Title: John Kiriakou speaking at Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE 2025), NYC
Show: Bits On Tape
Date: 2025-08-18
URL: https://youtube.com/watch?v=k3tKmaylRrY
Duration: 1:03:00

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[00:03] [Music]

[02:18] Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. [Music] Heat. Heat.

[02:50] [Music]

[03:27] I still don't think it was a good idea because what he did was a car to the statute which is there's a Burman amendment which basically says despite these sanctions the first amendments even if he went and he lost I thought there was still a good argument on appeal This shouldn't be a crime to begin with because what he did was constitutional protective activity US citizen to be able to speak whatever he wants to speak about. There's no transfer of knowledge. >> That's exactly right.

[03:57] >> So, but thankfully he's out now. He finished his sentence. I was able to actually get his sentence reduced by about seven months and DOJ, you know. Yeah. Because there were new sentencing guidelines that came out. He was very >> Thank you so much. And they always say This was a very grave crime. >> No, it wasn't with General Flynn. Very grave crime. >> Exactly. >> What are you talking about?

[04:42] >> Hey. Hey. Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. Okay. Gotcha. Yep. Bye. Bye. Bye. >> Okay. Very good. Um, so we can start. >> Okay. Step aside. >> All right. But we're going to start here

[05:13] in about uh 15 20 seconds. So if anybody wants to get situated, turn your phones off. Get ready for another very interesting tale here. All right. Okay. Let's get going here. This is, I think, the third hour of what's going to be an incredibly interesting programming here at Hope. And how is hope going for all of you? All right. Still good.

[05:45] Last two hours I thought were pretty pretty damn riveting. So yeah, you you've got some big shoes to fill here, John. And so u allow me to introduce John Kuryaku. John uh may be known to many of you, but for those of you to whom he is not, John was a former high ranking officer within CIA. He was a counterterrorism officer and he was the first US official to confirm CIA torture of detainees. He was punished for being a whistleblower. He served nearly two years in federal prison. He

[06:17] also exposed CIA's role in secret rendition and torture of a Canadian citizen Mahar in Syria. Since his release, he's become a leading advocate for transparency, for civil liberties, and for whistleblower protections. He's the author of several books. He regularly speaks on topics related to surveillance, intelligence overreach, and ethics with respect to national security. John co-ees cyber security and anti-surveillance seminars with the Yale Privacy Lob Lab founder Shawn O'Brien

[06:50] and continues to challenge the culture of secrecy and unaccountable power in the intelligence community. So, let's hear it for John Kuryako. [Applause] Thanks everybody. I'm going to give what I think is probably um a presentation not in the mainstream of what you've been hearing yesterday and today. Uh but I hope that I'm able to impart something that's helpful. So I'm going to go back to September 11th, 2001. I was uh I was

[07:24] working in CIA headquarters as a counterterrorism operations officer. The job of a of an operations officer, very simply, is to recruit spies to steal secrets so that CIA analysts can analyze those secrets and provide the policy maker with the best informed blah blah blah blah. Um, counterterrorism is is different. Your job is to well, before 911, your job was to infiltrate terrorist groups. Post 911, it was to capture, kill, infil in infiltrate, disrupt, whatever.

[07:56] everything changed, but we can get to that in a few minutes. So, like everybody else in the building on September 11th, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan or wherever to do whatever was needed. And I I wasn't I wasn't taken up on my offer. I was one of only a handful of people, 16 in the entire CIA, who was fluent in Arabic. And I kept volunteering over and over. You got to send me to Afghanistan. Surely you

[08:28] need translators to to interrogate these prisoners you're capturing. Well, it turned out they weren't interrogating anybody. They were shooting them. And so they didn't need translators. There was nothing to translate. Finally, I complained so many times that the director of the counterterrorist center sent me to Pakistan as the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations. And the first thing that I was told on my first day was to come up with a standard operating procedure for taking

[08:59] down a terrorist safe house. I had had all the operational training. I had had the very specific counterterrorism training and the driving and the surveillance and the jumping out of planes and all that stuff. Not much at all in the way of tech. So, I literally went back to my office with a legal pad and I thought to myself, what would I need to do to take down a terrorist safe house? Well, I would want it to be dark. So, I wrote 0200 at the top of the paper

[09:29] and I would need battering rams and guns and ammunition and bulletproof vests and secure comms and a satellite dish and encrypted walkie-talkies. I just went to galls.com. Galls.com. It's a big police supply house in Kentucky. I just ordered everything on the on my CIA credit card and just had it shipped out. So, when the stuff arrived, we got a tip for a terrorist safe house because 9/11 was an an active criminal

