Dakota Cary’s statement that “it is inconceivable the U.S. would ask a private company to hack Xi’s phone” contradicts decades of documented evidence showing extensive U.S. reliance on private contractors for offensive intelligence operations, raising questions about SentinelOne staff understanding even the most basic intelligence history.

The contrast between his confident false assertion and the documented truth is striking—perhaps America shouldn’t have private assets for hacking anymore because SentinelOne is proving such “cyber” analysts don’t even know basic operations history.

From Lockheed’s Cold War spy planes to today’s billion-dollar cloud contracts, the U.S. intelligence community has consistently relied on private contractors for its most sensitive operations—including offensive cyber capabilities that could (and would) absolutely target foreign (and domestic) leaders. Who killed 1961 Hammarskjold, and how? What about 1969 Mondlane?

China’s recent Salt Typhoon operation, while unprecedented in scale, represents not a departure from American practice but rather an adaptation and expansion of the privatized intelligence model the United States undoubtedly pioneered as its own an adaptation of a British program.

The Cold War was privatization of American intelligence

The modern marriage between U.S. intelligence agencies and private contractors arguably began in earnest with the U-2 spy plane program in 1954. The CIA awarded Lockheed $22.5 million and, within eight months, Kelly Johnson’s “Skunk Works” flew an aircraft capable of photographing Soviet military installations from 70,000 feet.

This wasn’t merely procurement as it was an unmistakable model of private companies as integral partners for America’s most classified surveillance operations. Lockheed was building the CORONA reconnaissance satellites by 1959, with the entire program disguised as the civilian “DISCOVERER” scientific mission. The pattern continued with NRO’s KH-9 Hexagon satellites from 1971-1986, where Lockheed again handled construction while multiple contractors managed the complex film recovery operations.

These partnerships established a pattern: private companies didn’t just supply equipment when they designed, built, and sometimes operated the systems that formed the backbone of American intelligence gathering. IGLOO WHITE and IBM, hello, hello, is this thing on?

The telecommunications sector proved equally crucial. Project SHAMROCK, running from 1945 to 1975, saw Western Union, RCA Global, and ITT World Communications voluntarily provide the NSA with copies of all international telegrams entering or leaving the United States—without warrants, court orders, or even written agreements. At its peak, the program analyzed 150,000 messages monthly.

The companies cooperated based purely on patriotic appeals and informal assurances from the Attorney General. When the Church Committee exposed these activities in 1975, Senator Frank Church called it “probably the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken.” Yet even after congressional reforms and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the fundamental reliance on private sector cooperation only deepened.

If you say Church and a “cyber” expert says “who”, it is a sure sign they aren’t prepared enough yet.

Perhaps most telling was Air America, the CIA’s proprietary airline that operated from 1950 to 1976. With over 300 pilots and a fleet including Boeing 727s and 30 helicopters, it conducted everything from arms delivery to search-and-rescue operations across Southeast Asia. The company maintained commercial cover while executing covert operations, demonstrating how thoroughly the agency could integrate private entities into intelligence work.

Historical reports documented American contractors claiming a captured Vietcong woman “willfully threw herself” from their helicopter en route to her interrogation, echoing methods attributed to Apartheid South Africa’s “Dr. Death” who could only dream of Elon Musk’s Neuralink to torture secrets out of civil rights leaders. These incidents illustrate how private contractors have long operated in the gray areas of plausible deniability that always characterize modern intelligence work.

The pattern is not just about contracting—it is often complete fusion of commercial enterprise with intelligence operations. You see a golf cart company in Florida? The trained eye sees special operations vehicles designed for tactical clandestine surveillance. Rubber rafts being shipped to Angola as aid? Dogs of War documented these exact craft landing on an Indian Ocean beach to orchestrate a violent coup.

Post-9/11 transformation was even more intelligence contracting

The September 11 attacks triggered an unprecedented expansion of intelligence privatization. Remember AT&T Room 641A in San Francisco? Who had the keys? By 2016, approximately 70% of the U.S. intelligence budget—roughly $50 billion annually—flowed to private contractors. I’ll say it again, 70% of spending flowed into the private sector.

The body scanner is sure to get a go-ahead because of the illustrious personages hawking them. Chief among them is former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff, who now heads the Chertoff Group, which represents one of the leading manufacturers of whole-body-imaging machines, Rapiscan Systems. For days after the attack, Chertoff made the rounds on the media promoting the scanners, calling the bombing attempt “a very vivid lesson in the value of that machinery”—all without disclosing his relationship to Rapiscan.

