Intro: "No boots on-the-ground" is a convenient nuanced phrase used to disguise private contractors
Former Spies No Longer Legally Allowed to Become ‘Mercenaries’
'NATIONAL INTEREST'
"Former United States spies are now barred from providing their services to foreign governments for 30 months after they retire. President Joe Biden signed the bill into law on Tuesday, part of a larger spending bill that will “prohibit U.S. intelligence officials with knowledge of spycraft and national security secrets from selling their services to other countries for 30 months after retiring,” Reuters reports.
The new law, first proposed by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX), found its legs after a Reuters investigation revealed how ex-National Security Agency personnel leveraged their knowledge to the United Arab Emirates, which allowed for the surveillance of Americans, according to the news wire.
“We don’t want our best-trained intel officers going straight into the hands of foreign governments for the sake of money,” the congressman said of the new law. “This discourages intelligence mercenaries and protects our national interest.”
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Ex-U.S. Intelligence Officers Admit to Hacking Crimes in Work for Emiratis
They were among a trend of Americans working for foreign governments trying to build their cyberoperation abilities.
WASHINGTON — Three former American intelligence officers hired by the United Arab Emirates to carry out sophisticated cyberoperations admitted to hacking crimes and to violating U.S. export laws that restrict the transfer of military technology to foreign governments, according to court documents made public on Tuesday.
The documents detail a conspiracy by the three men to furnish the Emirates with advanced technology and to assist Emirati intelligence operatives in breaches aimed at damaging the perceived enemies of the small but powerful Persian Gulf nation.
The men helped the Emirates, a close American ally, gain unauthorized access to “acquire data from computers, electronic devices and servers around the world, including on computers and servers in the United States,” prosecutors said.
The three men worked for DarkMatter, a company that is effectively an arm of the Emirati government. They are part of a trend of former American intelligence officers accepting lucrative jobs from foreign governments hoping to bolster their abilities to mount cyberoperations.
Legal experts have said the rules governing this new age of digital mercenaries are murky, and the charges made public on Tuesday could be something of an opening salvo by the government in a battle to deter former American spies from becoming guns for hire overseas.
The three men, Marc Baier, Ryan Adams and Daniel Gericke, admitted violating U.S. laws as part of a three-year deferred prosecution agreement. If the men comply with the agreement, the Justice Department will drop the criminal prosecution. Each man will also pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. The men will also never be able to receive a U.S. government security clearance. . .(The court documents said that the three men and others worked in DarkMatter’s “Cyber Intelligence Operations,” which gained access to “information and data from thousands of targets around the world.”)
DarkMatter employed several other former N.S.A. and C.I.A. officers, according to a roster of employees obtained by The New York Times, some making salaries of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
The investigation into the American employees of DarkMatter has continued for years, and it had been unclear whether prosecutors would bring charges. Experts cited potential diplomatic concerns about jeopardizing the United States’ relationship with the Emirates — a country that has cultivated close ties to the past several American administrations — as well as worries about whether pursuing the case might expose embarrassing details about the extent of the cooperation between DarkMatter and American intelligence agencies.
There is also the reality that American laws have been slow to adapt to the technological changes that have provided lucrative work for former spies once trained to conduct offensive cyberoperations against America’s adversaries.
Specifically, the rules that govern what American intelligence and military personnel can and cannot provide to foreign governments were devised for 20th-century warfare — for instance, training foreign armies on American military tactics or selling defense equipment like guns or missiles.
This year, the C.I.A. sent a blunt letter to former officers warning them against going to work for foreign governments. The letter, written by the spy agency’s head of counterintelligence, said it was seeing a “detrimental trend” of “foreign governments, either directly or indirectly, hiring former intelligence officials to build up their spying capabilities.”
Read more >> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/14/us/politics/darkmatter-uae-hacks.html
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