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Former NSA Employee Arrested on Espionage-Related Charges
- philip1209 4y agoInteresting to think that, with a little information, you could pull up the cryptocurrency transaction (assuming it's not a secret ledger like zcash) and trace how the FBI funded the wallet.
- AustinDizzy 4y agoI tried that exercise after reading the affidavit, and determined they were using Monero (XMR) which makes this task much more difficult if not impossible.
- solveit 4y agoGood to see they know what they're doing.
- bri3d 4y agoThe affidavit indicates that the target selected the cryptocurrency - presumably, he thought he knew what he was doing, but the amounts and times were still cross-correlated after the fact.
- NtochkaNzvanova 4y agoAnd not just crypto -- turns out they're quite skilled at robbing banks as well: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-23/fbi-beverly-hills-safe-deposit-box-raid-forfeiture-judge?_amp=true https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-23/fbi-beve...
- thakoppno 4y agoI too read the affidavit looking for opsec tips to commit my own mastermind crime.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ok123456 4y agoIt was funny how they redacted "Foreign Government-1" everywhere, but left "SVR Russian's External Security Service" in the footnotes.
- cypherpunks01 4y agoYeah, it was fairly apparent earlier in the complaint what country they're talking about, but that was funny to find. I'm sure it's not the first time footnotes accidently leak info that is supposed to be redacted!
- from 4y agoYou can find some pretty interesting improperly redacted documents all over PACER. Usually it's defense attorneys who don't realize that blacking out text in Adobe doesn't remove it rather than the government though. Here's one https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.422916/gov.uscourts.nysd.422916.17.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.42... for the sentencing submission for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux which reveals some pretty personal and operational information. There's one about a Colombian paramilitary leader/drug trafficker turned informant which improperly redacted all the people he informed on: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.18477.229.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.184.... This is from like a decade ago but goes to show how this kind of thing can literally put people's lives at risk.
- octoberfranklin 4y agoThe book about Le Roux is pretty good. Quite riviting reading. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41181600-the-mastermind https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41181600-the-mastermind
- dewey 4y agoI read this a few months ago and it was such an interesting read. Can recommend!
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- Someone1234 4y agoThe guy only worked there for three months, and there was an FBI sting operation against him. Is this something they routinely do to new employees, or maybe they found out something right after his hiring? It isn't strange that an employee was doing something wrong, they got wind, and set up a sting, but the timetable is crazy short.
- momothereal 4y agoI'm thinking some non-targeted honeypot, given he reached out to the undercover agent directly...
- ilamont 4y agoIt was the other way around. They reached out to him using a foreign email service provider and mentioning something vague about mutual benefits. He took the bait.
- wil421 4y agoThought the same myself. There was a skunkworks documentary a long time ago with engineers who worked on the program. Their cover was TV technicians or something else bland. He said one time he was approached by a women at a bar who was way out of his league. She was pushy and questioned about his work for a while. The engineer always thought it was a test by the government.
- wil421 4y agoHas there ever been a case where two undercover agents are trying to play the other one? Not knowing each other are agents. Or a situation where the guy who an undercover agent approaches tells his superiors? Who then want him to go undercover to find out who the suspected foreign agent works for. I’m sure this can happen in government.
- sgjohnson 4y ago> Has there ever been a case where two undercover agents are trying to play the other one? Not knowing each other are agents. It has happened several times with cops. Feds are a bit more professional I believe.
- dkokelley 4y agoI want to see a movie where a major criminal organization is completely overrun by undercover agents of various governments/agencies, but none of them know it so they keep the organization running for fear of being found out. The true criminals have long since retired.
- anigbrowl 4y agoI find it hilarious that he got hired to a security oversight position, started trying to sell his employers' property off the back of a truck, and became the target of a FBI sting operation all in the space of 3 weeks. How naive do you have to be to think that you're not being closely scrutinized, both because it's the freaking NSA and because you're within the normal probation period for a new job? Perhaps a worse punishment than the inevitable long prison term is the fact that this guys entire trip through the alimentary canal of our criminal justice system is going to have a continuous laugh track.
- ikiris 4y agoThe part that amazes me is someone this stupid made it through the hiring process.
- aliqot 4y agoUnderachieving stoners with IT degrees just laughing all the way to the bank... and then the dispensary.
- BobbyJo 4y agoNSA probably wishes they could hire stoners.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- koolba 4y agoThey used to drug test but I think that was too restrictive to their inbound funnel.
- aliqot 4y agoIt's more than that. Any previous convictions, charges or admissions of use will preclude you from clearance.
