South America in Competition Conference: Bonus Episode 2

Hi, I'm Doug Livermore, the IWA Director of Engagements, as well as the Vice President at Special Operations Association of America. And I'm Omar Ahmed Badami, the Director of IWA's Wargaming Division. This month, we're excited to provide two bonus episodes of the Euregular Warfare Podcast based on Conversations, HELL, and an event IWA coordinated in partnership with the Special Operations Association of America. The South America and Competition Conference brought together over 250 researchers, practitioners, and members of industry for two days at the Carusoft headquarters in the DC area. The first day included panel discussions on irregular warfare challenges in the South America region, and the second day included a detailed war game with participation from a range of stakeholders planned by the IWA Wargaming Division. For these bonus episodes, IWA Podcast hosts Jackie Yuntah recorded seven conversations with conference participants following their panel presentation. The participants include researchers and members of industry, each asked to dig into challenges related to how the United States must address competition in South America. This second bonus episode includes three short conversations, summarizing insights from conference panels. First, Jackie is joined by John Stockton, co-founder of Quantified, Dave Cook from the Special Operations Association of America, and Dr. Ryan Berg from the America's program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies to discuss how to use open source intelligence to track illicit financial networks. Next, Katherine Woods from the Institute of Financial Integrity discusses illicit financial flows and how to use tools of economic state craft to counter them. Lastly, Phil Fuster, a ZP at Spypod, further discusses the importance of Ocent and the need to refocus our relationships towards Alpader. We hope you enjoy these conversations from diverse stakeholders in the irregular warfare training. If you have an idea for an eventual war game IWI should run, want to get involved in future vents, or want to provide material support so IWI can continue these important conversations, please visit www.irregularwarfare.org and reach out to the team. Again, that is www.irregularwarfare.org. Lastly, before we start the conversations, we want to give a big thank you to the team at Erisock for generously providing their space for the conference and support for the event and to the Special Operations Association of America for partnering with IWI to make this event possible for the community. Without further ado, here's today's bonus episode of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Enjoy the conversation. We are here today with Dr. John Stockton, co-founder of Quantifying. Thank you for joining us today. Can you just start us off with giving us a little bit about yourself and tell us about quantifying? Sure, sure. Thank you for having me. It was John Stockton from Quantifying, co-founder, have a background in physics. Coming out of that could be me focused on quantum entanglement, and metrology and things like that. Then, thanks to my fellow co-founder, he's also a physicist or a tukman. He pulled me into the studying role of Silicon Valley and this podcast is going to be about who sent, right? Open source intelligence. We're basically doing that for banks in the context of how they're regularly. So he will not be aware that banks can't just break anybody, especially people who are sanctioned or have other what have deemed high-risk behavior. We help them determine who is who based on the AI that we have because of the same science, energy resolution, relationship extraction, risk label. Using all sorts of open source data, our Valley Props are all about accuracy, scale, and speed, especially with AI progressing as it is, the bar Keith Reiser and all of those, especially accuracy. We have an unlimited appetite in terms of how much open source do we've been bringing in because you never really know where the signal can come from. That's our business and then starting in 2020, for so we branched out into the federal space with Dependent Summation Mino, which is what people don't know if that is. It's a great QD organization that helps companies like ours, a lot of the time bridge, Bremfield and all of the two DC, and handholding them the whole way. And that's led to lots of great opportunities that have burned us into a dual-use company where we can support the financial sector and many different use cases within the government, whether it's the IC or DOD, STIFIUS. So, yeah, that's what we do. It's a lot of fun and that's great mission. Yeah, thank you for that. So you joined us today on the fourth panel here at the conference, which covered adversary networks and open source intelligence. So also joining us is Dave Cook, who moderated the panel, Dave's with the Special Operations Association of America and Dr. Ryan Berg, who is the director of the America's program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Thank you guys for joining us today. So I want to open this up to the group as a group discussion and let's recap post-panel and cover some insights. So what are some of the takeaways from the key big topics that you guys covered today? I think if we stay with the Iriwa Warfare topic here, I think what Dr. Stoxton covered right there was a very good swath of the middle ground of the gray zone between peace and armed conflict and a lot of what we're seeing, especially in the financial sector. And now with the foreign terrorist organizations, cartels that are foreign terrorist organizations, you have to follow