I’ll skip further commentary about extensive allegations of corruption, regarding Chertoff mandating expensive yet dangerously flawed scanners at airports.

Five companies came to dominate this privatized landscape: Leidos, Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI International, SAIC, and CSRA, collectively employing 45,000 cleared personnel representing 80% of the total contractor workforce. Booz Allen Hamilton alone, which Bloomberg called “the world’s most profitable spy organization,” earned $5.8 billion in 2013 with nearly a quarter coming from intelligence agencies.

Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations, while himself working as a Booz Allen contractor, were driven by Russian moles who used him to expose the depth of private sector integration in surveillance operations. The PRISM program involved Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Apple, and others providing the NSA with direct access to user data, with 98% of PRISM production coming from just Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft.

Meanwhile, Palantir Technologies being led by a notorious political activist, received its initial funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, and then developed tools claiming to make the NSA’s XKeyscore surveillance data more searchable and actionable. Internal documents revealed Palantir software was specifically being designed to integrate with XKeyscore, enabling analysts across the Five Eyes intelligence alliance to visualize and analyze massive surveillance datasets.

The cloud computing revolution further cemented these rather clear relationships that SentinelOne seems ignorant about.

Amazon Web Services won the CIA’s C2S contract worth $600 million in 2013, followed by the “WildandStormy” contract worth up to $10 billion in 2021 to modernize the NSA’s classified data repositories. The broader Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contract, valued at “tens of billions” over 15 years, brought AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM into the intelligence community’s core infrastructure.

These were NOT traditional procurement relationships—they represented the wholesale and overt migration of America’s most sensitive intelligence capabilities onto commercial platforms.

I know, because I helped lead the offensive dimension: Private contractors in U.S. cyber operations

The evidence for private contractor involvement in offensive U.S. cyber operations is overwhelming and directly contradicts any notion of operational restraint. I’ve spoken publicly about this for over a decade.

The Stuxnet operation against Iran’s nuclear program, arguably history’s most sophisticated cyberweapon, required extensive private sector expertise. Foreign Policy reported that earlier attacks on Iran’s Natanz facility used “field equipment used by contractors working on Siemens control systems,” while the final Stuxnet variant likely entered Iranian systems via Russian contractors’ USB drives. The operation’s success depended on deep knowledge of industrial control systems that resided primarily with experts in the private sector.

This reminds me of the early 1900s when private staff of American Telco staff would moonlight for extra pay at night by performing contracted services: private company staff performed wire taps, as a service to the government, as old as wires themselves. Ah, history.

The NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO), now renamed the Office of Computer Network Operations, employs over 1,000 personnel including significant contractor presence. TAO’s explicit mission includes targeting “foreign leaders” and their communications. The unit has expanded to multiple locations across the United States and routinely outsources development of cyberespionage tools to private contractors. Companies like Raytheon Blackbird Technologies developed the UMBRAGE Component Library for the CIA, while Siege Technologies created the Athena and Hera malware systems. The 2017 Vault 7 leaks revealed that 70% of the CIA’s cyber arsenal was contracted out, with 91 malware tools among the more than 500 in the leaked materials.

The zero-day exploit market provides us perhaps with the clearest evidence of modern private sector involvement in offensive operations.

Reuters reported in 2013 that the U.S. government is the “biggest buyer in the burgeoning gray market” for software vulnerabilities. Companies like Zerodium openly offer up to $2.5 million for mobile operating system exploits, while Crowdfence advertises $5-7 million for iPhone zero-days. These exploits aren’t defensive tools—they’re offensive weapons designed to compromise foreign systems, potentially including those of foreign leaders.

Former NSA personnel have established companies like IronNet Cybersecurity and joined firms like the Chertoff Group, creating a revolving door that ensures private sector capabilities remain aligned with intelligence community needs. Chertoff again. I won’t go into it further.

Salt Typhoon is China’s adaptation of the American model

China’s Salt Typhoon operation represents a sophisticated evolution of a privatized intelligence model they observed in American history.

Active since at least 2019, the campaign has compromised over 200 companies across 80 countries, including at least nine major U.S. telecommunications providers. The operation specifically targeted high-profile political figures including Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Kamala Harris campaign staff, while accessing metadata for over one million users in the Washington D.C. area.

The three companies involved—Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology, Beijing Huanyu Tianqiong Information Technology, and Sichuan Zhixin Ruijie Network Technology—aren’t mere fronts but functioning businesses providing cyber services to China’s Ministry of State Security and People’s Liberation Army.

This represents a crucial distinction: while U.S. contractors often maintain degrees of independence and work with multiple clients, these Chinese firms may appear more tightly integrated with state intelligence operations. Although this reflects China’s civil-military fusion doctrine, it could shift to be more like America and use increasingly private entities.

