Security

Former FBI Agent Admits to Decades of Small-Scale Bribery

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Historian pro-tip (pun not intended): tipping is rooted in slavery.

Fortune magazine just published a glowing profile of a former FBI special agent – someone whose entire career was supposedly about investigating financial crimes and upholding the law:

Former FBI special agent says he uses a simple trick to get the best hotel rooms in the world—and it’s all about showing love to the front desk

  1. Teaching corruption techniques on TikTok
  2. Bragging about 20 years of systematically bribing hotel workers
  3. Framing it as a life hack instead of what it is: paying for unfair advantages
  4. Getting positive press coverage from Fortune magazine for it

The cognitive dissonance is awful.

This guy investigated financial crimes, Ponzi schemes, and embezzlement. He knows what corruption looks like. He understands how small payments to circumvent official systems scale into institutional rot.

And yet, he’s pumping a detailed script for corruption:

  • Identifying vulnerable low-wage workers
  • Flattering them while placing $20 cash on their keyboard
  • Explicitly requesting preferential treatment
  • Claiming it’s about “appreciation” when it’s pure transaction

The really horrible part: He spent 26 years investigating financial crimes while simultaneously (by his own admission) corrupting hotel systems across Hawaii and the mainland.

And now he’s monetizing this on social media as a “simple trick” – spreading the practice further, teaching others to do it, normalizing the worst inflationary behavior. This is exactly how corruption works wherever it has become endemic – starts as optional, becomes expected, then becomes mandatory just to receive baseline services you’ve already paid for.

The pre-payment is the key (pun not intended). This is NOT kind or gratitude, it’s a quid pro quo. He even scripts it:

If you could get me a decent room, I’d appreciate it [while he puts cash on their keyboard].

He’s not subtle. He’s saying to those who refuse, they will lose income to those who participate in his scheme.

The fact that Fortune wrote this up as business travel advice rather than “Former FBI Agent Admits to Decades of Small-Scale Bribery” tells you everything about how normalized corruption is when it’s framed as “savvy tipping” behavior.

It’s absolutely wild. As I documented in 2014, American tipping culture was deliberately revived by the KKK in the 1920s as a way to deny fair wages to Black workers after emancipation. This FBI agent is now teaching people to extend a racist exploitative system.

History, Security

Ukraine’s Quartermaster Problem in Pokrovsk

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Ukraine is in danger from over reliance on centralized, linear logistics in an environment where Russia is dumping heavy distributed, persistent interdiction capability.

The German public broadcast service reports that a 20km death zone exists because Ukraine is still thinking in terms of scheduled resupply convoys – predictable, high-value targets. Russia just has to maintain a huge supply of cheap, operator-guided FPV drones and wait.

Looking at the map reminds me of American Civil War; this is a Grant moment at Vicksburg, not the bumbling suicidal Lee at Gettysburg. The decisive action isn’t going to be happening in tactical maneuver; it’s in the logistics architecture that enables maneuver.

Grant’s insight was from his famous quartermaster days, to win by making a supply system more resilient and adaptive than the enemy’s ability to disrupt it. His genius was application of multiple independent supply routes (river + rail + wagon trains), only living off the land as backup when necessary (controversial but resilient). His relentless operational tempo stressed Confederate logistics more than his own. Calculated losses in supply infrastructure were then possible because he could replace faster than the enemy could destroy.

If we translate Grant, the greatest American General and President in history, to today’s conflict:

  1. Pre-position distributed caches: Don’t resupply forward positions daily – establish 30-60 day hardened supply points that troops rotate through, such as decoy caches, frequent repositioning, or hardened underground storage.
  2. Multiple low-signature supply vectors: Autonomous ground vehicles, small cargo drones (10-20kg payloads, not 200kg), even human porters using covered routes.
  3. Expendable logistics: Accept that 30% of resupply attempts will be interdicted – build that into the planning ratios.
  4. Counter-logistics targeting: Interdict Russian logistics with same or more intensity than they’re applying to Ukraine (Crimean bridge and related operations aren’t widespread enough).

No amount of tactical brilliance can overcome a quartermaster system that can’t sustain the force. Grant understood this; Sherman then perfected it in his March to the Sea by making supply systems a weapon (although the latest research says the South was burning itself to the ground out of spite, per Lisa Brady or Sarah Rubin). It’s also why Napoleon and Lee were such disasterous, self-defeating fools (Lee’s army starved at Gettysburg partly because he cruelly refused to establish proper supply lines, while Napoleon killed 400,000 or more of his own men faster than his enemy could).