the money. And there's a huge opportunity to sort of cut off the supply chain here, which also goes into other illicit activities as well. South America, Latin America, Central America. Well, time for this Iriwa Warfare fight. Yeah, and enough items. No imprude your allies are. It was a lime with you and it was a bit of a disadvantage to him out. It was really mapping the space. Great. Because the strategy, Dr. Berg is pointing out, is to leave in on the private sector in terms of the core partners that are going to be to invest in the program that we're going to align with. And then we're going to let it private sector, public sector, even in foreign country partners to be very complex. You have to know what their connections are, who their relationship, who they have deals with. You know, you know, incentives are incentives, right? And so you can use O-Sent to map that and to map the playing field and then adjust your strategy to that as we compete with China. Thanks for having us, Jack. This is, it was a great panel. And I think one of my top takeaways is certainly that when I come to conferences like this, and I hear people like John speak about not just their educational background, but the products that they are producing and innovating on a day in and day out basis, I remember why political science doesn't really deserve the science part of the name. And I think others are. They've heard of the other science in your name, and it's not a science. But I respect all of them. I think that's a fair thing to say for political scientists like myself. But look, I'm here at this conference and I'm more of a regional specialist than I am a specialist than you really were fair, but I'm always blown away by how much the private sector is actually innovating to help the fight. And so the sheer number of tools is my first takeaway. And perhaps that's not extremely insightful, but it's just a comment on the number of different organizations, products and tools that we've heard from throughout the panels today. That can be brought to bear on this fight and to illuminate aspects of this battle with our adversaries that we otherwise wouldn't have the tools to be able to illuminate. And then the second point is one that I think often gets made that this is a lack of tools or an inability to kind of bring the private sector to DOD or to whatever institution it needs to be brought to to kind of build that bridge, to build a cooperative partnership with public private in order to go out and fight in this battle space. And what I've seen today is the private sector is ready, right? The private sector is ready and asking very eager to partner. And so that leaves me to believe that it's not a lack of tools. It's not a lack of appetite for the private sector. It's really about reforming some of the sclerotic institutions and slow bureaucracies that we have on the government side to get them ready, able, capable and willing to partner in this in a space with private sector. Think one thing that we didn't really touch on in the panel, but because piggybacks on what Dr. Burg is talking about is that in the Eurela Warfare fight, the private sector is usually the first touch point, usually the first target. And it's either intellectual property or cyber attacks or exploits or even exploitation of employees in foreign countries. And so having that interoperability or at least communication channel that's open between the private sector and government is essential today. Yeah, and it's part of our story too. I mean, we hear the classic Silicon Valley story of what you're being pulled in advertising and so you know, you started trying to change the world and ended up in on selling burritos, so just to come back, we've somehow found a way to do good and do well at the same time, which is almost a miracle, but to come back to that mission was huge and it would be a tragedy if the raw government institutions like rejected, ready and willing hatred. But you don't even need to be a patriot, which we are, to join the fight because for all the reasons you just mentioned, I'm a third-sip pep after anything else. Whether you want to be in the fight or not, you're involved. You're in the same situation as everybody else. But yeah, it's on the point. Yeah, I think there's a blind spot when it comes to a regular worker in a sense where utilizing Ocent to expose what's happening, right? To expose the fact that a lot of times the big soft target is the private sector. So this is, it's good in both capacities that this can, innovations coming out of the private sector because they're understanding how to fix their own problems. But then to utilize that in the defense space. My question is how, how ready is defense to leverage Ocent? And what, what does that look like over the past decade or so in terms of assuming it's gone from corroborating data to now it's pulling the leads and it's facilitating targeting? Yeah, yeah. It isn't it, isn't it, right? Like, what you see typically is lots of them, tourists, lots of champions, lots of, you know, innovation happening, but on the flip side sometimes with innovation tourism, where like, it looks like, you know, they're in for it, but they're really just dating. And not for willing to get married to the private sector. And it's hard as a, as a startup to know who's, you know, who to bet on. You're betting on people and agent views has to do to tie your wagon to you, right? And that's my channel's what luckily we found ones that are, you know, pulling us forward and do have production fun and do have a vision for how this is kind of kind of radio across the entire, the OD among K is where I see them another on, but, uh, yeah, it's