 I'm going to introduce our next speaker, guys. So come on in, sit down. This is next to last, and we're almost done for the night. I know it's a sad day. It's a sad time. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, if you can join me in welcoming our next speaker. Anyone not get one of these things? These are great, aren't they? I don't know if we have any left, but they're really awesome. One of my staff came up with this idea two years ago, and we've been doing this ever since. You can just, like, turn it over, and all you need is the Hubble telescope or a microscope to read it. But if you have really good eyes, it's really great. So Robert Anderson is our next speaker. He's a former intelligence officer with the U.S. Army, and he's been an instructor for SOCOM intelligence training, and he's got some really interesting topics and a lot of experience in the topics that he's about to talk about. So the title of his talk is U.S. Interrogation Techniques and Social Engineering. So join me in welcoming Robert Anderson. Thank you, Chris. It's really hard to follow Chris after an event like this, but I appreciate it, and I'm very honored, actually, to be here in front of you, and thank you very much. I hope you find what I'm about to tell you educational and that you'll be able to adapt and apply it in the course of work that you're doing right now. Because I think it's very important. A little background. Yeah, former intelligence officer. I was in the U.S. Army interrogation school. I also went through the Israeli interrogation school, and then after a couple years became a senior instructor for the U.S. Army for interrogation. I've conducted a bunch of missions all over 20 years. I actually, my first computer experience was an Apple II with the Army, and they had this green screen and basically connected to the 33-inch disk for gathering and monitoring intelligence. Then I bought my Macintosh when they first came out, and we used a lot of different computers at that time. Again, in the IT cybersecurity field for over 15 years, you can find me on Facebook under Elvis and my other handle is the Mantis. What I just found, as I became more and more involved in IT and cybersecurity and the whole vectors and the whole attacks coming through social engineering and, of course, trying to stay up in the field as a professional, I saw just some complementary things about what I learned in interrogation school and the techniques that social engineers use in order to display their craft. It's comparable, it's congruent, it's corresponding. To me, they kind of share some DNA. I kind of think of them as Irish twins. They're not quite exactly the same, but they're close enough for you to go. They must be related somehow. The interrogation school is probably some of the most comprehensive training I've ever been through. It was really, really thorough. It's conducted at US Intel School down in Fort Wachuka. We called it Fort We Gotcha, and there's a lot of intelligence training that goes on in that fort. The overall interrogation program itself, let me see, I'm coming out of college, background's in Near East history and languages, and I'm like, well, what am I going to do? I thought I was going to go to Harvard and get my PhD and become a professor and read Ugarit and Hebrew and Arabic all day long to people. But then this recruiter came to me and said, we could really use someone like you. I was like, how? He started going over what they were doing and talked about the interrogation school. I was like, I'm really not into hurting people and bamboo shoots and all that stuff. I'm not so cool about that. Then he said, we're going to train you in Arabic and we're going to send you overseas to travel all the time. I was like, okay, I'm into that. I want to learn another language. I love travel. The overall program itself, just the interrogation trainings, used to be six months. When I went through it, it was six months. Now they've shortened it a little bit. Then when I took the training, we were given a targeted language for various countries. The leading target areas are pretty much the same right now, Middle East, China and Russia. We first started out doing just classic book learning and understanding the different techniques and getting tested on those every day. There was a test on a certain technique and a certain approach. There was a lot of book learning. Then after that, we had a two-hour prep and then we were in a three-hour lab in an actual mock interrogation with a variety of different type of sources, as we call them, targets as social engineers call them. Everything was recorded. My whole three-hour interrogation with anybody was always recorded. Then we'd go back and the instructors would take me through my recording of that last interrogation. This one on five days a week for like four months. It was very, very intense. If you can imagine learning something by the book and then actually doing it and then watching yourself do it and then other interrogators watching you go through it, just the feedback and the input just made it a phenomenal, incredible training session. There's a final test. The last interrogation, of course, was brutal. It was a lot of stress. But again, it helped me in a lot of areas in life, just understanding people, reading people, and I'll get into more of that in a bit. Overall, interrogation training, they train us in all facets of intelligence. There are intelligence analysts that gather information and review information. There are what you guys know as SIGIT intelligents that deal with signals coming out of the NSA and the Army had its own little group that did that in a tactical fashion if they were actually going into the battlefield. But all that still was fed up to NSA. So we trained in all facets of intelligence, counterintelligence and things like that. We were looking at, you know, because we had to prep, we had to have this training so we would understand