Fix the quartermaster problems, and the interesting tactical problems can come back into focus. This is exactly the wheelhouse of the modern CISO: resilience engineering in adversarial environments. The principles are identical – don’t prevent every and any breach, architect systems that balance and function through multitudes of disruption, so engineers can get back to deploying features instead of fixes.

Russian “trickle infiltration” currently works while Ukraine’s logistics aren’t yet delivering a proper distributed defense. The soldiers describe units refusing deployment to Myrnohrad outskirts because they’ll be cut off. That’s a present day rational response to logistics weakness, while the history on solutions is clear.

The logistics warfare element has been and will continue to be how all conflicts are fought (Taiwan, Korea, etc.), and any military dangerously unprepared for distributed interdiction environments will face this reality, just as we see it unfolding with drones in Ukraine.

Success means Ukrainian units sustaining 60 day deployments and longer without scheduled resupply. It means Russian FPV interdiction is economically unsustainable because of dispersed, low-value targets. It means Ukrainian casualties from logistics disruption falls more than 50% as operational tempo increases. These are engineering problems that all beg for innovation on historical solutions, as Grant showed in his legendary victories.

Security

Google Researchers Announce Privacy Preserving Quantum Cash

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Google – whose entire business model is built on centralized surveillance meant to tax everything you do – has published new research on privacy-preserving digital cash.

Anonymous Quantum Tokens with Classical Verification

Google Quantum AI (the authors’ affiliation) is their quantum computing research division. They’re racing against all the other commercially sponsored academics to demonstrate “supremacy” by proving practical quantum applications.

This paper is therefore an academic statement, not a product Google intends to deploy yet, still worth unpacking.

It’s basically like reading about tobacco companies funding cancer research. It’s like reading about oil companies funding climate research.

Google’s source of income:

  • Chrome tracks your browsing
  • Android tracks your location
  • Gmail scans your email
  • Google Ads follows you everywhere
  • They’ve lobbied against privacy regulations

This paper:

  • Users can detect if they’re being tracked
  • Cryptographic guarantees of anonymity
  • Explicitly designed to prevent surveillance

This trust scheme requires a trusted bank/issuer to mint and verify tokens. Security comes from quantum mechanics (unconditional) generating tokens that are explicitly one-time-use. There’s no distributed or shared record of all transactions, just the bank’s private verification history. It is like physical cash or centralized payment systems where you trust the issuer yet want anonymity.

Maybe Google will patent it such that it can never happen without them. This is straight from the tech monopoly playbook. See: Google’s codec patents, Apple’s design patents, pharma evergreening.

Or maybe it’s about selling centrally planned and controlled infrastructure. It’s the predatory Oracle database model – you think you’re independent, but you’re codependent on their abusive stack forever.

If a central bank implemented this, would they use Google’s quantum infrastructure? (Vendor lock-in) More importantly, would Google have backdoor access? (National security concerns) What other reasons would Google want this to be realized, since it reduces ad targeting potential? Is it like Coke selling water?

If Google provides the infrastructure, they control the hardware that mints tokens. They could inject distinguishable states at manufacturing, while the “identical token” guarantee depends entirely on trusting Google’s implementation. This is like Juniper routers with NSA backdoors, but quantum.

The question is whether anyone should trust Google-controlled infrastructure for privacy, regardless of the math.

The answer is obviously no.

This academic framework for quantum surveillance resistant to mathematical proof is highly vulnerable to implementation compromises in every layer of the stack they control.

Energy, Sailing, Security

Aussie Hull Cleaning Robots Reduce Ship Fuel 13%

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These numbers are straightforward enough. Deploy a robotic pool cleaner to the bottom of ships to reduce drag, and save huge amounts of fuel.

A recent trial between the NRMA and the Rozelle-based hull-cleaning robot manufacturer revealed a 13 per cent fuel reduction on the diesel-powered NRMA Manly Fast Ferry fleet.

Using its arsenal of 4K cameras (mounted on the top, front and rear), dedicated lighting, sensors and propellers, the Hullbot successfully replaced the role of human divers during the trial to deliver a more regular, time-efficient hull cleaning maintenance.

Doing so reduced the amount of underwater drag created by biofouling (the accumulation of marine growth on ship hulls), which in turn made the circa 24-metre long vessels more efficient through the water.

Furthermore, the AI-powered robots performed critical cleaning duties on the hull exteriors that eliminated the need for antifouling paints.

The buried lede is the reduction in deadly paints. Antifouling is another word for toxicity, because the “fouling” stuff is being killed. These robots reduce a need to pollute, saving even more money on both paint and cleanup from the paint effects.

No wonder Hullbot just raised over $10M in a series A.