Victim of Cold War 2.0?

3/27/14, from a hospital bed in ABQ, the third hospital I have visited

in the last 72 hours in a valient but failed attempt to drive back home

(while being followed all the way):

~~~

Family, friends,

If you're reading this, things have not turned out well for me. This is

an effort to get the truth out to help others that may be facing

similar predicaments. I hope you can catch those responsible someday,

for the sake of everyone. Please consider that despite my silence on

these matters, you may be subject to great danger by simply just

knowing me.

 ~~~

Fellow scientists and hackers (in the MIT sense of the word),

This should serve as a wake-up call: at minimum, don't be careless like

me. Read [4], and keep the dream alive as best you can.

 ~~~

I applied to NSA in Spring 2011. I had just lost my job at the MIT

Lincoln Laboratory and was considering a second bid at a PhD,

continuing to take classes on campus. I was exploring several possible

opportunities at the time, and the variance was high: on one end of the

spectrum, I was thinking about starting a company with my flatmate, and

on the other I was considering returning to the world of federally-

funded R&D projects by joining a robotics lab at CMU.

To establish context, this was before the Snowden disclosures. I had

met a few (supposedly) ex-NSA throughout school, and all of them were

sharp characters. My assumption at the time was that the AT&T spying

scandal during the Bush presidency was not representative of the whole

place. Plus, all states enguage in this stuff: to not do so would put

one at great disadvantage.

The NSA interview process drug on and on. After some discussions over

the phone, I ended up filling out a huge form primaily about my work

and residence history called the Q-86. My recruiter, Brittney Lundie,

was considering me for the C2DP program, as a "cryptologic computer

scientist". I would help mathematicians implement algorithms to run

against big datasets - right down my alley, as I spent a lot of time

studying database systems in grad school.

Eventually, I assumed NSA had lost interest and I took a summer

internship at a robotics lab run by CMU in Pittsburgh, NREC. NREC was

located near the Allegheny River in the Lawrenceville neighboodhood.

The first few months there I rented a room within walking distance of

the lab that I found through Craiglist.

The woman that owned the house at 4405 Milgate St. was Odile Hobeika.

She was living there with her boyfriend Taylor Hahn. There was also an

upstairs bedroom she rented to a friend, Lindsey Yoas.

While I was at NREC, NSA finally came through to me with an offer of

employment. It was dependent upon me flying out to Baltimore, MD and

passing a variety of tests, including a polygraph. The interview

process was interesting [1], but I returned to Pittsburgh with the

impression that I had done very poorly on the polygraph and wouldn't

get the job.

A week later, things got strange in the worst of ways. One night, I

woke up in a sweat, heart pounding, being jarred awake by an

involuntary muscle contractions. The contractions primarily consisted

of uncontrolled shrugging and leg jerking. This combination made it

impossible to sleep, and I ultimately went to the ER, where they

ultimately gave me Xanax and sent me home, suspecting a panic attack. I

spent the next couple days wearing a Halter meter, wondering what was

happening to me and if I was going to survive.

At the time, the event could plausibly have been related to work

stress, but was supremely suspicous. First of all, I had never

experienced any sort of panic attack or emotional breakdown prior to

this (even in far more stressful times [2]). Second of all, everyone in

the house happened to be out when this occured (for everyone to be gone

for days at a time almost never happened).
 Third, and most obviously,

it happened immediately after I failed my 1st NSA polygraph.
 Fourth, I

am now dying at the age of 29 from presumably some other unexplained

illness.

I spent the remaining months afterward trying to recover. My sleep

quality seemed low, my ability to concentrate was shaken, and my memory

seemed to fail me more often. I thought I might have been poisoned, but

wasn't convinced. I was still taking Xanax every night to get to sleep.

At the end of the summer, NSA got back to me and said I needed to do a

second polygraph session, that I hadn't failed but they "just needed

more data". Though I was certainly in no shape to do so, I went back

anyways; you can guess how well this went. At the end of the summer I

received my rejection letter.

NREC continued to drag its feet on hiring me on as full-time as well.

Eventually I left, not wanting to be retained an intern forever. A

curious thing started around this time. I began to be solicited by

random people on LinkedIn. At the time, my assumption was that someone

at Lincoln dropped my name in the appropriate hat. I spent Christmas at

my mother's house, taking a break and feeling out leads, many from