[10:02] investigation. We had to invite the FBI as much as we hated to. and uh and it is Pakistan, so we had to invite the Pakistanis since it's their country. And uh we took a battering ram and we broke down the door and we caught these two 18-year-old kids. They both burst into tears and one asked if he could call his mom. And I said to a colleague, "This is the fearsome al-Qaeda. This is what we're so afraid of. Their children crying and asking if he can

[10:34] call his mom." Well, maybe it was an anomaly. And we did another one a week later. We did another one a week after that. Then we started doing two a week. Sometimes occasionally we would do two a night. After about six weeks, I got a call on a Friday morning. Friday and Saturday were the weekend in Pakistan. And Friday was like the only day of the week I allowed myself the luxury of sleeping until 8:00. And so the station chief woke me up and said, "Come in immediately. something important has come up. I speed into the

[11:07] uh into the station and um it's everybody. It's the station chief, the deputy chief, the head of the FBI contingent, his deputy and me. And the chief says, uh, we got a cable overnight from a sister agency in Maryland that said that Abu Zubeda was somewhere in Pakistan and we had to catch him. And everybody's kind of nodding and they look at me and I'm thinking I'm, you know, I'm nodding back and I'm thinking,

[11:38] but I know that name from somewhere, but I just can't place it. Well, we had been told that Abu Zubeda was the number three in al-Qaeda. That turned out to not be true. He was a bad man. He was a facilitator for al-Qaeda. He uh was kind of a logistics guy. He created the House of Martyrs, the the al-Qaeda safe house in Peshawar, Pakistan. He had founded and staffed al-Qaeda's two training camps in Kandahar province in Afghanistan and in Helman province also

[12:08] in southern Afghanistan. And if you if you wanted to make jihad, he would get you into Afghanistan. If you were in Afghanistan and and were tired of the fight and wanted to go home, he would get you out. He'd get you a passport and a ticket home and take care of those logistics. But he had never pledged filty to Osama bin Laden. Never. He was an independent player and he had certainly never joined al-Qaeda. But anyway, we didn't know that at the time. We thought he was the number three. And

[12:39] so the order is he's literally somewhere in Pakistan and you have to catch him. And I said, "Guys, there are 220 million people in this country. It's the size of Texas. What do you mean he's somewhere in Afghan or in Pakistan?" Well, that's what you're here for. I came up with a couple of low tech, no tech ideas that were terrible. For example, we were getting these these

[13:10] little pings of information. He's in Lahore. He's in Fiselabad. He's in Lahore again. He went to Queta. This is like every day. And I said one day, when I was a freshman in college, my dad through our crooked state senator got me a job for the summer as a toll collector on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. And there's a turnpike that collects that connects Lahore with Fisal Labad. I

[13:41] said, "I bet you I know how to run the machine, the toll machine." I said, 'Why don't we take all the Pakistanis out of the booths, we staff the turnpike with CIA guys, and when we see him, we grab him. We're all heroes. That was a terrible idea. There are like 50,000 people a day that go through those those lanes. That was a dumb idea. It didn't We wasted a week doing that. So then I said, uh, I said, you know, we need tech. We don't have any tech. So we

[14:12] got these two tech officers from the CIA from the Director of Science and Technology and they flew out to Islamabad and I said look we have a a VIP that we need to capture. Even his name was so highly classified. We didn't even tell the Pakistanis who we were after. We we called him a big fish and then that became Mr. Fish. And so they were they would ask about you know what are we doing about Mr. Fish today? So I said we got this big fish and uh we we don't know where he is. He he's moving around constantly on the on the run. He knows

[14:45] we're after him. He's a day ahead of us. In some cases, he was an hour ahead of us. We we broke into one safe house one one day and there was still a lit cigarette on the table and half an eaten sandwich and he was gone. Some sometimes we were like two or three days behind him, but we were we were on the trail. And I said, "Surely you guys must be able to come up with with something that can help us." Well, we had his cell phone number. And so I gave the cell phone number to these two guys and they went down into the

[15:16] bazaar and they bought, you know, a couple of pieces of wood and some wires and a soldering iron and I I don't know what the heck they were buying down there, but they came up with this thing. They called it the magic box. And it had a little telephone keypad in it. and we punched in the number, his number, and we just sat there. And they put it, they installed just a little speaker. So I said, "Well, what do we do?" They said, "We wait till he turns the phone on." Sure enough, about 12 hours later,

[15:48] and yes, we're sitting there for 12 hours staring at each other. He turns the phone on and makes a call and the magic box starts to ping and they say, "He's in that direction." and we all jump up and we're like putting on our strapping on our guns and all this stuff and then it he shuts the phone off. We couldn't even get out of the office, let alone get in the car and follow him through this city of 18 million people to try to figure out where he is.