what other information was available to us before I went into it in interrogation so I could have all the information I needed to actually prep and learn about what's going on with this particular individual or team or whatever. So it was some really good training. And of course, there was computers. You guys probably heard a lot about interrogators over the last 10 years, since 9-11 and Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and all that. It's changed. It's called a Military Occupational Specialty. Many of you may have been in the military. It's an MOS. When I first came in the Army, it was in 96 Charlie and they were called interrogators or prisoners of war. But then they thought that was too abrasive, I guess, and they turned us into 97 Echoes and they called us Interrogator Translator so they kind of a little nicer. And then after Abu Ghraib and all the investigations and, you know, senators talking about POWs and what we did, and it was ugly at Abu Ghraib. And we can imagine Chris or any other speakers here could tell you that, hey, if you're a torturer, you're target, you're probably going to knock in a lot of information out of them. And that's exactly true. So the Abu Ghraib was a horrible incident. So after that they completely changed it and removed the name Interrogator from the whole thing and now they're just human intelligence collectors. The field manuals changed as well. All of these were available online. It's, you know, a really good source for DICE and ISIS and anybody else to go out there and go, oh, here's the actual interrogation techniques they're going to use on us. Oh, okay. So you can get all this online. It's one way of operating, I guess. Once you become an interrogator, sometimes you're involved in a couple different areas. You might be, you might do a tactical interrogation, you know, during a conflict like the ones that are going on now or you might be, you know, and that's basically information that's 24 to 48 hours. You're trying to get it right away because something's going on and you want to make sure you get the information right away. So you use different approaches and techniques to gain that information. The other program you might go into would be called Strategic Debriefer and that would be, you know, let's say someone is trying to immigrate to the United States and, you know, he's coming from Iran and he used to work at the airport in construction and we would ask them, we had a whole different objective for that and we would want to know, well, tell us about, you know, what kind of concrete was used, what was poured. So then we gather that kind of intelligence and we know, well, we know what kind of concrete they use on the airport, so we need this type of bomb to take the airport out and so that would, that would be the role of a strategic debriefer. And then there was a Psychological Operations PsyOps. They take our skills and they use those to, you know, do a lot of different things, some things, you know, disinformation to try to throw the enemy off. The PsyOps unit would have, they would go into a country and they could set up a TV station, a radio station, a newspaper and then within 24 hours start broadcasting on the radio and on TV, intercepting a TV signal, sending out propaganda with that signal and then they could, of course, sort of leaflet dropping and things like that, so they could do a lot of that. The area of PsyOps is, you know, kind of interesting because it's changed, too. It doesn't sound like a very friendly name, so that's become a whole new name basically for collecting of information. So it's, they're kind of, they're trying to make all these roles and tactics appear to be nicer, which is not working, but... So I first found out I said this enticing thing about being an interrogator and all the movies we watched and all the stuff that, you know, we used to see and, you know, I was thinking the bamboo shoots and, you know, the rack and, you know, whatever. Never heard of waterboarding when I was in college so I had no idea what that was. Walk into the class and there's like six instructors and they come in and the lead instructor comes in and there's 16 of us in class and he comes in, we have one objective here and that is to teach you how to lie and imagine having six months of training on how to lie. And, you know, it's the whole basis of what many, you know, all social engineering is about. You go in, you're trying to be something, somebody, you're pre-texting, you're role-playing and you're basically lying from the get-go. So that was kind of interesting to me to kind of, you know, understand how we're going to learn how to lie very effectively. Now this kind of gets into the meat of what I'm talking about because these are the approaches that we would use and we were trained on, you know, for, you know, over and over again just so we would know how to really understand what is the best approach by reading our source, you know, looking at that body language, you know, looking at, you know, different things, speech patterns and stuff like that. Very similar to what Chris was just talking about. The direct approach is pretty much as it is. I mean, you walk in... I mean, imagine if you have ever imagined if we could have some POWs in here, I don't know. But if you get caught and you're in a conflict and you're caught by the enemy, imagine the fear that you have, you know, being in that situation. It's pretty hard to comprehend. I've never been in that situation. I've been in simulations, but never been in the real thing. And so many, many times just walking up and doing the direct approach with, you know, they just, they don't care. They're so afraid they're going to give you everything. And it's just, you know, you try that approach first and maybe another interrogator tries that approach first. You get whatever information you can and then it resists you. And then you go, okay, we're going to try a different