Behind the Bastards - Part One: That Time eBay's Private Spies Went To War With Some Bloggers

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

Robert sits down with Jason Pargin to lay out the insane story of how eBay corporate security, with the tacit endorsement of their executives, waged a relentless shadow war against two elderly bloggers for no reason really.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alright everyone, welcome back to Behind the Bastards. I'm Robert Evans and we have some sad news for the audience up at the top of the episode. Yesterday morning at about 0800 hours, Sophie Lichterman's plane left Tokyo bound for Manila. It was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors. She'll be back next week, but with me this week is our beloved returning guest, Jason Pargin. Jason, do you think that mash joke is going to work with our audience?

How many for the next to see mash? Like years before I was born? It's so dangerous because if there's any kind of an air disaster the day this episode's supposed to go up, then we've got to go in and well, no, that just makes it funnier. That makes it fun. The only time I've removed a joke for something like that was we made some jokes at the start of the COVID pandemic when I assumed it was going to be like a SARS situation. And we we cut those bad boys out before air because that did not age well with the entire country locked down. Jason Pargin, you are a my former boss over at cracked dot com, which is was

briefly defunct, but is now funked. But neither of us work there anymore. You are the author of a number of wonderful books. Do you want to talk about the book that you've got that's going to be out in about two weeks at the time which people hear these episodes? Yes. The book is a standalone novel called I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of

Doom. It is not a part of any series. It doesn't require any prior knowledge of me or this podcast or anything else. Anyone can enjoy it as long as you enjoy books. Robert gave a blurb on it. It was very kind. He said strangely that the book saved his marriage, which surprised everyone. I didn't know he was married. It's not that kind of book. I was not. That's the magic of your writing, Jason.

But so far the reviews are getting equal, equally, the positive ones are half saying, it's fun. It's a fun little roller coaster ride. You can read it on the beach. It's something you can read on the toilet. Like if you don't want to get fecal particles on your phone, this is something you can have on the toilet instead. And the other half the reviews are like,

I just put it down and stared at the wall for a while. And then I called my mom. I decided I had to totally change my life. I deleted all the apps off my phone. So I guess it's kind of, it depends on how you want to approach it. If you just want a breezy read, it's there for you. But apparently some people, they have decided to make permanent life changes after reading it. I mean, that's every author's goal is for the readers to make ill-considered rash decisions that alter the entire course

of their existence after finishing your book. Yeah, I've been reading your books. I mean, I literally started more than 20 years ago when I was an adolescent in high school, long before the cracked days when you were still publishing stuff on the internet. And it's been gratifying to see that you are one of, I don't know, like a dozen people in the country who can make a living writing novels. I'm very happy that continues to work. And it works.

But see, we've reached a point where I know for a fact their narrative is going to be geriatric TikTok star, tries to write a book, tries to cash in on his TikTok fame. It's like, no, I was writing books before social media existed, before you could upload video to the internet. I was writing books. This is no, I'm a washed up author trying to reclaim my success with TikTok. It's not the other way around. See, I even had this joke planned when I came in.

I was going to do like this series of bits about how you were actually Gen Z because with TikTok, it's not the other way around. See, I even had this joke planned when I came in, I was gonna do like this series of bits about how you were actually Gen Z because of your TikTok stardom, you've ruined that. Although Jason, I did wanna say to start this off, Sophie's not here, this episode is just you and I, and you as a Gen Z expert on the TikToks know that all the kids these days

are using the term raw dog for situations like this, which is deeply upsetting to our ears as old men. But the kids love using it for everything from sitting on a plane without a book to not taking psychiatric medication that's prescribed to you from your doctor. So are you ready to a Gen Z terminology this podcast episode that you suggested?

Yes, let's raw dog, let's raw dog goon this. Mm-hmm. Let's goon this episode. What are some other terms we- This won't be Ohio. I hear the kids are using Ohio as a term for mid or unimpressive. Right. Yeah, they're all right sometimes.

Jason, this is a story that you had suggested. And the bastard of this story is kind of the entire C-suite at eBay. It's a lot worse than I think listeners are going to be ready for, but to give some context, I want to actually start by peeling back outside of eBay, because as a heads up, the story we're telling is the tale of how eBay's internal security agency decided that a group of elderly bloggers, a pair of elderly bloggers were mortal enemies of the corporation and deployed insane degrees of force and violence to attempt to stop them from publishing blogs. But I wanted to peel back a bit and start by talking about where the industry of corporate

intelligence is, like private intelligence services that a company can hire to deal with threats to their profitability. Because I think it's one of the under-told stories of the 21st century, and it's partly under-told because people who tell it tend to get sued. It's really interesting because I read the story and read the results of it, and the legal process and all that, and I could not make heads or tails

of how any of this could have happened. And when I tried to read background on it, could not make heads or tails of how any of this could have happened. Because, you know, if you disappoint some guy who owns a mom and pop shop and he's kind of a douchebag or whatever, you can see that guy like mailing you a dead rat or something. The idea of upsetting eBay and they start mailing you dead animals in the mail. And that's not the weirdest part of the story. It gets so off the rails. This is the part I don't have is how there are people in the company who have this mindset. Because this story goes to places that you don't see fictional stories go.

There's no plot line on succession like this. And it would have come off as corny if there was. Yeah, it would be kind of unbelievable, but we're, we're getting ahead of ourselves and we're done with the cold open. What happens when a professional football player's career ends and the applause fades and the screaming fans move on? I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. For some former NFL players a new faith provides answers.

You mix homesteading with guns in church. Voila! You got straight away. They try to save everybody. Listen to Spiraled on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, voila, you got straight away. They tried to save everybody. Listen to Spiral on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For 10 years, I've been obsessed with one of the most bizarre and audacious cons in rock and roll history. We were all facing 20 years and all that good stuff. The lead singer tried to pull off an English accent

and they went on the road as the zombies These guys are not gonna get away with it. The zombies are too popular Listen to the true story of the fake zombies on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Welcome to the Cino show. I'm your host Cino McFarlane. I'm an addiction specialist podcast. want you to feel alone. Listen to the CINO show every Wednesday on iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Jason, for whatever reason, the company now has us do that little cold open thing. The listener will have heard an ad in between

where I just said the cold opens done and then Jason. But now we're warmed up. We're hot. Are you ready to go? Are you excited that our corporate overlords now make us do a cold open? That has improved the quality of the show, I'm sure. So on February 11th, 2011, the New York Times published a story about hackers who would force their way into the computer systems of a security company called HB Gary. At this point, the public conception mostly put spying as the domain of nation state actors, right? Like if you had asked the average person, are there like spy agencies in the employ

of like random finance companies. They probably would have said, well, like not real ones, you know, you've probably got like some sort of physical security for the buildings and stuff, but nothing like the FBI or whatever. But that view was already outdated in 2011. The HB Gary hack revealed a different world of espionage paid for by the highest bidder and most importantly Petty to an almost unfathomable degree

Rather than these the kind of stuff that like cyberpunk stories had had primed us to expect from our mega corporations like as high-profile assassinations and burglaries to steal priceless inventions most of the stolen documents from HB Gary revealed them like pitching their corporate clients ways to attack the enemies of like Bank of America and the US Chamber of Commerce in what we would consider incredibly petty ways, ways that kind of more than anything resemble the way people fight online rather than like, again, the sort of sinister stuff that like if you're playing like a cyberpunk pen and paper game, your team's going to be doing.

Because I had heard of corporate espionage, which I always thought was just somebody sneaking into another company to try to get a look at their design on a thing. And I assumed that was a thing forever, but what you're describing and what I know is coming in this story, it's almost like a type of psychological guerrilla warfare or just trolling people.

