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

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. All right, 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 eight hundred hours, Sophie Lichterman's plane left Tokyo
bound for Manila. It was shot down over the Sea

(00:23):
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?
Like years before I was born?

Speaker 2 (00:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
I guess 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 Sarr's
situation and we cut those bad boys out before air.
That did not age well with the entire country lockdown.
Jason Pargen You are a my former boss over at

(01:20):
cracked dot com, which 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.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
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, very kind. He said,

(02:02):
strangely that the book saved his marriage, which surprives everyone.
I didn't know he was married. It's not that kind,
I was not.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
That's that's the magic of your writing, Joseph.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
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 in the beach.
It's something you can read on the on the toilet,
like if you don't want to get fecal particles on
your phone. Sure, this is something you can have on
the toilet instead, and the other half reviews are like,

(02:36):
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 to breezy read, it's there for you.
But apparently some people they have decided to make permanent

(02:57):
life changes after reading it.

Speaker 1 (02:59):
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 twenty years ago, when I was an adolescent in
high school, long before the cracked days, when you were

(03:19):
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.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
It will 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.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
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 us with TikTok. It's not
the other way around. See.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
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 of your
TikTok stardom, But you've ruined that. Although Jason, I did
want to say to start this off, you know 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

(04:23):
dog for situations like this, which is deeply upsetting to
our ears as old men. But but the kids, 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 uh gen Z terminology? This podcast episode that you suggested.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
Yes, let's let's let's raw dog. Let's raw dog. Goon this,
let's goon this episode. Where are some other terms we.

Speaker 1 (04:55):
This won't be ohio. I hear the kids are using
Ohio as a tur 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

(05:16):
lot worse that 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 blog a pair of elderly bloggers were mortal

(05:38):
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 like where the industry of like corporate
intelligence is like private intelligence services that a company can

(05:59):
hire to deal with threats to their profitability, because I
think it's one of the undertold stories of the twenty
first century, and it's partly undertold because people who tell
it tend to get sued.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
It's really interesting because I read this story and read
the results of it, and like the result, 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 try to read background on it, could
not make heads or tails of how any of this

(06:31):
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 and the mail and that's not the weirdest part

(06:51):
of the story. It gets so off the rails. This
is the part I don't have is how there are
people the company who have this mindset because this story
goes to places that you don't see fictional stories going.
There's no plot line on succession like this, and it
would have come off as corny if there was.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
Yeah, it would be kind of unbelievable. But we're getting
ahead of ourselves and We're done with the cold open, 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 open's done,

(07:34):
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 eleventh, twenty eleven, The New York Times published
a story about hackers who had forced their way into
the computer systems of a security company called HB Gary.

(07:58):
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 employee 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

(08:20):
the buildings and stuff, but nothing like the FBI or whatever.
But that view was already outdated in two thousand eleven.
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 the kind of
stuff that, like cyberpunk stories had primed us to expect

(08:43):
from our mega corporations, like a 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 Chamber of Commerce, and what we would consider
incredibly petty ways, ways that kind of more than anything,

(09:07):
resemble the way people fight online rather than like, again,
the sort of sinister stuff that like you're playing like
a cyberpunk pen and paper game, your team's going to
be doing.

Speaker 2 (09:18):
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 just don' that was a thing forever. But
why you're describing and what I know is coming in
this story, it's almost like a type of psychological guerrilla

(09:38):
warfare or just yeah, just trolling people. I don't get it.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
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 would make a particularly
impressive movie. It was literally, we have hired different sort
of like a mix of like thugs and just like

(10:03):
people that we think we can get to like workforce
for a few bucks, to like trail every black person
on the campus of this college, right like literally like
that that's a big part of like when when those
activists broke into that FBI office and leaked all those
files to the Washington Post. This was a year YouTube
of wore Watergate. That was a big part of what
was revealed is that there were like colleges where the

(10:24):
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 understand, if you study the history of espionage,
one percent of it is really cool stuff where they're

(10:44):
making like polonium darts to shoot out of umbrellas and
assassinating governmental leaders, and ninety nine percent of it is
just we hired a dumb guy to follow them around,
and they're going to 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

(11:06):
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 kind of brute force people into being
scared to fuck with us, right, And that's the kind
of that's the kind of like plots that HB. Gary

