Mike Ritland
Appearances
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And he ended up pulling me over into that team.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I'll let you get there eventually.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
All right, so I grew up in Wisconsin.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, I got a younger sister, four years. You guys tight? Yeah, we don't keep in touch as much. We're both super busy. But we could definitely be a lot closer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
No, she's culinary. Culinary. Yeah, I picked that up from my dad as well. So my dad... Yeah, so he was in the Navy as a corpsman for a while. I think it was like four years, submarine stuff. But medicine, both my parents in medicine, were in medicine, and they did a lot of DIY stuff. So they built their house from the ground up, designed it from the ground up. So I was in that...
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
that kind of raw materials environment like the house never actually fully got completed which is actually kind of cool because it's constant like tools raw materials around growing up i thought that was an amazing experience uh dude i remember uh shoveling out the uh the house because it snowed before we got the roof on no kidding yeah it was pretty cool i was i was pretty young at that time but it was still like you know impacting like oh look you just you
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
You can just do stuff, right? That wasn't their profession, but they just picked it up, learned it, how to design it, built nearly everything. I think they didn't do the masonry for the basement because, yeah, the trusses. And then they were rushed with the weather to get the drywall up. So they paid for that. Everything else they did by hand. Wow. Wow. Pretty cool. But culinary, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
That's going back there. Yeah, he's really into – he was really into just cooking and really, really good at it. Both of my parents were doing barbecue competitions for a while as well. They're just – Jack of all trades. Yeah, just get into it and go. And I think that was a pretty good learning experience.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And obviously that had an impact on my sister, who got into culinary as well and did some great stuff there. I didn't pick that skill up. So what were you into as a kid? Oh, God. Definitely electronics type stuff. So it just depends on the stage. Video games first. Lots of video games.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I guess it was over time. So there was the console stuff like Nintendo, et cetera. So let's go all the way back. So Atari, and this is kind of like the first hardware hack actually. My dad, so if you remember the Atari joysticks, it's a joystick and a single button, right? That's the whole controller. And we were playing the game Tank, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
You just move around like you're in a tank and you fire at stuff, right? My dad took some speaker wire, a tongue depressor medicine, right? And ran a button probably from Radio Shack and just taped it to a stick to the tongue depressor, ran the wires off and soldered it to the controller so that I could have access to my own little like button when I was like four or something.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So I could fire the tank while he steered it around, right? I thought that was pretty cool, and it kind of stuck with me, right? Like, you just modify stuff, like, hack at stuff. So very simple, but, you know, that was the first video game, first hardware hack, right, that I was kind of exposed to. And, yeah, spent lots of time on, like, Nintendo, Super Nintendo. Then I got into Quake.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Quake was extremely impactful for me. That's where I went from... you know, consoles to the computer in the house that we had. You know, I used it for like encyclopedia, like you could chat with people online. Cool, but it's more just a tool, right? Then Quake. You got to start learning things back when Quake came out. It was late 90s, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
you gotta learn like how dial-up work how to connect to other people so you could do multiplayer like that wasn't just like a button or two so you gotta learn stuff and even running quake it's like oh you you just don't launch it you know reboot the computer in dos mode and stuff like that and so you're learning how a computer works but that also kind of that's where we get into hacking as well that's that's kind of like the inflection point of a lot of things also you know nine-ish nails was built into the game they did all the sound effects and
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
uh you can see the nine inch nails logo on the the crates of nails as well if you look in there um but yeah that was also kind of uh impactful for me with their stylistic stuff and the art damn so you started the hacking stuff at like how old were you we were the same age that was that was high school atari was high school no atari oh god i don't i don't even know when that was uh
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, I mean, just really... It was like five or six? Yeah, I don't even know. Damn. It was the 80s. But yeah, Quake was high school.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, I mean, it's all connected in some way. I was into cars as well. Part of it was just like... making the car continue to run, but also, you know, like, let's add sound systems to the cars and learn how that works, which is, you know, electronics in some way. Also got into water cooling the computer to overclock it, but that required learning, like... Water cooling. Yeah. So...
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
These days, you can just buy a kit and install it, right? But most computers are air-cooled. You've got a little fan in there blowing out the heat, right? If you overclock a computer, you can get a lot more power out of it, especially back in the 90s, early 2000s. But it would dump a lot of heat, lots more heat, and air cooling couldn't keep up with that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So what you do, you take little water blocks, basically, like a little piece of copper, strap it to the processor, the video card, and run water loops through it, kind of like a I don't know how to better explain that, but it's like a little maze that the water would take through the channels on this block, and it would pull the heat out, and you would dump it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And at the time, God, it was a Chevy Chevelle heater core that was just like the perfect size, and you could use that as a radiator with a larger fan on it. So instead of using the small fans that you'd find on like laptops or even desktops that, you know, maybe is like that big, you just fan that big. And it keeps it quieter while dumping heat, and you can just run these things really hot.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And yeah, I had to learn how to make those things, right? So, you know, you get a pond pump from like a fish store, you get the Chevelle heater core, get all the tubing wire together, but I had to mill out... I didn't mill it, I drilled it. I used a drill press because I could not afford access to that. It was like a $100 drill press at the time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
You just do like cross drilling through all different directions, plug it up and get this cool spiral pattern where the water would go through it and pull heat out of all your devices. And you got to learn about things like corrosion, like you got copper and brass and aluminum and like, you know, these things are going to start to corrode.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So you learn, you know, the chemistry behind how to prevent that from happening because you don't want corrosion because then your computer is going to have water all over it when it leaks.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So I'm going to put that on Quake as well. So you're playing online games, right? And you learn you can do interesting things. You start controlling things in weird ways, and it kind of escalates. You're like, wait a second. At the time, there was no what we call client-side security or client-side integrity checking. The game files I had on my machine were unique to me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
You would download them from the author. At this time, we were actually installing it from CD drives. And you just expected to not mess with that, but... Nobody's stopping you. You can go and mess with the player models, for instance. And you can, like, add a really large cross that goes, like, 10 feet above, below, and all sides of this person, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So now you can see them running around a corner because, you know, this post is sticking out them, and you see them coming from the corner. They don't know that, but, you know, it was a good approach. Or a lot of dark spaces, right? You can't really see people in the dark. You're like, cool, I'm going to add a fluorescent color to their skin. And there they are. They're glowing in the dark, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
See-through walls, right? Like, you've got these textures that would go on the walls. And, you know, they're opaque. But they don't have to be. You just set them to transparent. And suddenly you're seeing through the walls. And, you know, that type of stuff was... I had more fun figuring out how to do it than actually doing it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
But that kind of just opened the door of like, there's rules and there's expectations, but there's also not many people checking. Like, best way to kind of... God, I don't want to get into philosophy here, but there's this kind of beautiful, I think it's Jacques Ranciere, who defines like police politics, right? As like you got a road, right? And it's painted.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
There's lines and everybody just obeys those, right? And he connects that back with politics of like, oh, you're told to vote and do all these things. It's like, okay, but like, What if you don't follow the paint on the road? What if you go off the road? What if you get really close to the edge?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Most people, they see those lines, they're going to get right in the center of the road because that's what you're supposed to do. It's like, what happens if you don't? That's interesting to me. That's where weird things start to show up, like unintended designs, unintended powers and capabilities. just unintended failures, unexpected failures.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
It's really fascinating to play with that, play on the edges, see how close you can get. And I guess now that you make me kind of say this, that's probably a good descriptor for how I think about a lot of things, like art, everything across the board. Find the boundaries and what happens if you go on either side of it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I'm going to eat some now, man.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Oh, yeah. So, yeah. So, like, early, late 90s, more early 2000s, there's a lot of online communities. Some are big. I mean, I think the really big ones you would know of, that most people know of, rather, like 4chan and, like, something awful, right? Big places that had, like, the bigger names at the time. But there were also... much smaller, like, specific topics. Water cooling, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
There was a water cooling. There was a bunch of them. But, you know, there would be water cooling communities where people just share their techniques and stuff so they could all just improve upon it. And, yeah, there were also, you know, hacking-themed ones. So Bryce and Digital Gangster was one of those. He was... That was one of the several communities I have, you know, known him from.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And, yeah, there's... This was also at the time where online space and meet space were very separate, right? Like online dating, for instance. That was like, what? Now it's like, that's all the kids do these days. It's really weird. But I met my wife from one of those online communities. But eventually those worlds start to blend together when you spend more time in there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And you're spending most of your time in there and just talking to these people. Eventually, I mean, it depends on the community. Maybe not so much like Digital Gangster where it's like raw crime happening is maybe not the best idea to...
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I'll see if I can not eat these by the end of the show. Good luck. Nice. Those are good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
meet up uh for many reasons but you know certain lesser criminal communities uh yeah meet up with people and those worlds start to blur together and uh it's a little bit different than the you know 2024 is where it's just everything is just yeah yeah how'd you meet your wife Yeah, I mean, so we posted on one of the communities out there. I think it was from hardware overclocking.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, I can't remember exactly what it was, but I moved out to California. That's its own story we can go into. But when I moved out, I think it was like the first week, I'm just like, hey, anybody in this community around want to hang out, show me around the town? She was one of those people. I was like, yeah. And yeah, it just kind of grew from there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Not a hacker per se. Gamer, photography, art. Cool.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
14. Yeah, so almost 15.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, that's crazy. I haven't known her since 2004.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
No, I was not expecting that one. I'm going to have to think about that one, man. I don't know, man. Just... because I can connect this back with everything, is just kind of understanding... I mean, humans are a mystery to me, but at the same time, there's so much complexity, and it creates... It's like a... Everybody's different. Like, everybody wants to put everybody into a bucket.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Like, there's the us and there's the other. But, like, humans are messy and complicated and unique, and understanding that helps a lot with everything, whether it's being in a marriage or... attacking somebody to get into a company. It's like the same thing, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Like understanding, but, you know, very different motives and goals behind that one is just truly understanding the person and working with them. And, you know, the other is kind of the inverse of that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Uh, not like hands-on keyboard. I like to watch those. So for most of my time, like any of the hacking stuff, that was me... I kind of viewed it as, like, entertainment. Like, it wasn't, like, power, money, or anything like that for me. It was just, like, have some fun, right? Yeah, you can mess around. Like, I would do stuff in, like, some of the communities as well.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Like, I knew the people who would run the servers, so, you know, you can mess around in there. What kind of stuff? I mean, okay, for instance... I've got to remember all the complexities here, but... This community was like very liberal with like temporary bans and stuff like that. So, you know, I got myself banned and I'm like, get around that, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And then they could not get me banned in this environment because they had some add-ons that they were using for this vBulletin. I think it was vBulletin. It might have been phpbbb. Anyway, one of the large platforms at the time just had a lot of plugins that just... gave me raw write access to the database effectively. And, you know, I could post through that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And, you know, they had a lot of fun chasing me down in that situation. I'm just like, how are you still here? So very, you know, lighthearted in that instance. You know, they were more interested in how it was done than like, oh, you're breaking into my stuff. So...
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, definitely. And actually, you know, going back into the youth for a little bit, something probably important, I had a phase where I was really into magic, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Sleight of hand, deception, that type of stuff. I think that was middle school, right? Actually, got my first taste of authority not being super ideal for me. Brought in a... a fake cigarette to middle school, right? And it's the peak of the dare situation, right? It looked perfect.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
It looked like it was actively lit and you blow on it and like, you know, talc, I think powder came out, but it looked like smoke. That got confiscated. We got, friend and I got pulled down to the principal's office. I don't know. I think I got suspended for not taking the situation seriously enough. I'm like, I don't know. I don't even take this seriously. It's a fake cigarette.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
But I think my friend pointed out, oh, yeah, that's right. They brought on the cops to test it because some of the talc powder came out. And they're like, that might be cocaine. And my friend made probably an unhelpful comment of like, that's not even how you would smoke cocaine. But, yeah, anyway. Sleight of hand.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
That gets into deception and the human aspect, which is often forgotten a lot in hacking. People are like, oh, yeah, it's just knowing computers really well. Definitely a huge piece, but it's people as well that have to be manipulated. You got to understand them. You got to convince them to do things, which is the most common way of getting into so many systems.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Say, hey, like, I'm from your IT department, let me in. And you got to know how to make that sound legit. And, you know, if somebody is like, I don't know, like, okay, let's do some urgency to, like, make them kind of panic a little bit where their decision-making goes down.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And they're panicking and they're like, oh, I just got to do the thing or, you know, I might get fired or this bad thing is going to happen or, you know, there's so many different, like, psychological triggers that come into play and create this misdirection.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And you're like, oh, it's like, Sleight of hand for psychology, right? So you push people into different directions and you get them to reveal their password or run an application on their computer that gives you access to everything. And that overlaps with the technical and the hardware and all these other things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I guess being a generalist, now that you make me think about it, it just allows you to kind of glue all of those things together. And I guess, yeah, at the time before I officially got into like paid security, I always thought that was a weakness of like, oh, I've never specialized in anything. I couldn't possibly keep up with people who did specialize. I mean, that is true.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Every person I work with that specializes, they go so far into just absolute wizardry that amazes me. And I can never keep up because I just cannot sit down and focus and be like, I'm going to do this thing and that's all I'm going to do. And I get 80% of there and I want to go play with another thing. But, yeah. It worked out. It's great for the entrepreneur type perspective as well.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
We're going to take all the things. Keeps you busy, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Oh, yeah, yeah. So all the security stuff I was doing, the times I was doing help desk and stuff like that, security, for the most part, anything security-connected was a hobby. So even the overclocking and water cooling, that was a hobby too, but... Yeah, 2600 is kind of a hacker zine, I think they're quarterly.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
There's lots of people writing in to show tricks they've done, whether it's with pay phones, phone freaking. Wait, so what is 2600? It's a hacker zine, basically. Like a magazine? Yeah, like a little magazine. You can go to Barnes and Nobles and get it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I think it's quarterly, where they will just publish a new set of little articles written by different people that talk about how to hack something, how they hack something, just cheats on systems, just sometimes politics, just hacker-minded stuff. Gotcha. But that was also, when I first got into that, phone phreaking and stuff was more popular then as well.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, so that's hacking with phones, basically. So this goes back way, way long ago. God, I think the guy's name was Joy Bubbles, actually. Deaf guy. Or, sorry, not deaf. That wouldn't make any sense. Blind. And he noticed that there were, like, tones on a phone when, you know, connecting to overseas and stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Like, this is way back when, you know, you had to pay long distance and stuff like that, right? But phone calls cost a lot of money. But he noticed they made, like, certain tones and stuff, so he had perfect pitch, and he would just whistle them back. And he noticed, like, the phone network would do stuff when you did that. So, yeah. There's what we call in-band signaling.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
asking, just ask them, ask them for access. Granted, you got to kind of cloak it a little bit, but you pretend to be somebody you're not. And for instance, like I'm your IT department, I'm your HR. You call them up, you email them and you say, I need you to do a thing real quick. And that process will generally have them maybe entering their password, for instance.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
When you can hear the signal, the other end, you know, there's like the switch panel of the phone networks hear these tones, and it's like, you know, when you push numbers on the keypad and they make a tone, right? Yeah. If you do it in a certain sequence, it's like, oh, it hears that. There's other tones that the keypad doesn't make that tell it to do other things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
It's where the 2600 comes from, actually, 2600 hertz. I can't remember what that does, but... At the moment. But it would allow certain administrative type functions. And it's like routing around like, oh, you paid and now you can route long distance or something like that, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So hold on, hold on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, I mean, at least at the time. Things have changed since then. But yeah, it was just the tones. You could literally whistle those tones or hum them or whatever. So blueboxing was the other thing it's called. There's many boxes, many colors, but blueboxing just replicated that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
You could literally quickly dial a number or whatever you wanted to do, do the administrative codes, play it right into the mouthpiece, and you would dial and do all these things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Believe it or not, that's how Apple started. Woz and Jobs made some of their first money selling blue boxes. What is a blue box? So it's the device that would allow you to more or less get free phone calls in the age of having to pay for long distance and stuff. Like go to a pay phone, just pull out your blue box, hold it up to the mouthpiece, press some buttons, make it do what you want.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Call whoever you want. It was illegal at the time. There was a magazine I got into by a guy named Cap'n Crunch at the time. He got that name because there is a whistle inside of the Cap'n Crunch cereal. that just happened to make that 2600 tone when you blow it. So he didn't have perfect pitch like Joy Bubbles did, but he had the whistle.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So you just blow that into the phone, then you open up certain access with Cracker Jack. Not Cracker Jack, but Cap'n Crunch style toy, which is really cool. But, yeah, you can electronically reproduce those sounds, and that's what they were doing with the blue box. There was, like, red boxes and rainbow boxes.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
There was so many different boxes that would do different things that people would figure out, and they would share that with each other. And, yeah, it was technically criminal, but a lot of people did it at the time. And, yeah, Woz and Jobs took that money and started Apple with it. Nice.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Very cool. And I would love to meet that guy one time, but he's a great example of like the old school hacker that was way more about like mischief and just figuring out how things work and not necessarily anything criminal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, so I wasn't working there. I was just enjoying it. And there were a lot of different cities would have meetups. Like, hey, 2600 meetup. And you go and meet people that are into that stuff. Really tiny where I was from, so I didn't really go anywhere. But that was cool. It would get you into just more like, hey, here's other ways of hacking that you didn't know about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And just gets you to think like, wait, if I can do that, if they did that, what else can you do? Yeah. Let's play. It's all about exploration, experimentation. It is a frontier, too. There's just unexplored space. What else can you do? Outside of 2600, there's all the tools that people knew of the early online days, like Sub-7 or Netbus.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Kind of like a software trojan, more or less. Basically, you get somebody to run it, or you run it on their computer, And it gives you remote access, right? You can fully control those machines over the internet, right? open up the CD trays, close it up, just all kinds of wonky stuff that could be for pranks or could be criminal. God, okay. Reminds me of one of the ways we used it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So again, I was way more about just pranking and having fun. My friend in high school, her name was Heather. She was really into like... Just... spiritual stuff and like, you know, she thought like spirits were in her house and stuff like that. It was a phase, right? But a friend and I had that running on our computer and you could play noises at the middle of the night and shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
except it's into something you control. And at that point, you've got their password. That is a method that is still heavily used and constantly works.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And just like, it was terrible. It was so bad. And you know, the CD drives would open just like, you know, She was terrified at the time, but later on thought it was funny. But yeah, for an example, right? Like, you can just have fun. You can play with people. You don't have to actually straight up do crime. Crime does occasionally pay, though, so some people would get into that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
How would they use it? For criminal? Yeah. God, this goes way back. I mean, we're talking like 20 or 25 years ago. So I'm not 100% remembering this, but it would have been... You can do like file system modification, stuff like that. So... You can get access to cookies that will contain login information. You can just get into people's accounts, send mail as them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Spamming was a huge thing back then. That's where Bryce has gotten a lot of attention.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
reputation from from those early days spamming um my my friend at the time uh paid for his first computer by spamming for a porn company actually which is funny because he's uh cashing a check sizable check for a porn company and he's like i don't know he's probably like 14 or something at the time getting like weird eyes from the bank um so yeah that happened but um What else?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So a common misunderstanding about the statute of limitations is it's not just about the time in which has passed since you committed the crime. It depends on the crime, but many times the clock starts from discovery.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
It's a common misconception that is good for a lot of hackers to realize. But, I mean, I'm sure, so the CFAA, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, literally any access to any electronic interface that is not explicitly allowed, that's a federal crime. So, literally what I described, you know, getting onto my friend's computer, that's a federal crime, even though they're cool with it and all this stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So literally any of those things can be heavily punished. So yeah, it's tricky.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, so first job, IT. Again, security was not really a huge thing for the most part. All that was side stuff. But you still have to be conscious of secure design and My coworker was kind of my mentor at the time. He was ex-DOD, ex-Navy, had a lot of fun stories, but also got me more into security. We actually did our first security presentation For the company, kind of using some classics here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So the movie Sneakers, amazing movie, still holds up today. If you haven't seen it, go watch Sneakers. It's awesome. But they did a lot of physical security stuff. If the door's got the hinges on the inside, you can kick it open. If it's on the outside, then you can do something different. But what else? There's the social engineering aspect where...