I don't get it. Well, and it's important to understand, I think part of what kind of brings some context to this is if you actually look at what the FBI was doing at the height of the civil rights movement, most of their actual physical work was nothing that like would make a particularly impressive movie. It was literally, we have hired different sort of like a mix of like thugs and just like people that we think we can get to like work for us for a few bucks to like trail every black person

on the campus of this college, right? Like literally like that's a big part of like when those activists broke into that FBI office and leaked all those files to the Washington Post, this was a year or two before Watergate, that was a big part of what was revealed is that there were like colleges where the FBI was just surveilling

like every black student at the college. And it wasn't even with FBI agents a lot of the time, they had just hired goons to follow these kids around in case they might do something. So to an extent, I guess, part of what you have to understand, if you study the history of espionage, 1% of it is really cool stuff

where they're making like polonium darts to shoot out of umbrellas and assassinating governmental leaders. And 99% of it is just, we hired a dumb guy to follow them around and they're gonna know the dumb guys Following them because he's a big like he's not very good at it, but we don't really like what if they notice What's the harm to us? We want them scared right? The whole point is to just intimidate people And that's largely I think that is the logic that a lot of these corporate security firms function on.

It doesn't matter as much, are our plans super well thought out? What matters is that we brute force people into being scared to fuck with us. That's the kind of plots that HB Gary was shopping around to. They never, again, none of this stuff is ever as direct as you want it to be. So HB Gary, which is the security company, would send the plans they had to this law firm

called Hunton and Williams, which represented all of these big, like Bank of America, represented the Chamber of Commerce, which itself represents a bunch of different financial institutions in the company, or in the country. In one document, HBB. Gary's chief executive, Aaron Barr, offered to publicize biographic details about a union organizer that had challenged

the Chamber of Commerce when it opposed the Obama admin's healthcare reform package. And you hear that and it's like, oh, did he like have a drunk driving arrest? Did he kill someone with his car? No, I want to read you a direct quote from Barr on the salacious details he wanted to reveal about this union organizer.

They go to a Jewish church in D.C. They have two kids, a son and a daughter. And first off- What year was this, I'm sorry? 2011. All right. I think it's a synagogue. I don't think you call it a Jewish church.

I mean, I guess that's not like technically wrong, but like it'd be weird if you called it like a synagogue. I don't think you call it a Jewish church. I mean, I guess that's not like Technically wrong but like it'd be weird if you called it like a Muslim church like we have words for those but I don't know. It's weirder that he thought that that was like the damning detail that like yeah He goes to synagogue and he has two kids That's gonna you blew this all wide open, HB Gary. A week later, Barr offered to create in-depth target dossiers, and keep that in mind, because we're gonna run into that tactic again

when we go back to eBay, with the goal of, quote, mitigating the effect of adversarial groups, like US Chamber Watch, which was a citizens group that criticized and protested the US Chamber of Commerce. One proposition was to publish the petty criminal record of a member in the group. In another instance, H.B. Gary offered to work

with Peter Thiel's Palantir, which is a private spy company, to attack WikiLeaks before it could release a tranche of emails from Inside Bank of America related to the financial crash. And this is a little bit related to the financial crash. This is a little bit closer to the serious cyberpunk stories like WikiLeaks. They're doing some serious business in 2011. This at least sounds a little more exciting. But their specific plan to attack WikiLeaks was to submit a bunch of fake documents. Then

when WikiLeaks reported on them, exposed them as forgeries to damage, specifically to damage Glenn Greenwald's career. Which if you'd just given him a little longer, Glenn was going to do that on his own. I guess I'm already confused because we have worked in corporate environments where every hour, every minute, every penny is being watched. And the question is, well, how does this contribute to the bottom line? So the idea that you've got, like what really to me sounds like a dirty tricks department, and they're reporting to somebody, they're on the payroll with a

job title, what they're doing is being documented somewhere. It feels like the type of thing that a company in 1970 would do back when you, you know, the way you break your union is you go just burn the guy's house down or whatever to try to intimidate him. But you would not think in 2011 or whatever that you still have a dirty tricks department. And I know that I sound naive. I guess I just assumed we had moved into a world where you just sue people when you want to silence them. You would not go digging up, you know, like, hey,

there's rumors that these people are Jews. What's going on with that? I wonder how much of it is these CEOs and stuff are probably all older. They're probably all like mostly baby boomers. In 2011, you would imagine the guys running big banks are probably, most of them probably aren't Gen X, maybe a few.

And I wonder, I mean, even if they were Gen X, they were probably raised on stories of Watergate. I wonder how much of this is just like reading about the dirty tricks that the Nixon White House did and assuming like, well, that's probably what we should do with our powerful- Went great for him. Yeah, went well for Nixon.

That's why he had so many terms as president. Now, the fact that this hack of HB Gary happened in the first place was because Barr, who was like the dude actually submitting these plans to that legal firm, had made public threats to the leaders of Anonymous, the leaderless hacking collective a couple of weeks earlier.

And he had even stated that he had information about the names of several of their, quote, leaders that he was about to reveal, which I think was a lie. And Anonymous kind of called his bluff, which is when all of these emails got leaked. And for good measure, they took control of Barr's Twitter account just to fuck with him. Now, this led to Barr stepping down as CEO and basically begging Anonymous to leave him alone for the sake of his children. So now one of the things that you saw

as soon as like Barr got embarrassed is Palantir and all of these other companies that he had been talking about working with sought to distance themselves from HB Gary. Hey, this was just some lone asshole making like proposals to his court. Like we never agreed to do any of these jobs with them. We had Palantir, would never do anything

this unethical, right? Like you can trust us. This was just one lone asshole. Fast forward about six years to 2017, when Harvey Weinstein's life explodes and stories start to come out that he had used a different spy for hire company, Black Cube, in order to harass a lot of the women and stories start to come out that he had used a different spy for hire company, Black

Cube, in order to harass a lot of the women that he had abused and to try to stop the story that the New York Times ultimately published from coming out about him. Now, Black Cube, the firm that he used, was based in Israel and staffed with a bunch of former Mossad guys. If H.B. Gary is kind of like Bush League, Black Cube's like the New York Yankees, right? This is a high dollar, high power corporate spy firm with absolutely no ethical or moral constraints and a terrifying degree of power. That said, like H.B. Gary, they wielded this with like an almost, there's always this degree

of like incompetence that I think is just born from, and I think all the HB Gary guys, a lot of them probably came out of the government too. If you work in government intel agencies all your life, you have the shield of working for the government and then you move into the private sector and everything is a lot harder and you don't, you no longer have that kind of protection. And so you notice just like dumb shit, right? That's kind of the most interesting thing to me when studying like Black Cube and this

constellation of other Israeli companies that all have like former government agents working for them. Specifically, the way that Black Cube went after some of Weinstein's accusers was they hired about, had a bunch of investigators to make false identities to try to befriend some of the women online who were accusing Weinstein with the goal of basically disgracing them. And it was just kind of a wildly unsuccessful plan

that showed, I think a degree of like, just assuming everyone was dumb that was involved in this. Like none of these people would be intelligent enough to know that Weinstein might have people going after them. None of them would have any precautions in place. None of them would be talking to people like Ronan Farrow or talking to like anyone who might be able to advise them on like the risks that they faced going after Weinstein. It's just this like, it's very interesting to me, the kind of arrogance that you see

with these, which is going to be a big part of the eBay story too. Okay, I'm gonna be frank here. Every single story I hear about espionage at any level is always a dumb slapstick affair full of mistakes and people stumbling into the wrong thing. And whenever they succeed, it's almost on accident or because the people they were after were extremely stupid and made a bunch of really obvious mistakes. The listeners who listened to all your episodes know we did one series on MKUltra, which had a reputation in the conspiracy world as this otherworldly alien,

high-tech, mind-control, Manchurian candidate, space-age stuff. And in reality was just a lot of people getting very high on government funds. And one guy who had like a little jerk off room where he watched agents have sex with prostitutes. And it was just a bunch of very dumb people who had watched a lot of spy movies and themselves were working off of very silly,

I don't know, almost childlike ideas of what that kind of thing, of how it worked and what mind control could do. But ultimately they were just kind of drawing the government paycheck to do a bunch of idiocy. And I rarely hear anything that sounds like James Bond. That's the, you get a couple of those, right? Like obviously that has happened in the past, right? You have some, especially like you can go into World War II,

you can find some examples of really like effective and intelligent espionage. But I think some of it is that the fact that spy movies are such a big part of the culture has, it's kind of like the issue that people say AI language models are going to have, where they're going to get trained on more and more stuff that's AI generated and that's going to cause additional sort of hallucinations.

