Really has become. For example, digital methods are used to control all kinds of things, everything from bridges. It can mean ports. It can mean dams. It can mean the power grid. There are a lot of americans that dont fully understand how serious a threat were fighting. As a former fbi agent and chairman of the house intelligence committee, i had oversight of all 16 of our nations intelligence agencies. My name is mike rogers. I had access to classified information gathered by our operatives. People who risked everything for the United States and our families. You dont know their faces or their names. You dont know the real stories from the people who lived the fear and the pressure until now. So in december of 2009 i had joined the Investigations Unit for hsi in philadelphia. It sounds very technical, but all it is is just try to prevent u. S. Technology from getting into the wrong hands. Illegal acquisitions of u. S. Goods and technology can assist our adversaries in harming u. S. Soldiers. Citizens and allies. Basically what we do is we go out to companies all around the country so that they know who we are and can call us if they see any wrongdoing. So my first outreach was to a Company Called agi. Theyre a u. S. Defense contractor. And they produce complex threedimensional Simulation Software called stk, satellite toolkit. That wasnt my world. I mean, i was coming from investigating narcotics trafficking. What really opened my eyes to the importance of this technology was a simulation that they ran for me of a Ballistic Missile launch from north korea to hawaii. And in this simulation it looked at u. S. Satellites, literally where they were in outer space to figure out how can they do this launch at just the right time when our satellites arent watching to get that missile up and over so it could strike wide before were ready to defend ourselves. And that kind of opened my eyes to the importance of this software and why it shouldnt be in the wrong hands. So i came to the end of my presentation and almost as an afterthought, the control officer pulled me aside and he showed me crack 99. He showed me agis stk software advertised for a thousand dollars on a chinese website where it didnt belong. He said im not sure this they actually have it because in order to sell our product they would need the electronic license files, almost like an electric key that accompanied this product or the program wouldnt work. So he wasnt sure whether they actually had it or not. I had to find out. I spoke with my supervisor mike about my visit to agi and the discovery of crack 99. The two things we decided on was that, one, we were going to initiate an undercover operation and, two, were going to need to call dave hall. Dave had a proven track record. I knew that dave understood the complexities of these types of investigations. And based on the fact that it was sensitive technology, we knew that he would be perfect. One of the concerns we had at the beginning of the investigation was whether this person was working for the Chinese Government. Generally speaking they are considered to be an adversary of the United States and this software had direct military application and it gives us an advantage strategically in dealing with adversaries. Figuring out who was behind crack 99 was a little bit like finding a needle in a haystack, operating in anonymity on the internette makes it a lot easier to commit these crimes. Agi had done a little bit of their own research. Where is it hosted . And sure enough it was hosted in chengdu, china, under the name xiang li. I want to know what are we looking at . How big is this i wanted to make an undercover purchase. Crack 99 offered a very unique insertion point for an undercover operation because it was a website that was open to the public. I called a colleague of mine from the defense criminal investigative service, dcis, who works as an undercover agent and could take on the undercover person that for this case. I knew thats where this was going to go. They Work Together to stop the trafficking of critical dod Weapons Systems and technology. We dont want bad guys getting our stuff. That would provide our enemies with an advantage having the same weapons we have. We dont want to have a level playing field. We want to have the upper hand. Our mission is to protect the war fighter and in the end they protect us. When i first saw the website, it was like a bad 80s television commercial. It really was sloppy. It was like an amazon or ebay of pirating software, but this is technology that isnt off the shelf. Its not available to even u. S. Citizens. It was pretty clear this was a threat to national security. Our first investigative step was to send an email. We asked to purchase satellite toolkit for 1 thousand dollars. The retail value of that software was more like 150,000. He wrote us back and in the email he laid out payment instructions. Send payment via western union. Myself and the agent, we drove to the First Western union we could find in the state of delaware and we sent 1,000 to china. Not knowing the background of whose running the website, i wasnt confident that we were going to get what we paid for. Maybe its a scam. Maybe were about to get ripped off. We dont know at this point. Essentially were collecting evidence. Thats why we have to make the purchase and then see what happens from there. We open up our undercover laptop computer, and we just waited. And later on that day he sent us the Download Links. And he gave us instructions in broken english on how to unpack the files and download the software. We brought the evidence over to agi. And the head of i. T. Unpacked these files. He was floored by what he saw. We had every single one of their programs. All operational. This Technology Gives us an advantage on the