The Checkered Past of the FBI Cyber Contractor Who 'Spied' on Trump

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigations

February 17, 2022

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/02/17/the_checkered_past_of_the_fbi_computer_contractor_who_spied_on_trump_816761.html

Long before FBI computer contractor and Clinton operative Rodney L. Joffe allegedly trolled Internet traffic for dirt on President Trump, he mined direct-marketing contact lists for the names and addresses of unwitting Americans to target in a promotional scam involving a grandfather clock.

Not just any clock, mind you, but a “world famous Bentley IX” model, according to postcards his companies mailed out to millions of people in the late 1980s claiming they'd won the clock in a contest they never entered. There was just one hitch: the lucky winners had to send $69.19 in shipping fees to redeem their supposedly five-foot mahogany prize.

Tens of thousands of folks forked over the fees, only to discover the grandfather clock that arrived was nothing as advertised. It was really just a table-top version made of particle board and plastic and worth less than $10. Some assembly was required.

[…]

He relocated then to Phoenix from Los Angeles and changed the name of his mass-marketing firm American Computer Group to “Whitehat Data Services.” Instead of targeting consumers, he developed a reputation as a cyber-security expert and, ironically, a champion of consumers battling abusive direct-marketers and spammers.

[…]

A decade later, Joffe moved to Washington, where he eventually landed lucrative security-related contracts with the FBI and Pentagon requiring top secret clearance.

In 2006, Joffe joined Neustar Inc., a Beltway computer contractor that, among other things, secures and maintains Internet servers for federal agencies, including the White House. This high-level position gave the alleged former grandfather clock wheedler access to a proprietary archive of Internet traffic records – both public and nonpublic – known as "DNS logs." These logs reveal the back-and-forth pinging that computers and cellphones generate when they communicate with Internet servers, including ones transmitting emails.

[…]

It also put him in the same orbit with political VIPs. Joffe started advising not only FBI brass but White House officials, including President Obama, on cybersecurity matters. By 2016, his access to proprietary internet logs became of interest to operatives for the Hillary Clinton campaign, who appear to have offered him a plum job in a Clinton presidency for help on an opposition-research project against Donald Trump. (Shortly after Clinton's loss to Trump in November 2016, Joffe said in an email: "I was tentatively offered the top [cybersecurity] job by the Democrats when it looked like they'd win. I definitely would not take the job under Trump.”)

[…]

Durham accused Joffe of exploiting Neustar’s nonpublic data to monitor Trump’s Internet activities even after the 2016 election – through early 2017. He shared the sensitive information with Sussmann, who in turn gave it to the CIA. The prosecutor said Joffe mined data from Trump Tower, Trump’s Central Park West apartment building and even the Executive Office of the President “for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”

[…]

Added Swecker: “There could be other criminal statutes [invoked] as well" including conspiracy "but to me, the key issue is his contractual relationship. He also engaged researchers at Georgia Tech who were working on a government contract and being paid by the U.S. government.”

[…]

A month earlier, Joffe had tasked employees at his two small Internet startups to search for any Internet data (including private DNS holdings) reflecting potential connections or communications between Trump or his associates and Russia. Joffe emailed them a five-page dossier – the “Trump Associates List” – to guide their queries. As RCI first reported, the list included highly personal information on Trump campaign advisers Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. Steve Bannon appears to have been added to the list later as another target, the emails released by Judicial Watch reveal.

Read MOAR

>>16331547

Packet Forensics reportedly landed a recent Pentagon contract to manage a large chunk of Internet domains owned by the military. The bid was awarded the day Joe Biden was inaugurated president. The massive cyberspace will allow Joffe’s firm to set up dedicated digital infrastructure, including servers and software, to comb through private Internet traffic for the purported purpose of monitoring suspicious activity.

Joffe’s company also sells wiretapping equipment that allows federal authorities to spy on private web-browsing through fake Internet security certificates, instead of real ones that websites employ to verify secure connections. Once installed, Packet's device lets agents see an individual's online transactions without obtaining a warrant.

[…]

Joffe’s second-act success in government seems rooted in a simple fact: “He has friends in high places,” proferred a career Justice Department official. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, pointed out that Joffe personally advised President Obama on cybersecurity and other issues, and was also close to former FBI Director James Comey.

Secret Service entrance logs reveal Joffe visited the White House several times during the Obama administration. And in 2013, Comey gave Joffe an award recognizing his work helping agents investigate a cybersecurity case. Sources told RCI that Joffe has also worked as an FBI informant on various cybersecurity cases opened by the bureau over roughly the past 15 years.

>>16331547

D

Morning sun brings heat.

Full moon coming.

Undiscovered stars learned.

Missions forward.

Q

https://qanon.pub/index2.html#1543

For emphasis; UNDISCOVERED STARS

>>16331560

Undiscovered stars learned.

>>16331560

Joffe has created more than two dozen startups across several states, some of which have no employees, revenue or even offices.

Neustar

neustar

startups

no employees

no revenue

no offices

Undiscovered stars learned.