[16:19] Finally, I said to my boss, um, this isn't going to work there. There's literally nothing that I know how to do that's going to result in us locating him. I said, 'I have a friend though at headquarters. He's a targeting analyst and uh I'd like to fly him out. So, I cabled my friend. I said, 'Hey, can you come to Islamabad? Like immediately, like on the first flight. And sure enough, 4:00 a.m. he arrived at the airport. I picked him up and he said, "So, what's what's the fire?" And I said, "VIP that we're going after, the

[16:53] orders came from the president that we had to catch him. This isn't something that we jinned up in the office. The president specifically said, "I want you to catch him." And we had not caught uh a high level al-Qaeda fighter up to that point. We had killed Muhammad Af uh when we bombed Tora Bora the previous October, but we didn't know where Bin Laden or Amaz was the closest we had come to anybody. So, we went back to the station and he took a piece of butcher block paper about

[17:25] this big. It was almost the size of a small American uh billboard and he wrote Abuza's phone number in the middle and put a circle around it. And then around that circle he wrote the the names, the phone numbers, the email addresses, the physical addresses of everybody that had been in touch with that number. And then he did it as a secondary layer and then finally a tertiary layer. took weeks to do this,

[17:56] but in the end it looked like a work of art. It looked pretty like a spiderweb or something you'd see in a beautiful mind. Remember when he has all the strings pointing all these different directions cuz he was insane. So, um, the reason I asked this friend of mine was specifically because he was a targeting analyst. There are two different kinds of analysts at the CIA. There are intelligence analysts who read all source intelligence, read all the papers, think the big thoughts, write

[18:26] papers that nobody's going to read, and you know, become experts on a a geographic area or on a on a a core um issue like, you know, counterp proliferation or something. Targeting analysts are completely and totally different. Targeting analysts are almost exclusively assigned to the directorate of operations and even then specifically to the counterterrorism center so that they can pour through millions of pieces of data

[18:57] much of it metadata in order to locate a person. So why would you locate a person? For only two reasons to kill them or to capture them. That's it. or to kidnap them and send them to somewhere else where they can be tortured and the US can deny that any such thing is ever happening. So it took him several weeks and finally he came to me and he said uh I I can't get it down to any fewer than 14 sites. I

[19:28] said 14 sites man three weeks you've been working on this? We've never hit more than two sites in a night. We don't have personnel to to hit 14 sites simultaneously. It's never been done before. He said, "I'm sorry. I can't do it. I can't get it any to any fewer than 14." So, I I cabled CIA headquarters and I said, "Um, I need a a plane. I need 36 people, half CIA, half FBI. We need pallets of weapons and ammunition and night vision

[20:00] goggles and battering rams and and bulletproof vests and all this crap. 24 hours later, it's landing at the airport in Lahore. And um the larger stations that the CIA has around the world have what are called cash rooms. And they're literally small rooms that are stacked to the ceiling with cash. 50 million, 100 million, whatever you happen to need. You just take what you

[20:32] need, you sign it out, and you go do your thing. So I said to the station chief, I need I need $2 million in cash like right now. And he said, 'Okay, count it out. But I was warned my very first week of the CIA, don't ever [ __ ] with finance, security, or medical. Those three cannot just ruin your career, they can send you to prison. So every single dollar has to be accounted for. So, I took $2 million. Buddy of mine counted it. So, we had the count

[21:02] right and we put it in duffel bags and we drove to uh we requisitioned a van from the motorpool and we drove to L'ore and I went to see the Pakistani intelligence service colonel that was in charge of the city and he said, "What do you need? What can I be helpful for helpful on?" And I said, "I need a real estate agent." He said, "Uh, well, what are you going to do with that?" I said, "I need to buy two safe houses, one in in Lahore and one in Fiselabad." So, we got this real estate agent and I said,

[21:33] "I want to find the the biggest house you can get us." He got us a 10-bedroom, 10b house, and we're thinking we can use each bedroom for interrogations. I bought it on the spot, paid cash, went to Fiselabad, found a seven-bedroom house there, bought that, paid cash, and um and then we loaded all of our equipment and our guns and stuff into the into the two safe houses. So, finally, and this is late March of 2002,

[22:07] I I called a couple of my colleagues together. We've got three dozen people now, plus another four dozen Pakistanis. And I said, I think we're ready to go. We know where all 14 sites are. There's no sense in pussy-footing around. Again, there's no tech, right? Just what the the targeting analyst did. And it was just little bits and pieces like, "Oh, here's an email. Oh, here's a cell phone number." And he's just he's just bringing them together. So, um, I said the first thing we should do, I think,

[22:38] is to drive around during the day and make sure that we're not being set up. I don't want to drive into an ambush. We want to make sure there's ingress and egress. If we get in to a neighborhood and they trap us in, are we going to be able to shoot our way out? So, we started going from site one to site 14. One thing we found right away in Lahore was site 14 was a shish kebab stand with a pay phone. So that is not helpful.

