Why the FBI gave up

Kind: captions Language: en The internet is a battlefield. Cyber crime is out of control and now the government has decided to fight back. Private companies just got the green light to hack back against scammers and cyber threats. They claim it's the only way to keep the internet safe. Except, it's all a lie. The moment these companies strike back, you are in the crosshairs. Foreign hackers aren't going to sit back and take the hit. They'll retaliate and they won't target the companies. They'll target banks, hospitals, and power grids. The age of digital defense is over. This is a new privatized global war and you are the cannon fodder. On August 12th, 2026, President Donald Trump changed the rules of cyber warfare with one flick of a pen. A new federal program would give private US companies the legal authority to launch their own offensive cyber operations. Instead of just defending their networks, businesses could strike back against foreign cyber crime organizations. Under federal control, the companies would be allowed to conduct both cyber surveillance and cyber effects operations. Corporate America has been weaponized. The White House claims this is a necessary step to turn the tide of a war that up to now the US had been losing. Statistics from the FBI's own Internet Crime Complaint Center or IC3 revealed the scale of the problem. In 2023, reported losses from cyber crime in the US exceeded [music] 12 and a half billion dollars. By 2024, that number had hit 16 billion and in 2025, cyber criminals extorted a massive 21 billion dollars from American targets. Year after year, the numbers move aggressively in the wrong direction and it doesn't look like it's changing. The explosion of AI and cryptocurrency has just amplified the threat. Since most companies don't report corporate breaches and cyber crimes, the real figures are probably a whole lot worse. For decades, America let law enforcement handle it. Various government agencies were tasked with investigating cyber crime while the Department of Justice issued indictments against foreign criminal enterprises. From there, Washington relied on allies to track down criminals and bring them to justice. But that system clearly has not worked. Something had to change. The US can issue indictments and push for extraditions, but when those targets are decentralized syndicates operating in some of the shadiest places on the [music] planet, it doesn't matter. They're too far away for DC to do anything about it. The federal government can enforce laws within its own geographic boundaries, but those rules and systems don't apply to the vast, borderless expanse of the online world. So Washington decided to go in a different direction. They abandoned the idea of letting government and law enforcement agencies combat criminal networks. They let private companies do it instead. [music] They decided to legalize cyber privateering. Centuries ago, global empires faced a similar problem on the high seas. They could control their own lands, but the oceans were vast, lawless, and full of pirates. Rather than building bigger navies and waging war, governments decided to outsource their maritime security. They issued letters of marque and reprisal to private ship captains. Everyday merchants became legal pirates or privateers. These navies for hire were given the authority to hunt down enemy ships, and in return, they got a cut of the stolen cargo. It was cheap and effective, and it allowed the empires to get rid of the enemies without risking their own ships. Privateering was eventually outlawed in the 19th century until the White House brought it back from the dead. The US can't wage war on cybercrime alone. The digital seas are simply too difficult to control. So it's bringing back privateering, albeit dressed up in diplomatic jargon. Strip away all the fancy phrasing, and what it all boils down to is remarkably simple. For the first time ever, the US government has told private companies, "You are allowed to carry out cyber attacks." That means private security vendors and cyber defense contractors will no longer be restricted to developing anti-malware packages and setting up firewalls. Instead, they'll have the all clear to go on an all-out offensive to hack foreign networks, steal data, and strike back at botnets, and dismantle cybercrime organizations one piece at a time. Washington wants you to think this is a revolution, a new era in cybersecurity, the next leap forward in digital defense innovation, in [music] which the full fury of Silicon Valley can be unleashed. But that idea doesn't stand up. It's a reckless gamble that has a greater chance of going wrong and putting people's lives at risk. Why? Well, because the whole thing is fundamentally flawed. DC is acting as though private corporations will stick to the same standards as law enforcement and federal agencies. They won't. Agencies follow a very strict set of rules and practices established across generations, taking numerous factors into account. Private companies, however, have one priority that takes precedent over everything else: profit. The US government has a vested interest in hunting down foreign cybercriminals to keep its people safe and protect its businesses. A private security firm is only going to be interested in how much money it can make from hunting criminal organizations. That means they are heavily incentivized to hit fast, hard, and ask questions