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
They wanted to get through like a front lobby attendant who had to like buzz them in. So they had someone else come in with like, I think it was like a delivery, like just creating a lot of stress. So one guy's like, yo, I got this delivery. Other guy's like, hey, I got my cake and my balloons. Can you just ring me up?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And it just goes and escalates until he's like, ah, just pushes the button and gets in, right? Of course, you know, he didn't have a cake or anything like that. The balloons were to cover the camera. And the cake was, I think it was like a briefcase of some hardware that he had to like infiltrate into the company that would go attack things, right? Great demo.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
We use that like, hey, here's some physical security things. Get you to think about it. Catch me if you can. Another thing where it's, you know, social engineering was used. And believe it or not, that movie based on Frank Abagnale, most of the stuff he said is actually made up. It was like the con on the con.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
But anyway, yeah, that was kind of a classic thing that still a lot of security presentations today will still use those. Anyway, long story short, kind of got me into the idea of educating on security instead of just playing and having fun and just the entertainment value. It's like, oh, you got to actually teach people. There's a responsibility here of teach people how to not... Fall victim.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Also did some live password cracking. Back in the day, people were using real terrible passwords. So just adding some extra characters and stuff. We were able to do password cracking just in the middle of this presentation. Like, hey, this password you can get in 15 seconds. This one's going to take us 10 hours.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Basically, I mean, there's a lot of different ways. The way we were doing it was just brute forcing, being able to have the ability to just retry like word sets, like common password sets. You can just get those. There's a lot of password lists, what we call them, that will, when you're going to brute force and you just want to try them, well, like, hey, we know these are the common passwords.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
We know these are passwords from leaked breaches. Just shove them all together. good chance somebody's reusing that somewhere. Good approach. There's cryptography and stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Oh yeah, definitely. Highly recommended. Which one? One password's pretty good. There's different ones depending on what you need. Is Keeper any good? I haven't looked too heavily into that one. I know somebody who's very into that space that speaks fairly highly of 1Password, but it's been a while, so I wouldn't want to be like, yeah, this is the one, because that space is always changing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
One that you don't know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Exactly. So if you don't know your password, it should be unique per site and as long as hell. And that means you're going to have to use your password manager to autofill that or copy. However you're going to do it, you're going to need the password manager to feed that back and log into the site.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
That combined with proper two-factor is going to secure so much when it comes to you being compromised by social engineering and phishing. Okay, that's good to know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, yeah. So after that job, I was kind of bored of Wisconsin. And my friend at the time, the one who made the money spamming, he moved out to San Francisco a year earlier. and worked for a company called Longnow. They're the ones doing the 10,000-year clock that a lot of people are associated with. I think Bezos is on there, but Stuart Brand.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, so it's this idea. I don't think they've built it yet, but still working on it. But the idea is that they're going to put a clock, like an analog clock, in a mountain that stays accurate for 10,000 years. It's really to get people to think really long-term.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Just like who's really – it's hard for people to think more like even like one election out of consequences, right? Yeah. Like four years, ten years. Maybe you think as far as your kids. Okay, cool. Well, how about a thousand years or ten thousand years? Like that just changes how you think about the future and what you do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
what matters, what doesn't, and it's almost like a thinking prompt for people. It's like, nobody does it, start doing it. This was also, I think it was formed shortly after the Y2K bug, which was hilarious because computers started, a lot of the systems at the time were kind of birthed in the 70s, and they had two digits for the year, right? Like the last two. So, you know, 78, 79, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Eventually, what happens when you get to 99 and it rolls over to 00? Is that 1900? Is that 2000? I don't know. Neither did the computers, right? But people were only thinking, you know, a couple decades. That's enough. Somebody's going to rewrite my software. No, we're still using that software today. So that's where the Y2K bug came from.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And it's like, cool, you needed to at least think, you know, that was in your scale. So you can have four digits of space for your ears. That was the entire Y2K bug. But I believe that was kind of around the same time that... Okay, 1,000 years. What about 10,000? It's probably where that came from.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
The mountain, I think, is to keep it safe. They have to, like, keeping time for that period of time, like, you can't use any other timekeeping system. Like, you know, atomic clocks and stuff like that aren't accurate over that time span. So you have to account for like orbit variation, shift in the poles of the Earth and all of these other things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Like they have a whole CAM system that readjusts the calibration of where that clock will be in X years over that span. It's absolutely crazy to like engineer with that in mind. It's like nobody thinks about like orbit variance over time of the Earth or the poles shifting. for the clocks they use. Like, it's just not a factor. But, what if you had to? I think it's really cool. Interesting. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So, yeah, my buddy got a job just doing system for them and web development. And it's like, hey, if you want, like, a few weeks on my couch, go for it. I'm like, you know what? I'm going to take you up on that. I'm going to use that to just move out there. I had no plan. I'm just like, I brought three students. No plan. No plan. I'm just like, I'm just going to do it and figure it out. Um,
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
That is the go-to. You can walk into a building, but why do that when you can just ask from halfway across the world? Most companies, you'll still be able to walk in and do all that stuff. It's just not worth the risk unless they've got that level of security locked down where it's like, okay, you can ask anybody in the company for their password.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
which I guess is a very red team approach too. It's like you can't plan anything. You're just going to move and figure out what's in your bag of tricks as you go and work around the problems. But yeah, I'm like, I'm going to bring three suitcases. I prioritized one of them was like my gaming system. Like a whole suitcase was dedicated to just a computer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Like, I don't know what I was thinking, but yeah, that was 30% of my luggage when I moved out, stayed out as cash for a bit. Got some random odd jobs doing like audio QA testing and stuff like that just to make it. And eventually got into the game industry doing sysadmin, IT, help desk stuff. And it just kind of grew from there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And yeah, I stayed there for like, I don't know, 15 years in the game industry. But on the side, being in San Francisco gave me a lot of unique perspectives. So first of all, Stuart Brand is kind of the guy that was running the show over at Long Now. Stuart Brand is one of the original people on the hippie bus with Timothy Leary and all this other stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
They're going around the country doing the acid tests and stuff like that. But lots of just divergent thinking coming from that. And that was interesting just to kind of see. I didn't get that in Wisconsin. This is also kind of where the PC revolution came from, that type of right? We're just diversion thinking, what can we do? What mischief can be made? All this stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
The maker space, Maker Faire was out there as well. So this is just, this is more like hands-on hardware hacking, not like security hacking, just like hobbyist hacking, like 3D printers. Let's just build some stuff. The kind of stuff you'd find at Burning Man, right? Like the art, where you start mixing all these things together. That opened my eyes to just like different focuses and aesthetics.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
There's a really good point to kind of deviate here, something called beam bots. Actually, I'm going to pull up this laptop here to show you a picture because it makes way more sense when you see it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Thanks. Thanks for having me, dude.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yes, you're like, what? So, BeamBots, B-E-A-M. Biology, electronics, aesthetics, mechanics. It's just a kind of a design philosophy around building little robots. So, I just kind of had to show it because, I don't know, you're probably picking up a bit of an insect vibe from this, I would assume, right? Yeah. It does a couple of things. First of all, there's no PCB on here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
It's just freeform soldering. And all of these components, there's nothing extra for the aesthetics. It's all functional. So on the back, you've got a solar panel soaking up energy. This thorax here, that's holding the charge from it. And then these, this is really cool.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
These are LEDs, but LEDs, when you shine light on them, they actually emit a little bit of energy on the lines, like a reverse solar panel, right? They're inefficient solar panel. But you can literally use them as eyes for this. So depending on what direction it's facing, one eye is gonna see more light than the other. That's where the light source is coming from.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
They can give it to you, but you can't do anything with it because we've got two-factor turned on or stuff like that. different security controls and detections that suddenly requires physical access. You have to take more risks to do that. It's a lot more skill, a lot more work to make happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And there's a really tiny brain in the middle. It's literally four logic gates. which is tiny. Your phone has millions of logic gates in it, right? Like a calculator. My cable has hundreds of thousands of logic gates. This thing, it's got four, okay?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
What do you call it? A logic gate. So basically, all computing comes down to the concept of binary, on or off. Think of it like a light switch, right? It's on or off. You can do math with that. Let's go through it real quick, actually. We got three light switches, right? Yeah. Got to think which direction we're going here. So we got one on, two off. That can give us a one.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Turn them all off, that's a zero, right? Easy. Now we put two in the picture. You turn two on, you basically double the last one. So if two are on, that's going to be three, right? Basically, the first switch is the value of 1 or 0. The next one is 2 or 0. And then the next one will be 4 or 0. Next one is 8 or 0. That's binary math, right? Okay.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And all decision-making can kind of be based on this. So in this sense, it's very analog. But basically, this will eventually fill up and have enough energy charged that these four logic gates are suddenly making a decision. Like... This side's filled. Which eye is sensing the most light?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And at that point, it's gonna fire the opposing leg with all the energy it's gotten here to steer towards that. So you have this little bug-looking thing that walks, right? And it just constantly steers towards the light source. And to me, I thought that was really cool because A, it focuses on aesthetics, which is not super common.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And B, it uses really cool hardware hacks, like I said, with the lights here that normally it's for emitting light, but now you can reverse that and use it in an unintended way. And you can use really minimal logic
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
to do what you want and you know i've applied some of that to my cables as well not this specifically just the mindset of like you don't need 10 things in this cable you can strip it down to one if you're really creative wow that's how you that's how you shrink things so um that's that's kind of where that connects with you know like hey let's fake let's focus on uh aesthetics but also minimizing
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
and just using things in unintended ways to get more out of it. So that was... kind of a good point in which it kind of just opened my eyes to also, you know, soldering and electronics, but also the art of it and all that. So yeah, BeamBots, that was a good pausing point for my many hobbies that I would pick up over time that eventually led into what would become the OMG cable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, so I think this was about 2013. So first, Defense Distributed. It's the company behind the Liberator, which is a 3D-printed gun, and also the Ghost Gunner, which is a desktop mill. that you can mill out a lower receiver, AR-15 platforms was the first commonly.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I did not, no. So I got very interested in that. That was done by Cody Wilson. So let's crack that whole topic open a little bit more. So I think it was 2013. There was a lot of experimentation in the 3D printing space with firearms, right? Cody introduced it to the world. He basically inflicted this idea upon the public psyche in this amazing way that just caught my attention in a couple ways.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
First, it's this approach of like, hey, we're going to give this to the world in a way that is irrevocable. Like... Going back to that, like the police politics concept I was mentioning, it's just like, okay, what if you create something? Like there's voting and opinion having, but you create something and put it in the world. Nothing can change that at that point.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I just thought that was just amazing from like the political standpoint, regardless of what topic or what opinion you may or may not have on firearms, the politics of it and the power of creation was amazing to me. And he did it with a level of art and bravado that was just perfect for the delivery of this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, another great example of like no opinion on that is going to change its existence. It exists. And like if you're thinking about like real politics and participating, like creation is one of the most powerful things you can do. And that's what I kind of learned from watching that. But yeah, I decided like, hey, I want to know more what they're doing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And I've helped out with security and just computer stuff in general. Used what I had. Like, hey, can I help to a lot of different places, whether it's like Nine Inch Nails communities, just to get more insight of how the artistic process works there. Or in the case of Cody, just helping out with the security of that, just to kind of see how they work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
A bunch of anarchists getting together, building a company, and... Just the whole fight that they were in, it was very fascinating to me just to observe that. And that kind of stuck with me, both the creation, the power of creation, and the artistic approach they took to it. That was one of the things I kind of had in mind when I first created the OMG cable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
It's like, hey, at the time, I thought I was just going to open source this thing and put it out there. Yeah. That ended up not making sense because it was really hard to make. You can't just DIY it. But yeah, it was one of the motivators in my head at the time when I was first kind of putting it out into the world. So yeah, one of the many things is just like, hey, this is a fixation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I want to know more and I'm just going to focus on it for a while. So yeah, they're still doing their thing. So what did you do there? I just helped out with some security stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Network and IT. I mean, every company has got to have that, right? So I'm like, hey, you know, you're probably a small shop, probably don't have the level of security and understanding for your systems, but I don't know, maybe I can help. So it just helped out and it allowed me to get more insight into how they run things and just more exposure to like how the artist works, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Because that allows me to just kind of figure out... There's a lot of things I would experiment with, but I never found like my medium, right? Like as an artist, right? Like I... I've gotten music, you know, I'm not that great with music, you know, visual arts, not that great with that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
It's just kind of, even if I didn't do any work for them, just that... Just being a small part of it. Yeah, exactly. But even just seeing it happen would have been enough for me to... kind of kickstart some things. It's another thing. How did that come across your radar? I mean, it was everywhere at the time. It was like in Wired and all these other places.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Like, 3D printed gun, you know, firing. Like, it's... Everyone can print a gun now, like, regardless of laws. And that's, you know, that was kind of the message going around in the press. This was also kind of another pivotal time when the NSA ant catalog. So Snowden happened around the same time. This is often...
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
incorrectly misattributed to him, but there were a lot of leaks that happened around that time, both with and without Snowden, that kind of opened my eyes to the level of games and just technology happening in computing. Yeah, I mean, I already knew a decent amount of it, but the Ant catalog,
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Oh, man, that had, it was just like, you know when you're growing up and there's like the spy tools in the back of the magazine, you know, disappearing ink and, you know, all those things. This was like that on crack, dude. It was like, they had a malicious cable in there. This cable, when was it? It was leaked in 2013. The catalog was...
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Dated 2008, and they were announcing in 2009 they would have these cottonmouth cables... available for, you know, purchase to their ecosystem of, you know, whoever they sell to in the NSA. The price on those, I think it was a minimum order quantity of 50 with a $20,000 per cable price tag. It's like, wow, amazing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
But, you know, it had all these electronics inside, a radio inside, and that was cool. And actually, yeah, pull this up again. So, Cottonmouth, this is the page out of the catalog where it shows, it's really chunky cable, like really, really thick hood, but they sandwich a whole bunch of different PCBs inside of this thing. And, you know, that stuck in my head, obviously. So what does that do?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
They weren't super specific about the exact capabilities, but, you know, it had a radio. It had some ability to manipulate USB. I mean, I would... Based on all of my reading in here, the latest generation OMG cable is basically a dead match to its capabilities from what can be deciphered from this page. So all the way down to like covert exfiltration and stuff like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
That's a good question.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
It's more of a capabilities thing, like getting through and breaking security effectively. I would imagine this gets implanted into spaces that are higher security. If you can't just walk in and do stuff, if you can't do the easy things, you're going to start having to use these types of tools to get into a place, have somebody plant a cable, and then you've got remote access.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
There were a lot of other tools in this space. like, implanted video cables that you would implant on a monitor so you could remotely read what's being displayed on the monitor. Lots of cool tricks like that. Some were long-range, some were short-range, but all kinds of crazy spy gear that would allow...
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
impressive capabilities that very few people in the private civilian space even consider defending against.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, I forget if there was ever a mention of what Ant stands for, but it was just this leaked catalog with all of the different... It was a leaked catalog. Yeah, somebody leaked it. A lot of people say it was from Snowden, but if you actually trace it back, it wasn't. It was never at least attributed to Snowden.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, that just came out, and you get to look at the amazing spy gear that is out there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Definitely those video cables. I'm trying to remember all the different things. We can pull it up, actually. But, yeah, you want to pull it up right now? I can pull it up on the internet. Pull it up. Sweet. All right, cool. So, yeah, let's go through just a few of the pages of the band catalog. I haven't done this in a while, so I'm a little rusty.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
But, yeah, so let's look at just the hardware stuff. We got... Let's see, what is this? This is a short to medium range implant for RF transceiver. This is a component that adds RF to one of the other pieces they have in here, which they call a digital core, to provide a complete implant. So it's kind of like a customizable, build your own, what kind of implant do you need?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Uh, predecessor, right? So I had been doing lots of designs of malicious cables, right? And I had some really early proof of concept just to show it's possible. No wireless connection, really tiny payload capability, you know, a few dozen, maybe a hundred keystrokes, right? Really limits what you can do. It's really slow. I mean, we're not hitting a thousand keystroke per second thing. We're
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
They've put this into various pieces of hardware. There's actually, I think it's over here, Here's kind of another implant. They call this Thief. Lux Rabbit. It's a hardware implant designed specifically for Dell PowerEdge servers. Like a specific one hooks to... It's called a JTAG debugging interface. Basically, a lot of hardware has a debugging interface.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
If you get access to that electrically, you can do a whole bunch of stuff. You can implant things at a really low level on that machine. They give you all kinds of access, right? It gives you lots of data. So if you've got an implant that goes into there and hooks up to it, you've got permanent access. Similar to what I was describing with the USB cable,
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
uh with that that covert exfiltration mechanism um but this is baked into the machine so i would imagine the way this happens is during mailing interdiction so you know dell ships a server over to the customer right and our government knows this is happening they grab it in the mail
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
crack it open, put one of these inside, close it back up, send it off to the intended target, and now they've got long-term access inside there. Even if they wipe everything, like down to the hard drives, put new hard drives in, you can still get it right back in. They would have to crack everything open and look at all the hardware to find this type of stuff. Really cool.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Really cool types of hidden plants.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I mean, there are ways. Yeah. You got to know what you're looking for, basically. Do you worry about that stuff at all? I mean, it depends. Like, me personally, no. I know the types of targets that this is destined for. You know, I'm not one of those targets.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Well, I mean, the Israeli Patriots situation. Great example of, like, do I worry about my pager exploding? Like, I'm not Hezbollah, so no, I'm not worried. Just for example, just to put a very pointed, like, answer to a very current topic, for instance, right? Now, there are certainly lots of gray area.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
We've seen lots of gray area where it's like, wait, you're doing surveillance on US citizens and like, that generally isn't happening like with hardware implants and stuff like that. That's access to telcos, internet providers, and yeah, that's... I operate very openly, so it's not, you know, I'm...
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I'm a little less concerned, but it's more of a political and philosophical, like, you know, when nobody's got privacy, it changes society in ways that aren't very good. That's where I'm more worried.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Um... Well, hardware implants. Let's go with hardware. I don't know how often hardware implants would be used. That tends to be super targeted. And super targeted also generally, I would assume, I would hope, means significant more legislative, not legislative, legal oversight where you're getting the warrants and all these other things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Whereas these really wide net things, which hardware is much harder to make wide net. Wide nets where you can collect all the things because you've got access to...
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
uh telco phone uh internet type providers and you're just slurping everything up yeah everybody would then be pulled into that that's the kind of stuff that snowden showed right that's a different story that's that's uh everybody's get pulled into that one way or the other uh type problems that occur
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So do you have to worry about people breaking into your network and just causing problems in your life? That's a complicated topic. Like it's more privacy invasion at that point. And it's like, yeah, what are we worrying about? Are we worrying about our personal safety, our personal freedoms? Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Maybe it doesn't. Really slow, right? But it's like, it worked, right? Can't remotely update it, can't do anything, but it worked. I want to show the world, because, you know, hacker, you want to share the information stuff and work with other people. I didn't see it as like a product, it was just more like... more like art, like, hey, cool, look at this thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
society as a whole and the health of it if they you know and a free press like it's yeah it's it's a very large complicated topic do you think china's putting this stuff into the electronics that we're buying from them um i mean not like in the sense of like consumer levels i mean it depends right like could it be accessed from that far away
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
If they wanted to, anyone, if anybody wanted to do that, yes. But the thing is doing it to just like off the shelf consumer stuff is a lot harder to do in terms of hardware implants. If you wanted to do it that way, that's where we get more into the software level, like software backdoors, which we've seen in things like cryptography, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
You know, it's posited that a lot of cryptography backdoors were put in by cooperation with like the NSA, for example. I'm a little rusty on this stuff, but basically that becomes very valuable when you're slurping up all the internet data. And a lot of that's encrypted. But if you know how to quickly break the encryption, well, now you can see the contents. And that's where that comes in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Depends, I would say. Well, God, I have forgotten. I think China makes a lot of our power transceivers and stuff. Make a ton of it. Honestly, from what I've seen and the people I talk to that work in all this stuff, I don't think physical implants are quite needed. Things are just not secure remotely, like externally. Literally, I think it was yesterday, maybe. I don't know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
It's something that news that has come over the last few weeks where our own government is saying everyone, I think it was actually to their own government employees to use Signal. use iMessage, use encrypted chat. Do not use text messages because China has, they're just in all of the telco systems right now, which means they would be able to read the text messages, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
They didn't need hardware implants that I know of to do this. Maybe they did that to get in. But now they're in that system, right? I mean, I've helped in environments that a foreign adversary had gotten into, and it took a bunch of time to evict them and find where they are. That was done all remotely, right? A lot of this stuff doesn't require the James Bond-type hardware to get in. Interesting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And yeah, he reached out and wanted to kind of collaborate and have me build one for him. And I started on that process, but I didn't have enough time to complete it with his work constraints as well, because he didn't have time and stuff. And eventually what happened... Didn't know about it, but he went to someone else and said, make this for me. Oh, shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, that's a tricky topic. Interesting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I mean, there's so many things to worry about, though. Like, yes, kind of. Once you've seen enough horror shows, though, you're like, oh, wow, everything's just broken. Society as a whole, it's amazing that it operates. Just the levels of trust. Like, one person is all it takes. Enough well-placed, like, damage.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And whether it's security or just electrical power grids, all these things, all of it can just tip over, right? With just enough of a push. And, like, everything's that way. It's not just security. Yeah. Yeah, so I don't know. I kind of just lump it all together of like, this is a really good experiment for humanity. I mean, humans have been, what, on this planet for some say 300,000 years, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Like, we're living in the best time. I don't think there's a single person alive today who would be like, yeah, bring me back at random more than 100 years ago. Sign me up. Like, that's not a good... The odds are not good, right? Like, we're the most comfortable we've been, most well-off, on average, across the earth in this last hundred years. And, you know, it's a good experiment.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And things are volatile. I mean, that's kind of the consequence of freedom, too, right? Like, it's... The people got to maintain it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I like Signal. Signal's great.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I'm sure they did. I mean, so, I think they helped fund it, actually. But they helped fund a lot of things, our government, in many ways. But, I mean, Signal is an amazing tool if you're an agent as well. Like, you're going to be overseas in hostile environments, and you need to communicate. how are you going to do that securely?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Are you going to use a secure tool that stands out like a giant red flag because nobody else is using it? Probably not the greatest thing. It's like, hi, I'm an agent. I don't know what you're saying, but there's an agent right there, right? Like, I mean, obviously, there's answers to that and stuff, but it's valuable as like, oh, that's just the tool everybody uses.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Signal, everybody's got that, right? Like, that's valuable. You know, obviously, there's always tradeoffs, right? It's like it can be used for bad, it can be used for good, and, you know, who's bad and who's good and who's perspectives.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
A lot of people, yeah. I'll meet them where they're at. My manufacturers and stuff don't use Signal. They've got different governments over them and things like that. It's interesting. Whatever you use, I'll meet you there. Contextually, it matters. I'm on this platform, which can be seen by These adversaries, cool, noted.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I'll make sure I keep that in mind, which is kind of the whole point of like the psychology when you know you're being watched changes how you behave in ways that can be negative. Like, if you're always being watched by somebody, what does that make you? How does that make you behave? Different. So, yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, I mean, there's lots of other cool things in this catalog, like... Oh, Raptor Reflector. So, this is for picking up... Audio, this is standard audio bugs, right? Like, you know, spying on what's happening in the room. What else we got? Lots of cellular-based stuff. Now, this is like 10 years old at this point, so a lot of this stuff is well-known. Really tiny implants.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So this is like probably a VGA cable here, or like an older monitor, which made more sense back in 2008. really tiny implant into that cable, tapped to one of the color signals, and it would allow somebody to kind of energize it with like a radio pointed at it, more or less, and then receive the signal bouncing back with the video signal encoded in the bounce.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I didn't know about it until it came out. The thing is, it wasn't very good. I was just like, dude, first of all, this is not very good. This sucks. I wish I was making this a proper product at all. So I was like, hey, if you had the resources, I could have used that. Because I was just doing this on the side. But we have... you know, solved things since then.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So then you'd be able to see what's on their screen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Really cool stuff, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I don't know. I haven't studied those well enough. But, I mean, there's a lot of amateurs that just do that. Like, they'll just set up a balloon. It's kind of like the ham radio space kind of in a way where they're just like, oh, you know, we can track it. There it goes. It goes around.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I don't know, man. That's probably outside of my skill set and awareness and research. But, I mean, it could be used, like, a balloon. I mean, I'd probably be using a drone more. Because the problem with balloons is that they're much more higher altitude, which causes problems for a lot of electronic circuitry because it gets really cold and stops functioning.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Also, you know, you've got power that you've got to deal with So the best you can get is battery. Batteries also start to fail at that level of cold, right? So you need special batteries, something to keep it warm, which means more energy. So you're getting it from solar power, probably. This is really low-power stuff, right? I don't know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Maybe just the value of how does someone respond to putting something in their awareness? Yeah. Which is absolutely a thing, right? How does someone respond? Which, I don't know, similar to the drones that are popping up. And I'm just like, I don't know where that's coming from. Jersey had one recently. But there's lots of, like, drones in the sky.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I'm like, I don't know what that is, but I would love to find out. Yeah. Is it collecting data or is it just seeing how people respond to unknown unreported drones in the sky for, you know, tactical knowledge in the future?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, I mean, kind of. Like, I had always been tinkering with things like those BeamBots, right? But... Yeah, so I think it was on Twitter or something. I saw just a picture of somebody with a USB drive. The shell was open, and there's just like a firecracker sitting inside of it. No idea if it worked or not, but I'm just like... Everybody has like the same visceral response to seeing that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Like, oh, shit. Exploding thumb drive. And I'm like, you know what would be cool? As if it was worse. So... USB rubber ducky. Got to explain what that is first for this to make sense. My now business partner, Hack5, invented the USB rubber ducky, I don't know, like 15 years ago now, something like that. It does the same basic keystroke injection that I had demoed with the cable, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Where you plug it in, it types something really fast, whatever you want to control a computer or whatever you want, right? I wanted one of those that also exploded. So first thing I had to do If you open up a rubber duck, there's not much space in there. It's all electronics. I'm like, okay, how can I shrink this really tiny so I have space... for something goes boom.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So I spent a lot of time playing with that, right? Now I didn't recreate a rubber ducky exactly. Like it's a really, really limited version, like 200 keystrokes, really slow, done, right? That's it, really hard to use, but it was tiny. And I shrunk it and shrunk it, shrunk it, shrunk it. And it's just, I don't know, I think it was like eight by 10 millimeters when I was done, like a pill basically.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
You know, I think there's certain levels of communication and misunderstanding, so I don't want to be like, oh, he's the worst. But, you know, lessons learned as well of like, you know, if it's something you can turn into a product, maybe wait until it's ready. You know, things like that. Which is exactly what I did with the OMG cable, right? That's where it's like thousands of times better.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