a mix. And I mean, we talked, the D.I.U. For example, talked about the value of the reason because, you know, it is, you know, not many make it out. But if you're, you know, the name of the game of the startup is just a survival on the map, you can't cover enough people to make it through, but you need the fire in the right, the right brand, which was which one? Expand the conversation is even beyond defense to me. We talk oftentimes about the Pentagon and the blow to the difficulty getting the unspirtment to move, but I think it's also about other cabinet level agencies like the State Department. We talked in the panel a little bit about the diplomatic aspect of this or the ability of State, for example, to use some of the pioneers of the private sector, specifically in a region like Latin America, because, say, for about three of the countries, Venezuela, Kulin, Canawa, the usual suspects, you're talking about democratic countries in the region. And so there should be a part of our strategy in the way of a warfare perspective that is about getting to democratic publics, right? Getting messages to then getting key pieces of information, be it about corruption, criminal networks, government involvement, so on. Governments have to be responsive to these findings. And so there's a way in which the State Department should have a profound interest in the stuff that folks like John are doing, because it directly shapes or provides them more tools to be able to shape public opinion in places where we want to have deep diplomatic partnerships and compete in more than just the defense domain. So I think there's a diplomatic angle to this as well. We should broaden out, I think, the conversation on the sporadic institutions to include other capital-level agencies, not just even. Yeah, whoever has, I think the key point here is the colonel series, the post-indipulmacy. And, you know, Osem's great in and of itself, it's rising, it's huge, it's, you know, on a car would be other ints now, but it would also be a tragedy if you didn't take the fifth habit being open, right? And sharing it with partner nations, parent. And really, it's such a lot of opportunity if you didn't help them reach self-reliance, self-determination by pointing out what our adversaries are, how our adversaries are exploiting them, whether it's a legal phishing, a legal mining, or just state capture and a lot of cases. And doing that almost for free, right? Well, again, in a way, we're asking anything, this is all brand building, this is all trust-building. And we see in that work, and Mike is, and in our case, more optimization in the context of people like Well-led trafficking and providing data to help with prosecutions and things like this. And there's a huge appetite for that whole society approach to bring in not just multiple government agencies where it's a COD law enforcement, but NGOs and tag them harders like to open. And, you know, it's a great mission, and even if we're only a small piece of it, it's very morale-boost, especially in Silicon Valley where you get jaded a whole lot of things, to help get help even just a little bit. The civil society component is key as well. It's not just the part of our government says, as John said, but as he also said, it's also the civil society organizations, the NGOs, groups that care about some of these single or dual issue things, getting them to push governments to take action in certain cases, especially the more obstinate governance that governments that don't want to take action. That's key. So sometimes it's not sharing at the state level, but sometimes it might be a state or the state asking the private sector to share it with, say, a key NGO or a key investigative journalism outlet or something like that. Yeah, those NGOs are key partners like to me and Matuba, because as opposed to government, they're more willing, like they're not appraile than, like they just want to solve the problem, like they're not making a lot of money. They can't solve the problem, but that's not worth it, right? And to enable them in any way, they use this each and, you know, yeah, obviously, I don't know as many of that were in the United for a while live. And there's also investigative journalism that you come in and they're not just hands and like, they also provide signals, because you know, as opposed to coming to like ours, we're doing like 100 risks, we're kind of horizontal. Each one of them, like you said, very vertical. There's one for human trafficking, this one's for many for each, but like each one of them focused very tightly where to these issues. And they can share signals, back to it, you know, us, you know, model builders who can look for those signals. And so there are these four to it, it's kind of feedback loop. You can get when you include all the right people in the right realm and not just stick to a overly classified high-size situation where one person is presumed, you know, when one system is presumed to have, you know, gold data case, we're not in that world anymore. Trying to, you don't take the risk of opening things up. You know, and there are some risks there because Leo can, you know, could probably do with the type, because the old world, you know, but those risks were worth it when you can actually see the, what people need. Well, I guess I'll tell a story and then go back a question, too, but yeah, I mean, the NGOs are super clutch. The T's a doctrinal term. I think that's a good one. I remember my deployments in the mid 2010s and to special operators come in forward Yemen, and that was a time when we weren't in Yemen, but there were some international NGOs that were there, and our job was