Webroot hiring NSA Spooks?

Given the Snowden files, this is... Concerning?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/21/co-webroot-cmo-idUSnPnLA63927 160 PRN20130221
Duncan began his career with the U.S. Air Force, spending 10 years assigned to
the U.S. National Security Agency as an airborne cryptologic linguist performing
intelligence collection operations and cryptographic analysis. Duncan also
designed and implemented highly secure and classified government information
systems for FEMA, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force.

 

Not really new, first the F-secure 666/satan thread and now this. Wich vendor is next on your list

 

heck even i find find this a bit worrying. belief wise im totally against nsa and anything they stand for. i hope he does not bring those ideals over to webroot. otherwise im all for making webroot better. im hoping this also does not mean any backdoors to the nsa and implemented into webroot. i put a lot of trust into them and i hope they do not allow that garbage to go on.

 

He is "Chief Marketing Officer" so I don't think he's been working on the product as a dev and implemented "something".

More like he's been fixing all those Newegg deals for you

 

No, it's not concerning. He has a wide marketing background and is running our marketing - not any part of development.

 

Dunk: https://community.webroot.com/t5/We...ief-Marketing-Officer/td-p/27518#.UtRnTrT0PK0

TH

 

Even if he was running development he has a new boss now with new objectives. I don't think it means he can't be trusted because of his previous employment. It does reflect on his talent though.

 

In the business they have a saying.. You can leave the spooks, but the spooks never leave you. Essentially, once you a spook always a spook. Remember when Google started hiring spooks? Everyone sort of felt this was a precursor to closer govt. cooperation. Then later, Google got lucrative intelligence contracts, and so forth. Now digging a bit further, we find Webroots founder seems to have gone missing, then took a swan dive off a cliff back in 2008. It is my experience these types of things are rarely accidents.

But we find that Webroot was purchased by ACCEL Partners in 2005 just prior to the owner taking his rather peculiar swan dive off a cliff.

Why should ACCEL interest us? It's primary controller/manager is James Breyer, who was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital front established by the CIA in 1999. In-Q-Tel is the same outfit that funds Google and other technological powerhouses. One of its specialties is “data mining technologies.” (whomever writes the checks, as they say) He also was on the Board of Directors of Bolt, Beranak and Newman Technologies. BBN is a defense contractor, dealing primarily with High-technology development. BBN Technologies was the creator of ARPANET, the first operational packet switching network, essentially the first internet system, run by DARPA. BBN board consisted of many NSA/CIA members. Raytheon Defense Contractor owns BBN now.

Mayfield VC was the second investor in Webroot. Mayfield should prove interesting, as they are also a primary VC that funds NSA surveillance technologies. Pixim, along with their In-Q-Tel buddies was funded by Mayfield - and so is Webroot. But what is interesting is - Gillman Louie, who runs the CIA investment wing, mentions how 'close' he works with other funding agents like Mayfield, to ensure 'cooperation' against that deadly 'terrorist threat'. Understanding that - Mayfield is a strong investor in Webroot.

http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/stories/2001/11/12/focus5.html?page=all
Louie says he's had conversations with Allen Morgan from the Mayfield Fund, Stewart Alsop of New Enterprise Associates and Floyd Kvamme and Brook Byers, both at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, about working with their companies' existing portfolio members as well as the role they can play scouting for new companies to help the government better track terrorism threats.

So I am not making assumptions here. Merely pointing out some data I found in a cursory investigation of potentially running Webroot. One really cannot deny the 'close' associations, what one does with this data isn't really my business. Not making any statements, either way about Webroot other than the above public domain information streams.

However, if I ran an intelligence service, I could hardly think of a better way to harvest data on millions of PCs - could you? Given the Snowden files vague reference to the NSA working with 'US Based Antivirus companies', I am not too inclined to be as trusting as I once was.

 

Reading it like that, it does sound highly suspicious, so I can understand your concern. However, we are not using WSA to spy on users. We don't collect personally identifiable information so this would never be possible.

 

If you like yor insurance you can keep your insurance! Not implying anything, just the denseness of the human race can be quite impressive sometimes. LOL!!

 

I'll admit that was some pretty interesting "cursory investigation"

 

I find this very troubling enough to vote with my financial feet against Webroot software. With the way government operates specifically the US National Security Agency, Duncan, probably still possesses security clearances. This means he was read into certain specific government projects and is probably still screened periodically by the NSA and FBI. In other words once an NSA agent always an NSA agent. Having worked in those positions may have once been a good thing to have on your resume. In lieu of Snowden Webroot must have lost their blooming mind. It is in my opinion a very bad decision for Webroot to employ this man in ANY sensitive area. Thanks for whomever pointed this out. I am pulling the half a dozen companies I contract for away from Webroot.

 

The problem is, the military/corporate/industrial complex is so intertwined into American society that it is hard to differentiate. Swoden revelations, of which we only have roughly 1-2% of so far indicate that the above mentioned complex is not only operational, but it permeates almost all aspects of our society. Virtually everything has been weaponized against us, in one form or another.

When I do business with any entity, I am careful to check them out. Sadly, most larger corporations are involved - in some form or another, with the complex. So it is hard to do business with them without having some concern. Even with assurances, it appears most major IT corporations were compromised, either directly, or indirectly with moles inside of the organizations. Snowden files are teaching us that there is a cost for selling out your customers. The amount of people seeking off-shore alternatives is astounding now. The number of companies turning away from US-based corporate IT products is absolutely stunning. The cost of selling out customers will be steep, and long lasting.