>>16331560

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/08/durham-investigates-pentagon-cybersecurity-contractors-who-helped-clinton-campaign-plot-russia-hoax/

Durham Investigates Pentagon Contractors Who Helped Clinton Campaign Plot Russia Hoax

BY: PAUL SPERRY

OCTOBER 08, 2021

Durham is investigating whether they were involved in a scheme to misuse sensitive, nonpublic internet data, which they had access to through their government contracts, to dredge up derogatory information on Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign in 2016 and again in 2017, sources say — political dirt that sent FBI investigators on a wild goose chase. Prosecutors are also investigating whether some of the data presented to the FBI was faked or forged.

[…]

The sources familiar with the probe have confirmed that the leader of the team of contractors was Rodney L. Joffe, who has regularly advised the Biden White House on cybersecurity and infrastructure policies. Until last month he was the chief cybersecurity officer at Washington tech contractor Neustar Inc., which federal civil court records show was a longtime client of Sussmann at Perkins Coie, a prominent Democratic law firm recently subpoenaed by Durham. Joffe, 66, has not been charged with a crime.

Neustar has removed Joffe’s blog posts from its website. “He no longer works for us,” a spokeswoman said.

[…]

One of the campaign representatives with whom Joffe coordinated was Jake Sullivan, who was acting as Clinton’s foreign policy adviser, as RealClearInvestigations first reported. Now serving in the White House as President Biden’s national security adviser, Sullivan is under scrutiny for statements he made under oath to Congress about his knowledge of the Trump-Alfa research project. In a potential conflict of interest, Attorney General Merrick Garland employed Sullivan’s wife Maggie as a law clerk when he was a federal judge. Garland controls the purse strings to Durham’s investigation and whether his final report will be released to the public.

[…]

Joffe is the “Max” quoted in media articles promoting the secret cyber plot targeting Trump, a code name likely given him by Simpson, who has a son named Max. The stories described “Max” as a “John McCain Republican.” In 2017, Joffe, who spent much of his career in the late McCain’s home state of Arizona before moving to Washington,helped rekindle the Trump-Alfa tale by plumbing more data and helping feed the information to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which McCain chaired.

MOAR

ALSO SEE

https://law.unh.edu/blog/2020/10/conversation-judge-merrick-b-garland

>>16331589

Joffe worked closely with another top computer scientist assigned to the Alfa project, who has used the pseudonym “Tea Leaves,” as well as masculine pronouns, in media stories to disguise her identity. The operative has been identified by her attorney as April D. Lorenzen, who supplied so-called Domain Name System (or DNS) logs from proprietary holdings — the foundation for the whole conspiracy charge — and helped compile them for the spurious report that was fed to the FBI, according to the indictment.

A registered Democrat, Lorenzen was tasked by Joffe with making a Trump connection from the data along with the researchers from Georgia Tech, where she has worked as a guest researcher since 2007.

>>16331594

Stars learned.

In her bio, Lorenzen also said she currently serves “as the principal investigator for a critical infrastructure supply-chain cybersecurity notification research project.” She did not provide further details about the project. However, she regularly trains and briefs federal law enforcement agencies about cybersecurity issues.

A colleague of Lorenzen who features prominently in the project to link Trump to the Russian bank, but who is not referenced in the indictment, is L. Jean Camp, an Indiana University computer science professor who posted the dodgy data on her website and helped propagate the conspiracy theory in the media. “This person has technical authority and access to data,” she said of “Tea Leaves,” the originator of the data, vouching for her friend Lorenzen while hiding her identity.

Another “computer scientist” tied to the project was Paul Vixie, a colleague of Joffe who, like Joffe, gave $250 in 2000 to Rep. Heather Wilson of New Mexico, who was close to the late Sen. John McCain, who feuded with Trump, federal campaign records show. Vixie, who reviewed the DNS logs and suggested in the media that Trump and Alfa Bank were engaged in a “criminal syndicate,” supported Clinton’s run for president and bashed Trump on Twitter.

“Hillary presented herself as an experienced politician who is prepared to assume the presidency,” he tweeted in 2016. He called Trump a “fake Republican” who “will finish out his life in prison,” he asserted in a 2020 tweet.

>>16331560, >>16331598

https://patriotssoapbox.com/tech/minutes-before-trump-left-office-the-military-quietly-did-something-historic-strange/

April 26, 2021 – In the minutes before Joe Biden was inaugurated the Pentagon was quietly transferring millions of IP addresses to a little Plantation, Florida private company that appears to have little if any history. The company, Global Resource Systems, LLC is a shadowy firm that shares an office space above a bank and has never executed government contracts before. Interestingly Florida is also the home of Special Operations which have taken a new leading role within the Military establishment in recent years which began under Trump’s tenure.

>>16331547

The Big Pentagon Internet Mystery Now Partially Solved

By Associated Press on April 24, 2021

A very strange thing happened on the internet the day President Joe Biden was sworn in. A shadowy company residing at a shared workspace above a Florida bank announced to the world’s computer networks that it was now managing a colossal, previously idle chunk of the internet owned by the U.S. Department of Defense.

That real estate has since more than quadrupled to 175 million addresses — about 1/25th the size of the current internet.