to essentially message and form, educate the population, and the best information that we got were from groups like Doctors Without Borders that would publish the results. And I'm probably, we're probably not too happy that we, you know, are using their information, but I mean, it's good. And that communication is key, and the beauty is, again, it's public, and it should be public, and for them it pretty much has to be public, you know, that to show their impact. I'm not just supporting this public for kind of shared early reasons, but to contrast with China, who's seriously opaque, and where people are trying to read the, the T with the Eiffel Shrine, like, we have nothing to hide, right? In the scenarios, right? You don't know. You don't know. When you're trying to solve one problem, but the volume too? Yeah. I think if I could go back, a question or two that open source intelligence is being formalized and the House, permanent select committee on intelligence, just set up a subcommittee on open source intelligence, the first committee has ever been dedicated to a single intelligence discipline, and what that tells me is that more resources will be driven to Ocent, and to what Dr. Sokton was talking about, I think, you know, I remember an Army Special Operations Command, we could buy all kinds of things that if you dropped a money at O, they would really hurt, but asked to buy a subscription to Adobe or some kind of software and people's minds explode. And so I know this administration has gone through and Secretary Higgs has tried to expedite this software acquisition. I'm not sure we're there yet, and I think that that would be a really good place to start if I were a HIPC staffer on the Ocent subcommittee. Yeah, I'm a mystic, but also a little skeptical. The space has tuned this kind of outlaw and the power of the football situation with Go Home Wilson, but you know, it would be great if they do the right things. Right, like I mean, which clues you combine the information sharing, you kind of framework with the even just criminal life accounting, the practically between a double chart and double pair of data that I said, you like that, right? You can start a perspective of free because you know, when others see what you're doing, they want more. Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time to reflect post panel and any closing thoughts. I think I just thank you for hosting these events like those converging on loud platinum bowling. You know, you don't want to go to conferences where you see the same people again, you get just to see if like new people from different backgrounds, you know, mind the blow with the scientists with the business list, the data scientists with what would be, you know, whatever I am. This is the jack of all trades that you are. But yeah, I always compared to like a nice getting dinner where you get people together, you're not quite sure what's going to happen, but I'm going to be good. Sorry. Well, thank you so much for joining us today on behalf of IWI and Sowa. Thank you. And we look forward to hosting you again. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you, Jackie. Today, we have Katherine Woods from the Institute for Financial Integrity here with us to discuss the second panel of the day, which was economic warfare and supply chains. So Katherine, thank you for joining us. It's a pleasure. Thank you. But let's recap the discussion that happened earlier today for our IWI listeners who were not able to make it up to the conference. If you could just give us some overview of really some of the talking points and any insights that you had post panel. Yeah, absolutely. So what I can do is outline a little bit about how to non-state actors are working together to amplify the harm that they cause. And those two are Chinese money laundering organizations and cartels. Capital flight from China is estimated at $516 billion a year. There is a restriction on movement of capital from China to $50,000 per person. And wealthy and influential Chinese nationals, officials or other business leaders, they want more money outside China than that. The drivers for that are things like military buildup and a desire to have investments outside China, some of the popular countries that they might want to have that money in other United States would be one Canada, Australia, Europe, other kinds of countries. What these individuals want is to gain access to value in those countries, but obviously not to move that money in a way which makes it easily detected that they are evading those capital controls. So if you think about the United States, the question is who has a lot of money in the United States that they want to make available, I will also minimizing detection. And the answer to that is cartels. So cartels have millions of dollars in the United States. These are the proceeds from things like a fentanyl trafficking and the sale of other drugs. They want to move that money into the financial system and they want to move that money or that value back to Mexico, for example, the same methodology affects other countries, but we use Mexico as our example. So the way that this money launching cycle works is using a method called mirror transfers. So the way this works is the cartel cash is placed in the US financial system. So they'll deposit large volumes of cash, cash machines that they'll use money meals to do this and money broker on the US side and on the Chinese side work together. So the Chinese person who wants money or wants value in the United States deposits money into a Chinese bank account, they will look the broker on the Chinese side notifies the broker on the US side using something