Ex-Military Hacker: The Secret World Of Government Surveillance - Bill Thompson - #1131

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0:32mwmerch.com what phone have you got what is that uh this is a galaxy fold so it's got like the regular phone set up but then when you want to go wide you get this bad boy why no apple um i mean it's a philosophical thing for me uh i i just back when i used to do a lot more of this myself instead of running companies that do this but when i was doing it on my own um essentially the android operating system is published online and the aosp it's called it's the open source project um you used to be able to see most like a good amount of um uh the inner workings of the phone essentially um and understand how it works and and where the holes were um i looked at it for two reasons one reason was i was trying to develop implants or zero days for the military at the time um and and android being open allowed us to look into those types of things and then the second reason was um i could dump the my phone myself and look at it so if i was traveling to a country where i was sure something was going to be going on with my phone or maybe i got pulled into secondary customs and my phone was out of my hands for a while um it it was a lot more um available to me to do that whereas with apple it was very difficult to do those types of things does it not make it more secure that it's a closed architecture that doesn't allow you to see where potential vulnerabilities are as long as you trust the company right so you've got um on one hand how much i trust apple and on the other hand how competent i think people that can look at the android operating system to find its vulnerabilities are yes right okay yeah and i'd rather be able to look for myself have you got any idea what the justification is for getting access to somebody's phone without them giving permission you don't need a lot of justification with things like the patriot act i mean with those things hanging around it's just even that that was created before phones and operating systems for phones yeah at that point they were going after the um telephonic infrastructure so microwave links um down and up channel links from um uh bts' base transiver stations um that's tapping into signals the infrastructure right yeah and and the signals that live from the cell from the tower to the cell phone uh but by by saying infrastructure you've kind of future-proofed yourself for if there's going to be technology that comes out which is a different kind of infrastructure yes oh so it was very cleverly written unless they updated it in future well they updated it and made it more use it's more usurpacious it's one of the most usurpacious what's up with pieces uh usurping uh right right right underwrite like uh underhanded um it was you know the patriot act can you think of a more innocuous term for something department of peace uh and it's just uh it's it's just one of those things where you know we would we would need a six-hour podcast to pull the string on how we got there but it's it's uh a conflation of a lot of useful idiots looking for power is essentially the long and short story of it how much do you think i've heard that people bring up 9-11 patriot act after that surveillance nsa all of the foreign intelligence surveillance act right i thought you meant the fucking how is big pharma involved in that i'm sorry she should have got their fingers in everything i knew it was a covet vaccine yeah loop it round yeah yeah yeah uh five 5g um uh it was a foreign intelligence security act which is a kangaroo court that sits near fort mead maryland and when there's classified work going on this is all you can google this i'm not giving the keys away to anything um uh when you want to go after someone furtively or undercover um you go to a court that's you know pay you know part of the nsa or part of the the triumvirant three-letter soup agencies and you go to this judge and you say hey we think this guy's you know we think chris is a bad guy he's he's actually here spying for the english and here's three reasons why and the court will sign it and it never sees the light of day and i never thought about this uh meta even now open ai you know relatively new company they must have hey we've found this person that we think is potentially a bad guy we need access to their chat gpt logs i'm sure that's happening so for every big platform software and hardware there is going to be some form of interface between them and the government and for some of them formal and informal so there'll be the the government and this is uh i'll i'll use the i'll use the proxy uh government i won't say the u.s government again because i don't want to get sued they'll do a overt relationship that's got a memorandum of understanding or an agreement between or a memorandum of agreement between the two companies saying you know here and it'll be very you know what you would expect to see if there's a terrorist or something like that you guys are going to help us but then there'll be alternate channels that will get built you know um on the clandestine side where the government will a government will recruit someone in that place to say hey you're in charge of the uh security or you're in charge of the infrastructure here you know um you've got a daughter who needs really good cancer treatment we could hook her up with a johns hopkins or something like that i'm not saying the u.s government governments do it yep