You're Hello and welcome to Spycast from the Secret Files of the International Spy Museum in

Washington DC. I'm Mark Stout historian of the museum. I'm a PhD author and historian who served for 13 years as an analyst in the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Every month, the museum brings you interesting talks with authors,

scholars, and practitioners who has something to do with the world of

intelligence and espionage. We're joined today by Thomas Ryan, a partner at a company called Provide Security, which works in the computer security realm,

doing things like internal and external vulnerability

assessments penetration testing and exploit development and source

code analysis and all sorts of other things that my brain is not big enough to

understand.

I've heard Thomas speak a number of times and I can tell you you're going to find what he has

to say interesting and if you're awake it'll be more than a little alarming, I suspect, in its implications for intelligence and security of our country.

So Thomas Ryan, welcome to the International Spy Museum.

Thank you, Mark.

Thomas, let's start out with just, if you could just tell us, who is Robin Sage?

Robin Sage was a fictitious character I created in testing how fake personas work on the internet and how people do their research to

validate if this person is real or not for the whole concept of denial and

deception. How can the person, you know, go online and

extract information about you without you knowing it? So tell us a little bit

about Robin Sage's career. What did you have her do?

So focusing, the target was on the intelligence and the security community.

So to spice that up I put her as reputable education. She went to St Paul's out of was in New

Hampshire and then she went to MIT a good school. From there she was an intern at

...