That left the rest of the thumb drive empty. that I could hook up with a little mini detonator and maybe a firecracker or two and a bunch of confetti. And I rigged this up to a keystroke injection payload that opens a browser to an animation of Jack in the Box. And he's cranking it on the screen, except it goes for an awkwardly long amount of time to build up tension. And it's going, it's going.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Uh-huh, so you're watching that. And then, pop, the drive blows up, confetti goes everywhere. And I'm like, yeah, that was cool. I just viewed that as fun.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Another type of art or something like that. Put it out on the internet and it was like, that's crazy. A lot of people asked me to sell that. Now, no, that's a terrible idea for so many reasons, liability, et cetera. Um, When you put something into the world that can be used negatively, it's always worth gaming out. Like, how bad can it go and can you prevent some of it?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Which I've done a lot with the cable. But in this case, it was just something I wanted to put out there. But at that point, I had a really tiny ducky, right, that I could – Maybe I could put it in other things. And eventually I got the idea, probably like doing my IT job, looking on Amazon for spare parts for hardware and stuff. I noticed there were like USB cable repair ends and boots.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I'm like, wait, what? You can just get those? You know, at the time I didn't know much about manufacturing, right? Got some of those and realized there was enough space in them for the cables and this really tiny, you know, fake ducky, right? Shove it in there and I get the very first proof of concept of a malicious USB cable. Yeah, put that out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And, you know, I already told the story about that one where, you know, it gets out there and a lot of people like it and a lot of people wanted it. I think almost a year goes by before I'm like, you know what? I could make that way better. Like, that was a toy. Like, this is like a cool gimmick to show like a very basic prank. Barely even worked for that. What would a proper tool look like? Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I was getting way more into the concept of I want to do red teaming as well, so I'm combining those things. And yeah, I was like, okay, I need Wi-Fi, I need remote control to update payloads after it's already in play. Because the idea is you can either deploy a cable, like physically get in sight, or... you could just leave it in somebody's bag, just leave it around.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And eventually, you know, people are going to take a cable sometimes and they'll bring it in with them to the secure space. Like, cool, I didn't have to even go in. Great. which creates some interesting legal problems, which we can get into that I've also solved. But yeah, that kind of is just how it kept evolving. And then at that point, it's like, okay, this is a real tool.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
At the time, I was thinking I should do this in a way that I just make it open source and everyone could make their own. Are we still talking about the USB? Yeah, USB cable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And that's, I thought about that, right? Like I was prototyping this cable, this new one, like on a desktop mill for cutting PCBs, right? Like I was pushing the limits on this machine where you can mill a PCB. So the PCB, actually, I got a little problem with this. So a PCB, like here's a complete product. This is a Raspberry Pi, right? When I say PCB, I'm talking about just the green part here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
That's just, it's basically a fiberglass and epoxy with a thin layer of copper on it that gets turned into traces and that connects all of these components. The black thing there, that's a component. And all the little things you see on there, they're soldered on. That's components with copper traces connecting them together electrically. So I used a mill to kind of cut out the copper traces.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And I would assemble in my garage lots of different test versions of what this cable could look like. And I got the idea, kind of going back to the defense distributed concept, where, oh, open source is this. People can make it on a desktop mill, go that direction. What I learned over the 12 months of revising and revising is it's really hard to do this. Like, DIY was just not in the cards.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Nobody was going to be able to do this. I'm like, okay, well, let's throw out the DIY. I can just turn up the complexity. There's PCBs
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
with two layers like copper on each side right that's the common one those are i can make those in my garage but okay what if i want eight layers or something like that that like that gets really expensive we're talking every time i want to do a run of an eight layer pcb six layer pcb is a minimum of thousand dollars okay like i i have to send that off to a factory they're using lasers and all kinds of crazy x-ray inspection stuff to do this so i'm like okay if i can use that
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I mean, well, so, RIP. He's no longer around. Oh, really? Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, the way he would be introduced, like, I don't know. But it was always the world's most famous hacker is the tagline that was used.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
How far can I go? And that kind of is how I evolved into making a more and more and more complex cable that is like the latest generation OMG cable. It does all of these different things. And yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, I just, OMG cable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Oh yeah, so I guess I just kind of call it like early prototype tests. I was referring to it kind of at the time as like bad USB cable, which is not an accurate description. It was more of a nod to some research at the time that was called bad USB cable. That's where you would take an actual thumb drive.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
There's a few old, old thumb drives that you could take and reprogram the controller on it and actually do keystroke injection, among many other things. It was also a worm that would replicate to other thumb drives you would plug in. Cool concept, bud.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
OMG cable, definitely.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So here's the thing. I was making a lot of these things for personal use, but I would also kind of sell it to friends and stuff. It's kind of like the back alleys of DEF CON type situation. I wasn't advertising this, but it's like, if you know me, I know you, I'll give you some of these things. But it became clear I had to start scaling up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Like, the first batch of prototype OMG cables, I think it was 2019, I brought as many as I could. They took me... It was like 8 or 16 hours per cable, and 50% of them were failures, which is terrible. When you make something like an electronic product, usually you get like 95%, 99% yields, which means 1% to 5% are failures that you throw away.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
These things were so hard to self-assemble that I was throwing away 50% of what I made. Wow. So that automatically doubles the amount of time invested to make a cable. So I'm doing like 16-ish hours per cable to make them. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Silly. So, yeah, I was kind of hitting my limit of like what I could accomplish with the time I had. And it's like, you know what? I need to learn how to, like, delegate this outsource manufacturing assembly. Because I was also doing this, like, hand-placing things. You go to an assembler. So, there's a couple steps here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So, well, he, God, yeah. I need a refresher on this, but basically he had gotten the attention of the FBI, and they were hunting him down for getting into various places. A lot of social engineering tricks and stuff like that. And kind of a cat and mouse game. There's a movie called Takedown, right? So good movie. Check it out. But he went to prison then. and was pretty unfairly treated.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So, I'm going to run you through, basically, the manufacturing pipeline that I slowly learned is important here. But first, Hack 5. It's really important to mention Hack 5 here. So, USB rubber ducky, already mentioned. You know, that's That's Darren, Darren Kitchen, his phone number. He, you know, that was his baby invented about 15 years ago.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
He's got so many other things like the LAN turtle, the Wi-Fi pineapple, just packets for us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
They're similar to the ANCAP, right? What's the LAN turtle? Exactly, right? So all of these are different kind of like hardware implants or hardware tools for... They're multipurpose, but often used for offensive security. So like the land turtle is like a network implant that can control a computer, but also like sniff up network data or just do malicious network stuff. What else?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Wi-Fi pineapple. This is a little box with antennas on it that allows you to do network attacks, right? Really cool stuff. Network what? Network-based. So Wi-Fi attacks. Like you can break into Wi-Fi. You can... They call them like man in the middle concept. I like to refer to it as mischief in the middle.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
But basically, you know, you've got your device here and like the wireless access point here, right? They're talking. But you bring in a Wi-Fi pineapple and it can kind of intercept in between. There's so many different ways you can do this. There's no one single way. It's lots of Wi-Fi based tooling. Another example, it's not so much relevant these days, but
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
You know, when you connect to like your free Wi-Fi access points, coffee shops and stuff, your phone remembers that. Typically, you've told it to remember that usually. So next time you arrange, it's going to automatically connect, right? The Wi-Fi pineapple, for instance, can say, guess what? I'm that Wi-Fi too.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So if I pull up one right here and put it next to you or just anywhere, your phone's going to be like, oh, I know that one. Let me connect to it. So that type of stuff, there's just so many different attacks that I couldn't possibly run through all of them. But just as an example, there's so many different approaches to security.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
We think about computers and plug-in USB in, but yeah, there's other things. There's the network, there's the wireless, there's near-field communication with badges and things like that. Totally different tools, totally different specialties and focuses. The badge readers you don't think of as computer security for the most part. It's just building access, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
but that's all one whole thing interesting you're doing proper complete security awareness and testing well let's take a quick break yeah when we come back i want to get into what is the actual omg cable oh yeah good point perfect
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
OMG cable, right? Looks exactly like one of the many USB cables you've got. And if it doesn't, I got a whole bunch more hair to guarantee it does.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
There was a whole free Kevin movement where they were doing, I think they put him in solitary or something because they thought he could whistle into the phones and launch ICBMs or some shit like that. Oh my gosh. This is like back when everybody was like, oh my God, hackers, just evil wizards. It's still like that today, but it was much worse back then. They had no idea what was even possible.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, I mean, think about all the different, and it's, think of it as camouflage, basically. It's like, what's the environment? Do they use white cables? Do they use USB-A, USB-C? Is it a Mac shop? Cool, they're going to have lightning on one end, maybe, if they got the older phones, if it's, Newer phones, cool, and USB-C. And it's really about blending in to fit what's already in place.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So you could swap it out or you can do other things. There's a lot of different... and techniques you can have when you have a device that is physically invisible and just hiding in plain sight. So that's the physical aspect of it. And that took me a huge amount of time of shrinking down the components, which I will describe in just a second.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
But shrinking it down, it just took absurd amounts of time just designing the PCB that goes in here. And then beyond that, just the entire process of integrating the PCB into a cable. That just took... like a year, basically.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, exactly. So, the PCB inside of here, what it does is when you plug it into a... It's primarily targeting laptops and desktops. Um... It's got a PCB that will wirelessly kind of light up and it'll connect back to you. There's so many different ways you can configure it, but this wireless connection allows remote connection into the cable, get a full web UI in your web browser, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Whether it's on your phone or laptop. It can even connect out to the internet, and you can connect to this thing from anywhere on earth if you do it that way. What's it do, though? You've got to control this wirelessly.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
No. You've still got to have a wireless network it can connect to, or you bring one in. Okay. If I open my phone right now and looked at all the wireless networks, I bet there's probably one in there I could connect to. If not, are you going to notice a free coffee shop Wi-Fi nearby? No. Why not? For instance, right? Flexibility is the name of the game with this. There's no one way to use it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
There's so many ways because in a red team scenario, you don't know what you're up against and you're going to need some options to circumvent a problem. But yeah, still, what does it even do? You're connected to it. But it primarily emulates a keyboard. It says, I'm a keyboard, and it types really fast. So what does that do? Literally anything I could do sitting at the computer at the keyboard.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So whether that's implanting malware or whatever it may be, right? That's kind of the basic functionality of it. But, I mean, it's not it. USB cables can often connect a keyboard to a computer when you're sitting at a desk. Swap out that cable, and this can now intercept the keystrokes, which is really good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Just like one classic use case is if the machine is locked, I mean, you can type all you want, but you're at a lock screen. You need to get past the lock screen. What do you need to get past the lock screen? You need the password, right? How do you get the password? There's a lot of ways. I mean, you could call up the person and effectively ask them for it by saying, I'm IT or something like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
But if you're deployed between a keyboard, you can just... pull it right off the lines. They're going to type that password every single time they log into the computer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
You remotely see that, you rebuild a new payload that maybe when they go to lunch in the evening, when you know they're not at the machine anymore, it's just going to type in that password, automatically unlock the machine, and then do all the nefarious things you wanted to at that point.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, not so much seeing. There's a lot of, it depends, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So yeah, he was held for much longer. I don't want to misspeak here because I don't remember the particulars, but he was held for a very long time, pretty unfairly, eventually got out, and then went into InfoSec as a profession using that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Not at this stage. So at this stage, we're just blindly sending keystrokes in, right? So as long as you know what OS it is or something like that, that's all you need on a desktop. I know if I hit Command Space, it's going to open up Spotlight on a Mac. And then I can open up Chrome and then go to the address bar, do some things, right? For example.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Like that's a very repeatable series of keystrokes. And you can do them really fast once you know it. Just for an example. Okay. All right. So that's the basics of the very core functionality. And then you combine that with keylogging and suddenly... You're getting a bigger picture here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Oh, yeah, so you see a little window blink, right? That's basically your terminal. In that case, there's a lot of things I could do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And then if you detect the Trojan on there and you remove it, and the cable's still in play, which it's designed to be, just put it right back on. No shit. Which is absolutely a thing that has happened with a bunch of my customers. They have told me that they did an engagement with a very high-profile client.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
We can go into these types of things, but that reinfection vector is exactly what they used.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Either or. So all about flexibility. So you can program this a couple different ways. So what I showed was me remotely connecting to it and I hit go. But this can be configured that when it powers up, when it gets plugged in, it powers up. It can immediately run a payload. It can wait a series, however long you want, and then run a payload.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, over a year now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, exactly. So when I say payload, it's the series of keystrokes that gets run.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
You can. There's ways of typing out. If you've got a small executable, that you want to transfer over, there's a couple ways to do that. Like, you just use the keystrokes to download it, right? You can download stuff from, like, the terminal, for instance. Or I could use Chrome and download it there and go to the downloads folder and open it up there. Through keystrokes. Yep.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I can navigate everything with keystrokes.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yep, that's one way. I mean, I probably wouldn't email it to them because if I was going to email it, I'd probably include an email that convinces them to just run it for me. But if I'm up against a hardened target where they're not susceptible to that, they're unlikely to do it, I'm like, okay, well, let's get a cable that'll do it for me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
um as as an example right this can also do mouse movements too if we need um lots of control there and yeah it's that you can also yeah so the the malware right you can download that you can also type it back out um it's called base64 it's just a whole bunch of it looks like random garbage characters if you open like if you open up a an executable with a notepad roughly
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I mean, I guess he knew it looked good, so he's good at that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
stay in high level here, you're going to see a bunch of garbage text, right? But when you type that same text out in a notepad and save it, it's that executable. So I can type that back into the computer And boom, there's the executable, which is something we've done quite a bit in environments where they're checking what is being downloaded from the internet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Okay, you're looking at the internet. Cool. I'm going to just type this little piece of malware back into the computer. Lots of cool tricks you can do like that. Wow. It's fun. And so there's other aspects of this too. So, you know, keystroke injection, mouse injection. I showed you the key logging. Oh, you were asking about the ways of triggering it. So I showed you remotely I can click go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
We can have it boot up and go. There's also... what I refer to as geofencing. Basically, it's got wireless in there, so it can just look at the nearby networks and figure out where it is and where it isn't. And you can trigger or block things on that. And there's a self-destruct function where it'll erase everything on it. Now, it sounds super nefarious, but it's actually prompted by legal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
A lot of places have strict controls. So with the USB rubber ducky, it does the keystroke injection. It looks like a thumb drive by Hack5. That's my business partner. They invented that 15 years ago-ish. what they would do is you could put like salaries.xls on it. So it's like, oh, that must be the company salaries and litter it in the parking lot, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
That's one way that people would be convinced to pick it up in the parking lot, bring it inside, plug it in, see what's on it, right? And boom, they've just infected themselves with malware, right? There's a downside to that, which is depending on how bad that payload is, If you're a red team, you're an employee of this company, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
You've got malware sitting on a loose object that anyone could pick up and bring it home, bring it into another business, and now you have just infected another business. That's not ideal, right? So certain environments, their legal team is like, no way. You put geofencing on this. You have a payload where it boots up and just says, am I in the office? Is the corporate Wi-Fi present? Cool.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Oh, yeah, definitely. And just for the record, he got a pretty unfair shake at life. I think he got pancreatic cancer, and he died before his first kid was born, which is just fucking terrible. Man, that's horrible. I've since met up with his wife and cleared the air. Good for you. We're good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
If not, completely wipe everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yep. And where it isn't.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So this scan right here, this was done by LumaField. They've got a CT scanner, which is basically an x-ray scanner that takes a lot of x-rays, little slices across a product, and then assembles it into a 3D object. So LumaField, I actually just did some work with them to sit down and talk about their machines they use for all kinds of things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
manufacturing inspection but also starting to get into like security stuff like where you can literally see inside this is a scan of the end of one of my cables so right here is the connectors usb connectors and over here we got the components so this is the main processor and this little thing over here is the antenna you can kind of see the usb wires running out the bottom there wow and the cool thing is let's see if i can turn this there it is that is
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
the whole internal and lots more components kind of on the back. You can use this to step through every layer and just see literally every little detail about something. So if you got untrusted hardware for instance, that scanner would reveal all of the internals. In this case, it's just really cool and it shows off, here's what's inside my cable. Man. All the magic.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I think I'm going to. It's a beautiful scan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah. They have done a lot of work to kind of democratize the access to CT scans. CT scanning machines are normally this industrial machine that's really hard to use and really expensive. Like we're talking like a million plus dollars for machines, roughly. They do a subscription where it's like the cost of a maintenance contract. And they did some amazing stuff to make it super usable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Like you can see me turning this. It's super easy to use the outputs and set it up, and they did something magic. I don't know that they communicate this, but the sensor in an X-ray machine normally decays, and you have to replace it. They've somehow made an eternal scanner, so it reduces the cost as well, which I don't know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I'm completely obsessed with their technology right now, so sorry for the momentary splurge on that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I got everyone, basically. So here's the thing. Me, personally, I've got one customer, Hack5. And we can probably go into the story about how we met. But basically, when I was making these things by myself and I needed to take the jump into manufacturing, I had a lot of bad experiences, but Hack 5 was amazing. They're like, let me just kind of show you the ropes, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Like manufacturing, running a business, all this stuff. Darren has been great to me. So I sell all of my stuff to him. And all of my products are available on Hack 5 as a result. They take care of who gets it. And they have very tight expert controls. There's a lot of countries they just will not ship to.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, you can. You're not in a prohibited country. Wow. So yeah, you can just go on there and buy it. And hobbyists can use it. Security researchers, awareness training. So that's where you go on stage and kind of just show off. concerning things so that people will change their behavior, and primarily red teams.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
There's lots of red teams in the private space, you know, Fortune 500s, military, industrial, government, all have their own equivalencies to that. And again, the red team is where you are emulating what an actual attacker does from end to end, from
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
penetrating to the cup, getting into the company and all the entire chain of hopping around and getting to the crown jewels, pulling those back out that, that is red teaming. And, um,
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
this is used a lot there so uh i have a lot of customers who will also reach out just for advice on how to use the cables or maybe they've run into a situation like that legal constraint like hey this is cool but like oh yeah cool let me just fix that and solve that legal problem now i don't know like the full scope of what they're doing but it's like oh here's a problem i can solve that for you um
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
There's, yeah, every... They are the people I've talked to, and now I know a lot more than I can talk about here, but there are plenty of people who have said, yeah, you're going to Sean Ryan, go ahead and you can talk about it this way. A couple people... Who are those people? Yeah, so...
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I mean, possibly. I don't know that level of detail and don't really want to, but as long as they're part of the okay entities.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, I know exactly right.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
This is going to be defined on who is or isn't going to put me in prison. So that's my definition of good in this scenario is keeping those people happy. But to be clear, there's another advantage here, which is some of these places are critical infrastructure that they work at or are tasked with. securing or improving the security. So we all benefit from that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I don't want a place that has some form of nuclear material in it getting compromised because the people who want to compromise those places probably looking to hurt me in some way, right? So let's help them. So the other feature kind of added to these cables recently is we call it HIDX Stealth Link.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
It's kind of the branding of it to explain what it is, but ultimately still acting as a keyboard, but now it's got bidirectional data transfer. So like a network interface, but without ever showing as a network interface, you can send data back and forth between the computer, and it just looks like a keyboard to the target system.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
This was used by quite a few people in a lot of environments, but in this case, the critical infrastructure was not looking for this type of exfiltration technique. And it worked really well, got them in, and they achieved their objectives with this critical infrastructure and got it fixed. I was told that my name got put into a report that I will never have access to, but that's extremely cool.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, definitely. It depends where we're talking about red teaming, because there's military red teaming, which I would love for you to give me a couple of stories on. I'm sitting in a room with a guy who probably knows that really well, way more than me, so it would be a little ridiculous for me to explain that to you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
It's like, cool, I got my name into a report to fix some critical infrastructure with a technique that we developed with my team. And honestly, I'd love to pause and even talk about that team because... while I make the hardware and the manufacturing and run the business, all the tricks this does heavily about the actual firmware that runs on this and that requires multiple people to pull off.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, so there's a couple pieces of this, but one guy's retired and just loves working on hardware. Prior to this, I mean, he did a lot of things, but prior to this, he was working on the firmware for police body cameras, so... Very interesting background there. Another guy is blind, and he does kind of the UI you see. It's kind of poetic. The blind guy is in charge of the UI.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
He's got a lot of experience. What is UI? Yeah, so the visual interface. When you open it up in the control panel, and you've got all the buttons and stuff in there. Hold on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Ah, wirelessly. So when you connect to it wirelessly with your web, and then you open your web browser and then connect to the IP address, you get like a web page, right? Okay. With all the buttons on it that give you the controls. You can view the key logs. Gotcha. Open the hundreds of payloads you can save on here and run them. All that's purely visual. Okay. Click on stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
It doesn't have to be, you can automate it, but yeah, it's primarily visual and it allows all the cool controls to happen. So got another guy who, you know, in education and a lot of them are familiar with, you know, the government contracting spaces as well. It's a fairly small team, but they've been along for the ride the whole time and just constantly interested in picking up challenges.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And the way the Keylogger works on here is like, that's not supposed to be possible. How did you get this word out? How are you marketing this? That's a really good question, actually. I have not done any marketing yet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I think I just put a video out. A video of like, hey, I made this with my mail. Check it out. Here's what it can do. Excuse me. Here's what it can do. And then it just took off. That was mostly in the InfoSec space. So it kind of went around the hacker community and the security professionals. Security professionals. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And at some point, it just kind of goes outside that bubble because it gets enough traction. Like, Vice took it. Forbes took it. You know, there's so many different high-profile... This has been in Forbes? Oh, yeah, this has been in Forbes a couple times. Look, Bob, I made it to Forbes. Yeah, it's been pretty wild. I am at the point, though, where I am starting to think about...
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
But red teaming in terms of corporate cybersecurity is a subset of pen testing. Pen testing is find the holes. tell us the holes, right? I mean, that's cool, but it doesn't quite test how someone responds. I think there's this, I think it's a Mike Tyson quote, where everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face, right? It's like, okay, well,
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Focusing purely on this, because this has just become this awesome monster that takes a lot of my time, as well as running Red Team as well. So that's probably something I'm going to be pivoting into very shortly. And focusing on that, helping the team, and seeing what more we can do. Probably going to relax for a bit, though. Good for you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
It's very good. So I'm probably long overdue to jump.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I have no idea. So I've never had a plan ever on any of this. It's just what's the thing and the opportunity at the moment and how can I play with that in an interesting way. Yeah. Which, you know, there's a lot of things why you would want to plan in business, but I just, yeah, I don't know, maybe eventually I'll have a plan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I mean, it's been five, six years now, and I'm very proud of the results of it with all the places where it's been fixed and the very low abuse scenarios. We're very intentional when we think about... okay, let's add a feature to this, but let's figure out who wants this feature, who's going to make use of it. For instance, the number one that I want to avoid is like stalkerware, spouseware stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
People look at this and they're like, oh yeah, I need that for that. I'm like, no, I'm going to make that hard. That's not as valuable to a red team professional. We're trying to get into corporate infrastructure. We're trying to do like Ocean's Eleven shit on... like a Fortune 10 or something like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah. So here's the thing, though. That's the other aspect is there's a lot of very detectable defaults. You have to really know how to use the tool to work around these things. But by design, it's supposed to be detectable if you're doing good security. This is going to light up. It's literally, it announces itself as an OMG cable effectively out of the box, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So hopefully you're at least checking that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So here's the thing. Is the people who are that low on the bar of security, I don't need these to get in. I just pick up a phone. I send an email.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
That's that sweet spot where it's like all, you know, you map out all the desires, the capabilities and the threats and the negative consequences and just thread the needle to get just that sweet spot. And we spend a lot of time thinking about that. But right now, I just point to the last five years of like, look, the results.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And that way, you know, I can talk all day about how much intent we put into it. But the results are far better than the intent in terms of convincing somebody. Another thing, so I think I showed you These should actually ship deactivated for multiple reasons, which you can imagine. There's a little, we call it the programmer. It's kind of a firmware tool.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So you plug this into your computer to activate it, right? This doubles for multiple other things. So if you do like a self-destruct on it, you recover the cable with this if you wanted to. You have to get it back out of the field. But self-destruct, we'll just put it into a neutral cable that's just... Not harmful at all. Really good if you can't pull the thing back out of the field.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
maybe a little aggressive in context of cybersecurity, but, you know, how do you solve that? Like in boxing, you train, you get punched in the face, right? And then, well, okay, now it's not going to be new when it happens. So you might have a plan, but are you going to execute on the plan? Are you going to, like, miss some steps? Is motion going to get involved? And also, you know, I can...
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
You want to neutralize all your stuff. However, if you're blue team and you found this, you can also use one of these to dump every bit of firmware that's running on here, which will include payloads and all this stuff. So as long as, you know, it hasn't been self-destructed, you can just dump that and do a full forensics on it. So they get to practice as well. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So, yeah, we've done a lot of things that kind of show off the forensic capabilities and ways of approaching. So it's meant to be holistic for security, not just purely offensive use. But it's really about raising the bar, basically.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I doubt it. So these are highly targeted. So it's kind of... Things like this. Yeah, exactly. But I think it's good to think about it. Like, let's step back to, like, a different type of crime. Like, pickpocketing versus, like, Ocean's Eleven bank job, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Like, this is more on the, you know, the bank job, whereas pickpocketing, that's what you're more likely to experience as just a random individual.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
that's going to be more equal to like phishing emails, like really low-grade commodity malware type stuff that's delivered over email. Like the risk of physically delivering this stuff is too high. Or in the case of like, oh, we're going to contaminate the shelves, right? effectively, online or not, that's so high cost and so easy to find.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
You just need one person to detect that this happened and we'd all hear the news story. Which kind of reminds me of that Bloomberg grain of rice story, right? Which was complete bullshit. My friend Joe Fitzpatrick is a great guy to talk about this, but basically there was this Bloomberg news story that a little grain of rice component was found implanted in a bunch of servers, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And it just doesn't make sense, which is why that story didn't make sense, because there are so many other ways of approaching that that are way less detectable. Does anybody, like, how do you control where that goes? It's very hard to control where implanted hard work goes. And if you don't have control, anyone's going to find it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I think the closest you can get to that might be that Israeli pager story. where they had to create a fake manufacturing plant to develop these things. And that is how they controlled where it went.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yes, exactly. Fascinating. So thousands of pagers. I think it was a batch of 5,000 and 4,000 went out. So yeah, a lot of booms. But basically what they did is set up a fake manufacturing company, right? And I think they had their own manufacturing plant and everything. They licensed a legitimate – model of pager from a legitimate company, well-known.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
find holes at different layers, but red taming is going to be repeating exactly the entire chain. It's often called a kill chain, where you're connecting all of these different vulnerabilities to go from completely outside to completely to the crown jewels, take them out and succeed, and then you show how you did it after the fact. How'd you get into that?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
This is a typical relationship for a lot of hardware. You just license it and you sell it. And then you're like, yeah, put my name on it. Depends on what it is. Like, obviously Apple's going to do their own thing, but we're talking pagers, right? This is like 30-year-old technology here. So they did that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
They had a bunch of, they even went as far as getting a bunch of random customers and gave them good pagers. But then they got their Hezbollah client And I'm always curious about how they did that. I have some postulations, but they got their Hezbollah client and they made exploding pagers for them. They put high explosives in part of the battery,
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
and a detonator in there, and basically it was configured to explode, detonate this thing, after a specific message was sent to the pager. And the way pager networks work are all broadcast, so you can send one message that goes to all pagers in the network, which is probably what they did. Anyway, this was in play for, I don't know, I think it was like one or two years.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
These were out there and slowly going through the IT operations of, hey guys, we've got new hardware and slowly sending them out to the field. I think they were encrypted pagers. It was funny in some ways that this pager focus was entirely because they knew their cell phones were compromised. Like, oh, start using pagers. Maybe it was the walkie-talkies, I forget.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
But they were moving away from one comms to another to avoid surveillance. And as a result, they got explosions. But that's the kind of level of control. Like, if those got out to someone else, which, I mean, there's still opportunity for that. Like, they're not...