- MarchKilroy89 4y agoThis affidavit is a laugh riot so far. Guy has a background in infosec, an holds a CISSP cert, among others. The FBI sends him crypto and what does he do?! (1) immediately opens a KYC custodial account (2) xfers the crypto there (3) converts it to USD and sends it to his KYC bank in Colorado. You can't make this stuff up. Also I love how (ostensibly either proton or tutanota) is referred to "Foreign Email Provider". They should buy ForeignEmailProvider.com and make it another email domain for their users. I would love hackerman69420@foreignemailprovider.com
- vdfs 4y ago4 minutes later, someone registered that domain
- MarchKilroy89 4y agoWasn't me! But I expect my hackerman handle when you get your infra set up, anonymous registrant! :p
- arthurcolle 4y agoThey should just redirect ForeignEmailDomain to whatever the real foreign email domain was lmao. What is it, Tutanota? ProtonMail? FastMail? Lmao
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoYou should grab Hackerman31337 first. That will be worth something.
- lamontcg 4y agoi call dibs on zerocool@foreignemailprovider.com
- wswope 4y agoDon’t mind me; just checking for any automated scripts that are watching for unregistered domains mentioned on here: SmallPPDomainRegisterBot.com
- superkuh 4y agoNow we wait for the FBI to get involved, take custody of the evidence, and for one of them to start stealing They do it far more often, or at least get caught more often, than the NSA. FBI/NSA/etc are just government backed criminals.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago> FBI/NSA/etc are just government backed criminals huh?
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- harry8 4y agoWhat this tells us is exactly how competent the NSA are. Every single hostile foreign power has their secrets if this guy has them.
- mhoad 4y agoIt’s really clear you’ve never worked in security. Maybe sit this one out.
- harry8 4y agoPlease. Explain it to me. How can we interpret this as NSA competence? Do please share your expertise from working in security about how this guy having access to secrets is a positive indicator of competence. I'm more than willing to change my views given a good argument based on strong evidence.
- temp2022account 4y agoThe competence identified is how well the agency was able to rapidly determine trust in a new employee; there's no good way to determine trust before the person is cleared, and after they are cleared access to confidential information is assumed (otherwise you have a dead agency incapable of hiring new people). The NSA has a responsibility to remove weaknesses from their ranks, mission accomplished. If the problem you see is "Well agencies ought never give new people access to state secrets" then you can't have any changes ever - it's a dead organization. The other competency I see is that none of the documents, which are of course going to be used in court, are available to the general public. They proved a weakness without leaking any information to parties outside the intel community. They essentially demonstrated that even if they hire a complete moron, state secrets will not leave protected facilities.
- harry8 4y agoHahaha. Hiring this guy to serve beer seems to me like it's not a super-competent move. But they did, then they stung him and he's likely going to jail and they get to talk up their success on thwarting "the baddies." Until you read the details and laugh at the idiocy of it. According to you it's because they can't determine who to trust before giving them security clearance. No way to do it. Can't even take a reasonable guess. Do they still use totally discredited and shown to be utterly ineffective witch-doctor bullshit like "polygraph" machines? Or have they stepped up from throwing bones and reading tea-leaves? Or they've stopped and just give anyone clearance because there's no other way to do it as you seem to be claiming. Is that your experience of working in security? Please share.
- starik36 4y agoDoes FBI catch actual criminals anymore? It seems that every success of theirs consists of finding a weak minded individual, talking him into doing something illegal, maybe even supplying him with weapons or some other incriminating evidence, then arresting him a couple of weeks later. Do they have some sort of quota of how many terrorist they need to catch a year in order to get a bonus?
- bergenty 4y agoIt’s good, it’s going to have the dateline effect.
- throwawaysleep 4y agoA Russian could replicate everything the FBI did, so this seems like fair game.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoThat's exactly it. I wouldn't be surprised if EVERY NSA employee - especially new hires - frequently get their integrity tested like this. I mean a lot of corporates hire companies to send fake phishing mails to employees - I got caught out a few times by that because I clicked a link on emails thinking "wtf is this about". The issue there of course is that the enterprise I'm working for at the moment sends tons of "wtf is this about" emails. Currently I've got about two dozen emails from some guy updating all 100+ people in the IT organization on their deployment process, every hitch they run into, plus fixed timed updates.
- thedougd 4y agoJan 6th, 2020 gave them plenty to work with for the last two years.
- starik36 4y ago
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- frontman1988 4y agoIs the NSA even able to attract quality talent? How desperate must someone be to sell state secrets for just 85k. Most smart kids usually end up doing research or chasing money. Never heard anyone from elite colleges do a stint in government agencies. And given their hiring page it seems they have a lot of openings as well: https://apply.intelligencecareers.gov/job-listings?agency=NSA https://apply.intelligencecareers.gov/job-listings?agency=NS... Must be a very tough job getting smart people to work for them given the average salaries.