LinkedIn. In January, I interviewed with Radius Intelligence in San

Francisco, a local business search company founded by some Berkeley

students.

Radius was hard work (especially in my enfeebled state), but I enjoyed

it overall and learned a lot. This finally seemed to be the start-up

dream I had read so much about on Hacker News; I was pumped to have

finally escaped the world of defense. The big downside was volitility;

lots of folks had been fired from Radius in the past. After a

management shake-up though, most of the engineering team left in a

short period of time; I did as well.

Because of the volitility, I used Airbnb to stay in various locations

throughout the city. I needed to make a living somehow, but was also

hedging against the possiblity of being attacked again.

After Radius, I started experiencing scary encounters with what could

have been random people, but I now recognize were field agents. The

first was on the street in Belmont right before the start of PyCon

2013. I had seen him earlier in the day and said "deja vu".

This agent explained to me that he had been raised from an early age to

protect the Jewish people, and made a refence to Israeli intelligence.

He further explained that another holocaust must be prevented at all

hosts and that humanists were wrong about Islam, that it was

fundamentally incompatible with the western world. He talked about

trying to infiltrate student groups and seemed very interested in me in

particular. He then claimed to have many friends in the FBI and said

some negative things about Obama.

I stood there wide-eyed and listened, puzzled and scared, trying not to

argue any points with him: he seemed articulate and genuinely

convicted, and I feared he might be powerful. I shook his hand in an

effort to get away, and he recommended I read several controversial

books, including "The Third Choice" and "The Arab Mind".

I had another discussion with a street agent several months after I

started a new job at Crittercism. At the time, I was living near UCSF.

He was reading a copy of the "Shia Revival"; later, I came to learn of

these shorts of gestures as "signaling". He first asked if I was in

trouble (as if he knew that was the case). He then asked why I chose to

live in San Francisco instead of Boston. Finally, he said "SF is not a

friendly place", seeming to imply it was time to skip town.

Late last year, after going on leave of absence from Crittercism to

better focus on my health problems from the event in Pittsburgh, I ran

into the third agent as I was leaving the office of my GP.

She asked a complex question out the blue, along the lines of:

"If you knew someone associated with the Red Army, and they offered you

a job that would be a huge promotion, but you weren't OK with what they

were doing, would you take it?" I immediately thought to myself: "Which

Red Army? China? Russia?". I then said I wouldn't unless there were

special circumstances.

She then asked me: "If someone did something terrible to you, but you

couldn't prove it, what would you do?" At this point I tensed up,

realizing that she was aware of my poisoning. She proceeded to tell me

a story the husband of a diabetic friend of hers killing his wife by

giving her too much insulin. Note that diabetes runs in my family. At

that point, I assumed she meant a job with NSA (and I sure as hell

wasn't going to take any job that would put my family at risk like

that).

Her prediction did come in handy. When I last returned to SF, a man was

waiting for me in the food court, and offered me a job with a Swiss

Bank with an unbelievable salary. He listed off a variety of perks of

Switzerland, and noted it was more socialist. I was afraid enough to

humor the idea in front of him, not sure if he was US and feeling me

out or foreign and trying sway me. I later looked up the bank, and it

has a bad reputation in the financial community as being a place where

Jewish treasure was aggregated and kept after WWII. It was this moment

I realized there were at least two groups involved, that they don't get

along, and that they both somehow have me on their radar screen.

Thing is, why am I so important? Because I'm agnostic and have worked

on federally-funded projects in the past?

Perhaps it has to do with my father, who held a few genuine socialist

viewpoints. Most of his political viewpoints were disgusting and

unfounded, but it's hard to distance oneself from blood: was I

perceived as a threat because of them?

So as you can see, it seems I haven't had much control over how this

process has played out. I don't understand it, either: I've been

fumbling around in the dark and if I knew what was going on, I could

probably have made some decisions to save myself. As is, it seems like

I am being picked on by at least one and possibly two extremely

powerful organizations. Maybe they are acting upon me to learn more

about each other; I don't know.

So at this point, the best I can do is to bow out gracefully.

[1] Interview Process

We stayed at a hotel nearby Fort Meade. They fingerprinted and

