It was barely a month ago that a military contractor deleted her bikini-clad avatars after her online friends in the security world accused her of trying to tease out sensitive information. But now the social media phenomenon known as Primoris Era is back, writing for a prominent seapower blog.
The self-proclaimed “First Lady of Missiles” is now blogging pseudonymously for Information Dissemination, a naval strategy blog run by Danger Room pal Raymond Pritchett. Primoris Era’s hiatus from the Internet, prompted by a Defense Department investigation into whether she violated security protocols, is officially over.
As Danger Room reported last month, the proprietor of a series of Twitter and Facebook accounts known primarily as @PrimorisEra — purportedly military contractor Shawna Gorman — found herself under investigation for her prolific tweeting, Facebooking and IMing habits. Several in the national security community considered her torrid online questioning to be an unseemly form of soliciting secrets. One accused her of being a spy, before backing off that charge in an interview with Danger Room. Primoris Era says she just thought she was being friendly.
It was all fun and games until a Twitter fight with another contractor led her to shut down her myriad online personae at the behest of her employer, whom she would not name in a brief Danger Room interview last month. That concern appears to no longer be so salient.
“Suffice it to say,” Primoris Era writes in her inaugural post at Information Dissemination, “I’m not your average anything.”
She does not use her real name to blog, but lists a picture of a woman resembling those appearing in online accounts that use permutations of the name Shawn Elizabeth Gorman. And she lists a bunch of biographical details, including her Bay Area origins and pedigree working for Sen. John McCain. Apparently, the “First Lady of Missiles” moniker came to her from an old professor.
Primoris Era didn’t return a message seeking comment sent to two known email addresses affiliated with the pseudonym.
But Pritchett says that he was eager to bring her writing over to his blog, reaching out to Primoris Era around the time our story came out. “I wanted to have a writer in that space,” Pritchett says. “She’s a legitimate ballistic missile expert and the Navy talks about this stuff all the time… It’s difficult to get shotgun analysis when North Korea shoots a missile over Japan.”
Sure enough, Primoris Era’s first substantive post for the blog is a dense meditation on a Russian sub-launched ballistic missile.
Pritchett says he hasn’t been contacted by any Pentagon investigators seeking to establish whether Primoris Era unduly solicited or handled sensitive information. Nor is he aware of any changes in her employment status. And he couldn’t be less concerned about the controversy surrounding her: “I’ve seen a lot worse than this — a young person who gets caught up in social media stuff? C’mon.”
Since Pritchett blogs under the pseudonym Galrahn — a holdover from his gaming days in earlier decades — he wasn’t about to encourage her to use her real name. It’s on her to prove her chops as a missile expert now, something several of her detractors have questioned.
“If she wants the fog of war around her identity, I’m fine with it, because I know she’s legit,” Pritchett says. “My audience will judge people by the quality of their content, no matter who they were or what their reputation was before coming onto Information Dissemination. … I think her content will be awesome.”
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