um allegedly and so they'll set these relationships up um you know the the triumvirant that you think about when it concerns um spying is uh placement access and and uh motivation susceptibility um and uh accessibility so when you're looking at a source someone you want to recruit to spy it's does he work in the organization that does he have access to the information that we want is he motivated to share that information and can i access him when he's outside of the organization to get you know a hold of the um the secrets um and that that's what you you know i was also trained in the military as a human intelligence um operator which is uh you know recruiting people to um screw over their own countries so uh those are the things that you consider and so you know and if the americans wouldn't do it then they'll allow the english or some other five eyes organization to do it and then they'll talk to them so you know the the americans might know that the english has recruited a spine for inside of a mi5 or mi6 has recruited a spy inside of an organization that they can't recruit against at least on the books um so they'll just get debriefed by a five eyes partner who's doing the same thing so oh okay so uh one country that is in partnership with another one has been able to place somebody who will feed information back to them in an organization yeah the english don't care about the bill of rights that a different country yeah can't do that yeah but as long as the umbrella at the top is able to disseminate that information back down yeah and everybody can share or they'll just collect against that they'll know that there's a spy here so then the security agency will collect against that spy while he's operating in the country right have an understanding of what he's doing and then if there's a u.s person's nexus then it there's a process called minimization procedures which again you can google and read online but it's how do we minimize the exposure of a american person but all of it still gets cataloged so it's all still there what's minimization procedures minimization is when there's an inadvertent collection of an american u.s person or or even a dual citizen the government's not supposed to be collecting against them so once there's an inadvertent collection whether it's through technology or you accidentally recruit an american which really doesn't happen that often or you come across some media that was generated by an american ostensibly they're supposed to be protected by the bill of rights and you know unlawful search and seizure freedom of speech um ninth amendment all of those things are supposed to come into play and uh but what the government will do is they'll start a minimization channel and it's it's a good idea in practice because of course there will be inadvertent collection like i as an american might be traveling in bahrain and then show up on a on a cell phone channel that they're collecting on and then my excuse me my information is now collected and that goes back to you know fort meade or whatever and they're like oh there's an american there's a process to get rid of that information it's just uh the process moves conveniently slow in my experience um and uh is another vector for usurping people's rights um so there are people in there trying to fight it in the government the government you know you can listen to rampaul stump on this all day well you know i agree with some of what he says some i don't agree with but um they are obviously aware of these things happening they're fighting things like fisa which we've mentioned they're fighting things like the process for minimization but it's a slow the government's a you know a behemoth it's got to be hard when technology is able to move as quickly as it does to be able to keep up as well legislation just takes so long and even working out okay what is the strategy we want to implement let alone can we get it past the appropriate hurdles legislatively to get it brought in yeah the staffing of that legislation and then the voting and the pork and presumably the talent is always going to be on the side of the people building the technology not legislating against it like in order to be able to legisl at least begin to understand how we want to compensate for this new type of technology you need to understand the technology yeah but the people understanding it from the government side are never going to be as talented as the people that are building it so you're always in a race that you're very far behind very few organizations are as competent as the free market um inside of the u.s government one of them would be dARPA i advise there for a couple of years it's kind of the black box of uh the the dod their job is to like just come up with holy shit ideas um and then they get you know a budget to to work after these things oftentimes they'll fund things that they don't they know will not be built but they're hoping that there'll be spin-offs from the idea that will help so they might say like we want to build i always use this um analogy we might want to build a you know a a a rocket ship that can make it to mars in half the time that's just something easy we can talk about so they'll fund that um and the only thing useful that might come out of it might be a new type of carbon fiber that they had to develop as one of the subject lines one of the the key performance parameters was this new type of carbon fiber that was lighter and stronger so they never built the rocket ship but