I think ever since the end of like the start of the Cold War, every generation of spies has been poisoned by spy movies and it's caused like a, it's a caused a degree of inevitable degeneration, right? That's a big part of the eBay story. And it's, there's a, you know, I talk about, there's this journalist, Sebastian Junger, I admire a lot. And he used to work with a photo journalist who died in Libya during the early days of that civil war.

But the, his friend, the story he was in Libya to cover was he was specifically looking to get like photos and interviews with rebels who were in the way that they were dressing and posing, consciously aping Hollywood action movies. Because these were all kids who had grown up on bootleg American movies. And when they realized I'm about to be fighting in a war,

they all started like dressing and acting like different characters from their favorite movies. And I think his instinct was good. There is something like really important in that. And we, I don't think it's, most people are surprised, are not surprised to hear that like young men who become soldiers

are influenced by action movies, right? And particularly a lot of like how they act and even their expectations of what war will be like. We just don't extend it enough to be like, no, no, that's true of all the guys in the CIA and the FBI too, right? They've all been raised on this shit and they're all deranged by it.

So yeah, I did wanna talk a little bit more about like what some of these like hack for hire companies today are like, because and this is right before we get into the eBay story, but this is kind of important. Black Cube is part of a constellation of companies and Israel is one of the places where a lot of these companies exist. We have an industry in the United States.

There's a sizable industry that's kind of like the B tier of these hack for hire companies in India as well. And these are, you know, it doesn't take, they usually are not super expensive, but the amount of damage that they can do to our collective information ecology is pretty significant. For example, a peer company to Black Cube, Cobb Web Technologies, which raged about $10 million in 2019

to build a search engine for intelligence information. Basically, all they were doing building this search engine for intelligence information. Basically all they were doing, building this search engine, was spear phishing huge numbers of random people to steal their personal data and then put it into a searchable database that they could sell access to. So effectively like stealing people's personal info in order to brag that like, hey, we have something that equivocates to like a police database that you can pay for access to because we've compromised all of these different people's accounts. Cobweb's plan was to take the work that the kind of work that companies like HB Gary and

Black Cube had been doing for years and get more proactive with it, right? Instead of waiting for a company to be like, I want you to target these specific people, we just get as many people as possible, trick random people into giving up their data at scale. And yeah, that's, you know, there's actually an interesting report published by Meta, previously Facebook recently, that kind of goes into more detail on this.

You can find the link in our show notes. But that report noted that like basically they they've cobweb activated like fake accounts on Facebook Instagram what's app and Twitter in order to like grab just at mass information on activists politicians government officials like everyone they could get to fall for their shit. But to what end? What was the final goal of that project? To have a big database that they can sell access to. And you can search for- Who would they sell it to? Anyone who is looking for information on like, they can say like, you know, if you're an oil

and gas company, right, and you're worried about protests in the UK by anti-oil and gas protesters, like some of those people who have quote unquote defaced, I don't think they've done any permanent damage to any paintings actually, but those folks, you can pay for access to this database and we have spearfished and scraped a bunch of people who have sympathies to that group. You can see where they are and you can set up your own surveillance potential. You can try to infiltrate, but you'll get all this information on their real world and their digital networks. There's a lot that's come out recently about how there's this kind of unique cell phone

identifying number that's supposed to be anonymous, but if you also know kind of where people live, you can figure out which cell phone goes to which person. And using information that is available through a lot of these different data broker companies, you can track random people's cell phones in the United States if you're a corporate actor in order to stalk people who you consider to be a threat. This is the thing that's happening right now.

It's very easy. It's why everyone should use a burner cell phone and light their old phone on fire every 60 days. We're always saying this, Jason. You communicate entirely through telegram, which not the app telegram, but through an old fashioned telegram. We actually have an actor portraying your voice right now

and face. No one's seen you in years. Was watching an 80s slasher movie as it took place in 1989 and a high school kid got invited to a party via telegram. Oh my God. I was like, was that, and I was, 1989, I was 14. Were we still sending tele televisions back then? Am I that old?

That seems a little archaic, but anyway, this has been a long lead up to the eBay story, but I wanted to kind of set the stage for you. And now we're going to pull to an ad break, and then we will come back with the story that you actually asked me to tell you today. I've been thinking about you. I want you back in my life.

It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session, 24 hours. EPM 110, 120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not.

What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing.

They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It was December 2019 when the story blew up. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, former Packer star Kabir Vajabiamila caught up in a bizarre situation. Hey, GB, explaining what he believes led to the arrest of his friends at a children's Christmas play.

A family man, former NFL player, devout Christian, now cut off from his family and connected to a strange arrest. I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. I got swept up in Kabir's journey, but this was only the beginning in a story about faith and football, the search for meaning away from the gridiron, and the consequences for everyone involved. You mix homesteading with guns and church and a little bit of the spice of conspiracy theories that we liked. Voila! You got straight away.

I felt like I was living in North Korea, but worse, if that's possible. Listen to Spiral'd on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Back in 1969, this was the hottest song around. So hot that some guys from Michigan tried to steal it. tried to steal it. ["The Time of the Season for Love Me"] My name is Daniel Ralston. For 10 years I've been obsessed with one of the most bizarre and audacious cons in rock and roll history.

A group would have a hit record and quickly they would hire a bunch of guys to go out and be the group. People were being cheated on several levels. After years of searching, we bring you the true story of the fake zombies. I was like blown away. These guys are not going to get away with it. Listen to the true story of the fake zombies on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back.

This all brings me to the story of the Steiners. They are an now elderly couple who back during the early days of the dot com boom when they were a mature adult couple, got really interested in the then burgeoning field of online sales. We are talking about the mid to late 1990s. David Steiner was a video producer who had a childhood fascination with yard sales, which is a strange fixation for a little kid or for an adult for someone of any age. But you know, it takes all kinds of people to make a world.

And this fascination, he was kind of one of these, after all these Pawn Stars shows got big, there's a much wider community of people who are kind of obsessed with folks like selling old products or antiques and trying to find hidden gems that are worth a bunch of money. Steiner's kind of one of the very first generations of people

who is obsessed with this stuff. In his particular interests, he loves ancient marketing promotional products. He likes antique tools. And he starts following, prior to eBay, there are a couple of different early auction websites on the old internet that he gets into when he's interested in. And his wife, Ina, I think she's both like kind of maybe shares his interest to a

degree. And she's also a writer with an interest in kind of doing some journalism. So in 1999, this is four years after eBay's launch, they start to realize like this company in particular is the one that's going to actually dominate online auctions, right? There had been a couple of competitors. It's clear by 99 that eBay is going to be the big one. And the Snyders are just kind of nerds about this stuff. So they decide to turn their obsession with this new and exciting thing into a website, which is the thing people used to do back before social media.

And I, yeah, I, reading about this stuff always gives me this like weird kind of nostalgia that makes me feel like an old man. In fact, I will step in and, cause I know that the description of these people that prowl like garage sales, it makes them sound like creepy weirdos. The early days of eBay were fascinating. Yeah.