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
watching one pager go from hand to hand to hand, like, it's like, oh, we deployed it to Hezbollah, and it's reasonable to assume that this level of dissemination with this margin of error and other people touching them, and, you know, they probably did the math on that, right? I didn't. But that's kind of a good example of like how far you can go and like the risks of discovery.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Stuff like Stuxnet. Stuxnet's another good example of, I think it was the Iranian enrichment facilities where, oh, I can't remember the full story here, but there was like a thumb drive with a worm on it. And it basically got carried into this enrichment facility, and it would damage part of the enrichment machinery, right? But it didn't do it all at once.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
It would randomly pick one or the other because you don't want to be discovered, right? If you did it all at once, you're like, oh, something's up. It's just like, oh, one went out, whatever, it must be bad, right? There's like the psychology of making sure it doesn't seem like it's something to investigate. It's like, oh, bad machines, it must be bad process.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
They kept doing that and eventually, I can't remember how it got discovered, But there was an issue where it started spreading around elsewhere, like the worm or something like that. And somebody noticed it, I think. I can't fully remember. But there was a discovery event because it kind of got too wide. And once it's discovered, okay, now you can defend against it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Now you can find them in the wild. And the moment somebody found anything in our stuff, they're going to tell the world. Like, hey, look at this cool thing I found. I'm a security researcher. That said... On the flip side, there's plenty of places we don't look. Most of the stuff you find in there is just vulnerabilities.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
good question so kind of almost don't even know but over the course of just life and I started off as just help desk IT sysadmin where you learn a lot of things and at the time I didn't think it was very applicable but like those are all the systems and the nuances and like just the weird compromises you learn like oh I don't have enough budget so I'm going to do it this way or you learn about the end users that you're supporting as help desk and all the
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Like, oh, I didn't think there would be a hole on whatever, some aspect of a product. Like, oh, if you just log in 10 times and do this, you get in, you bypass everything. It's like, wait, what? You do what? That's the type of stuff that's typically, well, nobody thought to try that. So yeah, it really depends. Physical implants are much easier to discover. I mean, they're physically there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
You can't revoke them. You can't be like, oh, self-delete. It's there. I mean, not counting the Patriot situation. It's a different type of delete. But, you know, delete in a way that doesn't leave the evidence around.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I don't know yet. What are you thinking about? Like, I have been... Focusing more on personal stuff, just like hanging out with my kids, spending more time with them while I got the time and they're growing, you know, one's 14, so, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
No. Learning how to do that is part of it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Here's an example. So, I'm reusing the same implant in a couple of ways. So, I mean, this is an easy one. So, USB adapters, basically a cable, right? Cool. Uh-huh. I had a thing where customers were enjoying the firmware so much for like payload development, they would get the cable and cut the end off. I'm like, dude, no, that's my baby. What are you doing? So, you know, there we go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Keychains that, you know, don't have the cable on it. Cool. Got that. Now here's another one. Are you familiar with USB data blockers?
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So it's a commonly recommended secure charging mechanism. You're like, oh, I can't trust the airport charger or something like that. You're like, well, get a data blocker.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Mostly. I mean, I'm personally more concerned about the quality of the electricity coming out there frying my phone than I am about like a data situation. Because going back to the discoverability, you put something in a wide space like that, once it gets detected, you hear about it. We've not heard about it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And especially in a secure space, like all the airport locations, like everybody's on camera, right? Like, good luck. It would be really hard. There's advisories that come out, and I think the FBI was doing them. They get a lot of flack for that because there's no, like, proof it existed, but... I don't know. I don't have the intelligence they have either. So, I mean, there's things you could do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I also don't consider my creativity to be all-inclusive in all ways. You can do something negative. There's plenty of people with different motives and minds than me. So, yeah. We'll see. It would be a cool story. But yeah, data blockers. That's the idea. You now have safe charging. I'm like, cool. I'll put one of my things in a data blocker. Now, you know, cat and mouse.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I just thought it was funny. But just as an example, just kind of chase that a little bit. Go from there. I don't know. We'll see.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I've done a lot on the manufacturing side, so I've had to invent so many tools and mechanisms, both for creating these cables, which turns into their own products, because I'm teaching other people how to use them, and it breaks, and I've got to do support for those products, and they're their own PCBs and everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
It's a hardware product with its own firmware, just to test these cables at multiple stages. So I'm still packing these at home with the kids and the envelopes, right? I got to label those. It gets really annoying over time. I'm like, you know what, I'm going to create a machine to label these. So I just keep chasing that down and see how much I can do. You know, there's a guy called Cliff Stoll.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
He does a lot of really cool things, science, math. He's got a book on security, but he also makes something called Klein bottles. Total deviation here, but you'll see why. So Klein bottles are, you know, a Mobius strip. You take a strip of paper and you pull the ends up, rotate, tape them together. Now you've got a 1D dimension. So if you follow it around on a pen, it's one dimensional.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
problems they run into, and, oh, they're running into, like, policy that stops them from working, so, oh, they're going to do this. That's going to cause a degradation of security, but it's really common. You know that, having been in helpdesk and sysadmin, so you start to connect these things together, and it becomes this really...
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Klein bottle is a 3D version of that. Anyway, he, I think he lives in Palo Alto, a small place. He runs like distribution entirely out of his house for that. So under his house, he has built an entire robotic warehouse system with like drives the thing around, pulls the stuff out. I think that's cool as hell.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
um and it goes back to like the old school hacker mindset of just doing that i like that kind of stuff just catches me and i'll like okay cool i want to do as much manufacturing in home as i can because a my stuff is really small um but you know also let's just see how far i can take it how much more i can optimize like i this this orange clip that goes on these things that I ship with.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So you know which ones are bad. I've redesigned it like six times so far. Wow. I just want to see how much further can I take it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
It's a mix. So the process for it, I'm going to go back to this PCB as a reference here, but real quick. The process that I'm kind of taking right now is I ask one manufacturer, make the raw, the PCB, the green piece here. Then that gets shipped to another place that assembles the components to the PCB. They're basically running it through high heat.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
They melt solder, and they all get glued to the board. Now you've got a functional piece of... And now, once it's glued to the board, here's one of my implants. And we can get some close-ups later. But here is, that's one of the implants. That's the size of it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yep. Inside the boot of the cable, basically.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, I know. I mean... Serious, man? Wow. Yeah, there's a lot of compromises to make that happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
If you were not size-constrained on that, that would be ten times bigger because it would be so much easier to make with ten components instead of two or whatever. I forget how many I have in there. I think I got like 12. But, you know, times ten the components is normally what you'd see. So that creates the need to do a lot of creative engineering to compromise and get small.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
But at some point, I'll show you it here. Here's that little one with the USB-C end on it. And here is the USB-C A. So that's kind of, you know, okay, components are on there. One shop did the green PCB. One shop put all the components on there. Cool. Well, that's what I got right now, right? It's not cable yet. So another shop is going to help integrate that into cables.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
valuable just bucket of information for oh how would i get into the company using that and you know got really into security for a while it's just it's it's also a piece of that role like you're gonna run all the systems for it you gotta keep them secure too especially in small companies where you don't have dedicated security it's like no you you are the security so you gotta learn it that way which requires you to think also how does an attacker do it because
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And so this other shop is going to integrate it into cables to some extent. There's still unfinished work to do, unfinished testing. Then And if it's the woven cable, there's another factory that has to do special cutting and crimping and searing of the ends so it doesn't unravel. Anyway, so three, four factories later, it ships over to me. I'll do the finishing work on them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Sometimes it's closing the actual cables up, but at a minimum, it's testing everything, calibrating them, putting that initial firmware on there, tons of QA and QC work, packaging, I'm shipping it off to the Hack5 warehouse. Wow. Lots of work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah, so two places, basically. You can go to the o.mg.lol website. That's my primary website. Or you can go to my business partner. It redirects to my business partner, effectively, which is hack5, H-A-K-5, hack5.org, slash omg, and all of my products are up on their site. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I'm not sure I would know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Yeah. And there's been a lot of interesting challenges, too.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I'm happy to help all kinds of people secure their environments. Yeah, I mean, they know where to find me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Let's see. Oh, you know, another thing that might be interesting here is this kind of kicked off right when the pandemic kicked off. It's like, you know, working with the factories, had to do all that remote work. And that immediately ran into the chip shortage. I saw that come in from like six months before everybody else did.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So immediately had to figure out all the supply chain logistics, where to find chips when they are out of the market everywhere, hoarding them. This is something I have put... the first two or three years of profits entirely back into production.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
Whether it's improving the PCB, improving the capabilities, or storing extra components because we're in the middle of a chip shortage so I can still make my stuff. That was a wild time. And it felt like there was just one thing after the other that was like, no, you can't sell these. No, the market's down. No, you can't have access to the chips.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And just trying to find ways of working around that. Down to like... All these little tiny components come in a really long piece of tape coiled up on a reel, right? I count those. I assemble those by myself as well. So, you know, I got machines to count them and assemble them so I can just send it off to the assembler.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
There's so many different facets of running a hardware business that is like this that is really unexpected and I'm just kind of learning on the fly. So, yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
I mean, I'm all over the place. Definitely on Twitter, underscore MG underscore. Lots of other social networks starting to form and fall apart and whatever they may be. I'll try to keep all of that on the contact page of the o.mg.lol site, though.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
You got to defend against that, right? So eventually, I just kind of got bored of doing IT and made the jump into security. Started learning... Actually, Bryce is a good connection on this as well. So... I had known Bryce for a long time, and I think it was like 2013, first time I went to DEF CON, Hacker Security Conference, biggest one in the world, in Vegas, every year.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And I decided, oh God, what was this? So there's these unrecorded talks they also do in certain areas. He was on stage, I think he was doing something with Bitcoin at the time, and he had this telepresence robot on stage for a guy who was on house arrest. He couldn't come, so he brought a telepresence robot to be Bryce's partner on the stage. It was just wild watching this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
So I'm in the audience, and I'm just like, oh yeah, Bryce, Whitey Cracker. I don't like it. I'm going to go see what he's doing. And then, you know, he gives us a talk. And after it's done, I'm like, hey, yo, what's up? Like, never met you before. But from that point on, we kind of, you know, our relationship grew. Got to know him a lot better. But he also DJs, as you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare
And he was DJing for a guy called Fuzzy Knop, who, sorry, flip that around. Fuzzy Knopf was DJing for him, because he also MCs and sings songs, right? So he needs someone, you know, to play that. So Fuzzy Knopf was DJing for him on a lot of his shows. So I met him. And, well, he is the one who had built out a red team for a new company. Not a new company. New red team for a company, large company.
Shawn Ryan Show
#162 Leif Babin - What Leadership Looks Like in the World’s Deadliest Warzones
Mic Drop, hosted by former Navy SEAL Mike Ritland. It's raw.
Shawn Ryan Show
#162 Leif Babin - What Leadership Looks Like in the World’s Deadliest Warzones
Mic Drop, follow and listen on your favorite platform.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So it's difficult right now for them to form that cohesive network and unified action plan when you have folks from the Joe Biden side of the foreign policy establishment still extremely upset and feeling betrayed by the Kamala Harris side of it. But those wounds will heal, and time, I believe, does heal all wounds in that way as their economic interests are threatened further.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
potentially by the drastic reforms the Trump administration is pursuing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
operations abroad are dirtier apparatus, are blob foreign policy apparatus, capacity for covert activity and political dirty tricks weaponized against Americans, which is just a fundamental assault on the premise for even having them in the first place.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Well, I'm shocked. I'm shocked to find the U.S.-funded blob NGO swarm descending on a right-wing populist party in Europe. No, of course. I mean, this is the most predictable thing of all time. I mean, Georgia's queue has been... a thorn in the side of the US and UK and NATO foreign policy establishment for a number of reasons.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The central linchpin of world geopolitics right now is the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Romania occupies a critical strategic point in that war, not just because of the transport of arms from Pakistan to Romania into Ukraine, which has been a long-time route to be able to run guns and arms and munitions in, but also because Romania shares the Black Sea coast,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
with Ukraine, and NATO is presently in the process of building the single largest NATO base in Europe in all of NATO history, 100% bigger than the Ramstein base in Germany. And in fact, NATO is, as we speak, moving arms, supplies, jets, and drones to that base because it points...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Straight out at Crimea and will be the the place of force projection And you know, this is this is the the military hard power Play on on Crimea is which is absolutely essential to Russia in their view as this is what kicked off this conflict to begin with really there was the effective secession of eastern Ukraine, but it was
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
russia's warm water port access uh in in crimea and obviously their military base there that was it was the crime crimea referendum to join the russian federation that kicked off all of this including the the you know the rattles snake nest that that trump walked into with ukraine and russia and whatnot and so you know georgia skew has has effectively campaigned on
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
being friends with both sides, enemies of neither. Neutrality does not want to antagonize Russia by building the NATO's largest lethal warfighting capability right on Romania's coast. It makes Romania a target. Obviously, from NATO's perspective, the moment Russia bombs Romania and extends the fight beyond Ukraine, that would be a major international incident.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Not. Not? You know, I mean, I speak... I think that a lot of the folks there pay attention to the things that I publish. I think so too. There's interaction simply through X and whatnot. They have an incredible job.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But the attempt to remove Georgia skew is the same thing that happened with Imran Khan. The Intercept published leaked cables Who was that? Imran Khan was the Prime Minister of Pakistan. And again, there's this deep relationship between Pakistan and Romania here because Pakistan was essentially how we trained and funded the Mujahideen in the 1970s and 80s against the Soviets.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There's a lot of military capacities that we warehoused there. There's a lot of money laundering through those. There's the famous BCCI Bank, Bank of Commerce and Credit International, sort of CIA proprietary bank that went down in web of scandals around Pakistan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Great Britain, the UK, which has massive interest in Eurasia, just built an air bridge between Pakistan and Romania for this exact purpose. And so, but Pakistan also, Imran Khan, the prime minister, did not want to... He did not want to... This is shortly after the 2022 Russia-Ukraine military fiasco kicked off.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The US and UK foreign policy folks thought that, in their own words, when they were effectively bribing the political class of Pakistan, and this is all in The Intercept, everyone can look this up, these leaked cables, it showed that
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Carrots and sticks were offered by the Biden foreign policy establishment to parliamentarians in Pakistan in order to oust Imran Khan in a no-confidence vote, an impeachment that would take him from power. And then he was arrested shortly thereafter. He's currently in prison, even though he was the wildly popular elected head of state.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And the reason cited by the State Department for carrying out this coup operation was that Imran Khan had taken, quote, an aggressively neutral position because Khan had said that he will continue to have Pakistan do trade with Russia. He does not want to allow Russia. weapons, you know, to go to killing Russians.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And given how central that Pakistan is in this Pakistan-Romania corridor, Georgia skew, I see, is the same way, aggressively neutral. But that's all it takes. That was all it took for the State Department there. And can I continue just on this point? Absolutely.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Going after the courts in order to nullify elections or influence the activities of the elections is the beating heart of what USAID and, to a related extent, the State Department, CIA, and civil military folks at DOD do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
USAID is in their charter to pursue so-called judicial reform, which allows them to effectively bribe and try to rig the decisions of judges and the judiciary and the rise and fall of laws in foreign countries. And USAID made a special project targeting what they call EMBs, election management bodies. which are the bodies in countries that adjudicate elections.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So, for example, it's our Supreme Court that decided, you know, the Bush versus Gore hanging, you know, hanging Chad's, you know, election in the U.S., 20 years ago. In Brazil, the EMB, the election management body, is what's called the TSE. It's basically a subcomponent of their STF Supreme Court. That is the Demorais Voldemort judge who banned X, seized assets from Starlink, and is basically...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
criminalized pro-Bolsonaro support on Brazilian social media. And they were sought after by USAID. USAID, I have their internal documents where they've, in just a few meetings alone, they'll gather together representatives from 12 different EMBs across the world and have USAID basically convince them, train them on what kind of ways to structure their court or what task forces to set up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
in the disinformation space in order to allow those courts to have a to not just adjudicate the elections, but to be able to effectively criminalize questioning the elections or speech during the election cycle. This is part of how the power in Brazil of that court expanded to such a huge size.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
USAID was pumping money into that whole network around that court, pumping up the academic thought leadership, pumping up the legal advocates who were making pitches to the prosecutors and to the disinformation task force itself. And if they're going after every EMB, election management body in the world, effectively, to get those courts to criminalize populist speech.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
One of the things we're confronted by right now in this moment is it's becoming increasingly clear, I think, to the rest of the American population that it's this foreign policy establishment that's been weaponized against domestic citizens. But this was a nationalist movement from 2016 onward. Make America great again. America first, these sorts of things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You can bet your bottom dollar they're doing that to criminalize populist election results. In those same SEPs documents, this is the Political Process Strengthening Center at USAID, In that program, they define the enemy as populism.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They say that part of the purpose is to prevent the evolution of populist thought leadership because they define right-wing populism as a threat to democracy because it undermines the efficacy of democratic institutions, U.S.-backed NGOs and civil society institutions in the area. Well, guess what George's view is?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
He's a right-wing populist, or he's a populist at least, however you want to define it. He is, in their view, the virus that the white blood cells of USAID are custom-built to take out. And I just have to stress this point. This was attempted against Donald Trump when he won the 2016 election.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
When the Russiagate predicate came out about social media interference, everyone can trace the timeline of this and look up the contemporaneous news reporting. When the CIA came out and said there was Russian interference on U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
social media and there were Russian bots and trolls and RT and Sputnik were supporting Trump, they tried to get Congress to not certify the election result on the basis of Russian interference in the election. And to my recollection, they got, I believe, somewhere between a dozen and two dozen or almost a dozen U.S. congressmen to agree not to certify that vote. Now, it's not nearly enough.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There's over 500 people in the House and 100 in the Senate. But if you can get that ball rolling and poach sitting members of Congress here in the U.S. eight years ago before they even built up this apparatus to be juiced and as powerful as it's become, Think of how much easier that task is and how far a little bit of money goes a long way in order to juice those networks in Romania.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
People joined it because they cared about their own country or their own neighborhood, whether their streets were safe, whether their school curriculum reflected their own values, whether there was waste, fraud, and abuse at the White House or D.C. level. They didn't think about, in large part, international affairs, foreign relations.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Yeah. No, absolutely. That's what USAID does. They create the surround sound. This is part of the reason I call it the USAID Truman Show. USAID goes after every single category of institution in the country they're targeting. The media, control over social media speech, the unions, the workers' groups, the judiciaries, the parliamentarians, the arts and music and culture groups.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
the universities and the academic institutions, everything, even folks in the commercial for-profit sector side. What USAID does is it does what it calls capacity building. It does a baseline assessment or strategic assessment of all the assets they have in the region, and then they look at the gap between what they have and what they need in order to accomplish a particular goal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
State Department foreign policy goal or a, you know, interagency-approved foreign policy goal. And then they close that gap by funding everything they need.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So, for example, if Georgia SKU is overwhelmingly popular with unions, they will bring in, they will fund the NED's Solidarity Center or other sort of, you know, CIA, you know, back channels or NED is, you know, this sort of squishy in-between between state and CIA. You know, there are non- nonprofit NGO that gets its funding from the U.S. government. It was created by the U.S. government.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It was conceived of by the CIA director in 1983, William Casey, for it to be born. Its founders even say that their job was to do what the CIA used to do. That's basically delegated them They have something called the Solidarity Center, which is their union arm, and they'll often work with the AFL-CIO's international branches. So they say, okay, he's overwhelmingly popular there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Are those the people who are on board with our operational plan in place, for example, those people? have more disproportionate perception of political legitimacy for that, they will pump those up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
If they say, okay, well, Georgia Skew is popular, you know, in the media here or in these demographics, they'll do a demographic assessment, you know, by ethnicity, gender, religious denomination, and they will close those gaps. They'll do art and activism. You'll see musicians. You'll see performers. You'll see cultural figures.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They will all be approached by USAID-funded NGOs and interlocutors to do that. And that's That's effective enough in a country with counterintelligence antibodies because it's a sort of first world economy or a second world economy. In a place like Romania, the task of trying to stop the reach of those octopus arms is impossible.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They may care about a few wars that they hear about in the news, but The MAGA movement did not really have, and is only now beginning, I think, to incubate a sort of foreign policy intelligentsia that both the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party has had for over half a century, and that the Democratic Party has had.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Georgia right now has been in the news all year because they've been trying to pass our equivalent of FARA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which is a rule here that criminalizes any U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
person or institution who is lobbying the American government to change policies or lobbying Congress or the executive branch, but is getting funds from a foreign country to do that and is not disclosing it because we consider that to be a totally existential counterintelligence risk.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
If you don't have a FARA law to know which NGOs or which universities or which for-profit entities or whatnot are getting money from, pick your foreign country X, China, Saudi Arabia, UK, you name it, to do it, then That's an obvious counterintelligence threat. That's an intelligence operation, effectively, being run. When Georgia tried to pass that law, which is just U.S. FARA, what happened?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Well, there were the same street riots that were deployed that USAID was flat-busted, caught doing in every place from the Arab Spring to you know, to virtually every color revolution, street protest movement the U.S. has done, at least since the 1980s.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And so they're trying to stop Eastern European countries from even knowing the extent of the USAID Truman Show there and potentially even deploying their own rent-a-riot muscle to stop disclosure of that. So I don't know the extent in Romania, but I have to imagine If the truth is revealed, it would shock the world.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Every plot of dirt on God's green earth is influenced by USAID. I believe you said at the beginning of this that it was about 100 countries, and you mentioned Africa, Asia... Western Hemisphere, South America, and Eastern Europe. It's every country on Earth. For example, why is USAID paying tens of millions of dollars to British censorship NGOs and British censorship firms?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Why are they funding places like the Center for Information Resilience? Why are they funding all these British institutions if It has no impact there. Well, you're juicing the skids of these London civil society institutions when you do that. Institute for Strategic Dialogue and whatnot. What are those groups doing? What is Institute for Strategic Dialogue doing?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It is doing advocacy and high-pressure campaigns and liaising with the tech companies to censor Americans. Americans are targeted. USAID is attacking Americans. When USAID paid the OCCRP, this is the corruption reporting project that's under the... under the public limelight right now because of massive scandals that have broken out in the past several months.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
This is the largest consortium of investigative journalists in the world. This is the group that broke the Panama Papers and other major world stories. Turns out half of their budget comes from USAID and the State Department. I believe in the beginning it was all of it or virtually all of it. They were effectively spawned out of USAID and the State Department.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And so that process, I think, is forming right now, and people are trying to trying to form that North Star. And I think many of the things that I've published help go into that thought leadership soup.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The USAID and the State Department have approval over what staff they can hire. They closely coordinate on the kinds of stories or category of stories or workload that they can carry out. On USA.gov right now, everyone can see this in the Wayback Machine with USA.gov currently under maintenance, shall we say.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There's an incredible document at USAID bragging about the accomplishments that this investigative reporting group has done. Now, these are hit piece journalists that are carried out to capacity build independent media, not independent from government. It's our government. It's independent from you or what we say independent from other governments.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But they use this lie phrase independent media for all of their sponsored media assets. And so under the banner of supporting free and independent media in Central Europe, because they operate in Ukraine and about nine or ten or seven or eight Eastern European countries, it's jointly to do...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
independent media, sustainability funding, and anti-corruption, because we want to root out corruption in Eastern Ukraine, and root out corruption in Eastern Europe, root out corruption in Romania, and anywhere that, basically what they do is, They effectively function to write hit pieces and dig up dirt on the political enemies of the U.S. and U.K.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
legacy foreign policy establishment and then provide a predicate for prosecutors to arrest them or seize their assets or to induce policy changes in the country. And in fact, on USA.gov, and everyone can find this in the Wayback Machine, they have a document that says funding for OCCRP in Eastern Europe, $20 million dollars. Function, capacity building, independent media, anti-corruption.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Over $1 billion worth of assets seized. I believe it's several hundred policy changes induced in government or civil society organizations in the region. I believe they have six or seven government officials fired or sacked because of this group's reporting, including a president and a prime minister. So they're claiming criminal regime change.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And then the final one is 456 arrests and indictments. So this is mercenary media for the state. Paid for, deputized... These are effectively hitmen hired to seize the assets of, to get fired from their jobs, and to arrest, criminally take, use the criminal justice system, create a pipeline between their sponsored journalists and the local prosecutors.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
in order to arrest the political enemies of the U.S. government in these target countries. And you know this relationship with prosecutors in USAID runs very deep. For example, it was the USAID funding, which was implicated in that Joe Biden speech threat to Viktor Shokin around the removal of Viktor Shokin in Ukraine. That famous Council on Foreign Relations proposal And by golly, he did it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Son of a B, he did it. This was the famous clip where basically he said, if you don't fire the prosecutor, you're not going to get your billion. Well, USAID. USAID paid $27 million in just two grants alone to the Tide Center here in the U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The Tide Center is not just the fiscal sponsor of the Black Lives Matter Foundation, but they are also the fiscal sponsor of a group called FJP, it's Fair and Just Prosecutions,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
which is the group that manages the Soros prosecutors and tells them who to prosecute, who not to prosecute, has them sign pledges like Alvin Bragg and Letitia James, gives them talking points, gives them social media posts. This is all according to the Media Research Center, I should note. Meet on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. These are U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
