Former soldier searched Google, Reddit for spying tips, prosecutors say — Investigators say they found a document on the man’s computer titled: “Important Information to Share with Chinese Governme…::A document titled “Important Information to Share with Chinese Government" was allegedly found on the former soldier’s computer.
“Important Information to Share with Chinese Government"
I’m not a conspiracy person but does this not reek of a setup? 😂 Like surely someone spying for the chinese government wouldn’t just title a document that…
You’d be surprised how inept some people can be. Back when I worked in defense, we heard a story about a guy who, while preparing to exfiltrate sensitive data, named the file “data_to_exfiltrate.zip”. What a moron.
Yeah… Or setups just go past your nose often.
Here’s the link the the FBI’s released on the topic. If this was a set up the FBI is as bad at espionage as Schmidt was. He literally offered to commit treason for China via his normal gmail, with his real name attached, that was given to the US army by himself.
but then again this could easily be used to reason why the nsa ‘needs’ to spy on every citizen ever, else some 2¢ wannabe treasonist will make america ‘not great’
If you have proper full disk encryption and know the caveats, it really doesn’t matter what you name your files. If you’re the anal-retentive spy handler type, you are probably very organized, and you name files with exactly what’s in them.
He was a spy handler who handled secret and top secret documents and worked in intelligence for a number of years. I’m sure he knew how to encrypt his hard drive.
He may have even used a VPN, or tor for the searches which has (had?) a very curious ongoing network-wide DDoS attack (very useful if you had access to the entire inflow and outflow of the Internet via undersea cables and ISP access and wanted to do timing attacks) for at least a year in 2022-2023. The tor project themselves tell you that if your adversary is a nation-state, you need to use more protection than just browsing from your normal laptop on your home network.
I imagine he at minimum used private browsing to search Google and reddit for this stuff, but they logged the search and the DoD was later able to easily get the customer details of the IP from his ISP at the time the searches took place, and also all other searches during a time.
But it’s also just as likely he thought he’d be in the clear, knows how incompetent the beurocracy seems since he was inside of it, but something he did tipped them off and he was scrutinized (maybe his VISA application for China and plans to travel there yearly).
This seems like a weird way to set someone up… Setups are much more rare than the movies would have you believe.
I’m mostly concerned with the lack of details about whether he did or did not successfully give China those details… He was arrested at the San Francisco airport coming back from China… asset info, meeting places, etc, of even just a few known spies can potentially give the adversary a pattern to look for to find other unknown assets. I forget exactly when, where, or who, but there was some massive spy bust (either Russians in US or US in Russia, iirc) that happened because of some pattern they found between the registered addresses of the spies… Something about them all living in the same apartment building, or the numbers in the building or something. If anyone remembers the story please link it here.
Remember Jack the Dripper?
What an amateur. Did he even try using the War Thunder forums?
He will get sentenced more swiftly than an ex president who actually stole classified material and shared it with foreign heads of government.
How to spy for china and not get pregnant
Tbh it’s the biggest reason I haven’t started spying for other governments. Kids are expensive.
Schmidt studied Mandarin and was a spy handler, performing surveillance, interrogation and advanced psychological operation strategies
The saddest part is that a person in his position didn’t even have the knowledge to not link his treason Gmail account to his day to day Gmail account.
Gmail account 1 was subscribed to in the name of “Joe Schmidt.” In January 2018 and April 2019, SCHMIDT provided Gmail account 1 to the Army as his email address. Gmail account 1 also has a Google account associated with it. Gmail account 2 was subscribed to in the name of “Joey Schmidt” and lists Gmail account 1 as the recovery email address for the account. According to records obtained from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, SCHMIDT used Gmail account 2 to make travel reservations for his trips to the PRC
It’s literally worse his (Joseph Schmidt) alias was Joey Schmidt. Then from the email the army has on record as being him he does this:
SCHMIDT used Gmail account 1 to send the following email to the pubic email address for the Chinese Consulate in Istanbul: Hello, My name is Joe Schmidt. I am a United States citizen looking to move to China. I currently reside in Istanbul, and am trying to set up an appointment at the consulate in Istanbul. I also am trying to share information I learned during my career as an interrogator with the Chinese government.
The “Important Information to Share with Chinese Government” folder on my own drive just contains my angry reviews of cheap crap from Amazon that didn’t work as advertised.
"information to absolutely under no circumstance share with the Chinese government…
Or people that like broccoli."
The spies that are this stupid are the ones that get caught.
James Bond in the nutshell
In the nutshell? How’d he fit in there?!
James bond nutting in the shell
Not the best of hackers tbh
Oh man, that reminds me that I have a file called:
“File that would make any government super powerful, has a dead man switch, and I take bribes.”
I hope no one finds out about it.
Wait, you have one too? Crap
That’s like putting all your porn in a desktop folder labeled “Sexually Explicit Images”
I feel this dude’s recruiter was behind his quota and helped him fudged his ASVAB, or got him a waiver for the fact that his IQ is only double digits.
Approximately half the people in the world have an IQ in the double digit range. IQ literally has its mean at 100 for a given population. I don’t think I understand what you’re getting at there.
First off, IQ is an antiquated and terrible measurement of a person’s actual intelligence.
Secondly, if there was an IQ for sense of humor, or even just a ability to detect a joke in the wild, you’d probably sit somewhere in the bottom quartile.
You’re the one that brought up IQ in the first place, you can’t blame me for engaging on that.
It’s hard to detect a joke when it doesn’t exist in the first place.
The dude is dumb. I was calling him dumb.
Definitely not my best work, but also clearly not a serious thought provoking question that needs further investigation, or a correction about the mean distribution of IQ scores amongst a population.
Ah, there it is. Say it louder for those at 99 IQ in the back that you’re lumping in with this guy. That is, if you think they’re even smart enough to be able to understand you in the first place.
And it wasn’t a question you posed at all- it was a generalised statement that you consider half the population to be “dumb”, which, in a roundabout way, is where I’ve been going with this.
Edit: I see Lemmy is exactly the same as Reddit - full of so-called intellectuals that think of themselves as better then the average person, and that intellect is the sole barometer of usefulness in society. Keep downvoting me while thinking yourselves superior, fucking cowards.
it was a generalised statement that you consider half the population to be “dumb”
Entirely too optimistic.
The number of state actors in big tech is a big deal - Saudis, Isreal, and China and India of course!