like a WeChat message or an encrypted app message. And that equivalent amount of money is then made available in the United States for the benefit of that Chinese national. So they might use it for tuition fees for children who are studying there to buy real estate or for whatever purpose. So what we have now is that value has now moved from the United States to China. But it wasn't through a wire transfer, it wasn't through a cost border payment. So it's very difficult to detect and particularly it's difficult to link the two sides of that transactions. The cartel doesn't particularly want the money in China either. So what are they going to do with it? One of the things that they'll do is they will buy precursors to manufacture more narcotics. So Chinese companies are the largest manufacturers of these precursors. So if the money that's now with value that's now in China will be used to purchase precursors or it will just be used to purchase other items that can be sold to generate revenues. They get shipped to Mexico, used to make more narcotics or used to other items I get sold just to generate revenues. So what's significant here is that each currency stays in its own country. So the dollar stay in the US, Chinese currency stays in China and Mexican currency stays in Mexico. What's also significant is that when cartels were laundering their own money, the commission that they might charge was say 10%. The Chinese money laundering networks would do it for less than 2%, maybe 1%, maybe even less. And the significance of this is if you're a cartel, you've just increased your profitability by 8% just by changing your supplier. So I think a commercial enterprise would be quite pleased with themselves if they could generate 8% extra profitability just by changing a supplier. In an elicit finance and a criminal context, what this means is they have 8% more money available for purchasing more weapons, more narcotics and manufacturing more narcotics. So it amplifies the harm of these kinds of activities caused. And of course, this is just one methodology. They're using bulk cash careers. They're using crypto. They're using traditional wire transfers, trade-based money laundering, all of the other methods as well. But this is one that has become very prevalent recently because it is. So it's so much more sophisticated and it is more difficult to detect. Well, that's a really great depiction of how these models have come together over the years. So I'm curious, Krivin. Can you speak a bit to the history of these methods? And I'm also curious if you're seeing redundancy elsewhere around the world. So this is really a version of Huala. It's a technology and more modern version of Huala. So Huala has been in place for many years, particularly in the Middle East and Asian countries. And it's the same kind of concept of you move value without sending money transfers. So this is a more recent version of the MIRROR transfers. It's become the dominant model recently. As you say, it's highly effective. And so it has displaced many other forms of laundering. They're still used because you would not want to rely on a single method to launch your money. But we haven't seen parallels before. For example, between 2008 and 2018. MIRROR transfers were used to launch a money again by a primarily Chinese money laundering networks through casinos in British Columbia. So it was a simple concept where gamblers from China and other countries in Asia would arrive in casinos in British Columbia. They would deposit cash or transfer money in their home countries. And then they would be given large amounts of actual cash to take into the casino and gamble with. This was, it was pretty obvious that it was illicit proceeds because this money would be in shopping bags or shoeboxes. The notes would be misaligned. It would be wrapped in elastic bands. So clearly, if you were taking cash out of a bank to take to a casino, it's not going to look like that. And once that model was detected, effective action was taken to implement greater controls and more regulation in those casinos. So the concept of MIRROR transfers has definitely been around hundreds, possibly thousands of years in the form of a hollala. And then we're seeing more modern evolutions of that as well. So these professional networks don't just operate using the cartel model while they operate in other countries in the world as well. And there are other money laundering networks that use the same kinds of concept of MIRROR transfers. That's fascinating. But when it comes to contending with these and deterrence or any kind of security implementation to dismantle these networks, how does the US and its partners address this? And can they effectively do so, considering that this is an international space? So the answer is yes, they can, to an extent, to a more or less effective extent. Financial institutions have for many years had an obligation to make sure that they are detecting and taking action against the list of flows as of many of our government and public sector partners. It does require diligence on the part of financial institutions when we've seen examples of where they have not been fulfilling those responsibilities and they have been involved in elicited activities. For this specific methodology, banks are identifying and reporting this cash. So somebody tries to deposit large volumes of cash, for example, into an ATM. They are getting reported and action is being taken. But there are, these are a large network with many operations. So we should continue that collaboration between the public and private sector. I think what's important is with the international aspect, we need to collaborate