”It is massive. That is the biggest thing in the history of the internet,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network operating company. It’s also more than twice the size of the internet space actually used by the Pentagon.

After weeks of wonder by the networking community, the Pentagon has now provided a very terse explanation for what it’s doing. But it has not answered many basic questions, beginning with why it chose to entrust management of the address space to a company that seems not to have existed until September.

The military hopes to “assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,” said a statement issued Friday by Brett Goldstein, chief of the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service, which is running the project. It also hopes to “identify potential vulnerabilities” as part of efforts to defend against cyber-intrusions by global adversaries, who are consistently infiltrating U.S. networks, sometimes operating from unused internet address blocks.

The statement did not specify whether the “pilot project” would involve outside contractors.

[…]

The only name associated with it on the Florida business registry coincides with that of a man listed as recently as 2018 in Nevada corporate records as a managing member of a cybersecurity/internet surveillance equipment company called Packet Forensics. The company had nearly $40 million in publicly disclosed federal contracts over the past decade, with the FBI and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency among its customers.

That man, Raymond Saulino, is also listed as a principal in a company called Tidewater Laskin Associates, which was incorporated in 2018 and obtained an FCC license in April 2020. It shares the same Virginia Beach, Virginia, address — a UPS store — in corporate records as Packet Forensics. The two have different mailbox numbers. Calls to the number listed on the Tidewater Laskin FCC filing are answered by an automated service that offers four different options but doesn’t connect callers with a single one, recycling all calls to the initial voice recording.

Saulino did not return phone calls seeking comment, and a longtime colleague at Packet Forensics, Rodney Joffe, said he believed Saulino was retired. Joffe, a cybersecurity luminary, declined further comment. Joffe is chief technical officer at Neustar Inc., which provides internet intelligence and services for major industries, including telecommunications and defense.

In 2011, Packet Forensics and Saulino, its spokesman, were featured in a Wired story because the company was selling an appliance to government agencies and law enforcement that let them spy on people’s web browsing using forged security certificates.

>>16331547

“This Is Massive”: Shadowy DARPA-Linked Company Took Over ‘Chunk’ Of Pentagon’s Internet In Inauguration Day Mystery

https://www.sgtreport.com/2021/04/this-is-massive-shadowy-darpa-linked-company-took-over-chunk-of-pentagons-internet-in-inauguration-day-mystery/

>>16331547

The unstated scandal: The CIA collected info on President Trump

The issue that made more noise, however, was Durham’s disclosure that Rodney Joffe – a contractor with deep ties to the Clintons, and what appears to be a deep hatred for Trump – had exploited Executive Office of the President of the United States data he obtained from a “sensitive arrangement” with the U.S. Government to damage President Trump.

Here is our initial post on the topic.

https://technofog.substack.com/p/durham-clinton-allies-spied-on-the?r=fqvbg

https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1493402678185054213/pu/vid/960x720/YXdOd6tzPRlIiZXe.mp4?tag=12

>>16331623

What about the data involved with the Trump transition? On August 1, 2016, Trump reached an agreement with the General Services Administration (GSA) “for telecommunication and internet technology services for both the pre- and post-election transition period.”1 This is the agreement. Fool Nelson pointed out to me that Joffe’s other company, Packet Forensics, has a 2010 - 2025 contract with GSA. I wonder if Joffe’s company, Neustar, helped the GSA in the execution of the transition agreement. Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not sure it matters, as Neustar already had an agreement to provide “DNS resolution services” to the Executive Office of the President.

Regardless, the “transition theory”, if we can call it that, matches the timeline in the Sussmann indictment, which states that Joffe and his team continued to target “Trump-related computer networks” in late 2016 and early 2017. And it makes sense in context of Sussmann’s conduct, as Sussmann tried to put this information out there in late December 2016.

https://technofog.substack.com/p/the-unstated-scandal-the-cia-collected?s=r

>>16331623

The Sussmann Trial: fingers pointed at FBI leadership

Techno Fog

https://technofog.substack.com/p/the-sussmann-trial-fingers-pointed?s=r

2 hours ago.

Back in 2016, Agent Gaynor was the FBI’s counterintelligence division’s unit chief in Washington, DC. He learned of the Alfa Bank allegations on September 23, 2016 during a briefing led by the FBI’s Chicago field office. Agent Gaynor reported to Supervisor Special Agent Joe Pientka (who, along with Strzok, interviewed General Flynn) and volunteered to help work on the case.

[…]

This CHS was evaluated by the Chicago Field Office and “they thought the CHS was wrong.” They had several reasons for that assessment, including the fact that the source “made several technical assertions that didn’t pass an analytical merit.” In other words, the other source - whom we strongly suspect is Rodney Joffe - lied. This would be why he was terminated as a CHS.

During the break, there was a discussion of a sealed filing regarding Agent Gaynor’s “status.” It turns out he is being investigated by the FBI - not the special counsel. More on that, and more on Monday’s testimony, when the afternoon transcripts roll in….

>>16331632

>>16331623

>>16331547

https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1493402678185054213/pu/vid/960x720/YXdOd6tzPRlIiZXe.mp4?tag=12