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Meet The Company That Poached The FBI's Entire Silk Road Investigation Team (dailydot.com)
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."
You've obviously never worked in any government office or with police. Rather than spew misinfotainment myths, try a ride along with a peace officer on a Friday night. It'll open your eyes.
Most cops are scum. Ive lived in plenty of cities where I wasnt sure if I was in the US or the USSR
Which language were they speaking?
#DeleteChrome
I moved to another state that allowed privately owned offices to handle routine things like license plates (DL testing still were state run). I was in and out in 5 minutes, they didn't even have chairs for waiting.
Not.
"So I think the best people out there are working for private companies, and not for the government."
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
"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."
In California most of the DMV functions are available online. I haven't been inside the DMV office for more than 5 years. Unfortunately, lack of exposure to the DMV bureaucracy has caused a lot of millennials to believe that socialism is a good idea.
They were hired away from the FBI, and are now employed building Silk Road 3.
It depends on the job. I see more dead wood in Fortune 500 companies than I ever saw working for the Feds.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
A great strategy. If you can't do it better than your competitor, get rid of the competitor.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Patty and Selma?
.
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.
I recently read an interview by Danny Elfman and he had a great answer to a question:
My attitude is always to be critical of what's around you, but not ever to forget how lucky we are. I've traveled around the world. I left thinking I was a revolutionary. I came back real right-wing patriotic. Since then, I've kind of mellowed in between. It affected me permanently and totally.
Does this include the investigator who tried to steal rather a lot of bitcoin?
Ah, a bit of googling and it appears he was sentenced to several years in prison, so, I guess the "entire team" wasn't hired.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Is "opportunity" a new euphemism for money?
Good: Dumbing-down the organs of state security that now just wipe their ass with the Constitution.
Bad: FedGov will just hire these goons by lucrative contract (with the understanding they themselves will be rewarded with an early retirement golden parachute) to assist the DOJ to yet again subvert the Rule of Law with more Parallel Construction tyranny.
That looks an awful lot like a dangerous generalization.
I don't live in the US and I've never met a US police officer. Also, I do not support or defend police brutality in any way, it is crime and should be treated as such, however looking at the numbers of police officers in the US (around 1.1 million personal allowed to conduct arrests) you'd think that if they were ALL "scum" as you put it that you'd have a significantly higher rate of incidences of police brutality and deaths in police custody.
According to the ARD (Arrest-Related Deaths) Bureau of Justice stats; between 2003 and 2009 police in the US killed a total of 2,931 people they were attempting to arrest, of which 75% were being arrested for violent crimes. This sounds like a big number (about 419 people per year), but if viewed in terms of the number of violent crimes committed in the US (116,440,350,000 in 2013 for instance, taken from the FBI violent crime statistics of 367.9 violent crimes per 100,000 inhabitants in 2013) you realise just how tiny a drop in the ocean this number is.
More people die in traffic accidents over the Easter weekend DRIVING to the coast in South Africa between Johannesburg and Durban than are killed by the cops in the US in a year
Incidentally, around 143 US police are killed each year in the line of duty. Considering 13,286 people were killed in the US by firearms in 2015, according to the Gun Violence Archive, and 26,819 people were injured. I think it's a safe assumption that being a cop in the US is a dangerous job that brings you into contact with a violent criminals. Clearly violent criminals exist, they shoot at each other, the public in general and the police, some of them are going to be stupid enough to try to shoot their way out of an arrest and get shot in return. Clearly not all of the people killed by the police fall into this category, but I don't think we should judge ALL police on the fact that a tiny minority of their 1.1 million staff are brutal, but we should judge them instead on how they deal with those individuals and what they do to weed them out of their ranks.
So while the media may tell millions of us every day about how savage the police are in order to get us to buy their papers and tune-in to their news programs, I don't believe the hype is proportional to the size or nature of the problem. But hey, even-handed and rational news never sold any news papers or advertising spots, so I guess the chances of us ever seeing it are really slim.
Incidentally, how many cops have you had interactions with and why are they scum in your opinion?
Thanks, that was a perfect commentary. I've also spent a dozen years living overseas, and been to over 50 countries. We (Americans) have plenty to be critical of inside our boarders, but much more to be thankful for. If you disagree, talk it over with an immigrant, there are many more of those than people leaving.
Just another day in Paradise
Check your math. Your 2013 example implies that every man, woman, and child in the country had been subjected to a violent crime more than once a day.