approach. Incentive approach, basically, you know, hey, we're going to give you this if you give us this. We'll give you better sleeping conditions, better food, cleaner water, all that stuff. So incentives to basically bribe them to give us information. Emotional approaches kind of get, you know, they're a little more interesting because you really have to understand your source and you really have to build a rapport with them or her. And I haven't interrogated many women, but men especially, you know, it's a little bit different approach you want to use. You know, you have to adjust to, you know, their culture. You have to adjust to, you know, their particular circumstance. You know, you learn about, you know, where they were captured, you know, what they were captured with, what unit they were with, and then you use that to figure out ways to get information out of them. And that's all we want to do, which is the same thing a social engineer does. I want information. How can I get it in the most effective, efficient way? So you can imagine someone comes in and they're really scared out of their wits. And, you know, an emotional love approach, you know, really works a lot. And these positive approaches are probably more conducive to social engineering because, like I said, you know, the negative ones, you know, work in some instances, but most of the time it's a positive approach on the social engineering side. So, you know, showing someone, you can imagine when you're in a situation that you might be as a POW just to feel a kind touch, you know, on your shoulder. Just, you know, as opposed to thinking this guy's going to beat the crap out of me. Using that approach is very, very effective with, you know, many, many people in that kind of situation. Historically, a lot of the things we've been dealing with right now have been dealt with, you know, very strong emotional hate. So, you can use that approach if you have the right follow-up to gain the information. And it's very effective if someone, you know, for some reason decides they're not as afraid as we thought they were and they try to, you know, be a little more upfront about, you know, their feelings about whatever complex is going on or whatever the situation is. So, you know, we use that lightly when it's necessary because you're not going to get information out of someone, you know, if all they're spooing is hate and, you know, fear out, you know, as you just try to bang down on them hard. And I'm not saying physically, I'm talking emotionally and verbally, or it's, you know, a tag team approach where you have several different interrogators going after a source to get the information. Emotional fear up, same thing. You want to increase the fear. And there's a variety of ways we would do that. We would, you know, do that through various threats, various intimidation techniques and things like that. But again, all emotional, you know, there's no physical abuse whatsoever in this. I'll get into some of the physical stuff that we were permitted, you know, by whatever law or by training, you know, to do. Because again, you're not, the information, you want accurate information that's timely and, you know, fear doesn't necessarily, you know, bring that out of, you know, of a person in the most accurate way. Emotional fear down, again, is when that we see how scared they are, we know how scared they are and we're trying to do everything to calm them down and to assure them, you know, that we're not going to hurt them, you know, that we're going to take care of them. Okay, you know, we're going to feed you, clothe you, you know, get you back to your family as soon as, you know, we can work out whatever process we need to. So, you know, please, you know, calm down, we want to take care of you. Emotional pride, you go up, basically trying to build somebody up. And this really works well as a social engineer, you know, when you walk in and talk to the receptionist and you're like complimenting her or, you know, being nice to the speaker because he's an Eagles fan, even though you're a Cowboys fan, even though I'm a Niners fan. So that eagle up, you know, social engineers use, you know, all the time. Once in a while, you know, we'll use Eagle Down where you want to, you know, use your so-called pretext and your role-playing in a position that, well, listen, the CEO's expecting me and, you know, that doesn't happen, you know, I would hate to put in a bad word about you. So those kinds of areas, they work, they're probably not the most effective way, you know, even for social engineers, you know, to utilize that technique, you know, to really put the fear of God in someone or use that authority in somehow to, you know, abuse them in some way. Emotional futility, probably, you know, basically that's where we're telling the source that, you know, you know, there's no hope. You know, you are done. You're going to be, you know, prisoner of war, you know, for a very, very long time and we just make his position look futile so that basically he or she gives up and says, okay, you know, here's what I know. There's nothing I can do anyway, so I'm just going to tell you. Other approaches which a lot of social engineers can use as well, one, the we-know-all approach when you basically are telling your target that source, hey, you know, we know your unit, we know you were here, we know you were going after this and, you know, we already talked out here, friends, and they already spilled. So, you know, go ahead and tell us because we already know it all anyway. We just, if you cooperate, you know, we'll be kinder to you in, you know, your circumstances here right now. So it's an excellent approach because it, again, kind of plays on the futility approach. We already know everything but, you know, we need to know you cooperate if you don't and basically we're writing everything down to record even though we may not know anything. File and dossier approach, you know, this is, you know, kind of a role-playing approach where you walk in, you have a bunch of, you know, papers and stuff and you throw them down the desk and, you know, talking to the source and he's like, oh my gosh, what's all this? You kind of shuffle through the papers and they're, you know, then you look up, oh, yeah, you're in this unit and this is your commander. Okay, that's great. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm sorry about him getting shot like that. Oh, yeah, your other comrade. Yeah, he's wounded in the hospital but we're taking care of him. Just wanted you to know. And another one, repetition approach. Probably not real effective on social engineering. You don't sit there and ask, you know, whoever you're trying to gather information from the same question over and over and over again. It'll annoy them. They'll wonder, you know, what's going on and why you're acting so weird. But in an interrogation situation it's very applicable. But probably not so on social engineering but try it. You know, who knows if it might work for you. Rapid fire approach is when you have multiple people and this sometimes can't work. If you have a lot of people that have approached a front desk it can distract, it can cause, you know, a lot of confusion for the people at the front desk and you'd be amazed at, you know, people that you could sneak around from a social engineering perspective, you know, to get through, you know, that front gate and that so that rapid fire approach can be effective in a social engineering setting if you plan it properly and execute it properly. But if, you know, imagine a source who's just been captured just basically having three or four people firing questions at them at one point in time he or she is just going to be confused dazed and eventually just wears them down and that's, you know, part of the goal, wear them down emotionally. Silent approach can be very very effective in an interrogation perspective. Don't see a lot of applicability here, you know, with social engineering. You know, you're not going to get a lot of information, you just sit there and be silent, you know, whether you're at the front desk in the reception in this office and it's not going to be that effective. You can have what they call, you know, pregnant pauses where you're making them think and that can be effective but the silent approach here is you just sit across, you know, the interrogation table and you're either not looking at the source for a long, long time or you're looking directly at the source for a very long time but you're not saying a word. Of course, their mind is going crazy with what's going on, what's going to happen. I have no idea what this person's, what this interrogator is trying to do. Change of scenery is very effective. You take a person, you know, you still have a military police with you but just say you take them out of the security compound and you walk them over, you know, kind of see, you know, a little different view. It kind of changes their perspective. They get out, they get to just take a walk. They're out of, you know, their POW compound. So change of scenery can work and it can work for your social engineering perspective as well. You're talking to someone and you come out and just, you know, if you watch spy games but you're Robert Redford saying hey, always keep a packet of cigarettes a lighter because it's an easy way to start a conversation with someone and you can walk someone outside while they're going to take a smoke break and begin, you know, your information there. Gathering whatever you can, you know, in a different setting. You know, they feel less exposed. They're more comfortable and, you know, they don't have any other people around them that might hear what you're talking about. You guys have seen some of these. The mutton Jeff approach or the good cop, bad cop, the one who's been doing that done, the one really, someone's, you know, really being harsh with the source and then someone comes in and breaks that up and says, hey, you know, you can't treat this guy like this and moves in and, you know, they're being the nice cop and, you know, it's very effective. You can use this, you can definitely apply this to social engineering in situations where someone is leading in as a part of an overall exercise and you're the one that kind of redeems and saves, you know, an individual and you earn, you know, their respect and build that rapport with them from, you know, being the one that rescued them from the bad person. False flag, the not a lot of applicability in some senses. I mean, you can, it works. You know, of course, interrogation settings, but not so much in the social engineering. I've never applied it in social engineering. Separation, of course, you guys have heard of that. Separation could be a positive thing or a negative thing. So in some instances when, you know, you've heard of putting them in isolation, you know, that's, it's very harsh treatment. Emotionally, you know, we love human interaction. It's a natural thing. If you don't have that, you know, it really wears you down emotionally. Physical separation is a part of that. And then field expedient separation is another drastic technique that, you know, we would apply, you know, in certain circumstances as well. Separation, you know, as a social engineering, you know, technique you can definitely use whether you're in whatever setting in the business setting or if you're actually approaching someone that you've already done research on and you know where they're doing their happy hour and you make your approach then to initially, you know, gain familiarity and rapport, you know, with source of information and gain more information about their colleagues, but kind of separating them. So if you're asking intruding questions or maybe, you know, corporate sensitive questions, you know, they'd be more inclined to provide that information for you. There's a lot of things