battlefield and the threat posed by an operation like this is that he could sell it to anyone who was willing to pay for it. It can go to adversaries of the United States, it can go to terrorist organizations, it can go to criminal organizations. This software, finding its way into the wrong hands is equally as dangerous as any weapon. The reaction once we realized that the software was legitimate was what else do they have . Gordon ramsay . Handing out samples . Seems like just an ok use of your culinary talents, dude. Yeah it is smart guy. Almost like having a brand new iphone but not pairing it with at t. Thats true. Gordon ramsay. Oi, fingers, its not a buffet use the cocktail stick. Use a cocktail stick. Get the most from your amazing new iphone 11 pro on at t, americas Fastest Network for iphones. More for your thing. Thats our thing. Son, i need to tewhat is it, dad . If you ever have any questions, you call 18775225001. 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[ song johnny cash, th sthese are my people these are the ones who will reach for the stars these are my people by the light of the earth, you can tell they are ours a new step to take and a new day will break yes, these are my people they give us excellent customer otservice, every time. E. Our 18 year old was in an accident. Usaa took care of her car rental, and getting her car towed. All i had to take care of was making sure that my daughter was ok. If i met another veteran, and they were with another insurance company, i would tell them, you need to join usaa because they have better rates, and better service. Were the gomez family. Were the rivera family. Were the kirby family, and we are usaa members for life. Get your Auto Insurance quote today. U. S. Defense software was being sold on a chinese website where it didnt belong called crack 99. This software had direct military application and the implications are scary because there is no way of restraining the sales. It can go to terrorist organizations, it can go to criminal organizations. The reaction once we realized that the software was legitimate was what else do they have . Ultimately our goal in the undercover investigation was to successfully prosecute in a u. S. Court of law. We knew we were dealing with a person who was holding himself out as xiang li, but in addition to not knowing if that was a real person, we didnt know if that was the only person involved. We had a large number of questions about the operation. We needed to figure out a way of getting a viable target. So in january in 2010 i requested authorization to go trap and trace on xiang lis email account. If gives it gives me the email addresses. So i can get an understanding of how big his Customer Base is and how big his operation is. Email is an extremely rich source of evidence for Law Enforcement, but that doesnt mean you can just read somebodys email in a Law Enforcement investigation because youre interested. You still have to develop probable cause and obtain a warrant from a federal judge in order to gain access to their email. So dave said lets do a few more purchases and lets verify that this wasnt a fluke. Me and my counterpart went through another website. We sent a western payment to xiang li for these two programs. Same thing. Sent us Download Links later that day. Xiang li was highly responsive. He was extremely attentive to customer relations. He would do whatever we needed him to do as long as we first paid him the money. Thats the thing we noticed about him is that he was all about the money. So we downloaded the programs onto our laptop. We flew out to san jose, met with the company. They looked at it and they figured out that this was a working copy of their program. Again, he had cracked the license file to make it work. This software tested the Structural Integrity of airplanes, of spacecraft. Crack 99 was selling it as if it was, you know, a Microsoft Office suite. I was becoming increasingly concerned about the implications of the crack 99 operation. The biggest question for all of us was where did this come from . How did he get it . We didnt know if crack 99 was a large number of people hacking into u. S. Servers. We didnt know if he had inhouse crackers, meaning people who crack the licensing file to enable access to the software. I had no idea who i was communicating with, the originator or if it was one of hundreds of sales reps. Its an overseas target who is particularly difficult to identify because hes operating on the internet and is anonymous. So on the crack 99 website theres an email address to contact him at gmail. Com. You might ask why he was using g mail and therefore accessible by u. S. Law enforcement. And the answer is he wanted to use a readily available email that everybody was familiar with as opposed to a chinese email server. Once we had completed our third purchase, we applied for a search warrant. The judge signed off on the search warrant, and we submitted our search warrant to google. It boggles my mind that he has a gmail address. Were lucky he did. What it gave me was all the incoming and outgoing emails from that account and when we got the results, we realized that we had about 12,000 emails. And thats when we understood the full scale of his operation. We could see he was selling to customers all over the world. I saw Government Customer s from places like uganda, uae, saudi arabia. I also saw some customers in there from places like syria. One particular case it was for a government contract in syria. Iran. He had plenty of people reach out to him from iran. We knew that we did, in fact, have a problem, and we really needed to pick up the pace in this investigation. If we dont stop crack 99, the potential consequences are troops being hurt, terrorist attacks. Theres a reason this technology is restricted, and thats to avoid exactly this situation where the technology is being trafficked without any limitations all over the world. We know we need to have a plan to meet him face to face, to ultimately make an arrest. The problem is that hes in china, were in the United States. Plants capture co2. What if other kinds of plants captured it too . If these industrial plants had technology that captured carbon like trees we could help lower emissions. Carbon capture is Important Technology and experts agree. Thats why were working on ways to improve it. So plants. Can be a little more. Like plants. Behr presents tough as walls. Thats some great paint. Thats some great paint. Behr ultra, ranked 1 in Customer Satisfaction with interior paints. Great paint, new low price. Starting at 29. 