussion, please reply to debian-devel
only. Simply respect the reply-to. ]
Hello everybody,
you may or not be aware that getting a Debian developer is quite long. I
want to propose a solution to facilitate the integration of new
Debian developers.
It's quite simple. In order to fully learn how Debian works, the best
solution is :
- to adopt orphaned packages and correct their bugs
- that your work should be checked by an official developer (I'll call
it the sponsor).
Of course, as long you're not a registered Debian developers you cannot
upload your packages. The soluton is that the sponsor will upload the
package you'll do. The official maintainer will be
debian-qa@lists.debian.org. After all when you correct bugs on orphaned
packages, you're doing Quality Assurance.
This does also allow you to get new bugs in your mailbox. You just need
to subscribe to debian-qa@lists.debian.org. You would be allowed to
open/close/set the severity/forward the bugs since all debian-qa members
can do it on debian-qa packages.
If the sponsor finds that you've done a good job with the package, he
will explain that to the new maintainer team in the hope that your
application will be processed faster. And when you'll be
official Debian developper, you'll be able to change the Maintainer field
to your name.
I'll propose myself to be a sponsor. We'll need more sponsor ... any
volunteers ? Hopefully several people from debian-qa will accept to be
sponsor like me ...
All the future Debian developers interested should also reply ...
Any input appreciated !
Cheers,
--
Hertzog Raphaël >> 0C4CABF1 >> http://prope.insa-lyon.fr/~rhertzog/
Decklin Foster was one of the people recruited by those tactics.
To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Cc: debian-mentors@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: [New maintainer] Working for Debian and becoming a registered Debian developer
From: Decklin Foster <decklin@home.com>
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1999 13:39:13 -0400
Raphael Hertzog writes:
> Of course, as long you're not a registered Debian developers you cannot
> upload your packages. The soluton is that the sponsor will upload the
> package you'll do. The official maintainer will be
> debian-qa@lists.debian.org. After all when you correct bugs on orphaned
> packages, you're doing Quality Assurance.
Sounds good, I'll subscribe right after I finish writing this. I'm
also trying to work on non-orphaned backages as well (for example
right now i'm fixing a bug in gsfonts-x11.) So keep in mind that you
can always just send patches :)
--
Debian GNU/Linux - http://www.debian.org/
The Web is to graphic design as the fax machine is to literature.
Not only was
Decklin under the influence of
Hertzog, they were also under the influnce of the
Red Hat share offer. This email encourages speculation on the
IPO:
To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: SPAM from Red Hat
From: Decklin Foster <decklin@home.com>
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 09:57:45 -0400
Martin Bialasinski writes:
> is it only me, or did you also get this spam from Red Hat about stock
> options?
>
> Oh man - the bigger the company, the less clueful people?
On #debian last night, it was suggested that we use our opportunity to
buy some of this stock and sell it when the price goes up. This money
could then be used to fund Debian, buy new hardware, improve our
network connection, etc. Does anyone else think this is a Good
Idea(TM)? I would be willing to donate as much as I reasonably could.
--
Debian GNU/Linux - http://www.debian.org/
The Web is to graphic design as the fax machine is to literature.
Of interest to those watching the
ActBlue saga, there is an email about hacking and cracking:
To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: [New maintainer] Working for Debian and becoming a registered Debian developer
From: Decklin Foster <decklin@home.com>
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1999 16:37:40 -0400
Carl Mummert writes:
> Hacking is a serious crime
Cracking is a serious crime. Breaking into computer systems without
permission is a serious crime. Violation of privacy and theft of
confidential information is a serious crime.
Now what does this have to do with hacking?
> The fact remains that the debian policy is to discourage new
> developers by making it slow and difficult to get an account.
I have no problem with waiting, and I'd rather not look bad just
because some people keep speaking badly about the new-maintainer team.
We don't need another flamewar here. People have work to do.
--
Debian GNU/Linux - http://www.debian.org/
The Web is to graphic design as the fax machine is to literature.
The
New Maintainer report tells us they entered the process in the same
month, their application manager was
Craig Small and they completed the process in July/August 2000.
The advocacies and the application manager (AM) report are all
missing from the mailing list archives.
They had a page at
https://people.debian.org/~decklin/ but that has been inaccessible
ever since the peak of the
Debian suicide cluster.
They had a blog on another web site. It is captured in the Wayback
machine up to 2012. The last snapshot with the index is here:
http://blog.rupamsunyata.org/. The last blog post:
I'm the fuel that fires the engine of Failure
So, the Democrats in my very blue state put up a depressing, entitled, out-of-touch candidate for our vacant senate seat and she lost. The only reason I voted for her was because she wasn't a Republican. Supporting someone you don't even slightly like is psychologically draining.