prosecutors where the fiscal sponsor of that group 30% of Americans live under these Soros prosecutors now. And they're working with this group, Fair and Just Prosecutions, and they get their fiscal sponsorship through a mega-grantee of U.S. aid. USAID is, they do this everywhere and they can get away with it because judicial reform and anti-corruption is part of our humanitarian aid work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We're trying to strengthen their democracy. But this, when you read that accomplishment section, you don't know what crimes these people have committed. You don't know if they're guilty or innocent. USAID doesn't even brag about that in the document. It's the raw number. 456 of our enemies, 456 of our enemies got arrested
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
because of the incredible return on investment for paying our own mercenary media assets $20 million. And think of the return on investment. We paid them $20 million and we seized a billion dollars. You don't know what the crimes are when you read that document as a US citizen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
That scale of prosecutions, it's hard to imagine that every single person there was guilty of those crimes or that there wasn't some relationship with the prosecutors in the background that politicized those cases in the same way we have in the D.C. court here with the January 6th cases. So this plays out everywhere.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And this is also why USAID-funded SPOCs and NGOs had their own personnel making speeches to the prosecutors in Brazil when they ran the operation against Bolsonaro.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Well, it's all related. This is one of the reasons when I – do my lectures and I show the chart of the foreign policy establishment, State Department for U.S. National Interest, Defense Department for U.S. National Security, CIA as a sort of covert player to covertly help the State Department or covertly help DOD. These things are all connected. So the DOD picture is...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There's this USAID Truman Show, and it touches everything. You think USAID is not having a massive impact on the government of France and the government of Germany and the government of the UK? USAID pays the Atlantic Council. In 2018, in the Atlantic Council's Democratic Defense Against Disinformation white papers,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors on their board, I should mention, funded by the Pentagon and the State Department as well, and had a formal partnership with Burisma. But they're funded by USAID. In 2018, the front cover of their Democrat Defense Against Disinformation, one of their series in this, which was an internet censorship podcast.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
propaganda document and consensus-building document so that the Atlantic Council's muscle as NATO's think tank could go out to all of their different grantees and partner networks about who to censor, how to sell it, how to do it, what connections to establish with the tech companies in these governments. The front cover of this, and everyone can look this up,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
was the so-called Macron leaks in France and the distribution web of basically news stories that were damaging to Emmanuel Macron in the middle of his presidential run against Marine Le Pen, who USAID and the U.S. State Department – this is Western Europe. This is – where USAID ain't supposed to be, we're told.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The front cover that's funded by USAID has WikiLeaks at the center of this, Jack Posobiec as the other main highlighted note, a U.S. citizen, and the whole rest of the network map are all the different distributions of stories about these Macron leaks that helped Marine Le Pen but hurt their preferred winner of that election, Emmanuel Macron.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And what they were suggesting with that is that we need to stop Jack Posobiec and WikiLeaks from helping Marine, from publishing news stories that might help Marine Le Pen in Western Europe win that election. And that's USAID-sponsored, baby. They're touching every plot of dirt on God's green earth.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Well, this is why it's useful to think of it as a blob. So it can come from several directions, and then it gets consensus built to build the appropriate operations network to carry it out. So, for example, U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
foreign policy is supposed to be set by the White House through the interagency process at the National Security Council, and it's the State Department who's supposed to be the agency general to steward policy. the execution of those foreign policy and national interest goals. And it's the Department of Defense that is supposed to steward that on the national security and military side.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
depending on what you are trying to do, like, for example, let's take the Georgia Ski Romania example. This could come from any number of directions in terms of how the idea first gets pitched and also a couple different tracks in terms of how it gets approved. And sometimes it can be done in a way that's totally rogue.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
A perhaps darker one and much bigger one to tackle in terms of cleaning that up. By the sheer size of it, USAID is about a $44 billion budget. The Pentagon's $900 billion. Depending on how you measure it, the black hole in their budget is somewhere between hundreds of billions to $35 trillion. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And this is one of the unique capacities of USAID in this story and why I believe it's important for the Trump White House to shut it down, to abolish it, executive order, congressional act, however, stored under state, and then after passing a series of reforms that we can maybe talk about at the end, if necessary, to spin out a new agency again.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But the typical way this will happen is the White House wants to do something, or the Secretary of State, or some sort of thought leadership node within that, or within the National Security Council, pitch the idea and
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
All the different equities that would be involved in it, whether that's the Defense Department, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, supporting functions like FBI counterintelligence or DHS or other Justice Department and other people who would need to know in on that op would work. would all provide their comment and input.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It would finally get approved, and then it would be greenlit, and the appropriate grants to support that would all flow. The Pentagon would get the money, the State Department would issue grants about this, and then places like USAID would do the relevant humanitarian aid work in the region that would provide the cover to juice this, whether that's
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
doing civil society activity that has a sort of civil-military dual-use purpose or doing civil society work in the area that has a sort of CIA, State Department, national interest, political warfare element to it. And then that process would be midwifed by the National Security Council. But USAID is really unique in this process. And one of the reasons that it's gone so rogue is because
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
USAID has always been this switch player. It was created in 1961 by JFK. A point that I've stressed continually is that a lot of people are talking about this presently as if JFK was purely thinking of creating USAID as a magnanimous charity because of the his high moral fiber, and then it got corrupted through these money laundering and payoff networks that are being publicized.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Two weeks before JFK created USAID by executive order, he awarded the Green Beret to the U.S. Special Forces and is singularly responsible for the massive upscaling of U.S. psychological operations, civil-military affairs, and unconventional warfare. JFK was bogged down in Vietnam and Laos and all these counterinsurgency debacles where the U.S. had interests in the region
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
World War II had ended quite recently. The World-Based International Order made it a big no-no to declare conventional war and bring in, you know, 1950 North Korea-style tanks and planes and napalm. And so we moved into this small wars, political war modality. And JFK believed in that very, very strongly. You know, this is why you have places like the, you know,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
John F. Kennedy Center for Special Warfare that trains our special operations folks and the whole Fort Bragg-JFK special relationship during his presidency. But just two weeks after that historic October 21, 1961 Green Beret Special Forces event, JFK created USAID, and just one month later,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But the reason that I'm so overjoyed that it's starting with the USAID side is because it connects to all those points. And this is another thing that defenders of the establishment are now uncomfortably trying to find the right way to defend themselves, which is that if USAID is supposed to be humanitarian assistance and build the American people as a kind of international charity,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
launched Operation Pincushion, which sent the Green Berets, sent our special forces to Laos, where USAID was, you know, it would later turn out, USAID very quickly played this function of supporting these very same CIA-backed mercenary groups that Operation Pinkush was recruiting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They were sent to Laos by JFK to train and recruit these hillside guerrillas in Laos as part of our Southeast Asia, Vietnam-connected sub-war, unconventional warfare effort. We sent the special forces there to recruit them. The CIA managed that CIA mercenary army. And it was USAID who paid the head of that mercenary army to acquire two... U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
aircraft from two CIA proprietary airlines, Air America and Continental Air Services, everyone can look this up, in order to buy the planes that they use to traffic it's unseemly, but illegal narcotics to fund that war effort, as well as humanitarian relief supplies and personnel.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So USAID has played this swing role between state, CIA, and DOD and special forces work practically from the day it was born. But what's unique here is it's get out of White House approval free card. Can I flush this out for a second? Mm-hmm. Most of the major CIA scandals of the past two decades have not actually been the CIA directly themselves.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
In 1993, USAID created this new office to help wage the post-Cold War political warfare, initially in Eastern Europe, after we were trying to create political vassal states out of the former Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe. And this was called the Office of Transition Initiatives, OTI, USAID OTI.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And it was designed to be a fast, flexible, rapid response capacity for USAID to do regime change work, to do political stabilization, to basically do sort of a kind of civilian special forces for civil, military, and political warfare work that would not have to run the traditional traps of approval. It wouldn't be bogged down in bureaucratic red tape.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And it would effectively function under cover of humanitarian work as being a CIA, but without having the limitations that the CIA has on needing White House approval through what's called a presidential finding. So... All these CIA scandals popped off in the 1960s and 70s. The CIA went through a bunch of reforms. This was the famous Church Committee and Pike Committee hearings of 1975 and 1976.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
First time the U.S. ever created a Senate Intelligence Committee, a House Intelligence Committee, to permanently oversee the CIA, to stop what it had been doing, domestic political targeting at that time of left-wing Democrats, from ever happening again. Jimmy Carter won the 1976 presidential election because of these scandals. And immediately, his first year in office,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
carried out the famous Halloween massacre that laid off 30% of the CIA operations division in a single night and crippled their budget. By the way, tell me if that sounds familiar to what's happening right now, you know, the first month of the Trump admin. won the office because of political scandals from intelligence agency oversight. It hits them right away.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But then Carter ran into the Iran hostage situation. The national security state, the media, Ronald Reagan blamed Jimmy Carter neutering the CIA for having caused that. If we had had the CIA that we had before, the Iran hostage situation would have never happened. And so...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Why are they working with the U.S. Defense Department? Why are they working with Special Forces? Why is there even a civil-military coordinating branch for USAID and DoD? They have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes there or how dark many of the operations they thought USAID was involved in. And I think that this is part of what the blockade being set up right now to stop Doge
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There was still a black eye at CIA to get those old powers back, but the Reagan administration wanted those powers, so they couldn't get it through Congress.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So what they did is they basically created new structures to do what used to be done by the CIA, to be done by places like USAID and their newly created in 1983 National Endowment for Democracy, who is effectively the operations arm of much of USAID work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I say all this to say that USAID, the reason so much of the worst scandals that you find are USAID, and why I always say when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to USAID, is because the CIA needs to get presidential approval for every covert action they do. There needs to be a presidential finding that they need to do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
USAID does not, which means if a rogue cell at CIA or special forces or some wing of the State Department wants to do a dirty deed and they know the president won't approve or, in fact, targets directly or indirectly the president or his international allies, they know they can't get the presidential finding, but it has to be a covert action to run.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The world can't find out they're doing it or what these – grantees are actually doing, all they need to do is walk next door or place a phone call or, you know, meet in a secure location and tell their friends at USAID and USAID can make the whole thing happen totally, you know, basically behind the president's back.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And I can go through a bunch of examples of that, but that's what, that's how Trump got hoodwinked in term 1.0 by his own USAID.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It's the great flexible swing man for any of their needs.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Well, this is the magic of being an independent agency. Is it an NGO? No. No, it's a formal U.S. government agency, but they make grants and subgrants and contracting work after the NGO class. But it's an independent agency. There's a great... There's a great U.S. Army War College book slash extended white paper that I've been publishing receipts from for the past six months.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It's from 2014, and it's called the DOD and USAID Analysis and Recommendations for Development Defense Cooperation, going forward. It looks at this relationship between DOD, state, and USAID And it compiles DoD senior leadership thoughts on how best to synchronize what they call defense diplomacy development, the three Ds all working together, the military, the State Department, and USAID.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Because DoD has national security interests in the region, state has national interest or economic interest in the region. They need assets to play with, assets to liaise with, assets to build up, and development creates those assets. Paying to create these institutions, paying to co-op these institutions. So these things all go together, these three Ds, defense, diplomacy, development.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
This is 2014. This is over a decade ago. And in that U.S. Army War College memo, there's quotes from U.S. generals that say that they prefer working with USAID over state, even though USAID is... Independent, but it's always supposed to be guided by state. Because even our humanitarian assistance has to serve U.S. interests. And state represents those stated interests.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But you have DOD people, over a decade ago, saying they prefer to work with USAID over state for several reasons. That USAID is not bogged down by bureaucratic red tape of the, quote, interagency knife fight that happens at the National Security Council. But that USAID, quote, actually does stuff, whereas, you know, state is hamstrung by what they can actually do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It's a diplomatic incident if the formal diplomatic arm of the U.S. State Department does something versus an independent aid agency that is there on a humanitarian purpose and, oh, they were using it for this wrong purpose. Because there's much more oversight on state. State runs the interagency gauntlet every day of its existence.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
from finding out is about. They don't want them to have USAID's books. They don't want them to have the internal records. They don't want them to have the emails and communications. They definitely don't want them to have the transfer of money flows.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It has to persuade the White House National Security Council and all the interagency partners to do something. But really the only oversight there is at USAID is what's happened is at the Office of Inspector General level. You have their own in-house accountability mechanism. And there's some great examples of how this has gone so haywire. I don't mean to... Keep going. Okay.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There was a massive scandal for USAID, and everyone can look this up. It was the Zunzaneo scandal. And let me make clear out the gate that I do not like and I'm not a fan of the Cuban government. I don't believe in socialism. I don't believe in communism. I'm not saying what I'm about to say because I believe that the Cuban government should remain or whatnot.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I leave aside the moral question about whether or not this was the right or wrong thing to do. But here is what was done. In 2014, a very massive scandal popped off that I think few people today remember. This was during the Biden White House where USAID took humanitarian funds that were earmarked for Pakistan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
and use them, we are told, to unilaterally create a social media website in Cuba at a time when Cuba had banned U.S. social media, considering Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and the like to be arms of U.S. statecraft.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The Obama administration was riding high at this moment from the Arab Spring and the Facebook revolutions and the Twitter revolutions that USAID and NED played such a critical role in. Funding money to these networks, training them, teaching them how to use Twitter hashtags, teaching them how to coordinate Facebook posts to tell people where to protest.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
This was the sort of thing that even the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which directly oversees USAID, could not get access to until the present moment. Senator Joni Ernst had an ex-base with Elon Musk where she said when she tried to do oversight, she was threatened by USAID. When USAID ran the Zenzaneo op in Cuba in 2014 and the scandal popped off, who approved this?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
$1.2 billion pumped in by the State Department in Egypt during that time, for example. And so what USAID in their own internal documents showed is that they saw the success of the Arab Spring and they wanted to create a Cuban Spring. They wanted street protests, riots, what they called smart mobs in Cuba on the basis of U.S. social media that they could instrumentalize.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The problem was they didn't have the asset in the region. They couldn't get their social media in. So what they did is they used a Byzantine labyrinth of money laundering flows from these humanitarian aids earmarked for Pakistan – again, back to Pakistan – and used that to go through a subcontractor called Creative Associates International, who's a frequent USAID contractor for this dirty work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They were involved in all sorts of other ones, but it's CAI, not CIA, Creative Associates International, who then basically contacted two Cuban businessmen to create an identical version of Twitter, but for Cubans. Zunzanillo is... for Hummingbird. It's basically even simulated the bird. It had the like button, the retweet button.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And USA Documents showed that their plan was to get about 100,000, recruit people onto this platform, in their own words, with algorithms and feeds and promotion of that this was the site to share sports, music, and hurricane updates. That's their direct phrase in their own internal documents.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
but that once they had gotten a critical mass of users on the site, between like 60,000, 100,000, they would shift the algorithms, they would use the data that they hoovered up from Cubans signing up, taking note of their political proclivities, the network clusters they'd formed, in order to get them to take to the streets in a violent revolution protest against the Cuban government to form what they called smart mobs,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And basically, at the appropriate moment, once they've got them in, to get them to overthrow their government. Now, this is a classic CIA covert action. This has massive diplomatic implications for the United States government if this kind of thing is revealed. That's why the CIA is in charge of this stuff. Because the CIA is... the political warfare arm of the State Department.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The State Department maintains our diplomatic relations and posture with the foreign world. The reason USAID is not supposed to be doing covert action, the CIA, is because if there's diplomatic blowback, it should be diplomatic organs who are doing it. But But what USAID said, you know, so evidently there was no presidential finding for that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They ran it, you know, so without President Obama's approval, at least that's the official story. And when, you know, Senate staffers during the oversight could not get access. So the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senate Foreign Relations Committee said they were duped. The interagency of the White House said they were duped.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You know, the official story, and they had public hearings on this, by the way, I believe in 2014. Yeah. The official story is that USAID did this whole thing in-house. And they did it because it was so-called discreet rather than covert, that it was not a formal covert action. It was simply discreet democracy promotion work to bring democracy to Cuba.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
That's a, if they ran that in the Obama administration, imagine what was done, you know, Trump wanted to knock out ISIS. ISIS, according to the previous White House, you know, we have WikiLeaks emails of Jake Sullivan saying to Hillary Clinton, Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria. And that effectively, you know, ISIS was a useful friend against Bashar al-Assad. Trump wants to knock out ISIS.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And it turned out it was all in-house at USAID. What Senate staffers said was when they tried to get oversight of this operation along the way, they were told that if Senate staffers found out what USAID was doing, people could die. So they had to shield it from there. So we're opening up a Pandora's box And that's the threshold question is how much access to this is Doge ultimately going to get?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Hey, how do you fund money to ISIS if the president wants to eradicate ISIS, if you still want to use them as assets in the region? Well, you're not going to get interagency approval if the CIA does it in covert action. What if USAID does it? And that's how you see all this USAID money flowing to ISIS and Al-Qaeda and Taliban groups.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I think they just found $122 million from USAID to them just this week. I guarantee that number is a lot higher than that. And in fact, Trump's White House, Trump's OIG, who just took over USAID before this recent action, just published a memo where he said,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
and this is unbeknownst to the entire American public until now, that actually there's a big fat loophole at USAID where their contractors evidently don't need to... There may be a technical... Everyone can read that OIG report. John Solomon at Just the News published all this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But effectively, USAID can look the other way because there are no restrictions on their contractors in terms of their OFAC and counterterrorism money flow-throughs, or at least there's giant loopholes in them. So USAID can fund terrorist groups and get away with it in a way that no other U.S. government agency can. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
This is where it gets really dicey, and this is where I'm in a really difficult position. Because we have two... Fundamentally, there are two simultaneous tasks that... that appear to people who are new to this cinematic universe that are in massive conflict with each other.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
One is, given that this thing broke its sworn oath that it would never be used against the American people, and given the sheer depth and scale of what was weaponized, the American people need to know about it, and massive action has to be taken in order to not just knock it out, but salt the earth and stop it from ever rising again.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So you need to go extremely hard in terms of showing the extent of it. On the other hand, this has been, you can make a very compelling argument, the reason that Americans have the standard of life that they do and have the advantages and privileges of the world's most powerful nation that it does.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You can make a very, very compelling argument that the rise of America to the preeminent world power in the 20th century would not have been remotely possible without this blob apparatus. Come back to this concept of no blob, no pencils.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You can't even make a pencil in this country unless you have a mechanism to be able to influence foreign governments if they nationalize their graphite mines or the export of their gum trees in Malaysia or the ability to potentially make inroads or liaise with or change the minds of unions that go on strike, that impact US national interest.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
This is the reason that our corporations are so powerful. They rely on the battering ram of the blob. In the early 1970s, in Chile, when there was an attempt to nationalize the bottling industry, Before we ran that coup, that coup was jointly coordinated, not just between the head of the CIA, but between the chairman of the Pepsi-Cola company.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Pepsi met with the head of the CIA, Don Kendall, met with Helms, and this is all declassified. You can read a great Guardian report, read right up on this, or any of the major national security think tanks. Basically, Pepsi's bottling operations in South America were being threatened.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The chairman of Pepsi, Don Kendall, arranged a meeting with Henry Kissinger and said, hey, we need to stop this from happening. Kissinger then put him in touch with the head of the CIA. Pepsi, the head of the CIA, and the State Department's media mogul in Chile all met to jointly coordinate the best way to take down the government and take it down. Indeed, we did.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You see this happen time and again. How many governments have been overthrown in the interest of ExxonMobil and Chevron and other Western major oil companies? But hey, that's how we have cheap oil. You can make an argument that this is how we have energy dominance. And you can make the same argument about media, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Many people just this week are finding out that 90% of media outlets in Ukraine are funded by the US government. And if you're totally new to this space and you are rightly and righteously livid at finding out the extent of your own media ecosystem and diet has been puppeteered, co-opted, and financially sponsored by the government that is supposed to stay out of that domestically.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You see these statistics and you go, burn it down, salt the earth. We've been told from elementary school to our own media outlets here that we have a free and independent press and that there's no role for the government in the media. The media is independent from government. That's the difference between us and the Soviet Union and China is we have free and independent media.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They have state-run media. You know, that's what distinguishes a democracy from an autocracy. And I totally understand the impulse, and I believe as much as possible, reforms need to be implemented, criminal penalties need to be attached for violating it, treble damages for civil suits, even be able to sue the agencies if they don't do oversight of the NGOs who operate domestically.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But people who have not gone through their five stages of depression about the true extent of the USAID Truman Show... Before you proceed to the final evolution of these reforms, imagine a world where there's zero of that. Imagine a world where zero percent of media outlets or soft power hearts and minds work is sponsored by the U.S. government.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
in Latin America, South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East, North Africa, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Far East Asia, Eurasia. Imagine a world where there is zero influence whatsoever and other countries are not going to stop that, stop doing that work. We won elections doing this. And in doing so, we won favors for U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I didn't expect the speed of this. I think once they fixated on USAID, frankly, I think it was USAID's intransigence as the Trump admin and White House were just trying to simply audit things. And it was their reluctance combined with, I think, the scandals leading up to it that led them to zero in on it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
corporations, who in turn had skyrocketing and ever-expanding corporate profits, which in turn created the ability to hire Americans for jobs and to buy houses and to be able to buy health insurance and to be able to have a 401k of savings and to be able to pass down inherited wealth.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But another problem is the MAGA movement, again, has not really had to deal with this dirty work abroad because the primary concern has been what's six inches in front of your face. My schools have this woke curricula. My infrastructure is crumbling. My kids can't afford to buy a home until they're 45 years old.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But the other part is that this mission statement of the blob to do this got corrupted as globalization destroyed the predicate for doing this dirty work in the first place. Okay, we overthrow the government of Chile for Pepsi. We overthrow the government of Iran for oil and gas. We overthrow the government of some Central African country to get the lithium in the cobalt.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Nominally, this is all supposed to help American corporations and American citizens. But what happens when those corporations outsource all their jobs to foreigners? What happens when they're not hiring American labor? What happens when they're not even building their manufacturing plants here?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Who are we doing these favors for when you have globalist corporations and you have globalist corporate boards and they've got no skin in the game? These are not... These are multinational corporations, and most of their export markets are to foreign customers. At this point, most of their labor pools are foreign citizens.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Most of their infrastructure, the facilities that they're building, this is how we had the heartland turn into the Rust Belt. It's because when you have these steel companies and you have these manufacturing places build their facilities somewhere else, it's not just the citizens, it's the entire regional development that goes away.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So this whole concept of Reaganite trickle-down economics, that's what's good for the private sector, is good for the private citizen, has become completely divorced. And this is how you have this rogue blob that is stealing U.S. taxpayer money, citing a sort of Reaganite economic principle for doing this, trickle-down to the American citizens. But when you have this globalist conceit,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There's no trickle down. All you're doing is helping the Wall Street and London private equity firms and financial firms and equity holders and huge salaries for the C-suite, the directors and officers and shareholders of this college of corporations that don't even represent the citizens anymore. And there's ways to put firewalls, by the way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And this is what I'm trying to educate the American people about. For example, You shouldn't even be able to... We're going to make the reforms, let's assume, to the worst of this dirty work, right? Just like we did in the 70s. We used to assassinate people, the CIA did. The CIA had whole assassination guides. Scandals in the 60s and 70s come out, we said, okay, okay, no more assassinations, okay?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
A few things on that. One is, it's true that almost 14,000 employees were laid off at USAID. It's true that the name has been covered up at the building. It's true that all the foreign operations folks have been recalled. I don't know still, as of the time that we're speaking right now, that it's appropriate to say that USAID
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We can still do regime change work, but we can't authorize the killing of people of a political figure outside terrorism into covert action. Okay, well... you can do these for these other rogue activities. But in addition to that, Any stakeholder in a State Department operation or a USAID or that's assisted by U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Special Forces for great power competition has to meet some threshold of how much investment they're doing on the American soil, how many Americans they're employing on U.S. soil, how many contributions they've made to Americans and the American economy. You can't have this You can't have American taxpayers funding this globalist gut.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
If this is done for nationalist reasons to help Americans, Americans have to be the beneficiaries of that. So this is all part of this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I'm saying that's part of the reforms because people need to keep this in mind as a sort of nascent – Trump world foreign policy establishment. There was a Republican foreign policy establishment for the past six years, but they've all been the neocon faction that represented the McCain, the Romney, the Liz Cheney, the Nikki Haley types.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And I'm not even trying to draw a personal beef when I say that. You can make the argument that this is sort of the foreign policy school that Marco Rubio was substantially supported by and that drew that distinction in 2016 between Rubio and Trump at the time. But I think Rubio, like J.D. Vance – J.D. Vance was not a Trump ally in the beginning either, but they've –