98. Exclusively at the home depot. Tmobiles newest signal reaches farther than ever before. With more engineers. More towers. More coverage its a network that gives you freedom from big cities, to small towns, were with you. Because life can take you almost anywhere, tmobile is with you. No signal goes farther or is more reliable in keeping you connected. Hey. Hey. You must be stevens phone. Now you can take control of your home wifi and get a notification the instant someone new joins your network. Only with xfinity xfi. Download the xfi app today. As i was reviewing the emails, i saw that his customers were from over 60 different countries. He had emails from places like syria and iran. He doesnt care who his customers were. He just knew that they wanted a product and he had it for them, and he had to figure out how to get it to them. Ultimately we found well over 500 transactions. Its scary to think that stuff is in the wrong hands. Copy by mid2010 we had looked through the emails, and at that point we determined what the scope of the crack 99 operation was. Crack 99 was xiang li. It was one person operating this website and really if you think about what the crack 99 website was, it was an inventory of high level advanced software that had been stolen from the United States. Xiang li never asked us why we wanted the software, who we were, how we were going to use it. He had no concern for the potential harm and the consequences. His technology trafficking operation could cause. So now we could get a federal arrest warrant for this guy, but its not going to amount to much to somebody in china who is going to want to leave. It helped to go through all of his emails because i could figure out a little bit more about xiang li and im seeing how he communicates with his customers. How he follows up. I mean, he really was dedicated to all of his customers to making sure that they got the product that they paid for. And so i knew that he was eager to please his customers. I wanted to use that to get him to travel to where we could arrest this guy. We understood what his motivation was, and his motivation was money. In my experience, greed is almost always what gets people caught. Were not talking about crimes of passion here, you know. This is business. And then violating the law to make money. So the plan was that we would put a carrot on the stick in the form of more money. So i was going to explain to him that i was a business broker for an Aerospace Software products in the United States and that i had a Customer Base already that would be willing to pay considerably more than what he was selling his products for on crack 99 and that together we could make a lot of money. We told xiang li that we thought his prices in many cases were too low. We told him we could help him increase his revenue. So at this stage we thought the communications needed to go beyond email to skype calls. And i know that he said in his emails he doesnt speak english. And thats when we elicited the assistance of a translator to have telephone conversations. The point of these skype calls, in addition to proposing this business idea, was just to develop a rapport and a relationship and trust. Good morning, how are you . Were very excited about the software we got so far. Its been truly worth our while. The undercover was very disarming, very friendly. He was very natural person. Thats what we needed for this part of the operation. I want to explain an idea that we have here. Weve found a market for software. Small businesses are willing to pay a lot of money for u. S. Software. We can give him 50 for his support. That will be the partnership. At first he was a little guarded because he wasnt sure why i didnt just purchase the software from him and sell it to my customers without his knowledge. My story was i needed to have somebody that could troubleshoot. Im not a computer guy. Were interested in acquiring his support for the software that we purchase. Thats what we would need from him. If we had questions, i wouldnt be able to answer them. Thats why i needed him. I put a value to his participation. He said he need to protect his identity. Okay. I understand that. Hes not going to talk directly to our customer about price. No, no, never. So you be the one that talk price. Our customers will never know his identity. They will only be dealing with us. He says okay. He was very interested in that because what all that meant was that he could make a lot more money in the u. S. Market. During our first call we introduced the idea of us meeting in person. Tell him very excited about that. Has he ever has he traveled in the u. S. . I would love to meet and invite him to our business. He said he can come to u. S. It didnt go very far. We have a little laugh about it and we kind of just moved on. I knew it would be difficult to get him to travel, so i wanted to tread lightly. And then he introduced something new to us. He came back and said that he has another big surprise for us. He has