eyescanned us in the "Friendship Complex". I was taken aside and driven

to tour the main facility, which was absolutely unreal in terms of

size. They had me speak with a few different engineers, all of which

could essentially tell me nothing.

Notably, one of the early condescending statements by the woman

conducting the first polygraph for me: "You realize this is the

National *Security* Agency, not the National Science Agency". I sat

there, flabbergasted.

[2] Hard Things I've Experienced Before This

Shortly after high school graduation, my father threw me out the house.

He tried to prevent me from communicating with my mother and the rest

of the family by threatening them (physically). I had to put myself

through undergrad/grad school. No breakdowns in this entire period, but

a lot of taking it a day at a time. I snuck a cell phone to my mom, my

only way of talking to her for years.

[3] Discrediting This Letter

Some things to consider when someone eventually claims I'm either crazy

or a spy.

First of all, I largely owe my college education to government money in

the form of generous scholarships or pay: I received the Missouri

Bright Flight scholarship and spent a year of undergrad working in

government-funded R&D labs (NASA and Sandia).

Second of all, my boss at Sandia wanted me to stay there instead of

going to grad school at Wisconsin. If I had been a spy, wouldn't I have

stayed? A similar thing could have been said about my time at Lincoln

Laboratory (I deliberately remained an intern so I could spend more

time taking classes on campus).

As for crazy, well, if I'm crazy at least it got me through school with

no financial backing, woo start-ups, etc.

In the event someone tries to fake some other terminal message from me,

know that this is the only document I've ever written explaining all of

this. The handwritten version of this letter contains the MD5 hash of

this transcript.

Possibly paranoid here, but at one point on the street in SF, a young

white man in an offensive t-shirt walked up to me with a hat on and

struke a pose, as if he knew me. His friends immediately started

snapping photos; I thoughtlessly stared at them for a moment.

Call me paranoid again, but at another point on the street in SF, an

old Chinese man with what appeared to be a shaky hand asked me to help

him write an address on a letter. I thoughtlessly did so.

[4] For Scientists: My Greater Concern

Based upon my experience, I fear many freedoms, especially freedom of

religion, could be threatened by the abilities of NSA that have come to

light recently. Advanced collection networks like this are the perfect

tool for weeding out "undesirable" people from society; when needed,

they should be constrained carefully!

That said, in this case, I think we're seeing at least two different

intelligence agencies competing with each other on US soil. I fear that

one of may irrationally view all atheists and agnostics as undesirable

or likely to commit violence against those of faith.

Regardless, whenever you build such a massive collection network, you

run the risk of its data being used by a third party, either through

sharing agreements or hacking. It is indeed an existential threat to

our democracy, especially during things like [5].

Most importantly, remember that the US surveillance network is very

real! I know this not from using it, but from having been followed by

agents using it for the years after the polygraph. Both Facebook and

Google were watched in great detail for me.

[5] Cold War 2.0?

Several friends have asked me prying questions about my economic

beliefs over the course of the last few months (I assume prompted by

investigators). It seems like I'm caught up in the middle of a conflict

between Judaism and some sort of European socialist organization. Guess

that's what I get for being agnostic? I can't imagine my own country

doing this: I've received far too much good advice from friendly

strangers from the home country over the last few years. It's got to be

a foreign hit.

But who? Well, if the Israelis are at fault then perhaps I was got a

drink with the wrong person in SF, or posted too a liberal article

about US income inequlity in grad school. Ask around, I'm definitely

not a socialist firebrand that wants to do away with private property

and put everyone in townhouses!

That said, I think it's also likely that the Europeans are involved. A

bumped into an old Airbnb host of mine in SF recently, John Beauchemin,

while eating sushi in the Mission. Or rather, he walked in the door and

immediately started buying more food and drinks: a latino friend of his

brought some of it over. That's my best guess. John expressed some

radical anti-religious beliefs while I was staying at his place (e.g.

"You should visit southeast Asia: one of the few places in the world

Christianity left untouched"). Since someone foreign just tried to

recruit me, my guess is that he wasn't the only one that was feeling me

out.

Wish I knew the answers; guess you'll have to figure them out.

- James Jolly