later. The more aggressive and efficient they are, the better of a chance they've got of getting results. And the results mean revenue. But this could rapidly backfire because the digital world is an incredibly complex space. It is not neatly divided into regions and partitions with clear borders separating entities from each other. It is messy, it's [music] convoluted, and there can be a lot of overlapping infrastructure between something like a cybercrime syndicate and [music] a hospital cloud network. Cybercrime organizations know this, and they exploit it. They can deliberately build botnets made up of innocent people's devices. They can plant digital evidence trails that lead back toward businesses that have done nothing wrong. They can compromise machines belonging to organizations that provide critical services and infrastructure, making them look like parts of a shady digital syndicate. When you give private companies the green light to go out and attack those organizations, it comes with a massive risk that innocents get caught up in the crossfire. And all it takes is the tiniest miscalculation, the most minute error or oversight, and suddenly you have private healthcare databases being breached, water treatment networks going offline, and banking platforms being compromised. It is for this reason that so many cybersecurity experts have argued against this hack-back concept for so long. They knew that it would turn regular people into collateral damage as cyber warfare spiraled out of control. Retired Admiral Michael S. Rogers perhaps put it best when he was speaking to the House Armed Services Committee back in 2017. He argued that hacking back [music] would simply result in more gun fighters out in the streets of the wild west. As the years have passed, the voices of reason have been drowned out by other significantly louder voices, lobbyists. For years now, the big tech firms and private security companies have been pressuring Washington to provide them with active defense rights. They claimed that existing legislation like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was making them fend off cybercrime with one arm tied behind their back. Criminals could operate with impunity, but corporations were limited in how they could respond. They wanted the right to do more. They argued that it was simply a question of self-defense. They failed to mention the huge profit-making machine that would come into existence if the government eventually agreed to their demands. If the new memorandum moves forward, private cybersecurity firms could charge massive fees to the biggest firms in the world to carry out counter cyber strike operations on their behalf. Let's say a big financial institution suffers a ransomware strike, for instance. In the past, they'd have had to file reports with the FTC and IC3, and just hope for the best. At the same time, they'd be relying on their own in-house security teams to recover lost files and get their systems back online. Meanwhile, the ransomware group continues to carry out its operations, targeting the very same business just a few weeks down the line. With this new legislation, the company could instead hire a cyber warfare team to hit back at those who wronged them, and the battle would begin. Either side could cause serious harm to innocent organizations and civilian services, either intentionally or inadvertently, but the contractor doesn't care, they're still getting paid. Perhaps most terrifying of all, they won't even be punished if someone else gets hurt because of their mistakes. It is clearly stated within the memo. Usually, if a private company were to accidentally damage a third party through its own actions, it would be held liable. It doesn't matter where it happens, international [music] law is pretty uniform when it comes to this sort of thing. For years, that same logic has held true in the cyber warfare sector. If a cyber security company was attacking a criminal database and unintentionally knocked an innocent business system offline, it would be punished. The resulting civil litigation might even be enough to put it out of business entirely. The memo, however, introduces a new dynamic, legal immunity. It allows approved contractors to operate like agents of the state, serving national security, and that classification brings with it a certain level of protection. If one of those digital bounty hunters misfires, their victims won't be able to turn around and take legal action against them. They were operating with the authority and approval of the federal government, after all. The memo even contains a detailed explanation of what should happen if, or more likely when, something goes wrong. If an approved company accidentally targets an innocent American network or business, the instructions are clear. They must cease operations, try to minimize the damage, and notify the National Coordination Center. There's nothing about them being punished or penalized. The word liability doesn't even appear once in the document. If a private defense firm leaks your private information while attacking a foreign cybercrime group, [music] you have no recourse. You are just collateral damage in the digital battlefield, a battlefield in which both sides have every reason to be as aggressive and ruthless as possible. On the one side are the privateers who only get paid when they get results. Naturally, they'll make the most of their tools to achieve