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Meet The Company That Poached The FBI's Entire Silk Road Investigation Team (dailydot.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the sunny-side-up dept.

Patrick O'Neill quotes a report from The Daily Dot: The FBI team that brought down Silk Road has a new home. After headline-grabbing investigations, arrests, and prosecutions on some of America's highest-profile cybercriminals, five of U.S. law enforcement's most prized cybercrime aces have all left government service for greener pastures -- a titan consulting firm called Berkeley Research Group (BRG). BRG's newly hired gang of five includes former federal prosecutor Thomas Brown, as well as former FBI agents Christopher Tarbell, Thomas Kiernan, and Ilhwan Yum -- names that punctuated many of the biggest cybercrime stories of the last decade including Silk Road, LulzSec, Liberty Reserve, as well as the hacks of Citibank, PNC Bank, and the Rove Digital botnet; and the prosecution of Samarth Agrawal for stealing crucial code for high-frequency trading from the multinational, multibillion dollar bank Societe Generale. "Private industry provides a lot of opportunity," NYPD intelligence chief Thomas Galati told Congress earlier this year. "So I think the best people out there are working for private companies, and not for the government."

6 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. I have to wonder... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 5, Insightful
    ... just how much of the faux outrage on this is because of the fact that private companies are able to pay qualified people more than our government can pay them. And how much of that outrage is from people who consistently vote to cut government budgets.

    .
    So much of what I hear about government ineptitude is due to the underfunding of those people by the very people who consistently vote to cut the budgets. If I didn't know better, I would say that thier voting patterns are in a positive feedback loop that does not result in a good solution.

    1. Re:I have to wonder... by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 1, Insightful

      The U.S. government does not need more money. It has plenty. It takes a huge, huge amount of the entire U.S. economy to pay for itself. The last thing it needs is more money.

      Increasing the amount of money the government has will never stop government employees from being hired away by private industry. What WILL stop it is strong anti-corruption laws. This revolving door is well-known and well-appreciated by the DC elite. Obama - the man who has repeatedly pledged to crack down on Wall Street wrongdoing - picked as one of his top financial cops a figure who has spent much of the last decade defending senior bankers.

      And yet, not a word against this practice, but a slur against ordinary Americans who groan under the burden of supporting ever-expanding government spending. Faux outrage indeed. Go fuck yourself.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
  2. Re:I for one am shocked. by mvdwege · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So before they jumped to private industry, these guys were not the best?

    If you take a minute to think about, you'd see this is bullshit, like all such glib statements./p?

    --
    "I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
  3. Re: Jacob's Ladder by Trailer+Trash · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Most police officers who die in the line of duty either have a car accident or a heart attack - only about 1/3 are actually victims of homicide.

    Beyond that, yes, police don't actually kill that many people. But what we've found is that when they do, the others tend to cover up their bad behavior. A staggering number have killed multiple times. Given that half of all LEOs in the US don't ever draw their sidearm during their entire career, you get the picture that some guys just don't need to be police officers.

    I didn't understand it until I went to a mixed-race church with a black preacher years ago. One Sunday he gently explained it to us white folks in the audience. This is a guy with no criminal history, college educated, etc. He started out by explaining that every single time he had been pulled over he had a gun pointed at him, sometimes touched to his bald head.

    We have a pretty big problem with that stuff in this country, and the Tamir rices are just the tip of the iceberg.

    --
    Do you have ESP?
  4. Re:Opportunity? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No, it's the same old euphemism for money that it's always been.

  5. Re: Jacob's Ladder by Trailer+Trash · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Let me explain this really simply. Every single cop who pulled over the preacher that I talked about is a violent felon. Yes, it's that simple.

    It's not legal to point a gun at someone unless you have a reasonable belief that they are going to immediately cause great harm to you or someone else. Period.

    It's frightening how easily you ignore that.

    --
    Do you have ESP?