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I think that Rubio is doing, frankly, an incredible job so far. But the whole of Trump world is going to need to synchronize what their North Star is for these foreign policy visions. And I'm trying to say that it's a package deal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The thing about USAID was because of how flexible it was and because of how dirty it could be, again, when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to USAID and it's been this way for 20, 30 years at least. it was a shortcut. It was a shortcut that could close gaps quickly. And it's also a shortcut, for example, if you're not going to do regime change work,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And the highest ROI to be able to secure the petroleum, to be able to secure the lithium, the cobalt, the aluminum, the copper, the zinc, the timber, the import-export markets, the military bases, well, you're going to need to find other ways to offset that. the power you've lost by doing this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So for example, Trump in the oil and gas space, Trump is, you can see a creative way of trying to offset this. Like for example, let's just say a country who we depend on for petroleum access, goes rogue, shakes off the yoke of U.S. soft power in the region, say Azerbaijan or something, and you lose the petroleum because you lost your ability to influence those elections.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Well, now you need to offset that. Well, in Trump's case, he's saying drill, baby, drill domestically. So there's ways that you can maybe offset that. Or maybe you could, you can... Find other levers for carrots and sticks that don't rely on tapping into this dark arts sorcery work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
For example, I believe one of those things that just like with banning the CIA's ability to do assassinations after the 70s is banning social media censorship diplomacy. USAID's huge role in social media censorship. that's one of those assassinations level things that has to be completely banned by law in whatever continuing function USAID has.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
as a function has been shut down, given that I believe that the grants are still ongoing. There's been a funding pause, but USAID is funded through Q1, and there's going to be a dogfight in the budget about what to preserve, and the plan is to fold it under state. But to my knowledge, an executive order has not been passed formally abolishing it, and
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And any USAID administrator or someone who's caught doing that, there should be criminal penalties. There should be civil penalties with treble damages for every US citizen who's impacted by that. And because this is, This is impacting U.S. taxpayers paying to have this cloak and dagger work target them. There has to be recourse for that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So you can create those categories, but it also has to touch the corporate side for the stakeholder group, because otherwise, who are you doing this for? What are our American national interests?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I hesitate to concede that they fully had their legs chopped off. because of a number of reasons. One is, even assuming so, they're moving over to the State Department. Now, what I've been telling, you know, I do all these private live streams for my ex-subscribers, and for 14 months, I've been telling every lecture I've done, I've said, x-ray through every time you see USAID, and look, and
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
you have to see the State Department everywhere. They are not USAID. They're State Department. They've always been State Department. There's never been an inch of daylight. Now, let's sort of start with that because there actually is in the sense that it's a switch player between these other interagencies, and they have more flexibility to do this rogue work than State.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But they are fundamentally supposed to be a State Department function. They are independent, but they are supposed to be guided by State. And they only exist to advance the foreign policy stipulated goals set by state. But what difference does it make? Leave aside the flexible covert action under discrete democracy promotions.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Leave aside the accountability, get out of White House approval free card aspect of it. What difference does it make to shut down USAID if you move everything over to the State Department? It's a State Department role anyway. There was intense debate about whether even to make it an independent agency because it's fundamentally the State Department.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It's the same debate that George Kennan had with his peers in 1948 when they created the function for covert action in the first place for the CIA.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
George Kennan was the guy who authored NSC 10-2, the national security memo that established the plausible deniability doctrine for the Central Intelligence Agency to do covert action, political warfare, economic sabotage, propaganda, and information black ops, the whole gamut of everything that the CIA is authorized to lie about so that our government can deny to us and to the world that they're actually doing it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
two months before George Kennan authored NSC 10-2 and gave us the national security structure that we currently live under. He wrote this memo that I talk about frequently called The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare. This is on April 30th, 1948. This was two weeks after the CIA's first
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
mostly unauthorized, covert action to rig and influence the course of and ultimately win the Italian election in Italy, which was the first election in Italy after World War II that pitted a US-backed, pro-Western candidate against a communist, Soviet-backed candidate. And the CIA did all sorts of dirty work in there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Even if it did, there'd be the legal challenge, and the bills to abolish USAID are still just-born babies in the House and the Senate. And even assuming the closure and abolition of USAID, it is going to be inherited by the State Department. So that function will continue, but under the direct oversight of state.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They had their assets stuffing ballot boxes, using mafia muscle to shut down opposition meetings. We bought the media in the region. We worked with all the religious groups and the charities and The people involved in that operation, you know, publicly wrote in the memoirs that we would have lost that election if not for the CIA.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
James Woolsey even defended that regime change operation on Fox News in 2017 when he was asked, you know, Russia's meddling in our elections. We don't meddle in foreign elections. And he, you know, said, well, you know, we used to do that sort of thing, you know, in Italy and in Greece. And He's referring to this event that I'm talking about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And then she says, well, we don't do that anymore, though, right? And he goes, well, chuckle, chuckle, chuckle, only in the interest of democracy, you know, basically. But at that point, there was no authorized CIA covert action to do it. They were a spy agency. They were on the ground. They took the reins and run.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And ex post facto, George Kennan, 12 days later, says, hey, this thing was gangbusters, right? We just swung the entire course of the Italian election doing this. We need to do this everywhere. And in fact, we need to create the capacity to do this everywhere, even if we don't intend to use it. Because this was a real last-minute effort last time. We need this capacity in place.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Our assets in the organized labor, our assets in the judiciary, our assets in the media, our assets in the movies and culture – even if we don't intend to, just in case we ever need to. And he called this the inauguration of organized political warfare.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And something like 15 to 20 times in this memo, he presupposes that it's going to be parked at what he wanted to set up inside the State Department called the Bureau of Political Warfare.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
and that it would be a formal – that what we now call CIA covert activity would simply be another office at the Harry S. Truman Building in Washington, D.C., in Foggy Bottom, not in Langley, Virginia, and it would be called the Bureau of Political Warfare. But he goes over the reason why we might not want to structure it that way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We might want to put it at another agency, which would come to be the CIA. And he talks about how the funding – The funding for it may not be able to be disguised on the State Department's books. It may raise too many questions. There may be too much of a – for this sort of covert activity, it may be best because it's political warfare and it's really dirty and it's huge diplomatic blowback.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And State Department has to report its finances very publicly and there's –
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
we created the state department the very first meeting of of congress of the united states of america in 1789 it was the first agency we created it's ancient everything runs through it so he said it might be best actually to have this done but it should still work constantly with the state department it's fundamentally a state farming function but perhaps it should be parked somewhere else and then two months later boom cia nsc 10-2
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
was tasked to do the thing that was originally anticipated for the State Department Office of Political Warfare. The same thing is happening right now with USAID. That's all this is. They're just going to create, and in fact, everyone can read Max Boot, the, uh, you know, Arch Council on Foreign Relations, you know, Never Trump, Neocon, um, you know, uh,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
you know, constant voice on the think tank space against all things Trump world, he penned a article, I believe it was during the Trump administration, where he called for this exact same structure to be set up to create, that we should not shy away from this sort of work or hide the fact that that we do them. We should create a formal track at USAID called the Career Track for Political Warfare.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But the warning signs to look for, I think there's no better description of what those warning signs are than what was said by U.S. ambassador turned legal hatchet man, Norm Eisen, I believe in an MSNBC appearance this week, where he called the Trump administration an autocratic regime, and we have tools to displace autocratic regimes around the world in, you know, People-powered revolutions.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And it should be called a Bureau of Political Warfare inside of USAID. And people should be trained specifically for this function of USAID early in their careers. And it should not be something that's a big scandal. And so we have a limited personnel pool because nobody wants to say that's what they do. They should be celebrated.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We need to turn the culture around so that when USAID can do this, they've got a much bigger and better network to do this. And we're now running into that. So I don't actually see USAID going away when you move it at state. Okay. You are inheriting – and this is an uncouth phrase, but I think the visceral imagery is intended to make this stick – closing the Ronald Reagan building –
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And moving all of those funds, if it's a billion in overhead, moving just, if you keep all the grants and move that 43 billion into the State Department, the State Department just inherits a USAID herpes infection. It's the same problems.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It's this tumor, this growth, this permanent flare-up that now it's just, there's no difference between, other than the structural that allows you to get away from oversight, which is what I'm saying. But frankly, there'd be no difference if you shut down Langley headquarters and you created an office of political warfare at state to do that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
If you shut down USAID headquarters and created an office for international development at state... Now, you're making Marco Rubio at that point the most powerful secretary of state in American history when you do that. But fundamentally, the problem was there was not oversight or repercussions for wrongdoing and rogue activity at USAID.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And so it's coming back to the place it was intended to be spawned out of.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
What is that? The Atlantic Council bills itself as NATO's think tank, effectively. The easiest way to think of them is the sort of civil military, semi-clandestine, even though it's public-facing, coordinating arm for NATO priorities. So when you have... NATO is obviously the Western world's military alliance.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And so they're concerned with the military activity of U.S., France, all the NATO countries. And it's their sort of consensus military activity. And people are finding this out, who are mostly concerned with domestic policy, they're finding this out more and more with this USAID story, which is that
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
A huge and sometimes the most important and dispositive element in military work is actually the civil affairs, is actually the political and civil society topography of the target country and its regional interests. partners, allies, and adversaries. And then oftentimes it's that the political, which determines the military result much more so than the military activity itself.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We're seeing this, for example, with Georgia's Q, right? NATO wants to build the military base right there and just point like a gun out at Crimea. This will obviously put the people of Romania, put a big fat kick me sign on their back from Russia the moment this goes operational. Okay. Well, NATO doesn't want that to happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
NATO, could NATO roll into Romania right now and run a, you know, Yugoslavia run back like 1995 and 1999 and Georgia gets elected, you know, gets elected head of state, decides to cancel the NATO air base, kick everyone out. Kind of a diplomatic incident if they roll in and, you know,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
napalm raid from fighter jets and drones, the sitting government of Romania, just because that party won the election and decided to cancel a military base. So the military can't do that directly. What they need is the civil military. They need the civil side of military operations to make that election result not happen. And you see the same thing. It's not just always about tilting elections.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And this was the man who basically spearheaded nearly every lawfare push against Trump world for the past eight years, for everything from the Trump impeachment to the J6 impeachment, to the all of the Ukraine affairs to running a group called Crew, which sued the Trump administration hundreds of times. And, you know, he was the former U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Sometimes it's about the passage of a law. For example, Ukraine, there was a lot of tense debates about the post-2014 Maidan revolution government's in Ukraine's stance towards the Russian half of the country.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The Russian ethnics, the Russian speaking portion part of the country, the representation of the Russian side of the story on Ukrainian TV or social media or culture or the religious issues around the Russian Orthodox Church. Well, every bit of pro-Russia institution, institutional
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
affinity link that's cleaved out of Ukrainian politics or civil society helps further achieve the NATO goal of folding Ukraine into NATO and of helping Ukraine at that point militarily achieve reconquest of the breakaway Donbass and Crimea region. But the problem is if Zelensky didn't want to do that, for example, in May 2019 when he took office or April 2019,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
If he didn't want to do that, it would kind of be a diplomatic incident for NATO if they ran strafing air raids over Kiev until he promised to kick the Russian language off of Ukrainian TV, effectively ban or place extreme limits on the Russian Orthodox Church influence. If he... defied the IMF and its privatization plan for Ukraine's energy assets.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
NATO wants that done, but NATO can't be the one to do it. They can't have their fingerprints on the gun. So what they need is a sprawling civil military, whole of society capacity to have that political result achieved, but have it come from the civil institutions in and around that. And that's how you have the scandal of things like the Red Lines memo. 70 U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
government-funded NGOs, all signatory to the U.S. aid-funded, as well as NATO-funded and U.S. State Department-funded Ukraine Crisis Media Center, crisis management. This is the U.S. and NATO-funded organization umbrella arm. We talk about this 90% of Ukrainian media. Well, a lot of this is run out of these centralized U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
umbrella groups that coordinate the media surround sound of all these different NGOs and media organizations. And one of the major ones is called the Ukraine Crisis Media Center. Well, I've talked about this before. One month, Zelensky takes office, April 2019.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
In May 2019, the Ukraine Crisis Media Center issues Zelensky a red lines memo saying that Zelensky will suffer political instability if he crosses any of the 25 listed below red lines.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
that touched Zelensky's ability to negotiate with Russia about energy affairs, negotiate with Russia about security affairs, block the privatization efforts of major Ukrainian industries, deviate in any way from the path to accession into the NATO and surrounding EU bodies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It had a section for their education, for their culture, for their language, for their media, for their energy policies, for their security policies. It's not just the USAID Truman Show in terms of what us as civilians think are organic institutions, but are in fact USAID proxies. It's the policies of sitting governments.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Zelensky only became the head of state for Ukraine because of the political instability this very same USAID network inflicted on Viktor Yanukovych, however you feel about him. I'm not even opining an opinion, but the fact is he was run out of office in a rental riot operation where... All of the major groups involved were USAID funded. So, you know, easy come, easy go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And what they're saying is, twice in that memo, the top line of it says, these are red lines, cross them, instability. They say it right again in bold in the memo right before the 70 signatories. Message received, but NATO can't say that directly because, hey, that's an attack on democracy. If NATO says it, we're supposed to have a civilian-run government.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So you need a civilian front for the military consensus. That's why the U.S. Department of Defense pays over a million dollars a year to the Atlantic Council and why they have seven CIA directors on their board to juice the capacity to create this civilian front for a military monster.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
ambassador to the Czech Republic for President Obama and even wrote a playbook, basically, on how to... how to orchestrate color revolutions against populist movements that were rising in Europe while he was at the Brookings Institution just a few years ago. And he's openly calling on live television to take that same
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Yeah, well, USAID does grant funding. USAID builds thought leadership. So academics, academic universities function as a kind of super turbocharged NGO. They are 501c3s. They are nonprofits, just like the NGOs are. They are not for profit. You can give them a lot more money without the unseemly blowback of looking like USAID is picking winners and losers in private sector markets.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
private sector partnerships. And so USAID funds research grants. USAID funds departments and centers and institutions in order to make all these things happen. So for example, with the Wuhan lab, how did USAID end up paying $15 million effectively to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create bat-borne vaccines
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
jump from animal to human, gain of function, SARS-CoV-2, Frankensteinian freak monster viruses. Why are there USAID fingerprints on that work? Well, it's because it's run through universities who then put the pass-through funding in order to do that. That money initially went to, for example, I believe it was UC Davis. It was the University of California funding
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Then it went through to EcoHealth Alliance, which is this famous – EcoHealth Alliance was famous for its, I believe, NIH and HHS grants. This was the famous case of it being barred after the revelations of the past few years. I believe EcoHealth Alliance is now barred from being able to get future grants anymore. But they got his pass-through money, and then they then passed the money.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Then that money flowed to the Wuhan Institute. And so through this nonprofit sphere, you can create ever more layers of plausible liability that the U.S. government was behind this, that the U.S. government wanted to do this for whatever reason. You can make the argument that gain-of-function,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
is not actually to be, you know, deployed as a biological warfare weapon, or it's not actually to be sort of leaked to destabilize, you know, a popular government like the Trump administration, but actually it's, we do this gain of research function in order to build vaccines in order to, if somebody else builds something like this, we have a way to counter somebody else's biological warfare.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
This is the same argument. You can think of the Mockingbird media apparatus, the USA Truman Show in the media space. You can make the same argument that, listen, we fund this Truman Show. We find 90% of countries, you know, media complex while sort of either lying about it or trying to hide people from knowing about it, like protesting these foreign agent registration act type things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Because if we don't do it, somebody else, Russia could do it, China could do it, and so we need to be in the game. This thing's dual use. We're not necessarily just doing this to blare propaganda, but it's to counter foreign countries' propaganda. Same thing with why we, the justification for gain-of-function and building freak mutant viruses and jumping them from animals to human.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We create these viruses that never existed in a lab. in order to create vaccines against hypothetical future viruses, and to build the knowledge base of academic researchers and medical researchers in the field, so even if we aren't able to have the vaccines, we're able to quickly close the gap in the future to do that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
playbook for overthrowing foreign governments and to find a way to implement it here. And the first two things that he said off the top were that this needs to be a legal fight and it needs to be a media fight. So taking it to the courts and taking it to the media for hearts and minds. But what you've seen, one of the warning signs that I'm very concerned about
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We're learning more about the sciences by expanding beyond the current set of virus suites that we've seen. That's a policy debate that I'm not even entering into, but... But the fact is, is this is what we do. We do this at every major university. And universities, in turn, often function as arms of the state. For example, when the U.S. State Department and...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The CIA and USAID, USAID created the Office of Transition Initiatives, OTI, in 1993. That was when we were privatizing Russia. Well, who functioned in many respects as the long arm of the State Department during that time, often representing State Departments in diplomatic, effectively a diplomatic interlocutor, was the Harvard University. Harvard Endowment was working hand in glove.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
In fact, everyone can read about this published in mainstream media. The Harvard boys do Russia or read Casino Moscow or any number of write-ups. This is all openly acknowledged that Harvard was effectively a... a shadow diplomacy arm, and it was able to, you know, it put a massive favor in the favor bank to the U.S. because they led the shock therapy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They led the privatization of a trillion dollars in state-owned assets of the Soviet empire to be bought up at fire sale prices by Wall Street and London stakeholders. They loved what they were doing. Now, I should note, this is the same relationship that happens at the NGOs. Take, for example, the Tide Center, okay? We talked about this before.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The Tide Center is known by many conservatives as a sort of notorious left-wing Soros network because I believe Soros gave at least like $14 million or something to the Tide Center. dark money network hub that is a 501c3 but you can't see what money flows to any of its projects that are not 501c3s but that get their 501c3 through the Tide Center. And so Black Lives Matter Foundation
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
gets his 501c3 through the Tide Center. USAID gave them $27 million. FJP, Fair and Just Prosecutions, which is the effective puppeteer of, at least according to the Media Research Center report and the Daily Wire reports on this, which broke all these insider internal documents,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They give their marching orders to Letitia James and Alvin Bragg and the people prosecuting our presidents while effectively pressuring them to do so, while representing the donor network that makes up their re-election campaigns. This is a massive conflict of interest. And where do they get their 501c3 from? The $27 million USAID grantee recipient. But what do those grants look like?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Well, the Tide Center has – I think one of these is about a $25 million grant from USAID to the Tide Center. For the Tide Center to quote – and everyone can look this up. I believe I'm stating this accurately – To secure concrete commitments from foreign countries for certain foreign policy goals that are hinted at in the grant. Of course, this is another issue because of the secrecy around USAID.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
These grant descriptions are very, very nominal. You know, instead of the, you know, 10 paragraphs or instead, you know, it's just oftentimes it's 50 word descriptions for USAID. hundreds of millions of dollars worth of grants.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
is that a fundamental part of these people powered revolutions, these so-called color revolutions, is on the street action to destabilize countries, which also provides a sort of patina, a predicate to the rest of the world that this is the genuine reflection of the democratic
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And in this case, the Tide Center is being formally deputized to negotiate with secure foreign commitments from secure commitments for the United States government from foreign governments They're being deputized, and this may be the Tides Foundation rather than the Tides Center, which is its sister entity, but this is the Tides Network.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But that's what Harvard did, and that's what all these universities who get USAID funding do when they are involved in these activities. in that gooey line between domestic university researchers or domestic centers, but they have cultural exchange events with the people in Pakistan and the energy engineers there, like Arizona State University, for example, or Harvard, or Stanford, or MIT.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
These have international touch points, and every one of those touch points can double as an instrument of statecraft. What's a big, fat, juicy incentive to go out and do that statecraft to achieve U.S. State Department ends? Big, fat grant funding from the U.S. State Department, USAID, and frequently DARPA and the U.S. Defense Department.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
USAID, together with the U.S. State Department's Bureau for Refugee Population and Migration, Last year alone, according to, I believe, the Center for Immigration Studies, gave $1.6 billion to the migrant groups
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
who formed the illegal migrant trail from South America and Latin America up into the southern border, paying for their food, their transport, their shelter, giving them often cash debit cards. So this is... A billion and a half dollars that USAID, in conjunction, because again, USAID always x-ray through. USAID is the mask. State Department is mask off.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So it's no wonder that they jointly coordinate this. But it's the specific immigration wing of the State Department for refugee population migration, together with USAID, a billion and a half dollars just in, I believe, a single year alone. It may be the whole Biden administration alone.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
to a web of over 200 NGOs who, every step of the way, capacity build illegal immigrants to make the voyage safely and comfortably and can pay their whole way through in order to violate U.S. immigration law and to illegally... enter and make their new lives here in this country. And some of this gets really, really ugly. And I'll give you an example of this. USAID is doing that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And it was administered for the whole of the Biden administration by Samantha Power. Samantha Power's husband, and I don't normally feel it's appropriate to mention family members, but they are both political and in the Biden administration's government doing a one-two punch on this issue. So, you know, this is not about the personal. This is just because these two things are connected.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
people being underserved by an autocratic government but it has the the benefit of shutting down the country and destabilizing the government because they're they're between a rock and a hard place they they'll shut down the highways they'll shut down though you know the union workers will all walk out and shut down industry by going on mass strike uh there'll be violent confrontations uh in
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Cass Sunstein was a very infamous figure in the conservative world for a long time because he was the author, I believe in 2008, 2007, 2008, of a famous white paper called Conspiracy Theories, which made the argument that the U.S. federal government needs to infiltrate the online space and infiltrate the cognitive intelligentsia of alternative movements.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
At the time, he was concerned about things like 9-11 conspiracy theories on YouTube, undermining the diplomatic posture and standing of the United States and our military posture. If these theories gained steam, it would... He massively degraded the ability to wage war in Afghanistan and Iraq and build an international coalition.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And so he made the argument, and I'm not weighing in on this, by the way, substantively, but this is simply what he said, and everyone can look this up. This is Samantha Power's husband, who then joined Samantha Power on the other end of this. Actually, maybe I'll start with that side of the story.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
He moved over while Samantha Power was head of USAID, running this program, spending a billion and a half dollars to fund illegal immigrants to make their way from foreign countries into our country illegally. DHS is responsible for managing that and stopping that and catching them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Cass Sunstein moved over to DHS in order to help run the immigration policy, where he was basically a senior advisor on immigration policy around the open border that left the whole thing open. So you have the one-two punch. Samantha Power is funding the machine so that they all get here. And, you know, her husband is a DHS...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
creating and popularizing and implementing the policies that make sure there's catch and release and the whole thing's open and we can't do anything to stop them once they get here. Interagency approval, you might say, but it's all in-house right there. But
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The other part of this is this gets back to the role of USAID in psychological operations and why USAID needs to lie about what it does abroad and why it needs to lie about what it does to our own oversight organs and the people, the US citizens who vote for it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So Sunstein writes this conspiracy theories thing and he argues, whether you agree with it or not, a lot of people will never even think about that when they're considering the merits of such a thing that these things, if they gain steam, have massive diplomatic implications. You're going to convince France to contribute to the war effort.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You're going to convince Germany and the UK while they see things on YouTube that make their own parliamentarians or prime minister question the predicate for it. You can understand the national security impulse to want to do this work. I'm not saying that's the thing to do, by the way. Believe me. So it was called Conspiracy Theories, this initial paper, and it made the argument that the U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
dozens of cities, attacking police, as we saw with the BLM riots, even burning down police precincts. And then the only way to really respond to that in order to stop that is through an almost kind of quasi-military scale deployment to physically remove those people from the highways they're blocking, the infrastructure that they're terrorizing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
federal government needs to develop a new capacity to infiltrate these movements and develop methods to either neutralize them or reroute their cognitive thought leadership in order to avoid the outcome that results in free and unfettered alternative media popularizing ideas that could undermine the workings of the State Department or the U.S. military.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Then quickly thereafter, he writes a book called Nudge. Nudge is basically the Holy Bible for the censorship industry. And it's basically required reading for anyone who wants to have a career in countering disinformation or disinformation studies, if you will, or information integrity or digital resilience or media literacy. This is the sort of It lays out the gospel.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And I think that just because of the pure money outlays and how easy that picture is to understand for Americans, it's now challenging the entire foreign policy establishment from the operations of the State Department to the intelligence services to the defense establishment. I think it's validated already.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It's called Nudge because it's a book about how to get people to do things without top-down coercion, the appearance of autocratic coercive control, but getting them to do it anyway. How do you, Steph, shove people to do it because that's what Russia and China do. Nudge them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Find a way to get them to do it without your fingerprints being on it, without it drawing the same critiques that would have if the Russian or Chinese government decided to do this. And what it's about, you know, it's about creating this kind of whole-of-society surround sound. The State Department wants to do it, DOD wants to do it, CIA wants to do it, USAID wants to do it. Okay?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We don't need to make it formal government policy. We don't need to throw people in jail for they do it. If they do it, we need to create, you know, and Nudge itself was primarily about the behavioral role of this, but also the behavioral psychology behind this, but also about the role of institutions in making this happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But what you do is you, instead of doing top-down, you astroturf a bottom-up and you create a middle-out and a whole society. You want people to feel like their lives will be over if they challenge it, but you can't criminalize it. We have a First Amendment. Well, what if you raise the costs of that behavior? It's incentives. It's carrots and sticks. How do we heighten the cost of doing that?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