Because suddenly the concept of everybody's junk from all over the world is for sale and stuff that you, it's like, oh my gosh, this action figure that I thought only I owned and that I lost when I was eight years old. Here's this guy 2000 miles away from me who's got one. And it's, I never, I thought I had imagined this thing. Oh my gosh, here it is. Like the idea that all this stuff was for sale.

And then it immediately created this ecosystem of people who were learning all the techniques of how to like stealthily outbid somebody and all of this stuff. And it's, people forget what a, or if you weren't around back then, eBay was the first huge monster dot com business. And the first one that dot com business. And the first one that made it clear that like,

there's a dip, like not just real money, but like ways for regular people to make real money if they can figure out how to game an algorithm. And that, and also that stock when they went public, that was just like crypto style, people getting, becoming millionaires overnight. eBay was huge. So it was a fascinating scene back then,

because I bought and sold some stuff back in the 90s era eBay. And it was just, you find yourself, not just in a place where you buy things, you find yourself in an ecosystem and in a cultural scene. So no, I absolutely, in terms of like subjects to blog about, I totally get it. This is also a very smart thing to do.

If you're in journalism or in more broadly, just kind of the industry, you and I both spent much of our working careers in just like writing shit for the internet. You find a thing that has just exploded and that you know is going to be massive. And you make yourself the person that people go to to read about that thing, right?

That's what the Steiners do. They corner this and their independent publication starts out being named Auction Bytes, B-Y-T-E-S. And it's geared towards a fairly niche chunk of the internet, people making their living auctioning items on eBay and also increasingly as eBay becomes more and more of a big business, as it becomes clear how much money is in this, also the kind of folks who are interested in investing in eBay

and companies like it. Now, because Auction Bites is kind of the first website that's news for this early community of sellers, and it expands beyond eBay because soon there's Amazon and independent sellers are selling stuff on Amazon and there's Etsy and they cover all of that, right? Like they change their name to e-commerce bytes, which is the name that their website still exists under. And they become like the go-to gumshoe reporters for people who are small and medium sized merchants

selling products on these services, as well as like people in finance who are looking to do investing in the companies that actually are kind of the underpinning of this system. Now, if you've ever worked in an industry like e-commerce, you should know that daily life is a ceaseless war between the companies that provide a platform for online sales who want to keep as much of the money transferred through their service as possible while spending as little as possible,

and the merchants who actually provide products. As a result, E-commerce Bytes most widely read articles tended to focus on fuckups by companies like eBay, right? E-commerce Bytes really winds up kind of more on the sides of the merchants, and that leads to them having kind of an oppositional and confrontational attitude towards the corporations, right? Because largely, you know, that's how the people reading them look at the situation.

You can get an example of this by looking at the site today. One August 26th article by Ina promises, quote, a peek inside eBay payment holds. This article is based on an interview with a reader who'd sold a high priced item and had the money sent to him placed on a 30 day hold despite the fact that the buyer had confirmed receipt of the product and satisfaction with the purchase. In an interview I found on CBS News' 60 Minutes, Ina Steiner describes the job she and her husband did as acting as a conduit from small businesses and independent sellers to the larger corporate Monoliths who ran these websites and you know, that's not super interesting to most of us, right?

This is not like what generally when you think of hard-hitting journalism, you don't think about like people representing eBay sellers You know, I do think that's a valuable social role But it is not something that should have ever led to an exciting case of a deranged spy agency trying to destroy people's lives. No, but in that early era of the blogging years, there was a whole dynamic, because you saw the same thing in the film

in Hollywood business with sites like Ain't It Cool News, where once they got a huge readership, and once they started to be seen as something as an authority, they started to get tips and they started to break stories. Keep in mind, there's a parallel here because keep in mind, if you were a Hollywood studio, once upon a time you had actual news outlets you were dealing with. You had reporters you were friendly with. You had a whole mechanism for managing story scandals if something you wanted covered

up. So suddenly when the internet comes along and these bloggers come along and they just get a blind item via email, they'll just break the story. They don't have access. They don't care. They have no access and they don't have any kind of ongoing relationships that they want to keep. We don't need to keep Paramount happy, right? Like, fuck them, you know? Yeah. So this is similar here because I think in the corporate world, across the corporate world, there is real anxiety about this because their ability to manipulate and control the flow of information to keep a lid on stories to stay out in front of stories, because reporters, you know, they will contact you and say, hey, we're working on the story about these accusations against your CEO or whatever.

Do you want to comment? Well, if it's just leaks out to the internet, that person is just going to post it. So I'm not saying they necessarily got that deep with their stories, but I can see where a company, if you were from a world like you could keep the press on a leash and then suddenly there's these citizen journalists out there that was the boogeyman in the corporate world. You must be losing your mind, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And I should also note, I said this is a niche audience. The Steiners to this day, at least according to the reporting I've read, have a regular audience of about 600,000 people, which for a website like operated by two people, number one, that's a fairly sustainable business, but that's a good readership for an independent news site. That is actually very impressive. It testifies to the degree of work and trust that

their audience has in them, that they have kept that audience up to the modern day, right? When so many news organs are in the process of collapsing or have collapsed. Much of Ina's reporting focused on issues that dealt directly with sellers, but would be of interest to investors. For example, stories about eBay holding on to money from transactions for 30 days without any real reason seem like petty bullshit, and it is,

but it's something that at scale could mean millions in extra profits, which all gets funneled upwards to the handful of people who run the company and own stock in it. Enter Devin Winnig, the CEO of eBay during the period of time that we are talking about in this story, which was up until like 2019, like 2015 to 2019. Winnig had been born in Brooklyn in 1966. He was the son of Jeffrey Winnig, a toxicologist and chief executive of NasTech Pharmaceutical. When Jeffrey died suddenly, Devin, age 23, took over as CEO of the company for a year,

raised like 5 million in VC funding, and then joined a law firm, left the job after like a year, and NasTech seems to have kind of continued a slow decline afterwards. I bring that up because that basic pattern where he hops in, raises a bunch of VC funding, sets up a merger is going to kind of become the norm for his business career. In 1993, Winnig joins Reuters as the COO, and over the course of his time there, he becomes like the number two man at the company,

and he helps to manage the merger with the Thompson Corporation into Thompson Reuters. Now, this was a big deal at the time. There was a lot of antitrust scrutiny on it, because Thompson Reuters, when it merged, was the largest provider of financial news and information on earth. The merger led to massive job cuts across the now combined businesses, with leadership, particularly Devin, bragging about more than 500 million pounds worth of savings within

the first three years after the merger. Now, the reality of this was pretty brutal. The merger not only cost a lot of people their jobs, but it caused a collapse in profitability and influence for Thomson Reuters. It had been easily the largest company in the space at the time of the merger, if you like combine the readership of both platforms. But once they were merged, the quality dropped

and Bloomberg closed the gap behind them. There were several years of botched product launches while Winig was helping to run the company, which proved that the new team running Thomson Reuters didn't know what they were doing. This summary from an article in The Guardian gives you an idea of how disastrous this merger proved to be. In 2007, Thomson Reuters spoke for more than 36% of the market against 25% for Bloomberg. But according to its experts, Bloomberg will have nearly caught up in 2011 with a

30.8% market share against 31.4% for Thomson Reuters. Something has gone horribly wrong. At the very least, the task of melding these two companies together has been far more complex than originally envisaged. A less kind interpretation is that management, which has cut many hundreds of jobs, has taken its eye off the ball, losing hapless investors billions along the way. So you could say the evidence would suggest that Devin Winning is not a business genius, right? Based on his primary accomplishment, the merger of Thomson Reuters up to this point, a disaster for the company's influence and for its workers, but it makes a lot of money

for shareholders, and that's really all that matters. So in 2011, some of those same people make Devin Winnig, these, well, they hire, he gets hired at eBay initially as the president of their global marketplace business, right? He is initially successful here. One of the things that Devin recognizes early is that mobile commerce is going to be the future for eBay,

like sales to users shopping through their smartphones. And he reorganizes the company around that, which is a very successful move. In 2015, he becomes the CEO of the company. And within a couple of years at the job, the Steiners who are covering eBay as Winnig takes over at CEO, notices that his pay compensation

keeps rising at a rapid rate, particularly during a time when eBay itself is having trouble when they're dealing with increased competition from companies like Amazon, and when workers are not seeing their compensation rise. So from 2015 to 2018, Devon goes from $14.5 million a year to $17.6 million a year. This is out of line with the salary increases enjoyed by eBay employees during the same period, as Ina Steiner wrote on April 8, 2018.