they have three other products that came out of it and then those things get released into the free market so it's quite a useful organization it's quite good actually um it was more applicable back in like the 80s and the 70s because um technology hadn't evolved to the point where any big idea was going to need hundreds of millions of dollars whereas today there's people out there like elon and others who can fund these really big ideas so it's still a good organization but that that would that i would say that's the last bastion of competence inside of the government otherwise it's a totally incompetent um organization what was it that you said you had human hacking as well as software hacking what was well human intelligence is the gathering of intelligence through human like you know source and method means sources and methods means and then there's um the government calls it ethical hacking which is really a ridiculous moniker um where you're you know you're exploiting computer systems and building things like zero days and you're exploiting um structural um cracks or crevices in technology and sometimes you'll never use them they'll just sit on the shelf and that's kind of where the term zero day comes from it's like breaking clay in case break glass in case of emergency then there'll be other ones that get used all of the time and then uh there'll be people who do this in the government there'll be people who do this um you know white hack white white hat hackers um who will expose these things and then you know either do it for a bounty with a company or do it to enable something that's on the same side these people who are talented hackers get employed by a company to see if they can break their own system that was my first job offering when i got out of the military was to do it for a bank my friend i have a very good friend who we went through the same training pipeline together and uh we were both offered a very good amount of money from a bank to just go after their own infrastructure and then report back on how we were able to um you know it's a weird kind of ransom yeah it's a it's a victimless ransom that only makes things stronger yeah right yes exactly penetration testing is the is the is the unfortunate moniker uh when it comes to getting access to information systems how often is it a software hack and how often is it a human hack uh well that depends on how it depends on your budget and how fortified the infrastructure is and how how they treat operational security or opsec so you'll do like a target profile you'll you'll you know your commander or whoever you work for will state a goal we want access to you know x information at you know x organization whatever that might be and then you'll get a bunch of people like myself and from other disciplines there's there's multiple there's many modes of intelligence especially within the dod there's uh mazent there's physant there's elint there's comet there's um cyber there's open source intelligence mazent is measuring in area signals um physant is telemetry intelligence so you know a space shuttle will report back information to the ground station as it's ascending or a plane will be giving information back to its ground station while it's maneuvering it's the interception of that information there's elint which is electronic intelligence going after radars associating with aircraft or AAA batteries or early warning radars or fire control radars on on ships or airplanes that interception of those signals and parsing it I realized I said a bunch of acronyms and didn't explain them so now I'm explaining them and there's open source intelligence there's a variety of intelligence so you'd have all of those people in the room who conduct those things and they'd say what are the vulnerabilities you know we've done a target analysis of this what are the vulnerabilities or likely vectors that we can access and if you've got a budget so you know what are some of the cheapest ways well the cheapest ways are always recruiting humans that work inside of the organization so whether it's terrorists or government or that's always cheaper than trying to hack the technology 95 of the time it's cheaper it depends again it depends on what technology we're going after um if it's a you know a 3g nokia in in iran uh that's an easy day if it's a uh uh you know uh let's see what would be something very difficult um a highly encrypted satellite communication network where you need to be in the physical footprint of the satellite lobe in order to do the collection that's placement that's access that's money that's recruiting that's hacking that's decryption there's a bunch there so it really depends on the nature of the target and the technology um but uh generally inside of an organization there will be people with loose morals and you can obviously often get a lot out of them for just paying them 30 or 40 or 50k or you know finding out someone who runs the security network whose daughter needs eye surgery or has macular degeneration you bump into them at a coffee shop and strike up a conversation and i like what you like and establish rapport and then eventually you get to the point where you recruit them and then you pay them and then you get your information that's more classic spy craft type spy classically yes exactly yeah so i was trained in that classically while i was in the military but it was in order to conduct um forensic exploitation um forensic exploitation yes in in support of these types of