with international partners as well. And of course, that does get a little bit more complex because different partners have different priorities. I think with the Chinese Money Laundry Network, something that is really critical to understand is we refer to it as the Chinese Money Laundry Network because it's designed to enable capital flight from China and operated by Chinese nationals. But this is specific individuals who are benefiting themselves at the expense of the country and the people. So it's corrupt officials or wealthy individuals who are wanting to gain wealth for themselves. So we refer to it as the Chinese Money Laundry Network, but it's certainly not to suggest that this is something which is, or the people of China are not, are not participants in this. It is organized criminal networks and it's introducing criminality and criminal flows into multiple countries. So I think it does, I think it is an area where there is a justification for say, let's work together to counter these cartels and these money launders, even if we might disagree on some points, this is an area where we can work together. But there is that, there is that international collaboration needed and there is a really close cooperation needed between the public and private sector. So bank can identify an elicit financial flow, it can close a customer account. But if you want to actually arrest and prosecute, then that's something that the public sector has to take on. Which can be a challenge. Exactly. So this is all willing parties for the most part, for taking, but this is a transnational criminal organization. Can you speak to some of the economic warfare that's ongoing, that's more of measures of coercion that are happening specifically in South America or maybe more broadly. Maybe it's here, maybe it's just other areas where there might be interest. So what we can speak on is more on the elicit financial flows aspect. But what I can speak about is how those elicit activities and sometimes the tools of economic statecraft that are intended to counter them have unintended second order effects. So let me step you through how things work within a financial institution when it comes to managing these types of risks because that's what leads us to understand that sometimes the intended outcome may not be quite what is achieved. So we touched on the fact that banks have a responsibility not to process elicit financial flows. We had a bank last year who received a $2 billion penalty because they hadn't got this right. So the consequences are really significant. What a bank can do to protect itself is to do due diligence on its clients. So it wants to assess any risks they present and make sure that medications are in progress. So if it is a low risk client due diligence might be relatively straightforward. If it's a high risk client, I need to ask for more documents. They'll need to spend more resource evaluating them. They'll need to review all of that client and their activity and their profile more often. So maybe every six months or 12 months compared to a low risk client might only need to be reviewed every two, three or four years. They will need to scrutinise transactions more closely. So this resource required for that. And their regulator is going to be paying a lot more attention to a financial institution that has a lot of high risk clients. So high risk doesn't just mean the characteristics of that specific client. It can be because it's in a high risk category. So for a while, for example, and nonprofits were targeted by terrorist groups trying to use them to move funding for terrorism. All that might just be fronts for that. Another example are crypto businesses who might be perceived as being high risk because they are potentially targeted by money launders. And so what's important here is it's not whether that that business or company or entity is actually doing anything illicit. You have to do the due diligence because they are in a category that's at high risk. So at some point, as a bank is investing all of these resources in doing these due diligence, it potentially gets to a point where the revenues that you will get from the client aren't sufficient to justify the level of due diligence that you have to do. And so what the bank might decide to do is exit those high risk categories of clients. So what this means is that they no longer have access to reliable financial services. This doesn't just apply to entities or sectors or types of business. It can apply to a whole country. So for example, if a country is subject to economic sanctions or large parts of its economy, there is sectoral sanctions in place, then financial institutions may be really concerned that they will inadvertently be processing flows that contribute those sanctions. So they may exit that whole market entirely. What that means for that country is its economy is now disadvantaged. Its importers and exporters don't have access to the global payments, the infrastructure, the financial system, they need to to manage successful businesses. So this creates a cycle then. Economic decline, it makes people more vulnerable to being involved in things like human trafficking or illegal wildlife trade or environmental crime or other types of criminality. This also, so this creates a foothold for these criminal organizations. But what it also does is if you can't move money across borders legitimately because financial institutions are no longer surfacing that country or those businesses, then those financial flows are pushed towards informal methods of transfer. So income, the Chinese money laundering networks offering a cross-border payment service that isn't