(11:30):
was shopping around to and they never again, none of
the 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

(11:51):
company or in the country. In one document, HB. Gary's
chief executive Aaron Barr offered to publicize biographic details about
a un 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

(12:12):
quote from Bar on the salacious details he wanted to
reveal about this union organizer. They go to a Jewish
church in DC. They have two kids, a son and
a daughter. And first off that year, I'm sorry twenty eleven, right,
I think it's a synagogue. I don't think you call

(12:32):
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

(12:55):
week later, Barr offered to create in depth target dossier's
and keep that in mind because we're going to 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 like criticized and protested the US Chamber of Commerce.

(13:15):
One proposition was to publish the petty criminal record of
a member in the group. In another instance, HB Gary
offered to work with Peter Teal's Palantier, which is a
private spy company, to attack WikiLeaks before it could release
a tranch of emails from inside Bank of America related
to the financial crash. And this is a little bit

(13:36):
closer to like the serious cyberpunk stories like WikiLeaks, they're
doing some serious business in twenty eleven. This at least
sounds like, you know, a little more exciting. But their
specific plan to attack WikiLeaks was to submit a bunch
of fake documents and then when WikiLeaks reported on them,
exposed them as forgeries to damage, specifically to damage Glenn

(13:57):
Greenwald's career, which if you'd just given him a little longer, Glenn,
Glenn was going to do that on his own.

Speaker 2 (14:05):
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. Yeah,

(14:26):
and they are 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 nineteen seventy 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.
But you would not think in twenty eleven or whatever

(14:49):
that you still have a dirty tricks department. And I
know that I sound naive. I guess I just assumed
we had moved into, you know, 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 if these people are Jews, what's going on with that?

Speaker 1 (15:08):
I wonder how much of it is. These CEOs and
stuff are probably all older. They're probably all like mostly
baby boomers. You know, in twenty eleven, you would imagine
the guys running big banks or 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

(15:31):
that the Nixon white House did and assuming like, well,
that's probably what we should do with our right 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

(15:52):
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 Bar's Twitter account just to fuck
with him. Now, this led to Bars stepping down as

(16:15):
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 bar got embarrassed,
is Palenteer 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

(16:35):
to do any of these jobs with them. We had
Palenteer would never do anything this unethical, right, like you
can trust us. This was just one lone asshole. Fast
forward about six years two twenty seventeen, when Harvey Weinstein's
life explodes and stories start to come out that he
had used a different spy for higher company, Black Cube,

(16:56):
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 Massad guys. And if HB. Gary is kind of
like bush league Black Cubes like the New York Yankees, right,

(17:16):
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 HB. Gary. They wielded
this with like an almost there's always this degree of
like incompetence that I think is just born from and

(17:36):
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
this 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.

(17:58):
That's that's kind of those 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 had a bunch of investigators to
make false identities to try to befriend some of the

(18:19):
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

(18:39):
of them would have any precautions in place, none of
them would be talking to people like Ronan Farah 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.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
Okay, I'm going to 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

(19:17):
who listened to all your episodes, No, we did one
a series on MK Ultra Yeah, which had a reputation
in the conspiracy world as this other worldly alien high
tech mind control manchurion candidates 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

(19:38):
little jerk off room where he watched agents like 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 watch that kind of thing,
of how it worked and what mind control could do.

(20:00):
But ultimately they were just kind of drawing a government
paycheck to do a bunch of idiocy. And I rarely
hear anything that sounds like James Bond.

Speaker 1 (20:08):
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 Two,
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

(20:29):
that people say, AI learned 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 it's caused a degree of inevitable degeneration.

Speaker 2 (20:52):
Right.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
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 Younger I admire lot and he used to work
with a photo journalist who died in Libya during the
early days of that civil war. But his friend, the
story he was in Libya to cover was he was
specifically looking to get like photos and interviews with rebels

(21:15):
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 that there is something like really important in that,

(21:36):
and 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,

(21:57):
They've all been raised on this shit and they're all
changed by it. So yeah, I did want to 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

(22:18):
the places where a lot of these companies exist. We
have an industry in the United States. There's a sizeable
industry that's kind of like the B tier of these
hack for higher 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 like our collective information ecology is pretty significant.