they taught us during that six month training that was a series of various questioning skills. And again, we do those three hour labs we'd ask certain questions, they'd come back and say you should have, you know, used this question, you should have tried this technique and, you know, we'd have direct questions, indirect questions closed questions open questions leading questions and then something a lot of social engineers should, you know, take advantage of control questions, verifying the information that someone may have told you. They may have told you something and you think it's correct, but they may have misspoke forgot and then, oh, suddenly as you keep talking it comes back to them and so a control question is always a good thing to verify and validate information. Listening, of course, is paramount. You have to listen to what your source is saying and the inflection of their voice and this is the same thing, you know, in social engineering. I'm more adept at person-to-person social engineering. I haven't practiced, and I'm decent at phone, but I'm not as good as some of these guys by any means. I just haven't done it enough because I like that contact. I like to see them. I like to know and understand where they're coming from. When they feel uncomfortable, when I'm making them feel good it's easier for me. I'm decent, but not as good as these guys. I just don't have enough practice. But these are different type of listening techniques, dialogic, critical emotional and then the biggest thing that they beat into us in school is attention to detail, the littlest detail and you'd be in a situation and they have these scenarios that they've been going through for years and years and years and they know there's just one piece of voice inflection or one movement of a facial movement and if I didn't catch that they'd tell me, like, you missed that. If you'd have gone that, then the role he would have gone in this other direction I would have had the information faster. Sometimes you go back and I get the information but they were like, yeah, you should have been done in an hour and a half and you went almost two and a half hours because you missed this one clue. And then covers. Covers are just one of the easiest ways to gain information. Many times I wouldn't walk in to the WC compound or the interrogation booth I would, you know, as entirely your interrogator, how are you? I would come in as someone else. I might come in as the U.N. I might come in as, you know, another you know, as Humana, a humanitarian organization and say, hi, I'm with United Nations and we're investigating, you know, the treatment of POWs here in this situation. So if you would please tell me about yourself and they would be like I can help you out and we're going to get you out of here because I'm lying my ass off but, you know, I'm the U.N. guy and that's what they think. So we play a lot of different roles priests doctors, a lot of things and just basically lie to them to gain that, you know, get the information out of them because they don't think I'm an interrogator someone else trying to help them out. Of course props, costumes for all those roles we would use stress positions you guys probably heard about these a little bit in the news we would do this once in a while the ones we would apply so I worked a lot in the Middle East and Africa so just putting someone outside in the sun and having them stand in a certain position for you'd be amazed you put someone in a certain position just how tired their legs get and they just start wobbling and they're in the hot sun and then you bring them up to the most you know we would do it wouldn't take long because it's 120 degrees out there we'd be like 15 minutes then we, you know, because we didn't want we didn't want anything to die okay you're not going to get information out of a dead person we didn't want anyone to die so if you see kind of the correlation I'm hoping you're seeing what I saw seven, eight years ago as I saw this as a potential threat to the companies that I consulted with there's objectives for both matching that they're trying to obtain information techniques match there's lying, there's deception besides being attention to detail planning in us being sincere and convincing which is exactly what a social engineer does like Chris is saying you know, don't ever go out of pretext stay there stay there, just hey this is what I am this is my role, this is my this is what I'm trying to do here and you know I don't know what the problem is and training you to be sincere and convincing was one of the most important rules that they made us abide by we want to build rapport with whoever we're trying to get information from we want them to have confidence in us and so we, you know there's complete overlap there with social engineering and interrogation techniques a lot of the methods overlap a lot of the approaches overlap so that was kind of the whole gist of you know why I wanted to come here and share with you and hopefully get feedback and input what you think about how the army trained me as an interrogator which is a little bit different than how they're training today but still pretty much everything the same lying big deception, building rapport questioning techniques and style reading your source or targets body language, attitudes and motions, you know kind of having that sixth sense, pretexting cover stories, all are things that overlap between social engineering and interrogation ah, yeah, lying you know it's, you know I've, I guess first raised I'm an ordained Mormon priest I'm an ironic priest according to the Mormon church but I left then when I was 13 and, but still had, you know some, you know, Judeo Christian, you know, faith and background so lying really wasn't something that was very conducive to the way I was raised but I learned, I learned to adapt to it ah, very quickly but sometimes it really got the best because I'd be dating someone