operations what's that what's forensic exploitation uh you're handling a source and you're worried that he's not obeying your instructions so now you're going to pull the gps or data from the phone to make sure that he drove there the way that you told him okay so this is beginning to cross the two this isn't just the human side it's not just the technological side signals intelligence and computer um network operations supporting the human intelligence targeting cycle wow okay yeah to ensure that assets are doing what they say that they do right okay yeah because there's layers and layers there's what you want them to achieve technologically but then there's surveilling them to ensure that they're doing what you want them to do in order to achieve what you want them to achieve and you don't want them showing up like you know they might be running late from work so they just take a direct beeline to your meet instead of conducting a surveillance detection route and now they've you know they left their facility and they left with surveillance now the surveillance pulled them all the way to where you're doing your meet yeah instead of doing the surveillance detection route and dumping the surveillance not dumping cataloging the the surveillance and then not attending the meeting because you've got a tail wow okay what are what are some of the gnarliest exploits or information hacks that are publicly available and you can talk about but not enough people know about i mean pegasus is probably the king of that um it's basically a persistent persistent implant that lives on the phone um that in its earliest iterations required you click some type of link so there would be a phishing element to it where you know you're getting an email or you're getting a text where you know i might you know conduct some exploitation on your phone and figure out you text a lot with person a and then so now i'm going to um use the network and send a message that's looking like it's coming from that person saying hey chris come and check this link out blah blah blah blah blah you know it'd be innocuous or a website or something like that that it sends you to but then it would deliver some packets that would implant itself in you know uh a part of your telephone that was specifically for iphone iOS uh yeah but but I believe it branched out since then so Pegasus was post my military career so I didn't actually get to go and do the exploitation on it that I wanted to do on it or that I would have wanted to do it I read some papers I talked to some friends who are still in and asked them about it but it lived in a different place on the phone than it would even stand up to a person like me doing a quick triage natured forensics exploitation where I dump the phone and look through it it was stored in a place where it wasn't obvious that you should be looking for any type of code there or malicious code there who made it I mean I believe it was made by the Israelis I think that's common knowledge that certainly was one of the most like holy shit these guys cracked the nut here say what you will about Israel they certainly have their trade craft and their military operation planning down well dude if you can blow the balls off 3,000 fucking enemy combatants at the same time using a pager oh man I wish I'd have been part of something like that that'd have been great that kind of fell away that news story it was I mean it happened everyone was interested in it but that to me seems like one of the most like insane they should make a movie about that precise yeah yeah it would be just years of target development sourcing corporate espionage supply chain interdiction the amount of things that had to go into that to make that happen uh you know just getting plastique or whatever they use inside of a you know a pager that's easy supply interdiction you know making it through this network paying off the right people delivery the patience to wait you know that they're with all of these people uh it's just you know that was a stroke of genius most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit but what if i told you there was a solution something that identifies low t faster than a high school bully and it won't cost you all your lunch money that's where function comes in gives you access to over 160 lab tests including a deep dive into your full hormone panel every result is reviewed by 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secure so now we're going to go revert back to um which is actually you know throughout my time in the global war on terrorism that was definitely a thing that would happen like we'd nail down one type of technology we'd exploit it we'd kill a bunch of people and then they'd you know pivot to a different piece of technology or regress back to um you know something more primitive they did the same thing even with um i d's you know i d's started very primitively you know pressure sensors uh pressure triggers um you had to physically you know manipulate it you know drive over something and then they got to command and detonated and then they got to using garage doors that were operating in a frequency band that the the initial Magellans that we put out which were sensing the RF environment would tell you if there was something in the area and set it off so then they started using the garage door openers that were in a very low frequency band range that was outside of the Magellans the Magellans pivoted and then they went back to remote pressure and or or