(22:41):
For example, a peer company to Black Cube cobwe Web Technologies,
which raged about ten million dollars in twenty nineteen to
build a search engine for intelligence information. Basically, all they
were doing building this search engine was spearfishing huge numbers
of random people to steal their personal data and then

(23:02):
put it into a searchable database that they could sell
access to, so, you know, 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

(23:23):
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

(23:44):
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've cobweb activated like fake accounts on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp,
and Twitter in order to like grab just add mass

(24:07):
information on activists, politicians, government officials, like everyone they could
get to fall for their shit.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
But to what end? What was the final goal of
that project.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
To have a big database that they can sell access
to and you can search for They sell it to
anyone who is looking for information on like they can say,
like you know, if you're 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

(24:40):
like you know those folks, right, you can pay for
access to this database and we have spearfished and scraped
a bunch of people who have sympathies to that group,
and you can see where they are and you can,
you know, set up your own surveillance potential. You can
like try to infiltrate, but you'll get all this information
on their their real world and their digital network. There's

(25:00):
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 like data broker companies, you

(25:22):
can track random people cell phones in the United States.
If you're a corporate actor in order to like stock
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 sixty days. We're always
saying this, Jason. You communicate entirely through telegram, which not

(25:48):
the app telegram, but through an old fashioned telegram. We
actually have an actor portraying your voice right now, in
face no one's seen you in years.

Speaker 2 (25:59):
Watching the Slasher movie as it took place in nineteen
eighty nine and a high school kid got invited to
a party via telegram? Oh my god, was that? And
I was nineteen eighty nine, I was fourteen. Were we
still send a telegram back then? Am I that old? That?

Speaker 1 (26:17):
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 and we're back.

(26:41):
So 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 nineteen nineties. David Steiner was a video

(27:03):
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,
you know, after like all these ponn Star shows got big,
there's a much wider community of people who are kind

(27:25):
of obsessed with folks like selling old products or antiques
and you know, trying to find like hidden gyms that
are worth a bunch of money. Steiner's kind of one
of the very first generations of people who is like
obsessed with this stuff and his particular interests. He loves
like ancient marketing, promotional products, He likes antique tools, and
he starts following you know, prior to eBay. There are

(27:47):
a couple of different early auction websites on the old
Internet that he gets into when he's interested in and
his wife, na 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 nineteen ninety nine, this is four years after
eBay's launch, they start to realize, like, this company in

(28:10):
particular is the one that's going to actually dominate online auctions.
Right there had been a couple of competitors, it's clear
by ninety nine that eBay is going to be the
big one. And the Steiners 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.

(28:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:39):
In fact, I will step in and because I know
that the description of these people that prow like garage sales,
that 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, that I

(29:01):
lost when I was eight years old, here's this guy
two thousand miles away from me who's got one. And
it's I never I thought I had imagined this saying,
oh my gosh, here 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

(29:24):
this stuff, and it's people forget what or if you
weren't around back then. eBay was the first huge monster
dot com business and.

Speaker 1 (29:34):
The first ones that made it clear that like there's
a 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.

Speaker 2 (29:45):
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 nineties era. eBay 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.

(30:07):
So no, I absolutely in terms of like subjects to
blog about, yeah, it's I totally get it.

Speaker 1 (30:13):
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, and 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 that's what the Steiners do. They

(30:36):
corner this and they their independent publication starts out being
named auction Bites Bytes, and you know, it's geared towards
a fairly niche chunk of the Internet, people making their
living auctioning items on eBay. And also, you know, increasingly
as Eba becomes more and more of a big business,
as it becomes clear like how much money is in

(30:57):
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 like you know, independent sellers
are selling stuff on Amazon, and there's Etsy, and they

(31:17):
cover all of that, right, Like, they change their name
to e commerce Bites, 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

(31:39):
in the companies that actually like are 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 Bites,

(32:03):
most widely read articles tended to focus on fuck ups
by companies like eBay. Right, e commerce Bites really winds
up kind of more on the sides of the merchants,
and 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

(32:24):
the situation. You can get an example of this by
looking at the site today. One August twenty sixth article
by Ena promises quote a peak inside eBay payment holds.
This article is based on an interview with the reader
who'd sold a high priced item and had the money
sent to him placed on a thirty day hold, despite
the fact that the buyer had confirmed receipt of the
product and satisfaction with the purchase. In an interview I

(32:47):
found on CBS News's Sixty Minutes, Ena Steiner describes the
job she and her husband did as acting as a
conduit from small businesses and independent sellers to the larger
corporate monolists 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,

(33:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
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 seeing as something
as an authority, they started to get tips and they
started to break stories. And keep in mind, there's a

(33:41):
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 stories, scandals,
it's 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

(34:02):
the story. Like they don't they don't care, they don't
have access, they don't care.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
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 up?