[23:10] They the shish kebab stand closes at midnight. Obviously there are al-qaeda people living in the neighborhood. They're using that pay phone. You can't raid the shish kebab stand. So we cut it off. So 13 sites. One was a girl school which kind of surprised us and and we ate crow on that one. just to get that little detail out of the way. We we broke the door down that night and grabbed an 80-year-old man and his three sons only to realize that there were al-Qaeda people in the neighborhood. He was the only guy in the

[23:42] neighborhood who had a telephone and so they would give him, you know, a couple of rupees and they would make a call. Well, here they're calling like Osama bin Laden, right? So, so we let him go and I had to make this big scene. And I said, "Sir, on behalf of the president of the United States, I'm so sorry that we broke down your door. I'm so sorry that we raised our voices in the presence of your wife and your daughters, we would like to uh, you know, repair the door." And the Pakistani colonel said to me, you should offer to buy them shoes. They didn't have any shoes. So I said, "As a gift

[24:14] from the people of the United States, I would like to buy shoes for you and your family and the girls that are in your school." The next day, the guy's on TV. He says, "The Americans broke into my house at 2:00 in the morning. They shattered my door, but they were very nice and they bought us shoes and they gave us food, so it was okay." So, so we're driving around now. So, we ended up with with two of these sites being in Lore and 11 of them being in Fiselabad.

[24:44] Almost all of them were just mud huts, corrugated tin roofs or made out of concrete block. There was really nothing to them. And it was clear from early on there was no there was no problem that we were going to run into where we would be ambushed. And so as we're driving around, I got a call from the targeting analyst who remained behind in um Islamabad and he said, "Listen, I just got a call from a

[25:15] friendly Western intelligence service and they had a walk-in." Now, a walk-in is someone who literally walks into an embassy and says, "I have information that I want to pass to an intelligence officer." 95%, these are actual numbers, 95% of them are either lunatics or liars. Some are what are called intelligence peddlers where they actually do have a

[25:45] little nugget of interesting information and they'll give it to you, but they want $100 or $200. happy to happy to give you the $100. But then they're going to go to the British embassy and sell it to them and the French embassy and the Russians and the Chinese and that's a month's salary. That's a good life for something you picked up at the coffee house. Um there are some that are probes. Like you'll get an Iranian coming in saying, "I'd like to talk to a CIA officer." And then they're like looking to see where the cameras are, how thick the windows are, who's armed,

[26:18] you know, how many people are wearing disguises or not wearing disguises. They're they're probing just in case they need to attack our embassy someday. They want to try to find a vulnerability. But then there's 1% that's the real McCoy. So, the analyst said, "The walk-in told our allies that there's a large group of al-Qaeda fighters and they're hiding in a big yellow house." I said, "I want to talk to the walk-in."

[26:48] He said, "Can't do it. I already asked. They said the walk-in's not available." I said, "That's ridiculous. If it's a walk-in, the walk-in's always available." Which told me that there was no walk-in. It was an intercept. And they didn't want to share with us that they were on phones. I said fine. I took that call just as we were passing through from the front gate to the back gate of the University of Fisa Labad. And as we came out the back gate, what was there but a gigantic

[27:20] yellow house? And I said, "That's the house. It has to be the house." And the Pakistani uh colonel said,"I can tell you right now something bad is happening in that house." What? I said, he said, "Look, it's got to be 105 degrees right now and all of the shutters are closed. They have to be broiling in there, but the shutters are closed so as not to attract attention." I said, "Well, we'll put a bigger team on that house." We

[27:50] ended up catching 27 people in that house crammed in like sardines. But anyway, there was one final site that we needed to get to. And as we're trying to negotiate the traffic to get there, the analyst calls back and he said, "Abu Zubeta just made a terrible mistake." I said, "What was it?" He said he accessed his Hotmail account with a landline. I said, "Oh my god, tell me

[28:22] you have an address for the landline." And he gave me the address and it was the final site. And I said, "We I still have chills." This was 23 years ago. I still get chills when I think about it. I said, "We got him." And so we drive over to the site and it's an empty field. Not just that there's not a house on it. There's never been a house on it ever. And I said to the Pakistani, "How can this be? We're sure that the call came

[28:54] from this site." And he laughed and he said, "You've never lived in Pakistan before. This is quite common." He said, "When land is legally divided into lots, each lot is assigned a landline. But poor people will climb a telephone pole, splice a wire, and run a new wire to their house so that they can make long-distance calls. And the bill goes

[29:24] to the guy who owns the plot. I said, "That's pretty smart, actually." So he called one of his tech officers who comes, climbs the telephone pole, goes through this Medusa's head of wires up there, finds the one wire, literally follows it down the pole like this, and we're following down him down the alley, and he says, "It's that house right there." So that night at 10 o'clock, we were at