running a wire up to a hotel room and sitting in the hotel room and waiting so you know like you said the free market can pivot and develop new technology and asymmetric warfare in asymmetric warfare the threat can pivot especially when you're dealing with somebody who doesn't wear a uniform and doesn't care about the law of Geneva conventions they'll just go wherever they need to go to keep whatever's most effective yeah exactly this is what we saw in Ukraine right with drones that a $500 drone with a bit of plastic explosive yeah was able to find the weakness in this particular tank so then the tanks got webbed like frontage like prongs at the top so that they would get caught okay so we'll find a way to get around that so then EMP blasts will be used to knock them out of the sky so then we'll run basically big fucking strings big cords yeah it's this rapidly evolving it's like that baseball game with the bat where you're putting hands over the top and then you know Rochambeau or whatever they used to call it it's the same thing you're just how can we pivot that's what the military and the government by a lot by and large is really bad at is pivoting and responding to pivoting because we're militaries that are built around symmetric threats we were thinking about the Russians we were thinking about the Chinese and you know that's you know Geneva conventions law of land warfare you know there's just certain gentleman rules that you'll obey and say we're not going to do we won't target civilians we won't target churches we won't target mosques we won't do these types of things and then you know terrorists just look at that and say oh they're showing us their weaknesses let's run all of our operations you know i just read a news report the other day about gaza using the hospitals as torture facilities um it was just like two or three days ago that's morbid yeah yeah so they're just overtaking these hospitals there was um a book i i brought the author on i wasn't ever able to actually release the episode but i brought an author on who had written a book that was about all of the intelligence failures of america and uh it was like a popular history book but it came up to pretty recent pretty and when they did the Osama bin Laden raid they found the book on his bedside table and this guy was an old school British bloke and he immediately rang his publisher and said we need to put this on the front cover of the paperback release like so good that Osama bin Laden had it on his bedside nightstand yeah but yeah he he was using Osama bin Laden was using a popular history book about the failings of the American intelligence agencies and the rest of the right next to his Avril Levine CD yeah honestly yeah yeah and his facing yeah we uh we we put a lot of that out there I mean um I'm proud to say I worked in a lot of military organizations where none of the members have published books yet I'm anti-bloated government I'm like so against you know Andy you mentioned at the beginning had me on his podcast and said if you you know if you're a dictator for the day how much would you reduce the federal government by and I said 80% and I just gave a long list of organizations that would just go away there's it's just it's a self-licking ice cream cone that's its only ends and means are to grow and to pull more purse strings for the majority of the time so it's been an interesting loop to watch uh Elon's arc over the last what like two years or so oh very much so with Doge right because I think it's this weird ouroboros eating itself of we shouldn't have trillionaires because they're able to evade tax we need to take more taxes a lot of rich people say I want to pay taxes I think the top like one percent of earners pay 30 of the taxes already but the main concern of most rich high tax paying people is look at all of the fucking waste and fraud that this is being spent on and the guy that's paying the most tax was also the guy that was trying to remove some of the inefficiencies yes to be able to as opposed to pouring more into the top it's like let's make the system that spits it out the bottom more efficient so that we can actually get more of it we have some taxes going in lots of that's being wasted how can we make it more efficient i had um the uh cio the chief information officer for the treasury department uh sam corcos who founded levels i had him on the podcast last year and he's the it was the first long-form interview that anybody from doge had done um at his level i think i saw that one great but he's like dude it's ancient yeah this entire organization is a big lumbering behemoth uh it leans left as well internally and it's not agile it's not able to be kept up to date and all of these systems is he was explaining it's like 16 intersecting different systems that need to well this type of information is held on this particular type of database and we need to do a lookup request that comes across to this one so it's not one cohesive it's not a big fuck off excel spreadsheet right right that just holds everything right it's this frankenstein's monster that's been like contorted over time to it functions it functions in as much as the country hasn't fallen apart and you're able to submit taxes and you're able to pay them but uh yeah it's um it's a mess it's a mess yeah it's it my experience was my last job when i left the military was i was advising um a two-star general and a Fulbright colonel who were in charge of all the offensive cyber development for the army.