How Intelligence Contractors and the Intelligence Community

How Intelligence Contractors and the Intelligence Community to Steal from Domestic Financial Institutions:  Ethical, Moral, and Legal Questions

In a small hackerspace’s open house members of Endgame Systems, an intelligence contractor serving all major intelligence agencies, openly brag about one of their recent FBI contracts.  Claiming to having collaborated with the FBI, the contractors bragged about how they used social engineering and access to computational vulnerabilities to hack an American financial institution whereby they were “authorized” by the FBI to attempt to steal as much money electronically from an American financial institution before invariably the financial institution could figure out they were being hacked.  Although the necessity of protecting American financial institutions from being hacked into is not to be debated, one must question the legal, ethical, and moral authority by which an intelligence contractor or an intelligence agency has to conduct such an operation on American soil.  Clearly American financial institutions could be informed of their vulnerabilities without engaging in such an intelligence operation and protected by consulting with vulnerable financial institutions on how they could patch electronic security holes without demonstrating the effectiveness whereby a hacker could utilize these security holes.

Beyond the simple unequivocal truths on how American corporations and financial institutions can be protected against the nefarious operations of hackers, there are broader ethical, moral, and legal questions that should be asked.  The hacking operation disclosed by the aforementioned intelligence contractors should never happen because the risk of financial fraud and corruption.  Theoretically, such an operation could be conducted in secret between intelligence contractors, intelligence agency operatives, and leaders at a financial institution whereby loses conferred through being hacked could be written off to an insurance entity if such financial assets lost by an institution due to theft and fraud are covered by an insurance entity.  Concerned Americans should question if money stolen during such a hacking operation was fully returned to the financial institution, if the financial institutions leadership were informed of such an operation before its occurrence, and through what funding mechanism these intelligence agency contractors were compensated for their “services”.

Clearly intelligence agency contractors should never engage the public and expose components of their operations conducted in conjunction with any intelligence agency.  The legality of an operation could be questioned by a rational individual concerned about protecting their important financial resources.  I worry that if these are the types of operations bragged about publically by intelligence contractors what potentially more nefarious operations could be orchestrated without investigating important ethical and moral considerations.  Americans should be fairly concerned given the entities engaged in such operations and their historic propensity for conducting false flag operations.  Moreover, reading headlines such as “What we know about the bank hacking ring – and who’s behind it” (http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/16/technology/bank-hack-kaspersky/index.html) should be taken very skeptically especially given that the hacking operation disclosed by these intelligence contractors happened prior to releasing information about such “Russian” hacking operations.  The prevalence of command control hacking operations and their use to conceal the true origin of such an attack the necessity of protecting American’s from more nefarious uses should be of important consideration.  We must question why despite concerns over such operations and investigating their practicality how little was done to prevent occurrences.