Webroot is a great product. I like it a lot. So any links with the complex will be carefully considered by me, and they should be by anyone really. It doesn't automatically disqualify things for me.. I use Windows, I use other US products - with caution of course. But for 'crucial' things I certainly now try to avoid US-based corporate products/services - no question about that.

Webroot should really be cautious of whom they hire, and whom they allow to be connected to them. Nowadays it's absolutely a tragedy for companies to be linked to anything remotely connected to the NSA/CIA. It's corporate suicide.

 

@DoctorPC

Damn son.....

You be laying out some strong information, what are you NSA or somthin? Its like that next level.

Yeah, you could say so.

 

I've got nothing to hide. NSA can spy on me if they'd like.

Tinfoil hat off!

 

Joe as already responded what more is there to say really?

A statement from Webroot would surely look more or less the same.

And I doubt you're opinion or feeling about it will change based on what Webroot may say. Either you trust Webroot or you don't.

It seems it would be best for all NSA employees to stay with the NSA until they retire.

 

Well said

 

Not to go off tangent, but I think you need to understand something..

Your statement is dangerous. The bar at which you have nothing to hide isn't determined by you once you've signed your privacy over, it's determined by those monitoring you, and that can vary dramatically, even over time as that threshold is changed. Through this threshold dynamic, freedom of all people can be infringed upon with contrived threats to suit the agenda requirements. So you have nothing to hide? Let's assume you never do, or think you never do. However if that threshold is modified to include something has benign as a survivalist, or libertarian that threatens the established government? How about an herbalist that they view threatening to the FDA/Drug Companies at some point?

The fact is, you do not know if you do not have anything to hide, that's not a threshold you control. By willfully assigning your right to privacy over to someone else you've given control of that threshold to someone outside of you. Does that make sense? If political thugs will shut down a bridge to punish a mayor, imagine what they would do with access to NSA spying data on the American Public? That's the bigger lesson here. The bridge scandal is important on multiple levels. And one of those levels is what it tells us about the danger of the NSA's vacuum spying.

Back to Webroot - it's a great product. But I think they need to be careful of their associations.. I don't care if Dunk has the best credentials in the world, hiring him is a risky venture in light of the Snowden revelations. Former CIA/NSA employees are tainted goods these days, and putting that on your CV is corporate suicide.

The saving grace? Simple.. If a company like Webroot is determined to be compromised it would be devastating to the brand, absolutely devastating, and overnight they'd lose 75% of their installed base. That's what saves us - or at least offers some level of protection - our pocketbooks.. Right now hundreds of thousands of people a day are moving their cloud storage, email hosting, and server co-locations outside of the USA. Hundreds of thousands of companies across the planet are ditching Cisco, Juniper, and Huamei. These companies will feel the pain. Also note, McAfee was mentioned in Snowden files if I remember my reading of some of the releases, and within weeks after this they decided to change the name to 'Intel Security'.. That won't be enough, McAfee as a brand is destroyed as more of this data becomes known.

 

If you want and remember where you read about it you could post about that in this thread:https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=358190

 

Here is the Official Press Release for the Tinfoil Hat wearers: http://www.webroot.com/us/en/compan...appoints-david-duncan-chief-marketing-officer

TH

 

How do you prove that those in a position to know the answer and/or reply to such questions aren't... per strongly held beliefs about what is "necessary" to achieve "national security"... and/or per highest-priority legal agreement (under potentially severe penalties)... going to keep it secret and misrepresent the facts? Even if you somehow could know that during questioning event E at time T, how could you rely upon those answers to apply in the past and in the future?

Sometimes you just can't reliably know the answer to things that you would would want to know and have to know in order to determine whether or not to expose information to a party

PS: We shouldn't call thoughtful people thinking about and discussing totally legitimate concerns tinfoil hat wearers.

 

I don't appreciate the snarky comment. Yesterday's tinfoil hat wearers are on todays news, almost daily, discussing Snowden revelations. Conspiracy theories, once thought to be ludicrous, are revealed to have been totally accurate. Dismissing anyone you don't agree with as wearing a tinfoil hat degrades your standing, and lacks professionalism.

I have no blind devotion to any product, service, or person (other than my wife and kids), and frankly, I think it is dangerous to have blind devotion to anything but. Failure to admit the obvious is a sign of blind devotion that supersedes logic, or ration discussion, and it's something I've always disliked. You do not represent Webroot in any official capacity. Therefore your contributions here are nothing more than cursory, and based on your last post, fairly defamatory.

 

I gave the Official Release and if you read it and if people can't take a joke then you shouldn't posting here geees.

TH

 

Wouldn't it then be better if you asked a specific question about something you're wondering about on this matter and got an reply back on that question instead of waiting for an official answer of some kind on this wich may never happen?

I am very well aware of why this could be of concern for some, but I find it a bit funny that a company wich now employ a former NSA employee would need to go through some kind of Q&A session because of that.

 

@justenough

I don't work for Webroot I help Joe and help users of Prevx and now WSA also to moderate this forum as this thread is getting close to being closed.

TH