In this episode of Phoenix Cast, John and Rich sit down with Keith Mularski and Damon Mathews from Qintel. Keith is the former FBI agent who went undercover in DarkMarket as "Master Splyntr," eventually becoming a top-five spammer in the world and a "made man" in the cybercriminal underground before the operation culminated in 80+ arrests. Damon is a retired Marine CI/HUMINT officer now running national security operations at Qintel, and he walks through the years of policy fights and lawyer wrangling that came with pulling human collection into cyberspace. The conversation gets into attribution, what counts as intelligence versus evidence, and when "name and shame" is the right move. Worth a listen if you've ever wondered how 20 years of global collection becomes an 80% solution at the operational level, or why your Uber Eats password might be the thing that outs your tradecraft.

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Links:

Qintel - Platform Blue: https://www.qintel.com/platformblue

https://www.pghtech.org/news-and-publications/Qintel

Mathews - https://cipress.podbean.com/e/marine-ci-secrets-damon-matthews-on-multi-use-human-networks-high-stakes-ops/

Mularski - Pitt Cyber bio: https://www.cyber.pitt.edu/people/keith-mularski

Police1 - Witness to History (DarkMarket / Master Splyntr): https://www.police1.com/fbi/articles/witness-to-history-darkmarket-the-fbi-agent-who-became-master-splyntr-UuhOCI9r3Qfyo1du/