Quote, for the first time, eBay released a new statistic called the CEO pay ratio required now with public companies. eBay reported the ratio of the total annual compensation of Mr. Winning to the median annual total compensation of all employees is estimated to be 143 to one. Now here's the thing, Jason, that's actually not bad if we're looking like overall in US like publicly traded companies, on average CEOs earn 399 times as much as the median worker. So you could say eBay is not doing terribly, right?

And Ina's article doesn't portray this as like a polemic. She's really just kind of focusing on the facts that like, yeah, this is how much Winnig is getting, is making. This is how it compares to the rate of salary increases normal employees have gotten. And this is how much it compares to the amount of money that normal employees are getting. You would not-

And also to any normal person that kind of really does look like he failed his way up into that position. Cause he did. But well, but this is because you're, you have to understand what is considered success in that world. So like taking over a media company and tanking the quality, but it's like, well, yeah, you tanked the quality by 80%,

but you cut expenses by 90%. So if you think about it. It's a win. Yeah. And that is how, that's how a guy like Devin thinks about things. And, you know, Ina's not, she's not coming at this with the kind of ideological lens that like,

I might if I were getting, you know, on more of a rant about Devin, she really is just reporting the facts. But Winig gets, like comes across across, he gets sent from underlings various articles she's putting out. It's known in eBay's C-suite that you have to pay attention to the Steiners and their articles because your investors do. And everything she writes about his compensation makes him angry.

Particularly, she ends one article with this line. eBay employees, feel free to chime in on whether or not you received a pay hike of 10 to 14% this year, and what you think of your salary compared to the median salary of your colleagues. And again, I would say that that's like a responsible, very fair way to phrase that as a journalist. This is not like someone at like some far left rag, right?

Like, but Devin is threatened by this. Either one of us could post online a photo of our lunch and we'll then say 10 replies. I will be told to kill myself. You will be accused of being a CIA plant. Or a terrorist. And that you need to kill myself. You will be accused of being a CIA plant. Or a terrorist. And that you need to kill yourself. This is the first thing that struck me because when I saw what they did and then they explained

what triggered the insane reaction we're about to get to, and it's so mild. It's really, really mild. Because these people are not like yellow journalism. They're not muckrakers. and it's so mild. It's really, really mild. Cause like- These people are not like yellow journalism. They're not muckrakers. It's just, it's the mildest criticism. You can tell how polite these people are. Yeah, yeah.

I'm sure like Ina is like tips 25% at all times and like is unfailingly polite to everyone she encounters in the real world. Well, I'm saying specifically as a content creator, you can tell that that's not where she gets her traffic. The traffic is not from being an over the top trash on people. It's not the way all political commentary has the tone now of just constantly calling people pedophiles or whatever. I guess that's my point. It's not like they took on somebody who was just an assassin, just constantly tearing them down. It was just somebody who did, it sounds like. Look, to get that size of an audience and to do stuff that's actually substantive and mature,

that's amazing. And when you read that criticism, it's like, wow, that's the stuff that this guy considers crossing the line with what kid gloves must she have always been handling them with. Yeah, yeah. That's exactly the point. And I do want to put a pin in that accusing people of being pedophiles thing, Jason, because when we come back from the ad break, you and I are going to accuse a celebrity of being a pedophile. I've been thinking about you.

I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session, 24 hours. Everything like you always do. One session, 24 hours. EPM 110, 120, she's terrified.

Should we wake her up? Absolutely not. What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this?

We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It was December 2019 when the story blew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, former Packer star Kabir Vajabiamila caught up in a bizarre situation. Hey, GB explaining what he believes led to the arrest of his friends at a children's Christmas play. led to the arrest of his friends at a children's Christmas play. A family man, former NFL player, devout Christian, now cut off from his family and connected to a strange arrest. I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. I got swept up in Kabir's journey, but this was only the beginning in a story about faith and football, the search for meaning away from the gridiron, and the consequences for everyone involved. You mix homesteading with guns and church and a little bit of the spice of conspiracy

theories that we liked. Voila! You got straight away. I felt like I was living in North Korea, but worse, if that's possible. Listen to Spiral'd on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ["Time of the Seasons"] Back in 1969, this was the hottest song around. It's the time of the seasons. So hot that some guys from Michigan tried to steal it.

The run is high, high, high, high. that some guys from Michigan tried to steal it. ["The Time of the Season"] My name is Daniel Ralston. For 10 years I've been obsessed with one of the most bizarre and audacious cons in rock and roll history. A group would have a hit record, and quickly they would hire a bunch of guys to go out and be the group. People were being cheated on several levels. After years of searching, we bring you the true story of the fake zombies. I was like blown away. These guys are not going to get away with it. Listen to the true story of the fake zombies on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. Jason Legal got back to me. We're gonna have to cut the segment that we had planned. So, can rest easy tonight. The allegations will not be going out in public, but one of these days, Jason, one of these days, we'll get the truth out to the people.

So back to Ina and our friend, Devin Winnig, CEO of eBay. Now Ina had good reason to be politely critical of Winnig. His exorbitant raises for himself and the rest of his friends in the C-suite of eBay had coincided with a rash of outlandishly wasteful expenses, best exemplified by his 2016 construction of the Main Street building on the eBay campus. This building was envisioned as the company's front door, and at the grand opening, Winig explained himself by saying, buildings are symbols of your culture and of your brand. And it's like, you know, it looks like any other really nice Silicon Valley office, which isn't a weird expense when the companies are like doing great.

But when you're in a cash crunch, it's going to get like criticized that like, well, you spent how many millions of dollars on this building that isn't necessary for work. It just kind of makes you look nice to 0% of the people who are going to be spending money on your platform because they are not invited to the Main Street building, right? Especially when you know that down further in the lower levels of the organization, because we have both worked for companies that you know, you've got people who are reading memos going around about now, some of you are plugging in your phones in the outlets.

That electricity is not free. You must, you're not allowed to use those outlets for personal devices. That's up to 18 cents of electricity per month you could be using there. You've got people that are forced to watch every little tiny penny. Yeah. And, you know, if they work one hour of overtime that their boss deemed was inappropriate that they get yelled at. So this is why it's like, no, up at the top,

they don't have to watch that stuff at all. They can just decide, you know what? I want a building that will impress visitors. Yeah. And it's the kind of thing where this is not just like, some workers at the bottom or even just people like Ina criticizing eBay of like, wow, this is a really unnecessary expense.

This is the conclusion reached in January of 2019 by Elliott Management after they pumped $1.4 billion into eBay for a 4% stake in the company. Now Elliott Management is one of the, they have a very milquetoast name, they're not nearly as well known because they don't have a sinister name as BlackRock, but this is one of the most bloodthirsty money companies out in the United States right now. They are a ruthless Wall Street investment firm.

They actually just put out a really interesting article about how they think the AI industry is massively overvalued. That I think is one of the more interesting things that's been written from like that side of the ledger. But like they are not people, unlike a lot of like Silicon Valley, which runs on irrational exuberance and like think of how profitable this is all going to be. These guys are like bloodless vampires and they purely exist to maximize the profit that they can get for their investment. And they have no interest in like the egos of a guy like Devin Winnick, right?