available. Otherwise, those flows are opaque. They're not subject to any kind of monitoring and of course, they are supporting and enabling criminal activity. So possibly slightly, a slightly different angle on the question, but from a financial institution perspective and from a elicit finance perspective, that's sometimes how some of these tools of statecraft, economic tools, like sanctions can have perhaps some unintended consequences. Yeah, so I'm curious for your perspective of where we discussed some of these countermeasures that institutions can take to mitigate these risks. But where do you see this going? Do you feel like there's more traction now for institutions to do the right thing and to be reporting more diligently for just to be more aware? So I think in Harry where there is so financial institutions understand these obligations. They are there are various different reasons that they would not fulfill them, none of which are valid reasons, but I don't for a regulated financial institution, there's not necessarily an intention to not fulfill them. I don't think there's any saying, we don't think we need to stop money laundering. I think in area where there is a potential scope to to be more effective is to have that closer partnership between various different aspects of government to really understand how policy objectives and how those tools of economic statecraft intersect with the reality of how a financial institution is operating. There are some complexities there. Financial institution may have markets in some of these countries that may serve as clients in those locations, which is as we said, entirely legitimate because they're running legitimate businesses. But when it comes to some of the like government tools and policies, they're having a more nuanced understanding, I think, would be valuable. And I think there's certainly willingness on both sides to engage in those conversations. It's just making sure that the right people in the room. I think the second aspect is probably to engage more with the defense and public sector. And by public sector, sorry, the defense and private sector, and by private sector, I'm referring here to financial institutions because I think that's a less established partnership. So financial institutions work very closely with law enforcement, they work very closely with financial intelligence units. That's very well established. But I think there is scope to connect more closely on the defense side of things. And I think there's three things that the public, the private sector, like financial institutions can really offer. The first one is pragmatic diplomacy. I would say having that commercial mindset means you need to find solutions. So here's an example from a financial institution that I worked at. We had clients in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. If we call them three countries, then that would not play well with our clients in China because they don't see Hong Kong and Taiwan as separate countries. But if we call them all China, then that wouldn't play well with our clients in Hong Kong and Taiwan. So what we did was we called them markets. Three markets. Three markets keeps everybody happy. It doesn't cause anyone to be upset. And it means that we can continue that with that business. Can that really fascinating? Any other takeaways that you have from the panel, or perhaps anything that you wanted to cover, and maybe wasn't fully addressed in a panel? I think I'll just make a couple of other points. Being a good advocate for the private sector and financial institutions, particularly. I think that they also have a physical presence in some locations where government or defense or the military might be more complex for them to directly be there in that location. So I think a financial institution could be quite a valuable partner. That might be in capacity building, for example. Running some training where you are helping them to understand what these indicators look like. So we've spoken about Chinese money laundering networks, we've spoken about cartels, helping build the capacity within those countries to recognize what those threats look like, and some of the ways that they can take action. I think the financial sector is ideally placed to do that. And the third way that I think they can be quite a valuable partner is in a data sets methodology tools. It doesn't mean that you're sharing actual client information. But by sharing things that you are permitted to share under regulation, those can be new resources that may offer value. So I think my key message here is really, I think there is a really strong interest in that kind of partnership between the public sector and the private sector between different countries. These are elicit networks and actors that are causing harm to the societies that they operate in. So I'm very positive that there is this will and interest in working closely together. And we just need to make sure that we're maximizing all the possible ways that we can use that to achieve effects. Yeah, I think whole society is something that we keep touching on here in this conference. I think that's so important. And every domain, especially this space. Thank you, Catherine, so much for taking the time to sit down with us today for joining us and contributing to this panel. And on behalf of IWI and Sowa, thank you. Thank you. It's been a pleasure speaking and I'm excited about the conference too. We are joined today by Phil Cooster, who is the Vice President of the Public Sector at Spike Cloud. Phil, thanks for joining us today. Thank you so much. Phil joined us on the fourth panel of the day, which covered adversary networks