Speaker 2 (34:13):
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

(34:33):
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 you know, that deep with their stories, but I
can see where a company, if you were from a
world where you had like you could keep the press

(34:54):
on a leash, and then suddenly there's these citizen journalists
out there that was the boogeyman in the corporate.

Speaker 1 (34:59):
World'll 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 six
hundred thousand people, which for a website like operated by
two people, number one, that's a fairly sustainable business. But
that's like a good readership for an independent news site.

(35:22):
That is like actually very impressive. It testifies to the
degree of like 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
ENA's reporting focused on issues that dealt directly with sellers

(35:43):
but would be of interest to investors. For example, stories
about eBay holding on the money from transactions for thirty
days without any real reason seem like petty bullshit, and
it is, but it's something that at scale could mean
millions and extra profits, which all gets funneled upwards to
the handful of people who run the company and own
stock in it. Enter Devon Winnig, the CEO of eBay

(36:05):
during the period of time that we are talking about
in this story, which was up until like twenty nineteen twenty,
like fifteen to twenty nineteen. So Winnig had been born
in Brooklyn in nineteen sixty six. He was the son
of Jeffrey Winnig, a toxicologist and chief executive of Nastec Pharmaceutical.

(36:25):
When Jeffrey died suddenly, Devin, age twenty three, took over
a CEO of the company for a year, raised like
five million in VC funding, and then joined a law firm.
Left the job after like a year, and Nastec seems
to have kind of continued to 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,

(36:48):
is going to kind of become the norm for his
business career. In nineteen ninety three, Winnig joins Reuters as
the COO, and over the course of his time there
he becomes like the number two two men at the
company and he helps to manage the merger with the
Thompson Corporation into Thompson Reuters. Now, this was a big

(37:09):
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 DEVN, bragging about more than
five hundred million pounds worth of savings within the first

(37:30):
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 Thompson Reuters. It had been easily
the largest company in the space at the time. Of
the merger, if you like, combined the readership of both platforms,
but once they were merged, the quality dropped and Bloomberg

(37:53):
closed the gap behind them. There were several years of
botched product launches while Winnig was helping to run the
Cup company, which proved that the new team running Thompson
Ruters 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 two thousand
and seven, Thompson Reuter spoke for more than thirty six

(38:13):
percent of the market against twenty five percent for Bloomberg,
but according to his its experts, Bloomberg will have nearly
caught up in twenty eleven with a thirty point eight
market share against thirty one point four for Thompson 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

(38:35):
taken its eye off the ball, losing hapless investors' billions
along the way. So you could say the evidence would
suggest that Devin Winnig is not a business genius, right,
based on his primary accomplishment. The merger of Thompson Reuter's
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

(38:58):
in twenty eleven, some of those same people make Devin
Winnig 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

(39:20):
their smartphones, and he reorganizes the company around that, which
is a very successful move. In twenty fifteen, 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

(39:40):
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 twenty fifteen
to twenty eighteen, Devin goes from fourteen point five five
million a year to seventeen point six million a year.

(40:03):
This is out of line with the salary increases enjoyed
by eBay employees during the same period. As Ena Steiner
wrote on April eighth, twenty eighteen, 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 mister Winning to the median

(40:23):
annual total compensation of all employees is estimated to be
one hundred and forty three 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 earned three hundred
and ninety nine times as much as the median worker.

(40:45):
So you could say eBay is not doing terribly right.
And ENA'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. This is how much it compares
to the amount of money that normal employees are getting.

(41:06):
You would also, yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:08):
To any normal person, that kind of really does look
like he failed his way up into that position.

Speaker 1 (41:13):
Because he did.

Speaker 2 (41:15):
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 eighty percent,
but you cut expenses by ninety percent, So if you
think about it.