At this point, I would vote for a Democratic party (or a Republican party!) with the exact same fiscal policy as the current Republicans if they actually made a principled, moral stand on equal protection and civil rights, habeas corpus/due process, and reproductive rights. Those don't cost anything[1].
Maybe they should be solved before the stuff that does cost billions of dollars. As it is my choice is weak, almost grudging support for those rights from people who want to hand the economy over to the government, and disgusting, immoral, vehement opposition to them from people who want to hand the economy over to wealthy corporations.
Neither side is doing anything effective to keep us free, or to keep the market free. Each side says or implies that this is a Christian nation, which it explicitly isn't, while failing to do what's right. Sometimes I want to give up and stop voting.
[1] Conversely, of course, it doesn't cost anything to take people's rights away, or prevent them from getting rights in the first place; I think this is why anti-gay-marriage ballot measures have been more successful in the current recession. Some people get their kicks from the suffering of others.
Accessing the blog from 2013 onwards we can see
the front page has been replaced with the message:
This blog is not being updated. Old entries are still around, but I'm turning off the front page for now.
From there, we could find a link to
Decklin Foster on LiveJournal. Their profile tells us they like
#Debian-women. Don't forget the
Debian pregnancy cluster.
There is a link to a
Twitter/X account for Decklin Foster.
contributors.debian.org tells us that
Decklin Foster stopped contributing in February 2011, immediately
before the
death of Adrian von Bidder-Senn on our wedding day.
Chris Gleason is not on the list at all. If
Decklin had abandoned
Debianism, why did it take eight years to remove them from the keyring?
Reading the full history of the
Debian Harassment culture, we can see many other co-authors were
removed for purely political reasons and blackmail but keys belonging to the
people who had abandoned the project and people who died were left in
the keyring for years.
To: debian-devel <debian-devel@lists.debian.org>
Subject: RFA: all my packages
From: Decklin Foster <decklin@red-bean.com>
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2011 17:11:05 -0500
Message-id: <1297375750-sup-7355@gillespie.rupamsunyata.org>
I'm looking for a new maintainer for, well, any of these. My heart is
not in it anymore and most of them have been neglected for a while.
Recently my free time has been taken up by other things (mainly my job)
and I forsee that continuing.
http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=decklin%40red-bean.com
python-beautifulsoup and mpd need attention for proposed-updates; I
missed getting them into Squeeze. rxvt-unicode is a total clusterfuck.
If any desktop-type packages remain I will orphan them, as I am only
running Debian on servers now. Apart from that, perhaps with a greatly
reduced load I can still make a tiny contribution to the community. If
not, I will retire.
--
things change.
decklin@red-bean.com
Decklin Foster is on a list of former members of
Harvard's Center for Depression, Anxiety and Stress Research.
They have a photo of him when he was younger. It appears to be the
same person as the Github profile.
Various scholarly articles from Harvard experts on depression have
thanked
Decklin Foster for their contributions in 2008 and 2009.
Decklin Foster was collaborating on this world-class depression
research at exactly the same time they were part of the
debian-private discussions that precipitated the
Debian Day Volunteer Suicide in 2010.
- Pizzagalli, Diego A., Avram J. Holmes, Daniel G. Dillon, Elena L. Goetz, Jeffrey L. Birk, Ryan
Bogdan, Darin D. Dougherty, Dan V. Iosifescu, Scott L. Rauch, and Maurizio Fava. 2009.
Reduced Caudate and Nucleus Accumbens Response to Rewards in Unmedicated
Individuals With Major Depressive Disorder. The American Journal of Psychiatry 166:
702-710. 2008
- Deveney, Christen M., and Diego A. Pizzagalli. 2008. The cognitive consequences of
emotion regulation: An ERP investigation. Psychophysiology 45(3): 435-444.
- Wacker, Jan, Daniel G. Dillon, and Diego A. Pizzagalli. 2009. The role of the nucleus
accumbens and rostral anterior cingulate cortex in anhedonia: Integration of resting EEG,
fMRI, and volumetric techniques. Neuroimage 46, no. 1: 327-337.
- Diane L. Santesso, Daniel G. Dillon, Jeffrey L. Birk, Avram J. Holmes, Elena Goetz,
Ryan Bogdan, Diego A. Pizzagalli. 2008. Individual differences in reinforcement learning: Behavioral, electrophysiological,
and neuroimaging correlates - NeuroImage
- Daniel G. Dillon, Ryan Bogdan, Jesen Fagerness, Avram J. Holmes,
Roy H. Perlis, and Diego A. Pizzagalli, 2010 - Variation in TREK1 Gene Linked to DepressionResistant Phenotype is Associated with Potentiated
Neural Responses to Rewards in Humans - Human Brain Mapping 31:210–221
- Santesso DL, Bogdan R, Birk JL, Goetz EL, Holmes AJ, Pizzagalli DA. Neural responses to negative feedback are related to negative emotionality in healthy adults - Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2012 Oct;7(7):794-803. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsr054. Epub 2011 Sep 14. PMID: 21917847; PMCID: PMC3475354.