What assets do we need in civil society in order to achieve this? Well,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
If they're deplatformed, they can't access their wedding photos and baby photos because they're kicked off Facebook, or they see a friend of theirs was and can no longer DM with grandma because they posted about, hey, these vaccines may have come from the Wuhan lab, or these vaccines may have been funded by the US government, or they might not work, or we shouldn't go through with a mandate.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We don't want to throw people in jail for that. Yet, maybe. Because a lot of these same folks have now started to talk about, well, maybe the fundamental problem is the First Amendment itself, and that's why they are all working with the EU and the UK and foreign governments, like Brazil, to make this happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But, okay, so get the social media companies to demonetize them, deplatform them, do algorithmic suspension. Okay, that's one thing we can do. What's another thing we can do? Well, we can do defamations and lawsuits. We can use lawfare. And we can make high-profile cases of this. And there were... examples of this in documents of the affirmative planning of
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
finding a sympathetic plaintiff to make an example out of these media companies to do this. And these were published before things like Dominion and some of these other lawsuits around these cases. How can you create vocational penalties for doing this?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But when you do that, you get hit by the second round of the Color Revolution playbook, which Cries of humanitarian rights violations, authoritarian crackdowns. See, now we prove they're authoritarian because they've done this. And that's where the international community comes into the picture with joint sanctions, economic pressure. Now they can hold up this crackdown as the reason to do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So, for example, you don't need to arrest him, but have Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, implement policies that he goes on live television and proudly says, no jab, no job. You can't earn a living if you believe these things or spread information around that. Tony Fauci himself, and the eternal shame of it is it took three years after COVID for these emails to come out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
said that one of the best ways to actually get people to get citizen buy-in for the vaccine rollout and stop these vaccine conspiracy theories is to raise the cost of people saying them and that you need to make it hurt. And that will, you know, he said that in so many words, and everyone can look up this receipt. I have, you know, I've reposted this 20 times in my ex-account.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It's been played on Fox News. I believe there's an audio file with it as well. But that was not, you know, the criminal justice system. This was not the Attorney General of the United States, but it was the key administrator of the entire public health system during the COVID response, saying the fundamental guiding tenet of it is justice. Make it hurt. Make it hurt.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Change the incentives so that if people question what we're doing, it costs them their livelihoods. It costs them their social media accounts. It costs them their standing. It costs them their medical licenses. Make it worse than prison. Because at least you spend a year in prison. You come out, you still got your Facebook, your Twitter, your Instagram. You still got your business license.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You know, you... You can serve your time and come back to society. When you lose all these things, you often lose them forever, at least until Elon acquired X and set that free.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
How did that happen? Well, I haven't seen the source documents. I've seen this be reported. I haven't double, triple checked that. I've seen that as headlines. So I'm not affirmatively weighing into that until I see the source of those numbers myself. So I don't know her particular case. But what frequently happens in other high-level scenarios like this is,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
you have stakeholders who, now, first of all, so there's a few things, right? There's always the potential. So let me remove it from the Samantha Power thing because I just want to be respectful and note that I just don't know that for a fact, but let's just call this Cynthia P-word. Cynthia P-words. We'll call her Cynthia instead of Samantha, okay? Random example, not her.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There are many ways that this kind of radical jump in wealth can be acquired. Now, first of all, I also don't know if that's a cumulative household income that includes the net worth of her husband. This is also a frequent thing. I know in reporting disclosures, oftentimes you don't need to just report your own income.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And this gets back to the fundamental question. position we're in at this unique moment in American history where the foreign policy establishment is really, for the first time in a very serious way, having to respond to the will of the people who pay for it, which is that you have this out-of-power network here in the U.S. that is grasping to try to find allies on the Republican side in Congress.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You need to report the combined income of family members, because that's often how money is laundered. You saw this with the Biden family, for example. When you apply for security clearance, they need to know if you're holding your assets. You declare this much income, but actually the house is owned in the name of your wife.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It looks like you have a $5 million home, but it's your home, you live in it. Any moment you could change the deed back to your thing. So oftentimes there are equity interests or large asset interests that are combined. So again, I don't know in this case, but there are a few things. First of all, you have insider knowledge in these cases.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So talking generally about this, because this is the famous Nancy Pelosi tracker about how she does this. And I talk about this frequently. This is why there is a pipeline from blob to banker. the people who administer U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
foreign policy and are insiders and have national security clearances and know everyone in the business and know everyone in the network and know everything they're up to next and their whole inside thought process and they have access to the classified documents and they know, you know, like, you know, sure is a, you know, staring into a...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Magic 8-Ball or maybe like a fortune teller, they know, they can see the swirling purple clouds inside the glass of what the CIA is going to do, what the DOD is going to do, what the State Department is going to do, what the USAID is going to do. in Ukraine next, in Congo next, in Venezuela next.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They know or have a really good insider trader's advantage knowledge of whether there's going to be a coup, for example, in that country that opens up that country's natural resources to privatization. Is oil and gas going to be privatized in Turkmenistan? And you are a part of a Goldman Sachs firm This is how you get these things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Jared Cohen from the State Department's policy planning staff, then creating Google Jigsaw, which played the tip of the spearhead role in internet censorship, AI super weapons, and works closely with the US State Department and DHS CISA for censorship work, as well as foreign academic institutions.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Like the Cambridge University Social Decision-Making Lab, which is partnered with all these groups that does psychological inoculation work funded by the U.S. taxpayer in part or partnered in part. Well, what did Jared Cohen do right after going to Jigsaw? Went to Goldman Sachs, and he's doing macroeconomic and global policy there. Well, what does he bring to the table?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Let's see, the State Department's policy planning staff and that whole network where it was basically the CIA branch of Google that he was interleasing with that whole time. He brings the whole network together. How is he able to help Goldman Sachs make investment predictions so that they're one step ahead of the market?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Well, it's not technically insider trading in the sense that it's directly at the portfolio company with advanced knowledge of their business line and some 10B5 securities violation. It is the great unstated insider trading reason that there is this blob-to-banker pipeline. Mark Milley, for example, I believe is at J.P. Morgan or another one of those banks.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Another great example of this is the Joe Biden White House blobber-to-banker pipeline. So Joe Biden's closest political... advisor in the White House and has been since was since the 1980s was a guy named Mike Donilon.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Mike Donilon was this sort of shadow advisor figure who, you know, according to media reports, basically, you know, sits over Biden's shoulder with everything he does and and helps advise on, you know, political and other strategy. Well, Mike. So Mike Donilon's brother is a guy named Tom Donilon.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They are now being counter-pressured by folks like Elon and others who are threatening to primary them if they defect. And their strongest allies are a handful of folks on the Republican side in Congress, but most potently the in-power governments abroad that have a similar axe to grind against Trump and Trump world and Trump's foreign policy vision.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Tom Donilon basically hit the hat trick of everything you can possibly do as an apex predator of the U.S. national security state. National security advisor, State Department, coordinated the military, the intelligence, and the statecraft world for years and years, decades. Apex predator of the national security state at the highest level of military intelligence and statecraft.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
What was he doing during the entirety of the Biden White House? He was the chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute. So this is basically overseeing, administrating the investment arm of BlackRock, which has $10 trillion of assets under management. I know that a lot of those are donor-advised funds and pass-throughs.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But this is, at the end of the day, a $10 trillion juggernaut of portfolio investments. And his brother is the closest advisor to the President of the United States who commands the Pentagon, the CIA, and Macron. the State Department.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So all that would need to be done, I mean, you can imagine why, you know, BlackRock might want to pick up someone like Tom Donilon, who, you know, even if he had zero experience whatsoever as a banker or as a finance mogul, maybe, you know, Who knows if Mark Milley can even read a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or can even have a conversation with any of the quants who crunch the numbers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They don't care about that. They want to know whether or not they can be the first mover and capture the entire market, for example, of the potential for lithium to open up in the Golden Triangle. Because what's the Biden administration going to do? Are they going to send in the Marines? Are they going to send in the boys? Are they going to do that in Iran?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
What's going to happen with Russia and the $75 trillion worth of natural resources that Russia sits on? What parts of that? What regions? How about Africa? How about all the cobalt and lithium in the Congo? or the copper companies that are their portfolio companies, or the zinc, or the timber, the copper, the aluminum, the gold, the silver, everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And so, in theory, all that would need to happen was a conversation from Mike to his brother, Tom, and then suddenly, BlackRock has a first mover advantage of knowing exactly where, you know, the Wayne Gretzky quote, right? How are you so good? You're not even that fast. How are you so good at hockey? And he says, I don't skate to where the puck is. I skate to where the puck is going.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
That's how it looks like I'm so fast. Well, speed of investment is everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So there's the direct – Now, all of this has moral hazard involved. All of this corrupts the domestic process and in some respect jeopardizes that sort of Smith-Muntz style protecting domestic people from foreign-facing operations type stuff whenever those media outlets pick winners and losers in domestic politics. But there are two variations of this that...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
that will be happy to assist in this project any way they can.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
One of them you know is – well, let me explain them. So the first is a lot of people are just now seeing a lot of these very damning-looking USAID outflows to mainstream media outlets like Politico or to Reuters, for example. I mentioned that there's $300 million in –
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
grants that were given by the Biden administration from various government agencies to Reuters, while Reuters won a Pulitzer for, you know, Reuters was the tip of the spear for all anti-Trump reporting, and they won a Pulitzer in the year 2024 for their series on Elon Musk and malfeasance by Elon Musk and his companies at all of his different portfolio companies, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So what I predict you're going to see is a transatlantic flank attack, where you have the out-of-power foreign policy establishment here teaming up with in-power foreign governments, like in the UK, in the UK Labour Party, like across the EU with in-power EU governments, like in places like Brazil with Lula, like in certain governments in Central Asia,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX, X, at the same time that Biden from the White House had asked the U.S. government, had replied to reporters that regulators should look into Elon Musk and that 11 different U.S. government regulatory agencies, regulatory bodies and agencies were pursuing adverse action against all four of those very agencies that Reuters won its Pulitzer for writing hit pieces about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
This is, by the way, a little bit of a... There's the same sort of moral hazard here that you have with USAID sponsoring the OCCRP. Hit piece journalists... that only have the capacity to do that because their revenues and their profits are being buffered by the American taxpayer. Even though the grants are not explicitly to the U.S. to do that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There's no grant from a Biden-governed agency of that $300 million that says, write hit pieces on Donald Trump or Trump allies. Just like the money to OCCRP, the corruption reporting probe, is supposed to be for corruption, for politicians and oligarchs and significant cultural figures in Eastern Europe.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But in the process of doing that, OCCRP turned around and dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani and his work in Ukraine, and that formed part of the basis to impeach Donald Trump as president in the Ukraine impeachment in 2019. So American citizens who voted for Donald Trump effectively funded, through Donald Trump's US aid, the impeachment of Donald Trump.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They also dug up dirt on Paul Manafort and other US citizens, but in that case, It was, you can argue, dirtier than the Reuters case because the grants were to dig up dirt. In the Reuters case, it's complicated. You see this with just a huge quantity of U.S. media. Let me start from the bottom here. Premium subscriptions are part of news agencies' business models. Paywalls.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Almost every major media outlet has paywalls for their news content. And part of the justification for the U.S. government paying U.S. media companies sounds benign on its face. We want our government officials, our hired employees who are representing you, to be as best equipped and to be as knowledgeable as possible about what their line of business representing you as possible.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And so they need to have as much information as possible. And so we pay premium subscriptions for foreign-facing activity to U.S. media companies who are the best in business or sometimes the only or some of the only people who provide that needed proprietary service. So a great example of this is with the Reuters case. Because when I talked about the Reuters case, a lot of people
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
there's still a scandal there and a moral hazard in the system that needs to be reformed, but a lot of people ran away with it and sort of presupposed, when they read this, that that meant that it was like a direct pay to play. We don't know if there was or wasn't, if there was back-channel conversations, if there was an informal phone call. I'm not suggesting there was.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Or if it's simply the incentives aligned. You know these are the people giving you the money. You know they're targeting Trump. Because this was the other thing, is all 11 agencies targeting Trump, targeting Elon Musk, were paying to the... non-news agency side of Reuters who was digging up the dirt that the regulatory agencies could use to go after Elon Musk. The same thing for OCCRP.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I believe right now they're in the consensus building process of this, which is very similar to what happened when Trump won the first time. I cover internet censorship. It's my primary reason that I crusade on all these other elements. But this played out in the first few months of Trump 1.0.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
USAID funds the hit piece journalists. The hit piece journalists dig up dirt. The prosecutors then use that dirt as the basis to arrest them. And then you have a USAID big fat bow on top of it with an accomplishment section saying, ta-da, 456 arrests that we sponsored. But in this case, for example, the Justice Department under the Biden administration paid tens of millions of dollars.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It was something like $60 million to Reuters for Westlaw because Thomson Reuters has properties. They have their news agency side. They have a tool for legal folks, for legal research. LexisNexis and Westlaw dominate that space. So the Justice Department is paying for Westlaw and they're tens of millions of dollars padding the profits of a portfolio company of Thomson Reuters.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But every one of those million is less that they need to make in their news line because their profits are still being pumped up for the network, and they are still... picking heavy winners and losers in domestic politics. You know, like, for example, what if they were paying Raytheon?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You know, what if the Defense Department was paying Raytheon, you know, continually, you know, as it does, billions of dollars in defense contracts, and Raytheon opens up a new line of business called Raytheon Media LLC. And Raytheon Media LLC has a basically explicit media purpose. to target Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Republicans like Bill Kristol.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I mean, just straight up, just like the Washington Post, just like Reuters, just like no objectivity. In fact, they even just like the Washington Post and all the different journalistic things said, we're going to end whataboutism. Objectivity is no longer an underpinning credo of our reporting because we believe both sides makes misinformation spread.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So we do need to pick winners and losers in this. And Trump, And Trump doubled Raytheon's Pentagon contracts to Raytheon. So the contracts aren't going directly to Raytheon Media. They're going to Raytheon Military LLC. But now, Raytheon Media doesn't have to make a dime because their margins, their revenues, are padded up the wazoo by a huge cash infusion to a sister line of business.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You see this everywhere. NewsGuard, for example, one of the most notorious private sector for-profit censorship mercenary firms with the former head of NATO on its board, the former head of DHS on its board, the former... head of the State Department's Global Engagement Center on his board. You name it. Mark Milley, the former head of the CIA NSA. I'm sorry, not Mark Milley.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
General Michael V. Hayden, the former head of the CIA NSA, four-star general on his board. they got a $750,000 Pentagon contract, nominally for the purpose of helping the Pentagon scan the internet to help scan and ban Chinese and Russian propaganda online. Now, as this new MAGA foreign policy coalition and base has to navigate the tension between foreign ops and domestic interests,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We have to navigate what the role is of countering foreign influence and countering foreign propaganda, squaring that with the fact that that was the exact predicate used to take out hundreds of thousands and arguably millions of Trump supporters at home when Trump was called a Russian asset and Trump was just like Putin, Trump equals Putin. The FBI is saying it. The CIA is saying it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Internet censorship didn't really hit the American people in a very serious way until late 2017, early 2018. What were they doing in the interim time? They were having these consensus-building All the major think tanks were having these... How do we build the coalition? What exactly is going to be our civil society strategy, our legal strategy?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And you had tens of thousands of American citizens who were rolled up in these very groups who were supposed to be focused on Russia, making the argument that, well, these Americans are being an unwitting or unwitting vassal of talking points from Russia, so now we get to put them in these blacklist databases. So that's a tension that has to be navigated. But the point is, however you navigate it,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
That 750,000 Pentagon grant to NewsGuard was not explicitly for NewsGuard to create advertiser blacklists to target Stephen Crowder and Ben Shapiro and Prager University and Fox News hosts and virtually every populist right-wing media conduit for news. the man who is now the sitting democratically elected president of the United States. But it's the same Raytheon military, Raytheon media thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So we need to create firewalls so there's no domestic bleed. If you volunteer to accept... a U.S. government contract for foreign-facing work from any foreign-facing agency, whether that's state, whether that's aid, whether that's DOD, whether that's a confidential CIA service. It's another thing, right? Reuters does CIA services. They have a whole intelligence assistance wing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So they're getting paid By the CIA and the DOD, again, this is the, you know, it's not the Reuters media line, but it's the, you know, it's the sort of strategic intelligence and whatnot. But this problem pops up everywhere with all these news. But then you do have another problem. So you have that USAID Truman show that comes up from that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But then you also have the other one, which is that we actually do fund these, a lot of these U.S. media outlets online. to operate in foreign countries. And then they also operate at home, so they sort of are being a direct arm of the State Department for what the grant is doing, and then they're coming back and using that. So, for example, a great example is like our fact-checkers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Independent fact-checkers. My asthma. There's no such thing as an independent fact-checker. This entire field was created by the U.S. State Department. I would say with a set spike relationship, a sort of Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal relationship with the UK Foreign Office because this was a transatlantic thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The UK Foreign Office funds a ton of these as well, but it's one foreign policy blob there. Why do places like the Poynter Institute – Almost every one of the credentialed fact-checkers for Facebook and Reddit and Twitter 1.0 and TikTok and Twitch and YouTube, almost every single one of these groups are either directly or partnered with a U.S. state department.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Who are our friends in the Chamber of Commerce who can put economic pressure on this? How do we build a predicate for this, whether it's counterintelligence through Russiagate or whether it's a democracy promotion predicate that Trump is an attack on democracy? And that process is the process of seducing people from...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It's because we use this international fact-checking network, which is housed under the Poynter Institute. as the way to get foreign countries to censor their internet, to stop the rise of politicians, whether they be right-wing populist or left-wing socialist sometimes, to stop them, to censor their internets.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We pump up these American fact-checker groups, and then they get sent to Myanmar, and they get sent to the Philippines, and they get sent to Brazil, and they get sent to Latvia and Lithuania and Estonia.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And, you know, like, for example, you know, in this story about Bangladesh that I've been talking about a lot lately, where you have a lot of this USAID and, you know, International Republican Institute NED funds to – places like transgender dance festivals and rap groups there and, you know, supporting, you know, picking sides in the political thing there?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The guy who is now the top foreign advisor was the former Bangladesh foreign secretary. During this period before he retook power here recently in 2024, he was brought in by USAID. USAID ran a countering misinformation workshop hosted at the U.S. Embassy in Bangladesh. Who did they have as the featured speakers to teach
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
bangladeshi journalists about how to counter misinformation it was the guy who would be would get catapulted into the you know into the top foreign advisor position with with the new government and the guy who became the head of it is the clinton global fellow initiative i should note i mean it's basically a pro-us uh you know government now and uh
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And who was the other person that was the co-leader of this? It was the executive director of PolitiFact. The U.S.-based PolitiFact. The, you know, flagging you here for misinformation and disinformation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You know, pressuring the social media companies and always having that latent threat of advertiser boycotts and potential legal noncompliance, I should note, with the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation because it is, in July, effectively going to be illegal to spread disinformation in Europe under this EU Digital Services Act. And if I can stress this to any,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
people presently in charge of White House or State Department policy on this,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The EU Digital Censorship Act, technically called the Digital Services Act, has to be stopped through whatever diplomatic means necessary to stop it because it will absolutely destroy freedom of speech in this country as we know it, as Americans will not be allowed to talk to Americans about topics that a foreign regulatory body calls, in its sole discretion, disinformation unless you stop it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
different fractal coalitions into one cohesive network that can do this together, and right now they're fractured. I'm sorry if I'm taking a while for saying this, but just to complete this point, because it's going to hang over the rest of this conversation, we can't forget that the Democrats elected Joe Biden as president, and he was removed by another faction of the Democrats.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Every U.S. ambassador in Europe has to apply carrots and sticks pressure. The U.S. ambassador to the EU has to apply this pressure. The U.S. ambassador to NATO has to apply adjacent pressure. The White House has to. This thing is one of the craziest assaults on free speech in America our country will ever experience. And I should note, USAID and our foreign policy blob made this happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
In fact, my foundation's publishing this report. 19 U.S. government-funded... entities are signatories and nine of them are helping implement this very EU code of practice doing this. That's a full 20% of the signatories are from the US government and most of the major ones that have a lot more clout.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The critical node is coming from inside the House because the Biden White House actually had a formal policy goal. It's Information Integrity Working Group, which is something that I've now published. It's on our foundation's website to get Europe and help Europe pass this thing and tighten the disinformation regs.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
USAID had a formal program through CEPS to help the EU and other countries pass disinformation laws because the First Amendment wouldn't allow it. So they're working with the international partners.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I support the White House's current reforms. I do believe fundamentally and if nothing else, symbolically, the complete and total abolition of USAID, uh, alone sends a chilling message to not do this kind of dirty work in the future if you ever begin to look like the former disgraced, folded-up USAID. You can imagine whatever form USAID takes in the future, whether they call it U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
OOD or whether it's the Bureau of International Development at State, people are going to be tempted to do this. We have... This is like... God and the devil. This is like, there's an eternal struggle here. And sometimes the moral area can look great. Sometimes different elected governments are going to have different defined national interests about what governments to deploy US soft power in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And it's going to look to one side like it's freedom fighting, one side of the American electorate like freedom fighting or liberation. It's going to look to another side like regime change, coup mongering, and black ops dirty tricks. That will always be there, as well as the potential for profiteering or for doing that –
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
you know, index finger trick in the domestic thumbie war of a fair fight of two, you know, Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals, whatever it is, whoever can weaponize the blob can take out their domestic political opponent.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And we need, so what I would like to see happen is during this education process, while everyone is learning about the sheer extent of it, and we are just begun to peel the onion on this, is that in whatever stage of, The aid function continues to... The critical thing is putting in a Smith-Munt style protection for funding and operations.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Smith-Munt was supposed to protect us from foreign propaganda or... distributed inward. And even that was destroyed by Barack Obama's presidency with the NDAA modernization that removed that protection. So we are now completely Smith-Mutton-less than we have been for 12 years.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But there's something even worse going on with USAID, which is the Smith-Mutt problem of foreign propaganda rigging the domestic information ecosystem. But this is for funding and operations. USAID's function can fund U.S. organizations for their international work, and now they are pumped up on steroids with their capitalization for their domestic work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There was effectively a West Wing Democrat Party civil war, and Joe Biden put on the Trump hat while Kamala was running against Trump with a big smile. He even asked for the hat to put it on. I've never seen Joe Biden happier than the day after the election when he walked out and made the press statement that Donald Trump had won the election.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And also, their foreign operations can target U.S. citizens, like we mentioned with the OCCRP example. How are there no criminal penalties passed by Congress?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
How is there no civilian right of action with treble damages in civil court against either the recipient of the aid when Rudy Giuliani is paying his tax dollars for the State Department to hand it over to the group that writes hit pieces on him to get him acquitted?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
To get him not only humiliated, but to help all the adjacent reputational destruction that makes it easier to indict him on related charges. So we need a sort of Smith month for financing and operations for U.S. aid. Also for the adjacent ones. DOD should be subject to this law, state, CIA. But aid is the most obvious one because...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
These are public grants, and this is supposed to be humanitarian work. It's the last place you'd see coming to get socked in your own eyeball by the government you voted for. So that civil penalty can take the form of suing the grantee, but maybe you should also be able to sue the agency itself.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You can sue the FBI for wrongful death if something they do is through gross negligence or otherwise results in the death of your family member or something. This is something that The famous Jesse Trinidou case of the Oklahoma City bombing. That can be done. What if USAID had to worry for its own budget if it failed in oversight to catch one of its grantees?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And you could sue USAID if one of USAID's grantees broke that firewall. Well, USAID has to fight for its life in the budget every year just like everybody else does. And
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And if they had their own budgets mortally threatened and they need to decide whether or not to plan the overthrow of a government in Central Asia because it wouldn't have enough capital to pull it off because they're targeting a U.S. citizen in Tanzania. The whole thing gets chilled. But you need these reforms at every layer. You understand?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
what had been percolating for a long time, which was this weaponization, not just of what the focus was for the past several years of domestic agencies like the Justice Department and FBI against US citizens, but actually our even dirtier
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
I get back from that deployment and Iraq was getting bad and I wanted to go to school. So I went to put my name in the hat to go to SFARTEC, which is Special Forces Advanced Target Reconnaissance, Target Acquisition, Interdiction, Exploitation, a whole bunch of words and an acronym that doesn't even look right. It's SFARTEC, whatever.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
People call it Sephardic, and it's our CQB, Advanced Schoolhouse, for hostage rescue, for direct action, for vehicle interdiction. We learn all that stuff there. It's, I believe, an eight-week school, maybe nine weeks, so it's pretty long. And it is the minimum...