Speaker 1 (41:35):
It's a win. Yeah, And that is how That's how
a guy like Devin thinks about things. And you know,
Ina is 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
devn She really is just reporting the facts. But Winnig
gets real, like comes across like he gets sent from underlings.

(41:58):
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 payhike

(42:19):
of ten to fourteen percent 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. But look, Devin is threatened by this.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
Either one of us could post online a photo of
our lunch and will then say ten replies, I will
be told to kill myself. You will be accused of
being a CIA plant or a rist and that you
need to kill yourself. Yeah what, This is what the
first thing that struck me because when I saw what

(43:04):
they did and then they explained what triggered the insane
reaction we're about to get to. And it's so mild.

Speaker 1 (43:11):
It's really really mild because like people are not like
like yellow journalism, they're not muckrakers.

Speaker 2 (43:18):
It's just it's the mildest criticism you can tell how
to like polite these people are.

Speaker 1 (43:24):
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure like Ina is like tips twenty
five percent at all times and like is unfailingly polite
to everyone she encounters in the real world.

Speaker 2 (43:36):
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
It's not the way all political commentary has the tone
now of just constantly calling people pedophiles or whatever like that.
I guess that's my point. It's not like they took

(43:58):
on somebody who was just in 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

(44:20):
kid gloves? Must she have always been handling them with?

Speaker 1 (44:24):
Yeah, Yeah, that's exactly the point. And I do want
to put a pen 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 the
celebrity of being a pedophile. Ah, we're back, Jason. Legal
got back to me. We're going to have to cut

(44:45):
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
Ena and our friend defn Winnig, CEO of eBay, now
Ina had good reason to be, you know, politely critical

(45:08):
of winning. His exorbitant raises for himself and the rest
of his friends in the c suite of eBay had
coincided with a rash of out landishly wasteful expenses, best
exemplified by his twenty sixteen 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, Winnig

(45:29):
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 crunt, it's going to
get like criticized that, like, well, you spent how many

(45:49):
millions of dollars on this building that isn't necessary for
work It just kind of makes you look nice to
zero percent of the people who are going to be
smitting money on your platform because they are not invited
to the main street building, right, especially.

Speaker 2 (46:03):
When you know that down further in the lower levels
of the organization, because we have both worked for companies. Yeah,
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 are not allowed to use those outlets
for personal devices. That that's up to eighteen cents of

(46:25):
electricity per month you could be using there. That You've
got people that are forced to watch every little tiny
penny 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 this 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.

Speaker 1 (46:46):
Yeah, and it's and it's the kind of thing where
like this is not just like we're like you know,
some workers at the bottom or even just people like
Ena criticizing eBay of like wow, this is a really
unnecessary expense. This is the conclusion reached in January of
twenty nineteen by Elliott Management after they pumped one point
four billion dollars into eBay for a four percent stake

(47:08):
in the company. Now, Elliott Management is one of a
they have a very milk toast name, Like they're not
nearly as well known because they don't have a sinister
and name is like black Rock. But this is one
of the most bloodthirsty money companies out in the United
States right now, right they are a ruthless Wall Street
investment firm. They actually just put out a really interesting

(47:30):
article about like 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

(47:54):
purely exist to maximize the profit that they can get
for their investment. And they have no interest and like
the egos of a guy like Defen winning, right, So
they took one look at eBay's balance books after they
pump one point four billion into the company, and they conclude,
this is one of the most inefficient and chaotic executive
teams that we've ever seen seen, and the company is

(48:15):
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 Elliott has the kind of juice that means
everyone at the company starts sweating. This is actually potentially
a threat even to winnings job right Like this is
not you can't ignore the people who are able to

(48:35):
put one point four billion dollars into your company. Right
Maybe if you're Apple you can because that's pennies to them,
But eBay cannot afford to ignore that right 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. If you
and I have both been in that situation with various
corporate overlords, the natural impulsey is, well, I need to

(48:57):
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 winning
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 Elliott Right, who are using
it in part to try and determine whether or not

(49:18):
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 twenty nineteen,
then when Ina wrote another article about the fact that
Devin was very much overpaid, he gets angry. Now he

(49:42):
has hired a PR company at that point to help
manage the situation, right and in general the bad PR
that EBA is getting at this time, and the PR company,
because they're competent professionals, are like, ignore this, don't get
obsessed with this. These elderly people and their blog. No
response you can make to them that will not blow

(50:03):
up in your face. Just let this buy and try
to run the company more efficiently, right, which.