You realize that "skater" is a self-organized counter-culture which has anti-authoritarianism as one of it's core tenants right? Complaining about getting hastled by the cops while wearing the uniform of someone who is uneducated on their civil liberties while 60% of the time is guilty of possession of contraband(underage tobacco/marijuana) is totally the First Ammendment Hill you want to die on apparently...
If skateboarders weren't all pot smoking punks from bad homes and single mothers maybe cops wouldn't give them so much shit? Next time, try being born to better parents.
Or you could break the cycle and study really hard in school. It's not hard to get a 4.0 when all of your peers are illiterate and high school GPA is a fungible commodity that can get you in to an ivy-league school regardless of relative merit to a graduate from a hyper competitive school district. With honors classes and CLEP tests you could graduate in 3 years with a degree in Math, Engineering, Science, or Medicine(Law isn't the fast-track it used to be) and get snatched up for grad school.
If you don't like reading(listening to Black Flag is so much cooler amirite?) but still want job security: you could get a Bachelors in nursing and get tons of pussy for very little effort.
4 years is an eternity? No problem bro! Vocational training for Dental Hygienist or Radiology technician in 12-24 months! Wow!
California is $50 credit/hour which is affordable at minimum wage. Never mind the GI Bill and all of the outrageous opportunities for people who weren't born as white males to middle class parents.
But please, continue squandering the opportunities you have antagonizing glorified security guards/pawns of the prison-industrial complex because reducing the property values in the neighborhood you live is the most edgy thing you can think of.
SK8R 4 Life bro! Avril Lavigne! My parents don't understand me!
without the blanket of state authority to pull unethical BS. I have heard first hand accounts of SR users being intimidated into giving up SR logins. Which in itself wouldn't be suspect BUT; none of them were charged with anything, no paperwork was ever served and no warrants were ever seen except at arms length like some sort of conman flashing a fake badge. One report I heard had the person flatly refuse the first request, where apon his house was swarmed by "sheriffs", "cops", and "feds" picking over his computer, tossing his house... even found actual evidence of his SR activity in old mailing labels in his trash. Yet never a stitch of paperwork or single charge against him? Totally legit.
Effective too because you don't believe me even now do you?
"I think these guys are smart enough to avoid helping out drug addicts and other undesirable trash."
If only you were smart enough to know that on a darknet, you have no idea who you might be helping out. Those encrypted bits could be an open-source research paper, or they may be child porn.
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?
Disclaimer: US Govt employee who was looking at cybersecurity.
Legal, commercial enterprises can offer both more money and better training than the US Govt due to the highly structured wage-to-grade locks than the shady places. Most US Govt employees do have a good sense of morale fiber (NSA has had personnel problems due to their data retention problems, and these started before Snowden and for the same reasons). That being said, if its at least debatably legal (and definitely in the interests of the USA) most people will take more money since the absolute max the USA can give is ~$155k/yr (for maxed GS-15, which requires a lot of paperwork or overtime to get). DHS has the worst time retaining cybersecurity personnel since, as an additional dis-incentive, DHS is a crappy place to work (more infighting and posturing than any other department, plus other nasty bits depending on who you talk to). It's hard to keep working for the more typical $80k-$100k. when someone else offers you $300k-$600k+ and much less red tape.
The govt, in its infinite wisdom (moreso the lower / middle managers than policy level people), have decided not to train cybersecurity people because they keep leaving (there are infrastructure security problems that no one can agree on how to pay to fix beyond a loose band-aid). Information Assurance (IA) is considered a separate thing and is in high demand, because all IA people get to do is check boxes and yell "the sky is falling"--there is no actual research and you are not allowed to run anything other than 1-3 govt approved "checking" applications / plugins that are always a minimum of 1-2 months out of date. Most of IA's job is filling out endless amount of paperwork documenting approvals and software configuration changes and "impacts" (using quotes because, as mentioned, you have no effective tools to actually do a meaningful analysis with).
Govt IA people can get training--they just never get a chance to use it (and half is tailored to Govt. bureaucracy IA and not IA for the real world). By the time they get fed up and look for another job the training is out of date.
DMV's have improved since today's climate doesn't allow the rampant cronyism that used to infect the DMV's of many states. When the DMV fees are a political kickback, your going to get poor service. Now that they aren't (as often), you get professional employees.
Cheap storage VM.
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?
367.9 crimes / 100,000 people * 315,100,000 people = 1,159,000 crimes. Not 116 billion!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Sorry, you are quite right... finger trouble. My bad.
New York DMV has improved significantly now that most things can be handled on line or via mail. Even getting plates for a new car is done right at the dealership.