So they took one look at eBay's balance books after they pumped 1.4 billion into the company and they conclude, this is one of the most inefficient and chaotic executive teams that we've ever seen. And the company is burning through a huge amount of cash on shit that nobody needs. And now that we've put all this money into the company, we are going to demand serious changes, right? And Elliot has the kind of a juice that means everyone at the company starts sweating.

This is actually potentially a threat even to Winick's job. Like this is not, you can't ignore the people who are able to put $1.4 billion into your company. Maybe if you're Apple, you can, because that's pennies to them, but eBay cannot afford to ignore that. Now, when you are in a company like this and a bunch of people with a shitload of money come in

and say, we're going to make some serious changes, you and I have both been in that situation with various corporate overlords, the natural impulse says, well, I need to put my head the fuck down, right? I don't want to draw any attention to myself unless it's like for doing something good. And this is kind of what Winnig wanted to do,

but he had a problem. And that problem is the Steiners, because their boring industry publication is read by the folks at Elliot, right? Who are using it in part to try and determine whether or not the people running eBay are wasting more of their money. So this kind of irritation he'd had with the Steiners reporting on his salary grows into an obsession as he gets more and more worried that his control of the company is at risk now. In April of 2019 then, when Ina wrote another article

about the fact that Devin was very much overpaid, he gets angry. Now, he has hired a PR company at that point to help manage the situation, right? And in general, the bad PR that eBay is getting at this time and the PR company, because they are competent professionals are like, ignore this, don't get obsessed with

these elderly people and their blog. There's no response you can make to them that will not blow up in your face. Just let this by and try to run the company more efficiently, right? Which is like- Take a pay cut, maybe? If you're worried that that's- Take a pay cut. If you think that's a vulnerability and if you think you are overpaid, if you're worried that that's... Maybe take a pay cut. If you think that's a vulnerability in the order... If you think you are overpaid, if you think their criticism is true, then take a pay cut. Is that one of the options? Yeah, just don't take a raise this year, probably. You could get away with that, maybe.

Devin for a while goes with their recommendation, but whenever he would get angry, he would fume about the Steiner's to his fellow executives. And when he would fume to his fellow executives, all of the subordinates below him in the C-suite, they would send his emails on down the line to other people at the company, particularly to people in the, in eBay's like security division, right? And inevitably all of his complaints wound up at the office of his top security director, a man named Jim Baw, like B-A-U-G-H. Or Bog? We'll go with Bog.

So in April of 2019, Bog had his analysts gather information and prepared an anonymous handwritten note to be sent to Ina Steiner. He was not, maybe he, we don't know if he was ordered to do this, but he has his people get a bunch of info on her and he puts together a handwritten note threatening her physical person and threatening to destroy her reputation. The goal stated in the emails around this handwritten document was that they were making

it to get her to, quote, stop publishing articles critical of eBay. Now at this point, I don't know entirely where like the, they don't get the go ahead from the C-suite, right? I don't know if Devin actually makes a call here or if it's someone below him, but someone still has a lid on their worst impulses at this point, April of 2019. But Bog is just kind of getting started here, right?

The fact that his send a crazy letter to these people plan gets kind of killed does not kill his desire for vengeance against these bloggers. Now, I wanna give you some context on Jim Bog because understanding him is very critical both to understanding the kind of people who wind up in these corporate intelligence roles

and to understanding all of the insane shit that comes next. Bog, we don't have a huge amount of detail in his early life or whatever, but he was a, he worked for the CIA. He was at some point an operative at the CIA, right? From what I can tell, I think he worked there for a decent amount of time. I'm not sure if it was a full career, but it was a matter of multiple years. And then after he leaves the CIA, he starts a security firm that becomes very popular with Silicon Valley companies. He contracts to Apple, to Amazon.

He works security for the Oscars one year. Probably his biggest role is he provides a protection detail to Joe Biden at the 2016 Oscars. So that's a little odd, but there you go. Maybe they should, well, he dropped out of the campaign. That would have been a great thing for Trump to hit him on though, you know, if only. Did this guy give his security firm a cool name

like Black Cube? It's like Jim Baugh Consulting or something like that. No, no, nothing cool at all. Yeah, at least I'll say this for the Black Cube people, that's a cool name for a spy company. Like it sounds evil, as does like Palantir sounds evil, but Joe Bogg is not a particularly creative man. So it's a little hard for me to tell the degree

to which Bogg was still tied into the US intelligence establishment during the period of time that he's working at Silicon Valley, to underlings at eBay. He would periodically claim that his wife was still employed by the CIA. I think there's a good chance he was lying. He also would claim in public often while drinking that he was still a part-time employee of the CIA in his spare time.

I found an article in Puck News about claims made in the court case that results from all of this. Quote, Bog detailed how after leaving the CIA, he was re-enlisted to provide private sector colleagues, even a CEO he boasted, to spy on foreign, to recruit private sector colleagues, even a CEO he boasted, to spy on foreign leaders and report back on important international meetings.

I felt honored to be trusted with such sensitive information and to be able to provide security assistance to our government. So, and this is stuff that he says in court when he's trying to get his sentence mitigated, I continued to work after entering private security for the federal government, recruiting like business people, including the CEO of one company, to spy on foreign leaders and report back on their meetings for the federal

government. I think this is the kind of thing that happens a lot, but yeah. Yeah. If he was doing that, that's not the weirdest thing we've heard whatsoever. That is a kind of thing in terms of like getting hired under the table or whatever to continue to collect intelligence or whatever. Like that's a very plausible lie. If it's a lie, it's very plausible.

Yeah. And it makes total sense. If you're the CIA, what would you rather do? Spend the shitload of money and potentially risk lives of your operatives like wiretapping a guy or when the CEO of tech company X goes to meet with Vladimir Putin, talk to him afterwards. Right? Like one of those is much easier than the other. Yeah, they're there anyway, yeah.

And it's not all that hard to rope. Like if you're a guy like Bog, you go to this like, hey, you know, you've got this kind of boring corporate job. Do you wanna feel, do you wanna be a spy for a little bit, right? The CIA has a job for you. And all you have to do is the job you were going to do, right?

Like obviously you get a lot of guys who are interested in doing shit like this, if only to make their lives a little less boring. Now, the first and most important requirement is that you not get drunk and tell everyone that you're doing this. Right, yeah. Which Boggs seems to be doing.

He drinks a lot and he tells people a lot about his side work for the CIA and his wife's work for the CIA. Now, we don't know much about the specifics here, like really how far this went, but we do know that he's telling the truth about a lot of it because after he started talking about this stuff in court, the Justice Department had his letter to the court sealed, claiming it contained classified national security secrets. We only know all of the stuff that was in the letter because the court monitoring services forgot to redact it

when they put it up online. And so the guys at Puck News were able to get unredacted versions of what is now a sealed court letter. So again, the security states got a lot of holes in it still. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But yeah, fun story. So that is enough about kind of his backstory here. What is interesting to me about Jim is that he definitely has this CIA connection. He definitely has a legit background as a spy and a professional career working, or at least if not as a spy, working in some degree as an intelligence operative, right?