The connection to psychiatric research is a really odd coincidence,
given that
Decklin sent that RFA (resignation) email immediately before
the death of Adrian von Bidder-Senn on our wedding day. The death was
discussed like a suicide.
Subject: Re: Death of Adrian von Bidder
Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2011 09:39:49 +0200
From: A Mennucc <mennucc1@debian.org>
To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
Il 19/04/2011 18:17, martin f krafft ha scritto:
> Dear Debian colleagues,
>
> I have the sad task to communicate to you the news of the death of
> Adrian von Bidder (avbidder, cmot), who passed away last Sunday,
> most probably of a heart attack.
I had contacted Adrian regarding the Debian umbrella.
So I had also a chance of seeing a picture of him
http://blog.fortytwo.ch/archives/80-Yay!-Debian-Logo!.html
In that picture he seemed quite happy and young.
His death is quite shocking and sad.
a.
Remember,
Debianists admitted the group needed a psychiatrist back in 2006, well
before most of the deaths.
Around the same time,
a petition about suicide prevention was submitted to the Basel city
council and it had the name A. von Bidder at the bottom.
Now
Decklin Foster himself is missing.
William Lee Irwin III was another
Debian Developer who asked for help and then vanished.
There is a
Decklin Foster profile on Youtube that hasn't been used for nine
years. There are four subscribers. One of the videos has the
comment:
Mixed these together on my show (editsradio.org) this week and really liked the result, so here it is on its own, slowed down and a little extended.
Photo taken at the Wilbur Theater in Boston on 2012-07-31.
The last snapshot of
editsradio.org is on 6 April 2015. After that, the content is
changed to Arabic. From 15 August 2015, it is redirecting to another site,
also in Arabic, at
http://www.17serialbaran.org.
In January 2015,
Decklin Foster &
Chris Gleason are listed as a couple
as new members of the Brattle Theatre, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Later in 2015, a report from the World Science Fiction Society
lists Decklin Foster as a new member.
Spokeo has a report about Christina N Gleason-Foster in Chicago, IL
with a former address in Cambridge, MA, the same location as
Decklin Foster.
Going back to 2013, when the blog vanished,
Universal Hub published a report "House of Blues turns down the heat, adds ice water for electronica shows due to Molly scourge".
This is not about
Molly de Blanc it is about the Molly pills.
Decklin Foster drops a comment in the discussion:
This sounds like a bad idea. You really don't want to give huge amounts of water to MDMA users
There is a
LinkedIn profile for Chris Gleason in Pinellas County, in
Florida, not far from
Jeremy Bícha, the
Registered Sex Offender who was invited to speak at
DebConf25 in Brest,
France. Looking at the photo on LinkedIn, is this an older version of
Decklin Foster's wife who has transitioned back to being a man or is it
a completely different person?
It would be extremely offensive to ask such a question in any other
group of people but in the world of
Debianism and
Zizian phenomena, there are a disproportionate number of people who
are living such lifestyles.
Let's not forget the example of another
Debianism transgender bedmate with at least five identities, that was
Pauline / Maria Climent / Pommeret.
The
Republican Chris Gleason has a
profile on Ballotpedia where they claim to have come from
Massachusetts, the same Democrat state where we found
Decklin Foster.
Chris Gleason was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. Gleason's career experience includes working as a technology consultant. He served in the U.S. Army National Guard from 1989 to 1999. Gleason earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell in 1996. Gleason has been affiliated with Caribbean Christian Center for the Deaf, Michigan -Make-A-Wish, Seniors Helping Seniors.
In the recent UK elections, journalists and researchers found various
examples of candidates who didn't really exist. At least one political
party was accused of making up fake candidates to make their party
look bigger and attract more donations.
I have the impression the
Chris Gleason in
Florida is a different
person but I'm not ruling out the possibility it is a fake profile
or an alter-ego of
Chris Gleason, wife of
Decklin.
The
ActBlue crisis is real however. Here is a
committee report on the US house web site.
The Committee on House Administration, the Committee on the Judiciary, and the
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform are charged with ensuring the integrity of American elections. To that end, the Committees are examining allegations that ActBlue, a leading political fundraising organization, allowed bad actors, including foreign actors, to exploit its online platform to make fraudulent political donations.
There is a
profile on Mesh that tells us about Gleason's career and finishes with
a paragraph about the election fraud claims:
Chris Gleason
CEO at NextMed Holdings, LLC CEO at Translational Analytics and Statistics, LLC
Chris Gleason is a board member at Our Mayberry, a company focused on revolutionizing charitable giving and fundraising.1 He is a lawyer, entrepreneur, and community philanthropist with multiple leadership roles in charities helping children.3 Gleason has also been involved in various business ventures and has held executive positions in different companies.