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
qualification that you need to serve in a commander's and extremist force, which there's one of those per group, which is a reinforced company that's designed to conduct Haas's rescue and crisis response across the world.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
Usually at the team level you learn in so it's called so phallic you learn basic CQB Sometimes it's strong wall. I think at that time it was probably strong wall real basic CQB You don't learn points of domination. You don't learn Haas's rescue considerations Maybe a little bit, but it's not there's not a lot of it. Okay, so I
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
At the basic team level, if you don't have a Sephardic qualified guy, you might not know a lot. You might think you know a lot, but you really don't. And I thought I knew a lot, but I didn't know anything. I showed up and didn't know shit about CQB until I got there. I knew how to shoot. I was a decent shooter with pistol and carbine, but I didn't know much.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
No, it was, in fact, I was in Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion. The SIF was Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion. One company designated per group, so they were right next door. So I used to see those dudes come in and they had longer hair, they had cooler uniforms, they had better guns, and I wanted to be in the SIF. At that time, you had to have two years team time to even think about going in the SIF.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
But I had real good rapport with my company sergeant major, and he went next door to take the SIF. So he was my sergeant major. He became the SIF sergeant major. And, you know, long story short, I wasn't supposed to go to SIF as a new guy with only a year and some change on the team. But I went to Sephardic and came recommended out of Sephardic, and so they pulled me over.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
I mean, I wasn't supposed to deploy to Afghanistan for another year. Holy shit. um but i went next door and i was in iraq a month later i mean out of sephardic i'd from that trip i came back i went straight to sephardic which is two months i had 30 days and i was straight back in iraq so you did a nine month deployment come back
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
Did you have any... Were you married at the time? At the time, I was married, but I was married young and didn't... I mean, to be honest... Absolutely secondary to the mission. We barely knew each other. I mean, on the ground I had a couple months with her. So it was turning and burning. In fact, I had a hasty marriage because I saw some dudes get killed our trip.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
I was part of Operation Red Wing that trip, and we had a couple other Chinooks that were down. We had guys that we lost in the company. So it was a bad trip. It was a bad year. A lot of Americans were killed that year.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
He knew my uncle, and he said, Mike, what can I give you to stay in? I said, this is the things that I want. And he goes, which I found out later is true, HALO, or Free Fall School, is not a reenlistment option. And it's not. Back then, you didn't have a lot of incentive for staying in, so they used to give you schools to stay in. And I said, Sergeant Major, well, we can make it an option, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
I don't sure I I Explosively breached every other target every other night. We went out every night sometimes twice a night and going after bad guys, and it was a real active campaign. It was us and I believe SEAL Team 8, and we did joint ops, where it was like two SIF guys and five SEALs, and we went out with our indage and conducted counterterrorism missions.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
What did you think of working with the SEALs? My first impression of them weren't great because we had a few interactions with them where I'll never forget, you know, at the time I was, I believe, still in E6.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
I hadn't made E7 yet, but I had combat rotation behind me and I was on my second deployment and had been in training for years, had been in the military and the infantry, and so I had a background. I'll never forget one of the young SEALs being told by one of my guys who was a senior guy. I was the most junior guy in the SIF.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
A SIF, a Commanders and Extremist Forces, filled with the most senior guys in the group. I think my detachment years later, everybody made Master Sergeant the same time. Like an entire senior team with guys with multiple deployments. I had the least amount of combat. Guys on average had three or four rotations, and this is early GWAT. He said,
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
hey, maybe you should hang out with these guys because we could do some cross training and maybe teach you guys some things. And he said, what could your guys possibly teach mine? You got to be shitting me. He said that. And... And I was humbled to the fact that a lot of my own guys were so senior and already legends in the community. There was already stories about them. And so I paid attention.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
And we had a lot of experiences like that with the young SEALs, but a lot of them weren't. I mean, Jeremy Wise, who eventually went to work for the CIA and he was killed, unfortunately, in a suicide bombing. He was there, he was great. A couple of guys that are now in other special missions units were working with me and they were great.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
So I didn't have a horrible experience, but it was different. I mean, a young SEAL coming out of training, 21, 22, and even at that time I was 26 at the time. So it was different, but we got along good. I mean, we didn't have problems with operating with them and we had a lot of action and we had a lot of fun that rotation.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
What comes next? Another rotation in the SIF. I mean, the SIF is a grind. I did three SIF rotations that I racked back to back.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
Because that's what I want. He's like, Mike, I can't do that for you. I mean, I'll call and I'll try. And he did, but it's not an option. So a CSM even can't make it an option. And so I said, okay, that's, that's my, I gave the options on the table and they decided not to facilitate what I wanted as a dream. And so I decided to get out.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
going to war coming back going to war coming back going to war coming back i eventually moved up into reconnaissance in special operations and became a sniper went to sniper school went to free fall school and started specializing my efforts on long on the long gun so between unilateral operations which is working with task force the joint task force
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
I think at the time we were working with Tom DeTomaso, who's a famous Black Hawk down platoon leader, and he was a special missions unit commander.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
we we operated under him and under task force 16 which is stanley mccrystal's big uh you know kill capture conglomerate of the best units in the world we were part of that effort when we went out and crushed bad guys for years i mean it was it was a good run of killing a whole bunch of bad guys yeah so i did that for three rotations in a row you've got a hell of a career man yeah thanks man
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
So you leave there and then... So I leave and start grinding to build up this unit, hire and fire a couple of guys.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
Build up a skill set for special reconnaissance in the continent of Africa to be able to respond to crisis That potentially happened and there was no There was no at the time Organization that was covering down on Africa because it used to be third groups responsibility, but because of the war We had a change in hands and change in responsibility So we stood it up It was a grind.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
We got validated by Special Operations Command. And that was, ironically enough, September 1st of 2012. We got validated. And a week later, or September 11th, Benghazi happens. Mm-hmm.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
I had already been notified prior to Benghazi happening that my team and myself was going to be the first guys into Libya to run what's called a 12-weight program, which is a congressionally mandated counterterrorism program to counter al-Qaeda, which therein lies the Benny. Therein lies the point, which is before September 11th, 2012, I had already been identified.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
We're going to go in there, stand up a counterterrorism force to counter Al Qaeda. So it's often been said that, hey, oh, there was no threats there. There was threats, there was bombings, there were shootings, there was attacks on the UN, foreign nationals, embassy staff. So I was getting all those intel sit reps before that happened. And then obviously that happened and it changed everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
Where were you when that happened? Ironically enough, I was back in... special missions units compound doing a crosstalk brief with basically a key leader engagement with the team lead from Team Libya that had been designated and me and the other guy from my unit because we were former unit members of that unit we were there doing a crosstalk I'll never forget I went
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
I had a buddy who re-enlisted with me that I went to Ranger school with or re-enlisted without me. And he went to third range battalion. He jumped into Afghanistan on October 19th, 2001. Son of a bitch. Um, and so, The moment it happened, I was actually in college and I had gotten out of the military obviously, but I had transitioned into the National Guard component.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
I went there and met up with a J-3, which was at the time a colonel, and he told me last night, this just happened and this is what's going on. And so I stayed an extra few days to assess the situation and to get tied in because at that point, it was my unit's responsibility to react and respond outside of obviously the primary main effort
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
that unit that i was in's responsibility of uh responding to that crisis so was this happening was benghazi happening real time when you found out yes yeah it was happening real time it had it had it was it had it was still active and it was still happening and i was watching on isr things things unfolding jesus christ yeah is this what ultimately led you to separate
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
Yeah, so that's exactly right. Long story short, I deployed to Libya soon after that and stood up a 1208 program and We had all the right things done to go after the guys that were responsible for the killing of the four personnel that were killed in Benghazi. You know, Ambassador Stevens, Smith, and then Glenn Doherty and Tyrone Woods. So we went there. I was deployed there for over six months.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
I busted my ass and tried everything I could to kill or capture those guys with obviously other special operations units that were there. One other special operations unit that was there. And we offered up a full platter. Kill capture, bilateral mission, unilateral mission, whatever you want, we'll do.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
And we were told that the political climate wouldn't allow for it, so we're not going to do anything. And so let's just say I was disgruntled when I came back.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
I had a lieutenant colonel that I was co-located with that was a reserve officer from AFRICOM who was a fucking piece of shit, who was drinking every night, getting drunk, who didn't give a fuck about the mission, who was making excuses every single day about not wanting to work, not wanting to do the op. And so when I get back, I said, go fuck yourself. God, are you serious?
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
I got back. I did get recruited by the CIA at the time. They recruited me for a job. And I had finished my college degree, my bachelor's degree. the year prior to that. So that was a prerequisite to become a staffer for them. I came back with the anticipation of doing that job, but the sequester happened, which was a stop loss on all, or a hiring freeze on all jobs.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
So I wasn't able to do that job, which kind of fucked me up. You know, I was prepared to do that. So I transitioned off active duty and then went into the National Guard component where I took a team in Texas, a 19th Special Forces group, and was just waiting on the word.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
So I'm sitting in a chow hall at Fayetteville Technical Community College getting my associate's degree so I could further my education and saw the events happen, I did some crazy shit, man. I immediately started making phone calls. I went home. I packed a duffel bag of my equipment.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
The number one priority for me is personal defense because the first principle of patrolling is security. And if you can't secure yourself, you can't secure your family, you can't defend your life, you can't defend your family's life. So I would say it starts with a personal decision to buy a firearm, learn how to utilize a firearm and carry that firearm daily.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
What firearm would you suggest starting with, pistol or rifle? I think universally, I carry different guns for different reasons, but universally a Glock 19 is probably the staple conceal carry pistol In contracting we carry Glock 17s typically but Glock 19s Is the right frame size for most it's the right size frame for concealment.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
It has the most accessories per gun in the industry It's a good platform. It's reasonably reasonably priced and And I've used a Glock 19 when the military got them in special operations, and I've seen them throughout my military career, and I've never seen one fail. So a single action, only Glock 19 is the start point.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
No, the next priority for me is med. Med? Med, absolutely. 30,000 people a year die in vehicle accidents. I wonder how many of those could have been prevented. 400 idiots a year follow their tree stands and hunting and break their legs and do dumb shit. So we're prone to accidents. We're prone to trauma. And I've treated trauma in real life. I've saved people's lives with tourniquets.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
Tourniquet, which is a $29, $99 piece of equipment from North American Rescue, which we sell on our website at fieldcraftsurvival.com, is the number one piece of equipment in med that you need to carry. stopping an extremity wound, a traumatic bleed from a femoral or brachial artery is life-saving. If you don't do that, you simply just go to sleep and die.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
We absolutely do, yeah. We teach TCCC, Tactical Combat Casualty Care, which we were required by our contract to train. We teach a course, certified TCCC course. through NAMT, the certification on tactical med training, trauma training. I just taught a CPR lifesaver course at my tribe expo recently. So we frequently teach med and I expect
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
that if in contracting in austere environments we are required to carry a tourniquet based on our own understanding of what we could run into that a civilian should do the same whether that's in your inside your waistband because we do sell inside the waistband tourniquet holder or that's inside of a bag or inside your vehicle somewhere within arm's reach where if you're experiencing trauma you could save your life interesting what
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
I threw my battle dress uniforms, my camo uniforms in the washer and then dried them and was making calls like, what are we doing here? What's happening? And I was at the time, I was in 30th heavy armor separate brigade and I was in the scout platoon and I was a team leader. So I had a little minuscule position that could affect something, but I knew we were going to war.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
If we're talking about equipment-specific things that you need to carry, the next piece of equipment would be the way in which you carry it, which would be the bag in which you carry. A lot of people don't think about it, but the extension of your capability of what you can carry on your person is limited. You can only fit so much shit in your pockets and your pants.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
And if you have a bag, meaning an everyday carry bag, that might be your purse, your murse, your European man satchel. It sets you up for an extended capacity. That's how we look at vehicles. I mean, if I have a med kit in my back pocket that's a minimalist, low-vis med kit, well, I want my fucking car to be an ambulance. I want there to be enough med equipment to treat my family, myself.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
And then you upgrade that to your house as well. I want a damn hospital at my house. So having the ability to carry all their stuff is super important. And in that bag, I would definitely include a survival kit, a modern survival kit that
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
that has the staples of survival, including the ability to contain water, purify water, start a fire, signal, communicate potentially, sat iridium, VHF, UHF, the list goes on. Gummy bears. Gummy bears that are fat-free, that have lots of carbs, lots of sugars, lots of calories, they're survival bears. That's what we call them. They're survival bears.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
So I had a choice to make, which is real easy, which was I'm going back in the fucking military.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
So on September 12th, like 09 in the morning, I'm making phone calls to get back in.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
A week later, Benghazi happens.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
Yeah, it was, I mean, I felt for the people, obviously. But I knew that I was in a unique position to make a difference in the fight. Because I was an NCO. I mean, I was a noncommissioned officer. And I knew that there was an opportunity for me to get in the military and fight and get some vengeance. And that's what I wanted to do. I joined the Army to fight.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
The reason I got out, because there was no fight to be had. If there was a war, if there was something going on, I would have been in it. You know, I think something important to note is the biological instinct in men, most men, the men I associate with, to fight. I mean, it's to fight each other in training, because that's what we do as kids.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
We fight and we grow up in those environments where we're displaying our masculinity and there's a whole bunch of psychological and physiological things that are associated with that. And I don't think we grow out of that. We grow up and we want to fight and defend. That's what men do. And so it definitely was part of my character and my DNA. And I don't think it was fake.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
I think it was something very real and I wanted to fight. So I had to go back in. How'd you get back in?
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
it was a battle because the army didn't really know how to handle a whole bunch of dudes who were prior service guys that wanted to go back in was there a lot of guys that wanted to come back there was a lot of guys there in that time period a lot of people who were prior service who had gotten out i mean even older guys who had gotten out wanted to come back in and serve
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
So I had to go through the whole process again, which was I had to go through MEPS as an E5, going back through MEPS, the whole duck walk thing, all that stuff. I had to go back through all that to get back in. And they had a program, which is kind of similar to what's called 18X right now, where you can come in off the streets and try out for selection.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
And if you make it, they'll send you to special forces training. And if you don't, you simply just go back to your sister unit. Or if you don't have a unit, whatever your job is, they'll find a job for you in that position. Now, how old are you at this point?
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
yeah that's a lot of courage I was young when I hit the ground I mean I was running we immediately deployed to Afghanistan how many guys are on your team roughly well I think at that time maybe 10 10 dudes yeah we're most attachments are light by nature of guys coming and going and like I said my 18 Bravo senior was got was uh in surgery So he had to get a surgery, recover.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
And so we deployed that year to Afghanistan with a little bit of a light package. What year? This was 05, early 05.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
Yeah, part of the job is running Indige. I mean, when I reported... As an 18 Bravo, I was in charge of about 144 Afghan commandos.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
So I was in charge of all of them. As a new guy. As a new guy. Holy shit. I'll never forget. He said, hey, your guys are formed up waiting on you. Waiting on me? Yeah, you're the 18 Bravo. Get up there and... and be their commander because everybody else had other stuff to worry about.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
I mean, the 18 Charlies had to run the fire base, which is a full-time job of the base security and the actual physical structure, the generators, the water system, everything, the commo, base defense.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
What are your living conditions like? Shit, I mean tents living on a cot living on a cot surrounded by stacked sandbags and a Concrete ish just mud mud hut. Okay on the second floor of a little structure. I
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
Are you eating local food? A lot of the time we were, or Mermite or MRE. I mean, we were the furthest northern fire base on the border with Pakistan. And we had really not a lot of support. I mean, the closest... support was J-bad, which is still hours away. I mean, if something went bad.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
We immediately deployed to Afghanistan. So I was in charge of all of them. As a new guy. And they didn't want to be the guy that failed their mission and got an American killed. Had a catastrophic failure and crashed a $100 million helicopter, MH-47. Our guys didn't even have uniforms. What did you think of working with the SEALs? It was a good run of killing a whole bunch of bad guys.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
No, some of them were trained up by prior ODAs. I think first group was there before us. Before that, there was another third group team. And so they had a little bit of training But that's, I mean, man, when you're talking about Afghans in a rural province of Afghanistan that have no education, have no aptitude, don't know how to read, write. Yeah, I mean, it's all relative.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
no matter what the the condition or the situation when you come into a new fire base or or fall into new indage you gotta vet them you gotta put them through some kind of process to be able to see what their current capability is we did that it wasn't much so we started from scratch wow we were doing small unit tactics every single day i was doing small unit tactics with them every single day that we weren't operating and this would be the force
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
Not only, this is before Afghan commando units, Afghan border police, Afghan national police, this is before all that. So they didn't have a job. Their job for us were, they were Afghan commandos working for special forces guys. We paid them directly cash. These were our first line of defense and QRF if anything went wrong.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
The biggest kick in the balls that I've ever had, because, I mean, backing up a little bit, I had the option to reenlist. Obviously, I was on retention's radar for like, hey, this guy's an airborne ranger qualified dude. He's an E-5. I made sergeant when I was 20 years old. And so I was a team leader in the infantry, had good NCOERs.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
Well, I mean, again, that's relative as well because when you infill into a remote fire base, the one we were at in the middle of nowhere was surrounded by high ground. It was just a couple Americans in the middle of the Wild West. So we were getting rocketed. We were getting reports of attacks and all these things that were happening. So we were in it. We were in the thick of it already.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
But I mean, we didn't have any time. It was immediate. I think we went on an op two days, three days after we hit the ground. Immediately went and did a link up with one of the Afghan seniors or Afghan elders in a village. And that's a movement to contact. I mean, you're just rolling, hoping you're not going to get blown up, hoping you're not going to get in a tick.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
with the guys that you haven't vetted yet.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
How did that go? It went uneventful, we had activity, but nothing significant happened, luckily for us. And we just started building more rapport with them, vetting them, training them, and it improved our situation over time.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
No, I will say here's just a little bit of forward history on the guys that I trained. Those same guys that I trained had worked with Special Operations, including Special Missions Unit from the Navy prior to working with us. So there were some good dudes. And when I left that fire base, a guy by the name of Rob Miller ripped into that fire base
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
and was with those guys as an 18 bravo from third special forces group when he was killed and earned the medal of honor posthumously of course and those men, those Afghans that were with them were the Afghans that I trained, that were trained prior. And so they were squared away. I mean, they had heart, they were disciplined. They wanted it, man. You were impressed with them.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
Yeah, I was impressed. A good example was they instinctively knew when or if there was a potential significant act going to happen called SIG Act. And they would immediately get to the high ground and they were good about displacing themselves and then talking to the local community because you have to understand that these people lived in that same community.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
So they knew everybody around them and they didn't want to be the guy that failed their mission and got an American killed. So they had buy-in. So yeah, I was impressed with them. We had a lot of work to do, obviously. but they had a good base. And all the guys in Nuristan province that I operated with that were Afghan, in the village of Nure and Asadabad, Barrack out all great great men.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
What are these guys carrying? Do they have nods to have helmets at this time in the war? No nods. No helmet. We eventually evolved into that but we we were straight ak-47s and flip-flops Man, I mean it was we like our guys didn't even have uniforms. They're rolling around and whatever we can get them I actually
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
exploited a program that was a nonprofit that was providing clothes and toiletry items to soldiers overseas and got this nonprofit to send me helicopters full of equipment to be able to outfit my Afghans with just clothes, with just toothbrushes, because they didn't have it and we weren't paying for it. So they needed stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
And so it's like, hey, man, this guy's a good guy we want to keep in the military. But I told them that I want sniper school and I want halo school. in route to 18th Airborne Corps LURS, or Long Range Reconnaissance, or Ranger Battalion. And I was adamant about that. I actually went into a Sergeant Major's office who was the Military District of Washington, so he's a Command Sergeant Major.
Shawn Ryan Show
Mike Glover: "It Was a Good Run Killing a Bunch of Bad Guys" | Peak Points
I mean, it's so funny seeing these dudes running around with Harley-Davidson shirts and flannel jackets and USA ball caps, but we had to do what we had to do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#163 Gary Brecka - Biohacking Secrets to Longevity, Aging Myths and the Science of Nutrition
Mic Drop, hosted by former Navy SEAL Mike Ritland. It's raw.
Shawn Ryan Show
#163 Gary Brecka - Biohacking Secrets to Longevity, Aging Myths and the Science of Nutrition
It's unfiltered. That was the most horrible screaming I'd ever heard. Taking a hit on the chin, you want to pay it back. It's tough talk from the top minds in their field.
Shawn Ryan Show
#163 Gary Brecka - Biohacking Secrets to Longevity, Aging Myths and the Science of Nutrition
Mic Drop, follow and listen on your favorite platform.
Shawn Ryan Show
Peak Points | "I Was Covered in Blood" - Terrifying Moments as a Police Officer
Mic Drop, hosted by former Navy SEAL Mike Ritland. It's raw.
Shawn Ryan Show
Peak Points | "I Was Covered in Blood" - Terrifying Moments as a Police Officer
It's tough talk from the top minds in their field.
Shawn Ryan Show
Peak Points | "I Was Covered in Blood" - Terrifying Moments as a Police Officer
Mic Drop, follow and listen on your favorite platform.