and open-source intelligence. And Phil, could you start off with just tell us a little bit about yourself and Spike Cloud. Absolutely. I'll start with Spike Cloud. We're the largest player global identity intelligence. It's based on about 60,000 dark-bed sources. And in it includes info stealer logs, this data, and third-party breach data. We have about 860 billion identity or digital assets and unique records, including data from behind the firewalls in China, Iran, Russia. And we reveal unknown intelligence about companies, people, supply chains, and global relationships to support both offensive operations and defensive operations that affect mission outcomes. And our customers who've glued about 15 different agencies in the government, including civilian agencies, DOD agencies, as well as the Intel community. And we're currently certified by U.S. Cyberquim. Right. Yeah, and I've spent about 40 years in the government industry year. I run the Beltway with technology companies and with the companies like Next Computer, Edda.com, Dell Proputer. And most recently, I was a cheaper equity officer, I'm ready to patchy. Very good. Well, thank you for that. So to tie this into the panel as well as if I go and work fair more broadly. So it sounds like the mission of this company is really helping to identify the person behind the keyboard, right? So you're really able to run down the motivations of a threat actor, therefore, helping to facilitate with the dressing those threats, right? Yeah. So we're looking for the bad actors out there and understanding how they're getting to our target audience and how they're attacking. So whether that's a criminal organization, a nation state, or in some cases, it's a criminal organization working with a nation state to acquire that kind of data for nefarious reasons. And some of those are criminal reasons. Some of those are to influence government employees or governments in our hemisphere. And what we try to do is provide the intelligence necessary for the regular work fair community to attribute certain actions with the intelligence that they are trying to gather. So we're looking at the cyber data to fuse with the human intel. And we're providing that open source intel that we gather to tie to their intel. Okay, great. So it really helps to map those adversarial networks and understand, and I'm sure bring some significant insights. Yeah. Reflecting on the panel today, what are your insights, walking away from that panel? And I mean, anything significant jump out at you or anything that you feel like was left on the table that you want to address now? Nothing that was left on the table. I thought it was really interesting hearing the conversation around the influence of China in Latin America and the impact it's having in our hemisphere. There's only two governments that are really pro-united states left in South America, for example. And the fact that there's so many important minerals and natural resources that we rely on from South America and such America that, you know, that influence can impact our economy, can impact manufacturing in this country. So understanding that state craft that China is applying to Latin America is going to be very important. And that was really interesting to hear kind of the different thoughts that we're going on around that. During the day today, we were looking, for example, just to understand who is impacting Latin America from a state craft perspective in the space industry in Latin America and within a couple hours we found two individuals that were working in both Peru and Mexico in that capacity from the PRC and infecting systemies in that community, in that space community from that country. So it was really interesting to kind of see the impact that the PRC's having in those both politically and from our industrial perspective. Overall, in the conference today, I think just some really incredible insights of the connectivity there and how deep it runs. So just some major takeaways for me today were partnership. That was a consistent theme in leveraging that partnership to build trust in order to build resilience, I think is for me. How about you, what were some of the biggest takeaways today that you think if you could boil it down? Yeah, probably could boil it down. We have to recocus on our relationships with the governments in this atmosphere. We respent a lot of the last century trying to build relationships and unfortunately, you know, we we done well with some. We done poorly in others in shine away from those governments. Isn't going to help our economic interests. It's not going to help our military interests and it's going to help our potential adversary in the end of a computer. And I think understanding the impact of OSU in that analysis is going to be critical on how to apply it and how to understand its impact overall in things like a regular warfare and diplomacy. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate you coming out joining us on the panel contributing to the conversation today and on behalf of IWA and so thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to today's bonus episode of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We hope to enjoy the hearing conversations from the panel speakers of the IWA, SOW, South America and Competition Conference. If you have an idea for an event or a war game, IWA should run, want to get involved in future events, or want to provide material support so IWA can continue these important conversations. Please visit www.irregularwarfare.org and reach out to the team. Again, at www.irregularwarfare.org. That concludes today's episode. We look forward to seeing you next time.