and I just, I'd go into cover and pretext and I'd be like holy shit, I just lied the crap out then I'd have to go back and you know cover myself later if the relationship turned into anything long term so it ah, it ah, it's very interesting about lying but it's just something that's at the heart of social engineering and what we you know, what we need to do in order to get the information from people building rapport is critical ah, whether you're lying or not you're just trying to build rapport and you, once you gain that confidence once you get that, the faster you get that rapport the faster you'll get the information ah, and you do whatever you need to do one of the situations I was in when I was conducting a pen test for an organization, CEOs of course are very susceptible, they're getting better but you know senior executives they seem to think that they don't have to follow the security policies and IT security rules and things like that ah, so we conducted a test we went after the CEO ah, we did initial research, found out what he was going to be doing, where he was going to be ah, we knew he was going to be out of the office for a certain period of time and so we planned this ah, over about two weeks ah, when he was not in the office we called his receptionist and we basically started posing as his new father-in-law to be, whom she had never met and you know, he was completely busy with work had no idea about what was going on with all the wedding plans and basically went after the receptionist because we had heard in other engagements at some of the really swanky clubs in Washington DC ah, that you know, because he was a CEO really had a bad memory problem, wrote down all his passwords and one of the IT guys that we basically listened to, you know, in a surreptitious way, as I might say basically said, oh yeah, he keeps him here in his desk he goes, and I've told him ten times, I've told him twenty so he's not walking in I've called her up, I'm saying hey I know he's going to be back I'm coming by the office to meet ah, your CEO and you know, I'm such and such ah, he's a Marion, you know, my son oh, great, so she's like of course, all a flutter and she goes, well let me know when you get here okay I'll just walk you right up, you know I'll be great, I'll let you know when I'm in reception, she was down there waiting for me in reception took security and goes he's going to see CEO oh, okay, walk right past security you know, of course we were checking driver's licenses and all that stuff she's just all about everything so I'm kind of waiting about five minutes in a chair next to her and I see she's busy and I kind of look like I'm a little bored and you know, kind of flustered I know he's not coming back for another hour and a half she finally goes, would you like to wait in his office he was like yes, oh, that would be awesome and I don't want to disturb you anymore so, get in the office she leaves me in there all by myself walk over the desk take a picture of the information of all the passwords and then proceed to log in ask him on his computer to download a couple of pieces of information as evidence that we breach them I really felt bad when he did the after action because she felt horrible all she could think of was how excited she was going to meet the new father-in-law and this big wedding's coming because the mom is doing all these wedding plans and stuff like that and she's just trying to help her out with his schedule and just would love me walking in there and getting a chance to meet me you know, again, lying kind of something, you know if you have a conscience sometimes you kind of feel bad afterwards but again it was, yeah, I really feel seriously, she was just so excited to bring me up and it was like he mocked me right into his office so building rapport was really important and being sincere and convincing of course, you see, you know I understand the pretexting portions of this developing a scenario doing your planning and prep and your recon, using as much open source information as you can or using other steps to target people in order to accomplish what your overall goal is. We use the same techniques as interrogators just, you know a little bit different. We're looking at personality types just as you are we're looking at emotional states of mind and, you know, we baiting also is a classic technique that you know, you're all aware of as a social engineer I we've covered this there's some differences, of course are the target for social engineer you know, isn't in the POW compound and isn't being forced to give information so they're not held against their will they're not under a major emotional duress and the source actually may have training, you know, on resistance techniques so it's a little bit different, most targets for social engineers, most of them which goes back to the whole purpose of this is the education of this on how to resist these types of things let me get here so we're promoting big time cyber seer program social engineering resistance innovation which basically deal with security policy enforcement awareness trading building social engineering defense in your business architecture in your security architecture and then testing it you know, it's all great if you do this education but if you don't test it you can't confirm and validate that the learning is actually taking place I had the concluding thoughts things I've already said, so let's jump to questions because I was flagged on 10 minutes to go any questions? no operational questions please about anything like that, go ahead sir how do some of the military trainings differ from some of the civil law enforcement interrogation like some of the re-techniques and some of the it's a lot a lot of the approaches still work mountain Jeff back cop, good cop emotional up and down, fear up, fear down so law enforcement will use a lot of those same techniques of course they have in the United States you