Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and it's welcome to episode 311 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Clint Watts.

He's a former U.S. Army officer and FBI special agent who's testified before Congress multiple

times on issues relating to terrorism and cyber warfare.

He's currently a Robert A Fox Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute's program

on the Middle East, as well as a senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington

University.

And we'll be speaking with him today about his new book Messing with the Enemy,

surviving in a social media world of hackers, terrorists, Russians, and fake news. And now here's our interview

with Clint Watts. All right, so we're here with Clint Watts. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Okay, so the first thing I want to talk about is these conversations you had with a terrorist

named Omar Hamami.

So how did you first start talking with him?

Actually, I think Omar, I'd have to go back and and look but he may have talked to me first.

This is going back probably 2012-13 was he would pop up on the scene and because he was such a narcissist as goes with

Jahati terrorists they really like to read about themselves or check themselves out

on the internet and he had pang me I, or I had seen a post that the account had put up and I had commented on it.

And that's kind of how it got started.

And Omar wasn't just reaching out to me, he was reaching out to lots of Western journalists. He wanted to get in the news because he was having trouble. And so yeah, it was kind of one of those fluke things that happened, but he picked me out of the crowd I think because he knew what my

background was and he was an American yeah yeah he's originally from Alabama and so

he grew up in Alabama he had you know he originally was just

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