[29:54] the the bigger of the two safe houses in uh Lahore and I I stood on the coffee table and I said, "Guys, at the risk of being melodramatic, we're going to have to synchronize our watches like in the movies." But I said, "Here's the plan. 0130, you leave the safe house. 0145 be in the neighborhood of the target. 0155 be within line of sight of the target. 0158. Get out of your car and exactly as the clock strikes two, break down the

[30:26] door, grab all the men, separate the women and children from them, and then we put all the men in patty wagons. So that night, I went to the roof of the Fisal Labad safe house with one of my CIA colleagues, and I remember looking at my watch and saying, "O200, here we go." And as soon as I said it, we could hear this sound, this boink boink, like metal on metal. And I said, "That's not good."

[30:57] First of all, nobody is awake in Fiselabad, Pakistan at 2:00 in the morning. It doesn't matter if there are 7 million people there, the whole place is sleeping. So this sound is not normal. And as soon as I said that, that's not good, we heard shots fired. Well, we knew that site 13 was the closest to the safe house. So, I got on the radio. Rule number one of of CIA operations, the batteries never work. I I actually had to go to NSA when I got back and I said,

[31:29] they were like, "What can we do to be more helpful in future operations?" I said, "My god, we put a man on the moon. We can't have a battery that lasts more than 15 minutes." Like the battery, every single operation, the battery dies. So, I called him on the phone. I said, "What's going on over and he screams, "Shots fired. Shots fired." I said, "I know. That's why I'm calling you. Who's firing at at whom?" So, I couldn't understand what he was saying. We ran downstairs. We we jumped in the car and uh and sped over to the site and it was it was chaos.

[32:02] So, there were a dozen or so fighters on the first floor of this house. Um, on the second floor there there was a there was a steel reinforced door leading to the sec second floor. The guys on the first floor didn't know who was on the second floor. They knew it was a VIP because they had their own cook. And the door was always locked. And every day the cook would come downstairs, go to the market, buy food, and go back upstairs and cook. And they were never allowed to see who was up there. Well, it was Abu Zubeda, his Tunisian bodyguard,

[32:34] and um an Assyrian bomb maker. When we started breaking down the door, they ran to the roof of the house and started to jump to the roof of the neighboring house to escape. Now, literally the last thing I said when we were kicking off from the original safe house was the orders are to take them alive. Nobody should fire their gun unless they're being fired at, right? Everybody understands. And everybody's like, "Yes, the Pakistanis." Yes, yes, we

[33:05] understand. The Pakistani guy just starts picking them off with an AK-47 from the street. He killed the bomber with one shot. He was dead before he hit the ground. The second guy that jumped was uh the uh the bodyguard and he was shot through the femur, right through the center of his femur. Abu Zuba was shot in the thigh, the groin, and the stomach and um and just dropped. So I get there and

[33:39] like I said, it's chaos. And I said I said, "What's going on?" And the Pakistani says to me, "We got him. We got your man." I said, "Who is he? Which one is he? He's this one. And I'm looking at him. I said, "That doesn't look anything at all like Abazuba." We had a six-year-old passport photo that we doctorred nine ways from Sunday with a baseball hat, glasses, cowboy hat, beard and mustache. We had hundreds of these variations. None of

[34:10] them looked like him. The the passport photo was this young, goodlooking. I think he was like 21 in the photo. Good-looking, thin guy with a a very wellcropped beard and mustache. This guy on the ground, fat, clean shaven, Albert Einstein hair going all over the place. I said that I I don't know who that is. So I called the analyst. I said, "Listen, the pack shot this guy and they're saying it's him and I don't

[34:41] think it's him. What should I do?" He said, "Get me a picture of his of his eye. I'll run a retinal scan." So, I knelt down. Remember, phones didn't have cameras in 2002. So, I had a camera that, you know, cutting edge technology. I could plug into the phone. And um I knelt down and I shouted at him, "If the hayun, open your eyes." He was dying. He was bleeding to death. So, I held his eyelids open, but his eyes were rolled back. And I told the

[35:13] analyst, "He's he's bleeding to death. I can't even get him to show me his eyes." And he told me, "Give me a picture of his ear." I didn't know until that night that no two people on Earth have the same ears. They're like fingerprints. So, I took a picture of his ear. I plugged it into the uh phone, sent the picture to Islamabad. He sent it to Langley. Langley came back a minute later and they said, "It's him." So, we pick him up, we throw him into

[35:44] the back of a filthy Toyota pickup truck, and we rush him to uh the worst place on earth, Fisabad Hospital. The doctors there tried very quickly to patch him up, but word got around the al-Qaeda community that we had gotten him. And so, they started driving by the hospital and just opening fire on the hospital. And we kept having to duck down. And I said to Colonel Muhammad, the Pakistani, I said, "If they realize how lightly armed we are, we're dead. Can we get a can we get a helicopter in