have rights if you're in Morocco you know it's completely different law enforcement style so yeah there's a lot of similarities thank you yes sir do you want to does it work? how can you tell if your subject is holding back information or legitimately doesn't know anything yeah that's always something you need to validate so you might use different approaches with different interrogators put them in a situation that they definitely don't want to be in for very long and then change the approach you know maybe do a fear up approach with one interrogator really scare the Jesus out of them and then bring someone else in to comfort them and then you know you can learn body language is critical they can try the silent treatment on you but there's one rule you guys should ever know not be broken everyone breaks and I learned that from some Israelis that were actually interrogated by the Russians and they said we broke we were trained well and I'm trained well we broke so eventually we're going to get the information sir hi so you mentioned interrogators roles as input into psychological operations the new PR term is strategic communication not quite that it's something information and I forgot to look it up I was wondering if you could give examples of what it looks like to do that at scale or what sort of information you would give or what sort of input you'd give to those kind of at scale positive side like when we were in Mogadishu we tried to go in there and be the nice people doing all the stuff one of the things we did we write cool little Arabic phrases on fans that they could use to basically keep the flies off themselves and keep themselves cool as an interrogator what kind of input would an interrogator have knowing the culture having the training I would tell them this is what works on a positive way this does not work on a negative way we might do a really harsh campaign drop a bunch of leaflets do some serious radio broadcasting all over a place telling them hey turn in your weapons or we're going to do this if that's compelling to that specific type of target sometimes they would do nice things one of the missions I did was that after Hurricane Andrews because it obliterated everything so they sent me down there to the team and we stood up a TV station a radio station and started printing out where all the water points are where all the medical points were and stuff like that so good and bad news for cycle up PsyOps this question is in regards to role playing and maintaining a backstop in your cover like you mentioned when you're taking it that far away the lid's going to be blown the second guy comes back into work how do you are you considering that when you're building that backstory always on that but our approach there was to be in and out before he was over there and then come back and report to him hey you were breached and guess what you were the best that's a short game well we had done a lot of work ahead of time and if we didn't have someone actually watching exactly what meeting he was in at that point in time and then signaling me hey he's coming in then I want to excuse myself but we knew he was in a meeting for at least two more hours and I had basically my target was be in his office within 30 minutes or less and I got in within 15 so you didn't have like a backstop there to say what a scenario if she would have recognized something I already had her hook line and sinker when she escorted me up to the office if I couldn't get to the office if security stopped me at the gate there's one thing too your security policy I show a business card like you were saying that's not good enough I show a license, government ID that's decent I call Ross Uprupt and he can get me a fake license so I can use that if you go to a state agency they're going to write down the information so if I go to the state of New York and walk into one of their IT groups that security guard is not letting me leave until he writes down all my information but I can still be wrong he's just writing it down you go to a federal installation they take your license from Idaho this license is valid so the level of security that costs a lot for every government ID possible so if the security guard would have stopped me that was where I had my backstop to exfiltrate thanks thank you were there any materials specifically like books or sources we could read that would be readily available to civilians that would help you become a better interrogator and social engineer I can send those with Chris's permission over to his website the links to the PDFs on all the army field manuals that they've been using over the last 15, 20 years so I can get that if thank you guys yes sir thank you carrot cake thank you guys so much did you have a question thank you again sir normally you need to understand what they know going into a situation like that and what they don't suspicion can be raised and if something with the receptionist waiting by her desk came up and all of a sudden see signs from other people that look suspicious to me there's always where's your restroom skip the restroom head to the elevator and get out of there yes sir as a social engineer or as an interrogator it just depends yeah it does the techniques I had a lot of ex-girlfriends that have said I didn't know you were like that but there was something weird about you because you had these you knew what I was going to do and you asked questions and then you asked follow-up questions and it was like I don't know how you figured that out six cents I used to after I got out when I was much younger definitely seriously I'd go into a pretext I'd be lying to my parents girlfriends or whoever because that was the training it becomes easy oh yeah the role-playing the line was very it took me a couple hard lessons to learn the importance of truth and you want great information and you want it to be true so you have to respect the truth and you have to know why you're lying