In addition to his role at Our Mayberry, Gleason has served as a board member for the Goldwater Institute since 2013.5 He was also recently appointed as the president and CEO of Moximed, a medical device company, in June 2024.2
Gleason has a background in sales leadership, having previously worked as VP of sales at Relievant and VP of sales of interventional urology at Teleflex.2 He has also been involved in political activities, receiving income from Election Watch, a Wisconsin-based group, in 2024.4
It's worth noting that Gleason has recently entered the political arena, running for the position of Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections in Florida for the 2024 election. His campaign has been controversial, as he has made unsubstantiated claims about election fraud and criticized the incumbent, Julie Marcus.
On 10 April 2026,
Miami Independent published a video where they interview
Chris Gleason and
Jeff Buongiorno about vote rigging allegations. The
CIA is mentioned within the first ninety seconds of the video. I
stopped watching at that point.
In the case of another Debian Developer,
Paul Tagliamonte, he really was working in the White House and the
Pentagon. We have a photo to prove it:
Chris Gleason's campaign web site has the title
Whistleblower in big letters. This implies he was an insider
or he was connected to an insider, in other words, his claim to be
a whistleblower encourages us to ask about the bizarre possibility that he
really is or was the transgender wife of
ActBlue's missing director of
information technology,
Decklin Foster.
If that was true, did his/her domestic arrangements give them
unauthorized access to servers, laptops or cloud accounts for
ActBlue? I was very grateful to receive
donations of file servers from the Catholic archdiocese of Melbourne.
Take a side-step and have a look at the other
Florida connection with the
US Republican party. In the report about
Senior management and HR email privacy: Martin Ebnoether (venty), Axel Beckert (xtaran) & Debian abuse in Switzerland, I made the observation that
Axel Beckert's boyfriend and I both worked at the same company.
The owner of that company is one of the top donors of the
US Republican party and he lives three doors away from Mar-a-Lago,
the home of current US President
Donald Trump. Trump himself was elected for the first time on my
birthday and
I correctly predicted there would be conflict in the Strait of Hormuz.
Decklin was using Gists,
they also stopped abruptly in 2017.
The Red-Bean.com web site has a
list of people associated with their web site and Decklin's name is not
on the list.
Whether they are the same
Chris Gleason or not, we can say for sure
that the
Decklin Foster from
Debianism is the same
Decklin Foster who became Director of Information Technology for
disgraced fundraising platform
ActBlue Civics, Inc.
Here is one more interesting leak from the
debian-private leaked gossip network. It shows us that
Decklin Foster was in favor of the practice of dividing the community
and humiliating people. It looks like he supported the humiliation of
Sven Luther at the very time he was working in the Harvard Medical
School's depression research team. Sven's mother was dying at the time
this bun fight erupted.
Subject: Expulsion process: Sven Luther
Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:29 +0100
From: Joerg Jaspert <joerg@debian.org>
Organization: Goliath-BBS
To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
...
Now, the list of people who sent something in for the process:
Anthony - Requestor
Supporters, unordered:
srivasta@debian.org
mbanck@debian.org
tbm@cyrius.com
93sam@debian.org
fs@debian.org
jgoerzen@complete.org
fjp@debian.org
dilinger@debian.org
joeyh@debian.org
liw@iki.fi
stappers@stappers.nl
tolimar@debian.org
jeroen@wolffelaar.nl
tfheen@debian.org
micah@riseup.net
decklin@red-bean.com
tb@becket.net
tytso.mit.edu
The conflict between
Sven Luther and
Frans Pop appears to be a factor in the eventual suicide of
Frans Pop. The whole group failed.
Subject: [Very long] Post-partem rant and retrospective
Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 03:56:11 +0200
From: Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>
To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
I've decided to write this in a separate mail because I'm afraid this may get long. Quite a bit of this has been written before, but I hope some of you will bear with me.
[snip]
So, what has made me decide to leave the project. It's a combination of just plain emotional stress over the whole Sven Luther issue, frustration with the inability of the project to deal with that and with some other issues, and frustration with the fact that a fair number of members of the project seem to feel that as long as you don't upload packages with trojans, pretty much anything is OK.
and eventually....
Subject: Resignation
Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2010 21:41:18 +0200
From: Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>
To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
It's time to say goodbye. I don't want to say too much about it, except that I've been planning this for a long time.
Participating in Debian has been great.
...
To see all the leaked messages from debian-private,
including the history of
Decklin Foster, please see
my crowdfunding campaign video.
, I just wanted to get something out sooner rather than later for people to play with. So the things that are working and tested are now:
comments? additions? reactions?
As always, comment on mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@nirik/116392979078747195