Washington Post Opinion: “One of the most intriguing private intelligence companies is Strider Technologies”

In his latest opinion piece for The Washington Post, "A band of innovators reimagines the spy game for a world with no cover," David Ignatius explores how the nature of intelligence is changing with the rapid evolution of technology. In this modern, digital age, traditional methods of intelligence gathering are now becoming vulnerabilities. "After all my conversations with veteran CIA officers, I've concluded that the agency needs an entirely new tool kit...The point is the urgent need to innovate," writes Ignatius.

Enter Strider. Below is an excerpt from Ignatius' piece:

One of the most intriguing private intelligence companies is Strider Technologies, founded in 2019 by twin brothers Greg and Eric Levesque and chief data officer Mike Brown. They hired two prominent former CIA officers: Cooper Wimmer, who served in Athens, Vienna, Baghdad and Peshawar, and other locations; and Mark Pascale, a former station chief in both Moscow and Beijing. The company also recruited David Vigneault, former head of Canadian intelligence.

Strider describes itself as a “modern-day economic security agency.” To help customers secure their innovation and talent, it plucks the secrets of adversaries like China and Russia that steal U.S. commercial information. China is vulnerable because it has big open-source databases of its own, which are hard to protect.

Using this data, Strider can analyze Chinese organizations and their employees; it can study Chinese research data, and how it was obtained and shared; it can analyze the “Thousand Talents” programs China uses to lure foreigners; it can track the contacts made by those researchers, at home and abroad; and it can identify connections with known Chinese intelligence organizations or front companies.

Eric Levesque explained to me how Strider’s system works. Imagine that a software engineer is applying to work for an international IT company. The engineer received a PhD from a leading American university. What research did he conduct there? Was it shared with Chinese organizations? What research papers has he published? Who in China has read or cited them? What Chinese companies (or front companies) has he worked for? Has this prospective employee touched any branch of the Chinese civil-military conglomerate?

Strider can operate inside what China calls the “Great Firewall” that supposedly protects its data. I didn’t believe this was possible until Levesque gave me a demonstration. On his computer screen, I could see the links, from a researcher in the West, to a “Thousand Talents” program, to a Ministry of State Security front company. It turns out that China hasn’t encrypted much of its data — because the authorities want to spy on their own citizens. China is now restricting more data, but Levesque says Strider hasn’t lost its access.

The full "How the spy game will work when there's no place to hide" by David Ignatius here.