that end. That means the likes of automated scripts, aggressive countermeasures, and brutal exploit payloads designed to devastate scammers operations from the inside out. On the other side are the criminal syndicates themselves. They have been making huge amounts of cash for decades through scams and dark web data sales. They're not going to give up just because the US government decided to play hardball. They're going to adapt. They're going to lay traps and cause as much chaos as possible. These are not amateurs. They're cold, calculated professionals. They will set up honeypots and dead man switches so that if their servers are targeted, innocent people will pay the price. >> [music] >> And the instant they sniff that even something might be wrong, these hackers will unleash worms and more. The White House has attempted to preempt some of the concerns via careful wording of its memorandum. Even if they granted the power to launch offensive cyber operations, private sector firms must still operate according to the control and oversight of the federal government. It lays out strict rules of engagement. The message is clear. The government wants people to rest assured that these cybersecurity companies will be moderated and measured in their actions. They will only target the bad guys, and that every measure is being taken to keep everyone safe. Unfortunately, while that might make for a reassuring statement, it is almost impossible to enforce. And that ties back to the complexities of cyberspace. The US government could authorize a militia to strike an enemy base, giving them specific instructions and coordinates of where to attack. As long as the intelligence is sound and the instructions are followed, nobody else should get hurt. But when the US government allows a private defense firm to go after a cyber syndicate, it's a totally different ballgame. In the digital realm, bad actors don't operate in fixed locations. They don't even use their own physical hardware a lot of the time. They rent the same cloud infrastructure as Fortune 500 firms and healthcare groups. They subscribe to the same hosting providers as a small business and retail brand. More often than not, they'll also reroute their traffic via hijacked civilian networks and compromised devices. It makes it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for even the most experienced cyber operatives to pinpoint their locations. This is why any notion of targeted cyber operations is so ridiculous. Because cybercriminals can conceal themselves so easily among civilian digital infrastructure. It's like a serial killer hiding out in a crowded room. Instead of using a sniper for a clean, precise headshot, cybersecurity firms would throw a grenade through a window. Sure, they would probably get their man, but there would be a huge amount of innocent blood on their hands as well. Should this proposed program come to pass, the world will officially enter a frightening new era of digital warfare. The internet as we know it will no longer be the same. Cyberspace will become an increasingly hostile war zone with rogue criminal syndicates, state-sponsored hackers, and corporate bounty hunters all fighting it out for dominance. Ordinary Americans and small business owners trying to exist in the same space will be even more defenseless than they already are. Because they won't be able to afford their own digital bodyguards and bounty hunters to keep them safe, they won't have teams of cyber warfare experts on their side looking out for digital identities and their data. It's not hard to imagine how the situation might evolve from there. Those at the lowest levels of the digital food chain will be forced to sign up for increasingly costly and complex subscriptions. The biggest firms, those that can afford their own private armies of government-sanctioned cyber operatives, will offer to protect the little people. [music] And that'll come with bigger consequences. Likely in the form of more of their data, more of their loyalty, and more of their freedom. Perhaps [music] the worst part of it all is that the memorandum or any subsequent policy that's implemented won't stop cybercrime at all. If anything, it'll just make it worse. There's far too much money tied up in scams, phishing, malware, and database breaches for cybercriminal groups to simply wave the white flag and just walk away now. They'll just resort to darker, sneakier, smarter tactics. They're going to harness the powers of machine learning and neural networks to suit their malicious ends. And they're going to put a lot of innocent people in between them and the companies coming after them. Instead of being isolated incidents, these will become regular occurrences, and they'll be inevitable byproducts of the new and improved war on cybercrime. This isn't how cyber defense is meant to work. True security comes from investing in stronger architecture, bolstering digital law enforcement agencies, and forcing the biggest tech firms to develop stronger software. It requires reforming laws to safeguard individual digital rights, rather than worrying about multi-billion-dollar companies. Because when the new digital war starts, it'll be the rest of us that suffer. As technology gets more advanced, so do the tools available to cybercriminals, and they'll stop at nothing to get what they want. Watch 10 most dangerous hackers of all time to see their cyber hall of fame, or click this.