[36:15] here?" And he said, "I think so." So 20 minutes later, the helicopter lands. I walk into the operating room just like this. I said, "Doc, wrap it up. We got to go." And we put him on the helicopter. We flew him to a Pakistani military base. They started operating there and they saved his life. The doctor told me he had never seen wounds so severe where the patient lived. And he lived. He was later taken to a secret

[36:45] CIA prison where atrocities were committed against him. He was tortured mercilessly, illegally, and moved to six different black sites in six different countries before finally ending up in Guantanamo in 2005. I've I've reached out over the years a number of times to his attorneys and I I've actually become friendly with them and Abu Zuba and I now exch exchanged

[37:17] messages and I apologized to him for what our country has done to him. This guy was innocent. He was innocent of everything that we had accused him of. But the order was to take him and we took him and we can't admit that we made a terrible grievous error. So think of the technology that we were using in 2002 to catch somebody who was supposed to be one of the most dangerous men in the world. There was almost zero

[37:48] technology involved. And fast forward just a number of years to what you heard in the last presentation about Vault 7. I want to tell you I'm I'm going to try to explain to you how 911 changed the CIA. On 9 on 911, the CIA was, you know, an intelligence service that recruited spies to steal secrets and analyze those secrets, etc., etc. on 912. It was a

[38:19] paramilitary organization, a paramilitary organization that did not have to answer to oversight committees or justice department task forces. Executive Order 1233, which banned CIA assassinations, was was amended to not just allow CIA operations, but to set up the mechanism by which the CIA could go all around the world and kill anybody it wanted. I sat about 10 feet away from a guy in the counterterrorism center. Nicest guy.

[38:51] He'd come in every morning. He'd say, "Hey guys," we'd say, "Hey, Rick. Come in on Monday." "Hey guys, how was your weekend?" "Hey, it was great, Rick. How about yours?" "Ah, great." "Hey, having a cookout on Saturday." "Yeah, I would love to see you, Rick." Finally, one day, I said to this guy next to me, I said, "You know, he's the nicest guy in the world." And I don't I don't even know what he does here. And he goes, "John, he's the head of the special activities division." And I said, 'Oh. Well, after he left the CIA, there was

[39:22] an article about him in Vanity Fair of all places, saying what qualified him to be the head of the Special Activities Division was that he had been a hitman for the Cali cartel when he was recruited into the CIA right at 911 because we needed somebody who knew how to kill people and not get caught. And so he trained an entire cadray that is now called global services.

[39:53] With the technology that the CIA has now, it is able to carry out a meeting at the White House every Tuesday morning at 7:00 called the Tuesday morning kill list meeting. And what they do is they come up with a list of people to be executed that week. And then using technology that we learned about thanks to the Vault 7 revelations, global services sends its teams all around the world. They kill the people

[40:23] they're supposed to kill and then they come back for next Tuesday's meeting. So what kind of technology are we talking about here? Well, the Vault 7 stuff showed at the very least that the CIA can take uh possession of your remotely take possession of your car by hacking into the into the uh computer system. Why would they want to take possession of your car? Maybe to drive you over a bridge or into an abutment or

[40:54] into a tree. It's to kill you. We learned that the CIA can turn a a smart TV speaker into a into a uh microphone and it looks like the TV is still off. You have no idea that you're being bugged. Phones, forget it. I've just given up. When I I used to be on the board of Wikileaks and for a while we would just put our phones in the microwave oven and then have our

[41:24] have our meeting. And finally somebody said, "Guys, you know, they still track us to the meeting. We put our phones in the microwave. They still know where we are, even if the phones are in the microwaves. Then we had to leave our phones in the hotels and they would still stop us at the airports on the way home." But another thing that we learned too is that is that NSA I'm sorry, a CIA was spying on NSA. Yeah, I actually had to read that twice when I when I saw it in the Wikileaks documents. CIA is spying electronically

[41:57] on NSA. And then of course the the yet the CIA's yesmen went on MSNBC that night and said, "Well, it was probably a training exercise. We're just trying to prompt each other to use the best technology." No. No. The CIA spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee to see what they were gathering in their torture report. So, think of the changes that have taken place just between 2002 where all we had was a

[42:29] camera and a and a cell phone and now where what we learned from Vault 7 is actually old technology. Is is anybody safe? When the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee and Senator Ran Paul says, "Mr. Attorney General, does the president have the legal right to murder an American citizen on US soil without

[43:02] benefit of a trial?" And then the eventual answer is yes. What kind of country do we have? It's like it's it's gone crazy. But the technology has moved so quickly that it has allowed the government to obfuscate what it's doing and to fudge our own constitutional protections. And that's why we need hackers because hackers are the only people who

[43:35] are able to keep up with the intelligence community's hackers. Right? We all recognize how quickly this stuff is moving. And so the only way to counter it is to develop additional technology to protect Americans to protect Americans from their own government. Thomas Jefferson once said that periodically the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of martyrs.