What makes Salt Typhoon particularly sophisticated is its focus on compromising the backend of wiretap systems that U.S. law enforcement itself uses for lawful intercepts. It’s literally the privacy extremists’ most frequent talking point, that a backdoor for someone becomes a backdoor for anyone including adversaries.

By infiltrating these systems, Chinese operators gained access not just to general communications but to the specific targets of U.S. government interest. The operation used known vulnerabilities rather than zero-days, employing “living off the land” techniques that made detection extremely difficult. The persistent access achieved—maintained for months to years in some cases—provided both intelligence collection and potential disruption capabilities.

SentinelOne is Bonkers: Dakota Cary’s claim needs serious context

Now hopefully it is clear why Dakota Cary’s statement that “it is inconceivable the U.S. would ask a private company to hack Xi’s phone” appears to reflect either diplomatic discretion or a fundamental misunderstanding of U.S. intelligence operations. Am I being too charitable?

The documented evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that the United States has not only asked but routinely contracted private companies to develop and deploy offensive cyber capabilities that could absolutely target foreign leaders.

Consider the specific capabilities revealed in the Vault 7 leaks: tools to compromise smart TVs, smartphones, and vehicles—precisely the technologies foreign leaders use daily. The NSA’s TAO unit explicitly lists foreign leaders among its targets, and its operations have included intercepting laptops ordered by high-value targets before delivery. The CherryBlossom project compromised wireless infrastructure in “bars, hotels, airports”—locations frequented by traveling officials. These aren’t theoretical capabilities but operational tools developed with extensive private contractor involvement.

The distinction Cary wants to draw—between China using private companies for offensive operations and supposed U.S. restraint—collapses under any basic scrutiny.

The U.S. intelligence community has spent decades building precisely the kind of public-private partnerships that enable such operations. The difference lies not in whether private companies are involved but in the specific organizational models: the U.S. operates through a more distributed contractor ecosystem with greater corporate independence, while China’s approach features tighter state control and civil-military fusion.

A convergence of intelligence models

What emerges from this analysis is not a story of fundamentally different approaches but rather a convergence toward hybrid public-private intelligence capabilities. The United States pioneered the model during the Cold War, formalized it through the Church Committee reforms, and exponentially expanded it after 9/11. China of course studied and adapted these practices, creating its own version of American spy craft that simply reflects Chinese governmental structures and strategic priorities.

Both nations now operate through complex ecosystems where the boundaries between government agencies and private contractors have become increasingly blurred.

In the United States, massive intelligence budget very openly flows to contractors who develop offensive tools, operate surveillance systems, and provide analytical capabilities. In China, companies like those behind Salt Typhoon function as extensions of state intelligence while maintaining commercial operations. The shared model is to provide plausible deniability, technical expertise, and operational flexibility that pure government operations cannot match.

The real insight from comparing Salt Typhoon to U.S. operations isn’t that China has crossed some unprecedented line—it’s that the privatization of intelligence and cyber operations has become the model everyone leverages. The “inconceivable” has not only been conceived ages ago but fully operationalized, documented, and refined over decades of practice by the very nation that now expresses surprise at China’s adoption of similar methods.

Wrap Up

The parallel histories of American and Chinese intelligence privatization reveal a natural and a rather Boring (e.g. private company with old tech tunneling under American cities) transformation in how nations conduct espionage and cyber operations. The United States established and refined the model of deep public-private integration in intelligence work, from Lockheed’s Cold War reconnaissance programs to today’s multi-billion-dollar cloud computing contracts and zero-day exploit purchases. China’s operations in the news, while remarkable in scale and sophistication, are simply an expected evolution of established practices rather than any revolutionary departure.

Dakota Cary’s claim is absolutely contradicted by decades of documented evidence showing extensive private contractor involvement in offensive cyber operations, tools explicitly designed for targeting high-value individuals, and a thriving gray market where the U.S. government is the largest purchaser of offensive cyber capabilities. I’m always curious when American “security analysts” seem to not know their history.

As all nations continue to blur the lines between state and corporate capabilities in cyberspace, the question isn’t whether private companies will be involved in sensitive intelligence operations—it’s how democratic oversight and international norms can adapt to this post-Church reality where the most powerful surveillance and offensive capabilities increasingly reside not in government agencies but in the secretive unregulated conference rooms and data centers of private corporations.

Just ask GM or GE or Ford or…

I’ve been saying this stuff out loud since at least early 2012. SentinelOne should be held to account for a 2025 false statement that veers completely over the line.