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- May 10, 2015
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Scary stuff here. Former NSA employees working for a company to create a partisan left-wing disinformation narrative targeting Republicans and selling the information to the NSA. All of this for political gain and election interference.
It is a long article. For lefties with short attention spans, below is one of the more alarming pieces of information.
DUPUIS: I wish I had written more stuff down. At one point, we had all these new Elastic Search, NSA people show up…
They are an open-source, proprietary search technology API that can be integrated into software. It's used by a lot of companies. I've never worked anywhere that hasn't had some sort of Elastic Search type tool embedded into the product.
We already had one NSA person join, Ryan, and that made sense because he's a security analyst. And it sounded like he was excited to get out of working for the government. But then we got a new executive that had previously worked at the NSA, and he came from Elastic.
But this second NSA guy became the director of technology or something. When he comes in, we go down to The Draft House, this bar down the street from the office, for a kind of employee welcome thing.
Ryan gets really drunk. He didn’t seem to be able to hold his liquor, and I started asking him about PRISM.
THACKER: This was the top secret NSA program to spy on Americans that Edward Snowden leaked to Glenn Greenwald. PRISM allowed intelligence services direct access to the companies' servers to search our communications.
Members of Congress didn’t even know it existed.
DUPUIS: I didn't say anything about how I felt about it. I was just wondering what it was like to be working at the NSA when it got blown up by Edward Snowden.
And he said, “You know, that exposed the locations and identities of people that were undercover, and put their lives at risk.”
I thought that was a pretty reasonable thing to be upset about.
And then Ryan and the other former NSA guy are kind of bantering back and forth and saying, “Oh, it's not like what people think it is. We actually have to really follow the law, follow the Constitution. But a lot of people get fed up with that, and leave to go into the private sector. Because if you sell it back as a product to the government, you're not bound to federal law.”
THACKER: They were telling you what the game is. The game is you work inside NSA, or these intelligence agencies. You then leave the intel agencies, and you go work in the private sector. And then you sell this information right back to your old employer in the federal government.
DUPUIS: Yes.
THACKER: Did you understand it immediately at the time, “Whoa, what's going on here? You’re two former NSA guys, and you just explained the game to me.”
WHISTLEBLOWER: Insider Details How "New Knowledge" Cybersecurity Firm Created Disinformation in American Election
It is a long article. For lefties with short attention spans, below is one of the more alarming pieces of information.
DUPUIS: I wish I had written more stuff down. At one point, we had all these new Elastic Search, NSA people show up…
They are an open-source, proprietary search technology API that can be integrated into software. It's used by a lot of companies. I've never worked anywhere that hasn't had some sort of Elastic Search type tool embedded into the product.
We already had one NSA person join, Ryan, and that made sense because he's a security analyst. And it sounded like he was excited to get out of working for the government. But then we got a new executive that had previously worked at the NSA, and he came from Elastic.
But this second NSA guy became the director of technology or something. When he comes in, we go down to The Draft House, this bar down the street from the office, for a kind of employee welcome thing.
Ryan gets really drunk. He didn’t seem to be able to hold his liquor, and I started asking him about PRISM.
THACKER: This was the top secret NSA program to spy on Americans that Edward Snowden leaked to Glenn Greenwald. PRISM allowed intelligence services direct access to the companies' servers to search our communications.
Members of Congress didn’t even know it existed.
DUPUIS: I didn't say anything about how I felt about it. I was just wondering what it was like to be working at the NSA when it got blown up by Edward Snowden.
And he said, “You know, that exposed the locations and identities of people that were undercover, and put their lives at risk.”
I thought that was a pretty reasonable thing to be upset about.
And then Ryan and the other former NSA guy are kind of bantering back and forth and saying, “Oh, it's not like what people think it is. We actually have to really follow the law, follow the Constitution. But a lot of people get fed up with that, and leave to go into the private sector. Because if you sell it back as a product to the government, you're not bound to federal law.”
THACKER: They were telling you what the game is. The game is you work inside NSA, or these intelligence agencies. You then leave the intel agencies, and you go work in the private sector. And then you sell this information right back to your old employer in the federal government.
DUPUIS: Yes.
THACKER: Did you understand it immediately at the time, “Whoa, what's going on here? You’re two former NSA guys, and you just explained the game to me.”
WHISTLEBLOWER: Insider Details How "New Knowledge" Cybersecurity Firm Created Disinformation in American Election