[44:06] I hope that that's not true, but it seems like we're kind of headed in that direction. So when I see things like news reports that Julian Assange is working for the Russians, okay, Julian Assange is a friend of mine. He's been a friend of mine for 15 years. He's not working for any Russians. He doesn't like the Russians any more than than he likes the Americans. He has no contact with the Russians ever. But he's he's a transparency absolutist.

[44:40] And when we're run by political figures who are secrecy absolutists, especially when it pertains to our own civil rights and civil liberties, then maybe we need transparency absolutists to balance the scales. And so even though I don't understand 99% of what you guys do, um, I'm begging you to keep doing it because you're the only thing that stands between us and

[45:11] authoritarianism today. The CIA is a rogue organization. So is NSA, FBI. They're too stupid to be rogue, so don't worry about them. Um, but but worry about the CIA and NSA. You're the only thing that's protecting us. I'm told I've got like five minutes for questions. Is that okay? >> Yeah. You can keep going for a few minutes and then we can take questions or we can take questions now. >> Okay. I I want to say one other thing.

[45:42] When I first got hired at the CIA, I was um I was hired to be an analyst in the office of leadership analysis. It no longer exists. and I was the classified bio biographer for Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government and I sat next to the to a guy who did the same thing for the Iranian government and he was a techn. Now this was like 1989 1990 so tech was not what it is today and our we there was a guy that sat in between us. We're all within like 8t of

[46:13] each other. Guy sat in between us was handling the Saudi royal family. So, he needed to do a a Saudi royal family tree. And the Iran analyst said, "Oh, I'm really into tech. I can do a program that'll let you do a family tree." So, he took two days off. He did this little program. It made the family tree. The other analyst populated it. Everybody's like standing around like, "Oh my god,

[46:43] look. It's like like this, like the family tree, and you can see who's related to whom. Oh my god, they gave him a $500 exceptional performance bonus. Okay, today he is the number four ranking officer in the CIA. He is the associate deputy director for technology. He's the guy that's liazing with Palunteer and with INQEL and with with every one of the defense contractors.

[47:15] And remember, the CIA's budget is unlimited. The day after 911, I walked up to Kofheer Black, now Ambassador Kofer Black. He was the director of counterterrorism. And I said, Kofheer, I know how busy you are. Again, September 12th, I said, Kofheer, I know how busy you are, but I have an idea for an operation that I want to pass by you. And he put up his hands and he said, I have so much money, I can't possibly spend it all. Whatever you want to do,

[47:45] just do it. Well, that wasn't just John cuz he liked John. That was the entire CIA. So, imagine literally unlimited budgets. It's a dangerous landscape out there. And that's why we need people like you to balance those scales. Okay. Well, thank you very much and I'm very happy to answer questions. Thank you.

[48:16] If you have questions, please come on up to the front. Also, an announcement. We're looking for Valerie Taylor. Apparently, there is some kind of emergency. If you could go back um to the AV section up here in the back, right? Um great. Thank you, Miss Taylor. Um come on up with any questions. I imagine there's got to be a few. This was such a compelling story. Thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Thank you. >> Hey, John. Um, so obviously over the

[48:46] decades we've seen a huge sort of trickling down of surveillance tools, technologies, and techniques going from once, you know, it was just the military and intelligence and it now is down to the police. Do you see any parallels in terms of techniques and technology with groups like ICE now that they have sort of more power than before? >> That's a good question. technology um similarities between the CIA and other organizations like law enforcement organizations like ICE, those law enforcement organizations, ICE, DEA, ATF, even BOP, which freaked

[49:18] me out the other night. I or the other day I happened to go to Capitol Hill to see my attorney. He's a friend of mine, excuse me, as well. we were just going to go to a baseball game. But I saw this van load of Bureau of Prisons prison guards taking off their BOP polo shirts that say Bureau of Prisons on them and putting on ATF shirts. >> And I shouted at them, "Shame on you. Shame." But the the kind of surveillance tactics that they use are very much old school

[49:51] what the CIA used to do where you know you've got six cars on a guy and you're breaking off and coming back on or you have static surveillance maybe there's somebody on the second floor of the Barnes & Noble with binoculars just just tracking the movement or one of the things that the French came up with that the CIA adopted is if you're if you're confident that you have surveillance, you're going to have a hard time not turning around to just see if you're being followed. So, the French just put