And he is still, even though he has this real experience, someone whose entire conception of the world and specifically how intelligence works seems to be based on stereotypes from Hollywood movies. And I'm going to read now a quote from the New York Times describing how he would, after he gets hired at eBay to run this special elite security analytics team, how he would talk to his team of analysts about threats to eBay. Mr. Bogg would bring the analysts into a conference room and show the scene from American Gangster, where Denzel Washington coolly executes a man in front of a crowd to make a point. Or a clip from The Wolf of Wall Street, where the feds are investigating shady deeds, but none of the perpetrators can recall a thing. Or the bit from Meet the Fockers about a retired CIA agent's circle of trust. That one came up frequently. No one is supposed to know about

this, Mr. Bogg would tell the analysts about some piece of office gossip. We'll keep it in the circle of trust. So I guess, okay, but right away, here's where I'm again getting confused because this blogger, they were not a threat to the company. They were a threat to that CEO that they thought was wasting money, both in terms of taking a salary, in terms of spending money recklessly. So this is where I didn't get why this guy, this goon took such offense at what these

bloggers were doing if he was not ordered to buy the CEO, because they're going to make the story like all the CEO did was vaguely say, well, I don't like this, and that he went off on his own. But this is also the part that I could never figure out what his motivation was. Jason, if you'll forgive me, I'd like to talk about the Nazis again here, because I think this is an illustrative point,

not because these people are Nazis, they're not, but because it's illustrative as to how stuff like this can actually, like stuff like this filters down and up without necessarily commands being given. There was this understanding in the Third Reich that people who worked at various levels of the government should all be working towards the fearer, right? Which meant that rather than just waiting to get explicit instructions while you were doing something like helping to set up the architecture of genocide or of state repression

in the Gestapo, you should try to figure out what Hitler wanted and provide it for him before he asked. So a lot of the time, there's not a lot of documentation about Hitler ordering specific crimes against humanity. What you do have is him having dinner with a bunch of his high-level adjutants and aides and officials, and talking vaguely about things he would like to see happen, and then they go to their underlings and say like, hey, these are the kind of things Hitler wants.

And then it keeps kind of filtering down as people sort of try to figure out what the actual policy implications about these vague grandiose statements ought to be. And that is not just how the Nazis work, that's how large organizations that are heavily based around the personality of a leader at the top and pleasing that person work. And I get the feeling Devin Winnig, he is temperamental. He is someone we have some evidence has a lot of mood swings.

I think a lot of people at the company have an understanding that their ability to get hired elsewhere, their ability to stay at eBay is dependent upon Devin being happy with them. When Devin will go on rages about these people, that makes it into a priority for the lower people to find a way to deal with them. Even if Devin isn't necessarily ordering them to break the law, this kind of desperation to, I want to kind of proactively please the boss is how a lot of this stuff works, right? And I do think that's kind of the broad psychological

thing going on here. And if I can make another extremely inappropriate comparison to this day, it's never totally clear to me if like with the Manson family murders, if Charles Manson actually ordered that done or if he was just extremely high, like, why? Oh, yeah, I do. Yeah, I go and kill them all.

I just paint the walls with their blood, da, da, da. If he was just talking and then they just, they took it as an order because, you know, like to this day they talk about Manson as his criminal mastermind and he manipulated everybody else around him. It's like, no, I think they were all just kind of dumb and high and they didn't know, you know, he was just ranting the way he does. You've seen him in interviews.

And so they just went and did it. And maybe he himself didn't know if he wanted it done because that's kind of the way people work. A lot of the time. And I'm not saying, by the way, just to be clear, I'm not saying that like Hitler was not on board with the crimes committed by the regime, but he was not a nuts and bolts guy and he didn't need to be. And oftentimes that's not how things work.

You have, you know, the guy, the person at the top expressing these kinds of like rage-filled grandiose goals and he has put people in place below him who he knows will do something. He doesn't need to know the specifics. An extremely important point that I do. I do want to stop and focus on this because this happens all over the place. You create a culture that it is in many cases intentionally set up so that if there is backlash or you get caught doing something that you can say, well, there was no order telling them to do this.

And so trying to pin it on you with these nebulous terms of, well, but you rewarded similar behavior or you made it clear you weren't going to punish such behavior or whatever, that you created a culture, you hired the type of people that would do this kind of thing. It's hard and in this criminal case, I think it's going to turn out to be true. It's hard to pin it on the guy at the top that kind of set the stage for it to happen. And the people who really know what they're doing, they the stage for it to happen. Right. Exactly. And the people who really know what they're doing, they make sure that it's run this way.

Yeah. Yeah. And this is not just eBay, but eBay is a particularly extreme example. Now, under Bog, as he's basically running this security division within the company, eBay develops a pretty paranoid set of internal security policies. I should note, because we're talking about the most irrational example of this, there's a good reason for some degree of paranoia.

The year before all of this happens, everything starts to happen 2019 with the Steiners, there's a mass shooting at YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno, California. The shooter in this case was Naseem Najafi Agdam, who's a vegan activist YouTuber who believed the company had filtered her channel to keep her stuff from getting viewed. She wounded three people before killing herself. And you know, it's kind of hard for me to see eBay attracting exactly that kind of thing, but also it's not hard for me to imagine someone who is not well convincing themselves that eBay has destroyed their business for some reason.

And like, it's not a non-factor, right? So there's this obsession Bogg has with like the physical security of the company that lends to this general air of paranoia. And he would tell his colleagues in the analytics department, because they're researching, they're looking into people who are critical of eBay online, right? And the reasonable end of that is we need to, you know, if some people are saying on Twitter, I want to like shoot up an eBay campus or something, we need to know about that because that actually could happen, right?

But that's not the only people that they're going after. And this kind of kernel, the justification for what they're doing is where a lot of the madness comes from. And Bog kind of hypes himself up after the shooting on the importance of his role. He would tell his employees, quote, we need to be ready. We're the only ones who can prevent this from happening. Bog would hold regular mass shooter drills and as always, he would play clips from action movies and spy thrillers to inform and motivate his staff on how to deal with the shooting.

When he wasn't psyching them up about this stuff, he was frightening them with knives. This is one of my favorite stories from this guy. At one point, he like walking around, there's a barbecue grill on the eBay campus and like someone leaves a knife at the grill and he freaks out about it he gets the whole team around him and he's like waving the knife around ranting about how like if a deranged person found this they could have used this to hurt somebody and then he takes it into the security office and he stabs a chair and he makes them leave the chair with the knife in it there as a warning to everybody about how much more paranoid they need to be.

So you can tell this is a man who's got like a good sense of priorities. He's responding rationally to the world before we get into this shit with the Steiners. I could speak for the next four and a half hours on this subject, but instead of going to try to condense it down to a few sentences. There is a type of hyper-performative masculinity that is all about being scared. All the time. And these are the guys that have a pump shotgun under their bed and a little quick release latch thing, because like, well, somebody breaks in, I'll roll

out of my bed, grab this, take out the guy at the window, shoot the guy at the door, roll into the hallway. And they spin, and they think of it as being tough guy, but they're scared. They're scared to death. They go to the zoo with a gun on their ankles. Like, watch, there's a mass shooting at the zoo, or what if a bunch of the animals get out and it's up to me to shoot them. It's like they're living in fear and then portraying that as masculinity, tough guy stuff when it's actually the opposite.

It's just constantly being overly afraid of everything all the time. Yeah, we have a lot of problems with this exact kind of guy, right? And Bogg is kind of one, he's an example of how it works at like the top of sort of a corporate food chain when this guy gets into security. And when I kind of try to psychoanalyze him,

again, we don't, cause he was a CIA agent, we don't get a lot of specifics of his career, but I think that he probably has, you know, one of the big, one of the two Watergate guys, the dude who was played by Woody Harrelson in one of the recent shows, I'm spacing on his name right now, was a former CIA man, right? Who had been a part of some of like the regime change shit in Central America, but not doing like exciting murdering people or handing over guns mostly like Making sure payments went where they needed to go and handling paperwork

So he is part of these sketchy scary like very movie worthy plots But in a really boring way and then when he leaves He's kind of insecure about the fact that he doesn't actually know how to do anything cool And that's where a lot of the dumb shit with the Watergate break-ins come in, is like, this guy is convinced, well, I was at the CIA doing shady shit. I should be able to do something like this,

even though he doesn't actually know how to do anything but file paperwork. Yeah, they don't actually know how this stuff is done by the people that are actually good at doing the dirty tricks. Right, right. Yeah, and that is the feeling that are actually good at doing the dirty tricks. Right, right. Yeah, and that is the feeling that I get with Bog. So Bog's team consists of about a half a dozen analysts, which when he gets hired are all,

are mostly men, but by May of 2018, after he's been there, I think a year or two, he had hired or fired and hired people until the entire team was very young women. This is the kind of environment where no one feels safe asking him about this, but he would explain it to them anyway by playing a video of Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg giving a speech on how there aren't enough female leaders. And I'm gonna quote from the New York Times again.