- theGnuMe 4y agoI would think so. If you are highly talented you’re set and probably get promoted quickly. After your stint you can do the contractor thing as well. Govt needs a lot of software so you could start a company on just their needs. The key issue is identifying the needs which is easier if you’ve worked there.
- thrill 4y agoAwww - he got caught before he could get his new citizenship.
- jjtheblunt 4y agothat's funny (seriously)
- cypherpunks01 4y agoWhy did they try and entice him to travel to DC? Since it's on federal charges, what would it matter which state he got arrested in? Of course there are plenty of FBI agents in Colorado on hand at any time, so I'm just slightly confused why they did that, when it could have resulted in him backing out.
- walrus01 4y agoas with other stings where an FBI counterintel agent has been pretending to be an employee of a foreign government, probably he thought he was leaving material at some super secret sneaky spycraft dead drop in WA DC for a non-official-cover employee of (russia, china, whatever) to pick up.
- Thorrez 4y agoDid he tell them he lived in Colorado? That seems like something he might want to keep secret.
- lawrenceyan 4y agoI don't think people with purely software engineering backgrounds truly realize the extent to which technology has outpaced them. Hackers were at the cutting edge in 1983 when War Games came out. That era has come and gone, and we live in a different paradigm now.
- aborsy 4y agoA funny aspect of these stories is “secret” and “top secret” designations. There was another story about a memo with “top secret” or “secret “ stamps on pages, that an agency had distributed internally. The information was like, use AES-256 for important data, or key length 3072 with RSA. It was all well known material, nothing secret. I was like, WTF!
- _kbh_ 4y ago> There was another story about a memo with “top secret” or “secret “ stamps on pages, that an agency had distributed internally. The information was like, use AES-256 for important data, or key length 3072 with RSA. It was all well known material, nothing secret. I was like, WTF! Just because there are public recommendations now days does not make the information not classified. There’s a chance that in the past the recommendation was set out because of attacks that the NSA thought only they are knew about. Interestingly enough I’ve seen the recommendations change depending on the classification of the document in some leaked secret document there was a recommendation to use some algorithm (RC4?). In the top secret document the recommendation was the same but to discard the first 3072 bytes to avoid a key stream bias vulnerability.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- boomboomsubban 4y agoHow does this persons name have no google footprint before today? I searched "Jareh Dalke" and limited searches to before September 22nd, and the only thing that popped up were stories from today that bypass Google's date feature. Not even the endless spam personal information sites popped up for the name. Nothing else pops up.
- hulitu 4y agoHe's a PRO.
- grendelt 4y agoDammit Jareh, now I have to sit through another security briefing because of your dumb ass. I literally just did my latest training last week, now we're probably all gonna have to go through it all over again.
- azinman2 4y agoWhat’s always amazing to me is how cheap espionage is. You want the blueprints for nuclear subs that effectively remove an entire class of deterrents that protect hundreds of millions of people? Sure just give me 5/6 figures. This has happened at this price magnitude many times before. At least charge significant money if you’re going to sell out your entire country!
- misto 4y agoI guess the pay at NSA isn't that much? Wonder if anyone here some ballpark figures.
- jonnybgood 4y agoNSA employees are federal employees and go by the federal pay schedule which is public information. Unless they’re contractors.
- LatteLazy 4y agoFundamentally, if you work for the NSA, you either have very different morals to what the US is meant to be about, or none at all. This introduces a simple problem for the NSA (and similar groups). The people working for you are inherently disloyal. You can rely on a member of (say) the military to be at least somewhat resistant to bribes, threats and flattery, because they generally do honestly believe in the ideals of the country they're defending. The same applied to intelligence services in the west during the later cold war after the USSR became hopelessly corrupt. That's why the west won so many intelligence victories. And the vast majority of the losses where when the opposite applied: people who honestly believed in communism in the early cold war. But in today's NSA, you cannot support freedom, democracy, the rule of law, basic honesty, or really anything except for "they pay well so I don't think about it". And when that's the case, there is always someone else willing to pay better...
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- icare_1er 4y agoThere are many legal systems in the world (and I'm talking about developed countries), where charges like this would not stack up, since the individual was pretty much enticed into committing a crime, by the FBI, rather than on his own. This is a very grey area.
- 2rsf 4y agoI agree, this is strange. Maybe some things are not being told?
- maerF0x0 4y agoIt shocks me how little $$ people are corruptible for. Like $85k? You mean like maybe a year of earnings (likely a lot less time). What are you gonna do, take 1 year off and then go back to work? And compared to what risk? Basically forever in a shit hole prison in a country you betrayed? Seems like a crap deal 1 year for 40...