[50:22] 50 people walking toward you. You're not paying any attention to who's ahead of you, and then they just break off and go around, constantly walking toward you, and you have no idea you're being surveiled. So, it's a very effective technique, and that's that's what they're doing. They're kind of doing what regular cops do. A lot of sitting in cars waiting, going to people's houses or going to the workplaces or going to places where they may congregate. You know, guys maybe go to a bar that they like or they play cards or

[50:52] whatever. It's very old school. They're not doing a lot of tech technological collection. It's too expensive for them. Their budgets actually are limited, so it's different. >> Thank you, John. We have a question from our virtual attendees from aesthetics. Why was the CIA able to transform overnight after 9/11 when government agencies usually move at such glacial speeds? >> I'll give you a two-word answer. Dick Cheney. [Laughter] >> There we go. >> Seriously,

[51:22] >> aesthetics has one more for you as well. Why do you think that none of the Snowden leaks so far have given anyone standing to bring lawsuits against the NSA? You know, I have to say that is an especially painful issue for me. Um, I was in prison when Ed Snowden went public with his revelations and I was very proud that in a an interview he gave with the New York Times, he said that Tom Drake from NSA and I had inspired him to go public. Um, and he and I have remained in touch all these

[58:11] >> You think they're trying to sabotage the operation? Maybe they're secretly >> We talked about that at length. Were they trying to sabotage the operation? Did he know something about Pakistan that they didn't want him to uh to reveal? You know, I think at the end of the day, no. I think this was an one isolated idiot who thought he could get promoted by taking out the big man that he got wrapped up in the excitement. He had never been in a situation where bullets were flying before.

[58:42] You know, there's a famous story about a guy named um Bartlett. What's his name? He He's the guy who killed John Wils Booth and his orders were very specific. Hudson, Bartlett Hudson, Bart, something like that. Uh, very specific. Don't shoot Booth. Take him alive. Well, he's he looked threw a knot in in the barn wall and then he just put his gun up and shot Booth because he wanted to be famous. And he said Jesus came and told him to do it.

[59:13] That's what he said. And I I always wondered the same thing about this this Pakistani guy. He was just a policeman. He was just supposed to stand there in like direct traffic and he just opens fire on these guys on the roof. So I I I hope it was just a mistake. >> Can get away with a question. Um hi. Uh, one of the most interesting things about your talk to me was the level of detail that you gave in threat modeling, the uses of technology for surveillance, the different uses of different sets of technology for surveillance, uh, and different operational methodologies of

[59:44] the different agencies. One of the things that I find is very difficult to explain to activists when running security trainings, especially non-technical ones, is how they have to break down even any individual state actor into a bunch of sub agencies with different resourcing. How can we do better in helping train activists to do this modeling themselves is one question and the associated question is a particular interest right now with the genocide in Gaza and the US's assistance for it. What would you recommend as the

[1:00:16] most useful thing that US citizens and hackers in general or the overlap can do to pressure the United States government to cease its support for Israel's genocide? >> Oh yeah. Wonderful. Um, to tell you the truth, can can we chat afterwards because it's it it's going to be long. >> Sure. >> I I appreciate it. Both fantastic questions. Thank you. >> Do we one more real quick? >> Okay. >> Hi. Um, yeah. I would like to thank you

[1:00:47] for the uh insight that you give into American intelligence um you know, operation and mentality. I'm wondering how would you compare that to uh foreign intelligence services, their operational capabilities and their mentality? >> Yeah, good question. Some are um exceptional. The Brits are terrific. Uh the Israelis are terrific only because there are literally no rules for the Israelis. They just shoot anybody they want to shoot and blow up anybody they want to blow up and then bulldoze your

[1:01:18] parents' house and then, you know, disappear you. So, um, they don't ever have to worry about testifying before some congressional committee or answering to a police investigation. They just kill everybody. Um, another thing the Israelis do that we don't do is um, the Israelis spy on us actively, oppressively. Uh, and we are not permitted to spy on the Israelis. Now, five, the five eyes, US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, we have this agreement where not only do

[1:01:49] we not spy on each other, we share literally everything. We used to have this classification called secret, no foreign, releasable, US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Now, we don't even need that classification. It's not even a classification. It's a control. We don't even need that control anymore because we share literally everything. We sit next to them, you know, in our headquarters, buildings, etc. The Israelis are are different. We've not been permitted since the Nixon administration to spy on Israel. And the Israelis have literally hundreds of

[1:02:20] undeclared spies all over the United States, mostly at defense contractors and universities stealing our secrets. So, you know, when you've got no legal bars to anything you want to do and you've got an unlimited budget, yeah, you can be great. Sure. and then your your own domestic tech industry is giving you everything then no problem and I apologize I've gone over but thank you very much oh if you're interested in a surveillance class uh ivyscyber.com

[1:02:51] all the uh all the details are there thank you everybody [Applause]