Ms. Sandberg did not say these women should all be young and blonde. Charlie's Angels and Jim's Angels were their nicknames in the executive suite. But Ms. Zee, which is one of his young employees, wasn't about to point that out. Women got fired too, and afterward the survivors would whisper about why. One departed analyst had been reprimanded for not smiling in front of executives. Another was let go because she sang to keep herself awake during the night shift. A third because she chewed on her pen.

So, you know, just to give you a picture of this guy, he makes all of his employees young and blonde. Everyone at the C-suite is aware of this. They make Charlie's Angels jokes about it. And then he'll fire them if they don't smile enough or, you know, aren't acting cute enough for his behavior. Again, very, you know, a guy we're all well familiar with. To take the creep factor up a notch, Bog and his top assistant, Stephanie Popp, ordered the rest of the analyst team

to refer to them as mom and dad, repeatedly telling them, we're a family, which it just sounds like a nightmare working for this team. So with his Charlie's Angels style HR violation of a team in place, Bogg started watching the Steiner's website like a hawk as in May of 2019, the CEO began sending more and more messages about their content. That month, May, Ina published an article revealing that Devin Winning had directed

corporate funds to build what she described as a quote, lavish New York City pub style lounge on their campus. This was in fact a scale replica of a New York City bar, Walker's West built on the eBay campus entirely for eBay employees. I don't know why this particular bar is important. Like I think it's a popular bar.

I think it's just a bar Winnig thought was cool. So he spent shareholder money building a perfect replica. And it opened at 3 p.m. every day on the eBay campus. So again, the fact that there's a bar on campus and everyone is drinking is not a non-factor in some of the decisions that are going to be made here. Ina's article on the construction of this pub has the same slightly critical but professional tone as her other work. Quote, sure seems like an unnecessary expense for a company watching its market share get

eaten up by Amazon and being warned about overspending by a major investor. This is what kind of infuriates people at the eBay's executive level. Bogg gets the article and he's scared that someone at Elliott's going to read it. And so he forwards a link to the CEO who forwards it to an underling executive who sends it to a PR consultant and complains, I'm no longer just accepting ignore as a broader strategy and want to fight back. Looking forward to talking ASAP to get your assessment of how to do that most effectively. And this excerpt from the subsequent court filing describes what happens next.

Thereafter eBay communications employees sent information to the consultant about the Steiners, including their buying selling history on eBay and the perspective of eBay employees who knew them. On or about May 31st, 2019, Executive 2 and Executive 3 exchanged messages regarding Ina Steiner and eCommerceBytes. In relevant part, Executive 2 described an eCommerceBytes article discussing Executive 1,

that's the CEO's, presentation to shareholders during eBay's 2019 annual meetings as shockingly reasonable. Executive 3 referred to Ina Steiner as a cow. Executive two responded, her day is coming. Executive three stated, I can't wait. Jim Baw came to me with some thoughts and I told him to stand down and leave it alone. Executive two responded, you are being too kind. Tell them to be my advisor on this issue.

Sometimes you just need to make an example out of someone. We are too nice. She needs to be crushed. So I want to go over the escalation here, right? These two executives, they get the message from the CEO and then they start talking about Steiner and what they need to do about her. And executive number two is like,

well, she, I mean, her presentation on like the CEO's shareholder meeting was really reasonable. And then the other guy is like, yeah, but, she, I mean, her presentation on like the CEO's shareholder meeting was really reasonable. And then the other guy is like, yeah, but she's a cow. And then they start making these increasingly like movie, like threats. Her day is coming. We'll make an example out of her. She needs to be crushed. The, the escalation from like, well, this is a pretty reasonable

piece of reporting from we need to destroy this human being happens in the space of a couple of text messages, which I find really interesting. And I feel like we've left a lot of the listeners behind because there's such a disconnect. The problem, like again, the fear that these investors were going to see this article, the problem is not the article. The problem is that you built that goddamn bar. Why did you spend all that money on a bar? It's like, well, this is, you know, this is the last straw that she told everyone about the bar we built.

It's like, no, no, no, back up. You, you, you went one step too far. Your problem didn't start with a blogger noticing you built a replica of a New York bar for millions of dollars, it's that you did that at all. Because after all, if she had made that up, if that was fake, well, then it's easy. You can just go out and disprove it and say, hey, this is a lie. This is libelous.

It's the fact that what she was saying is true that made it so damaging. So now focus on why is it that what she said was true? That was your own actions. And she finds out about this because the contractor eBay hires, like puts a page up on their website, like with pictures of the construction and like how much it costs and everything.

Cause they, you know, that's the, how the contractor gets additional business and Ena just finds it Googling around like, oh, it seems like they spent a lot of money on this fucking thing. Like the absolute, the number one refusal to see that like, well, it's your own action that's getting you the bad attention.

And the fact that like, and you didn't even take any efforts to stop someone from finding this out, you know, you could have had them do an NDA, right? You didn't have to let them publish an article about it on their website. Did you not think anyone would notice? Anyway, Bog after this point gets the go-ahead

to actually begin offensive actions against the Steiners. And on June 6th, he tasks his team with tracking all of Ina's articles and social media posts concerning eBay. On June 7th, he sends a contractor, a retired police captain named Gilbert, to surveil the Steiner's home in the Boston area. The day after this, Bogg himself called the Steiner's home in the middle of the night

and hung up as soon as they answered. The harassment campaign had begun. And it is amusing to me that apparently the CIA training that this guy had told him like, start by trolling them on social media, then you call them and you hang up. I guess this might be why we lost Cuba. Unfortunately, as with Cuba,

things are going to escalate pretty rapidly from here. And we're gonna cover that and more Jason on Thursday's episode. Right now, we're gonna cover your books that people can buy, or in one case, preorder right now. Yes, the new book is called, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. Yeah, it's out on September 24th. If you are hearing this after that date, it's already out.

If it's not, then that means it got pulled off shelves and I'm probably in jail or something, or I got canceled somehow. There's probably an equally interesting story in that. Otherwise, it's available in every format, including audio, ebook, hardcover. I do not read the audio book. I'm not an audio book narrator.

People keep asking me that. That would be a disaster. They hired a professional. Yeah. I would love it if you, if the same thing happened to you that happened to, oh shit, what's his name? Tom Clancy, that one time where he like accidentally

described a nuclear submarine so accurately that the government had to sit down with him. Um, anyway, you know, read Jason's books before he is arrested for accurately describing aspects of our nuclear defense triad. And listen to the remaining podcasts on this network before we get taken out for, I don't know,

I don't have a joke ready. Whatever, I'm tired. Go to hell, I love you. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For 10 years, I've been obsessed with one of the most bizarre and audacious cons in rock and roll history. We were all facing 20 years and all that good stuff. The lead singer tried to pull off an English accent and they went on the road as the zombies. These guys are not going to get away with it. The zombies are too popular. Listen to the true story of the fake zombies on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to The CINO Show. I'm your host, Cino McFarlane. I'm an addiction specialist. I'm a coach, I'm a translator, and I'm God's middle man. My job is to crack hearts and let the light in and help everyone shift the narrative. I wanna help you wake up and I wanna help you get free. Most importantly, I don't want you to feel alone. Listen to The Zeno Show every Wednesday

on iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What happens when a professional football player's career ends and the applause fades and the screaming fans move on? I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. For some former NFL players, a new faith provides answers. You mix homesteading with guns and church, voila!

You got straight away. They try to save everybody. Listen to Spiraled on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.