I suspect a lot of this was due to necessity - NYC DMV offices don't have much space and have to serve a lot more people than the the ones elsewhere in the state, but all branches benefited from the reduction in walk-ins.
I never witnessed that.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
More people die in traffic accidents over the Easter weekend DRIVING to the coast in South Africa between Johannesburg and Durban than are killed by the cops in the US in a year
Really? 419 people dead from traffic accidents on a single highway on a single weekend? I'm not saying it's wrong, but a lot of your other statistics certainly stretch credibility.
Incidentally, around 143 US police are killed each year in the line of duty.
Most of which are car accidents.
Considering 13,286 people were killed in the US by firearms in 2015, according to the Gun Violence Archive
About 2/3 of which were suicides.
I think it's a safe assumption that being a cop in the US is a dangerous job
That's only valid if you don't compare it with other jobs. I think the most dangerous right now is logger. It used to be convenience store clerk. Police don't even make the top 50.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
"Sweeping brutality under the carpet or trying to cover it up is indeed wrong (possibly criminal in itself) and should be robustly discouraged. However the culture of secrecy is by in large a direct consequence of trying to avoid the inevitable, derogatory, riot-inciting media frenzy that follows"
If some police cover up brutality, including when they kill someone without legal cause, the right word for their behavior is criminal and you can't justify their behavior by saying they did it because they feared what would happen if the general public or the media found out about it.
Indeed, that is exactly what I said. Police brutality is wrong and criminal and should be treated as such. I was very clear about that. I ALSO think however that it is incorrect to judge ALL police on the actions of a few criminal individuals.
Similar levels of unstable individuals?
Considering that "police officer" ranks in the top ten jobs for the most psychopaths, I don't trust your assessment.
Citation: http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://time.com/32647/which-pr...
I can and will judge all involved with the cover up as accessories to murder, because they are by all legal definitions.
"Indeed, that is exactly what I said. Police brutality is wrong and criminal and should be treated as such. I was very clear about that."
Yes, I wanted to emphasize that it was more than "possibly criminal"
"I ALSO think however that it is incorrect to judge ALL police on the actions of a few criminal individuals."
Yes, of course I agree. The proportion of blame that can be attributed to the police force is most concentrated on a small part of the force.
"However the culture of secrecy is by in large a direct consequence of trying to avoid the inevitable, derogatory, riot-inciting media frenzy that follows"
I disagree, I think that "inevitable, derogatory, riot-inciting media frenzy that follows" is "a large direct consequence" of both the few cops that partake in criminal behavior and coverups, and the few people who claim all cops partake in criminal behavior and coverups, and the latter group tends to make less sweeping claims when the former group tends to be smaller or partakes in less criminal behaviors
I disagree, I think that "inevitable, derogatory, riot-inciting media frenzy that follows" is "a large direct consequence" of both the few cops that partake in criminal behavior and coverups, and the few people who claim all cops partake in criminal behavior and coverups, and the latter group tends to make less sweeping claims when the former group tends to be smaller or partakes in less criminal behaviors
I totally agree with your above comment regarding the "large direct consequence", I will also say that plenty of evidence exists to suggest that some police deserve to be in prison as they are criminals. I also think we have similar feelings when confronted with evidence of crime being committed by the police. I would add to this though; All the negative press about the police whether accurate or exaggerated, real or imagined amplifies and encourages negative feelings in the public mind. While I think it is right that we the public should get to hear about this sort of news, I think that the media tries to turn everything they report into as big a story as they can in order to make money out of us rather than to report cold hard (often boring) facts. The negative image does not benefit the public, or the police.
I think it's fair to say that in order to remedy the situation the police need to be utterly transparent about what they do and what they get wrong. But equally, I think they need to be allowed to do this by the media without being damned as an organization when an individual has done something unforgivable
"While I think it is right that we the public should get to hear about this sort of news, I think that the media tries to turn everything they report into as big a story as they can in order to make money out of us rather than to report cold hard (often boring) facts"
I agree.
"The negative image does not benefit the public, or the police"
Yes, but at the same I think there is a link between media coverage intensity and a willingness to remedy the problems.
"I think it's fair to say that in order to remedy the situation the police need to be utterly transparent about what they do and what they get wrong. But equally, I think they need to be allowed to do this by the media without being damned as an organization when an individual has done something unforgivable"
Good point. While still agreeing with what I said above, at the same time, I can see that if media worked on not spreading blame to police and law enforcement in general it could facilitate the implementation and internal support for the needed changes.