Speaker 2 (50:08):
Is like take a pay cut maybe if you think
that's a vulnerability. And the orders. If you think you
are overpaid, if you think their criticism is true, then.

Speaker 1 (50:17):
Take a pay cut. Is that just don't take a
raise this year? Probably, you know, like 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 Steiners 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

(50:39):
his emails on down the line to other people at
the company, particularly to people in the ebays 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 Baugh or Bog will go with Bog. So

(51:02):
in April of twenty nineteen, Bog had his analysts gather
information and prepared an anonymous, handwritten note to be sent
to Ena Steiner. He was not maybe 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

(51:22):
and threatening to destroy her reputation. And the goal stated
in like 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 they don't get the go
ahead from the C suite, right, I don't know if

(51:43):
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 twenty nineteen. 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 want to give

(52:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (52:19):
Bog.

Speaker 1 (52:19):
We don't have a huge amount of de tail 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

(52:39):
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 twenty sixteen Oscars. So that's
a little odd, but there you go. Maybe they should
while he dropped out of the campaign. That would have

(53:01):
been a great thing for Trump to hit him on. Though.
You know, if only did this.

Speaker 2 (53:05):
Guy give his security firm a cool name like.

Speaker 1 (53:08):
Black It's like Jim baw 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
Pallanteer sounds evil. But Joe Bogg is not a particularly
creative man. So it's a little hard for me to

(53:29):
tell the degree to which bog was still tied into
the US intelligence establishment during the period of time that
he's working at Silicon Valley. To underlings an 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

(53:49):
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

(54:12):
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,

(54:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (54:42):
But yeah, yeah, if he was doing that, that's not
the weirdest thing we've heard whatsoever. That is the kind
of thing in terms of why getting hired under the
table or whatever to continue to collect intelligence or whatever. Like, Yeah,
it's a very plausible lie. If it's a lie, it's
very plausible.

Speaker 1 (54:58):
Yeah, and it makes total sense if you're the CI,
what would you rather do spend the shitload of money
and potentially risk vives 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.

Speaker 2 (55:15):
Yeah, there anyway, Yeah, and.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
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're you've got this kind of boring corporate job.
Do you want to feel it? Do you want to
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.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
Now, the first and most important requirement is that you
not get drunk and tell everyone that you're doing this.

Speaker 1 (55:45):
Right, yeah, which bog 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,

(56:07):
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

(56:31):
got a lot of holes in It's still yeah yeah,
but uh 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

(56:53):
a spy, working in some degree as an intelligence operative. Right,
and he is still even though we had 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

(57:14):
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. Mister Bog 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

(57:35):
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. Mister Bog would tell the analysts about some
piece of office gossip. We'll keep it in the circle
of trust.

Speaker 2 (57:55):
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 yep, 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,

(58:18):
this goon took such offense at what these bloggers were
doing if he was not ordered to buy the CEO,
because they're gonna make the story like, yeah, all the
CEO did was vaguely say wow, I don't like this,
and that he went off on his own. But it's
this is also the part that I could never figure
out what his motivation was.

Speaker 1 (58:38):
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 action 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 variouslevels of

(59:00):
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, you know, 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, right,

(59:21):
And so a lot of the time we don't have
a lot of 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 aids 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

(59:42):
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 and the personality of a leader at
the top and pleasing that person work. And I get

(01:00:05):
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 Devon being
happy with them. And when Devin will go on rages
about these people, that makes it into a priority for

(01:00:26):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:00:44):
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, right, if Charles made example,
actually ordered that done, or if he was just extremely high,
do you gotta go ahead kill him on put put
Pete walls of their blood, and if he was just

(01:01:04):
talking and then they just they they took it as
an order because you know, like to this day they
talk about Manton's 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 random 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

(01:01:26):
he wanted it done, because that's kind of the way
people work.

Speaker 1 (01:01:31):
He you know 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 kind
of like rage filled, grandiose goals, and he has put

(01:01:54):
people in place below him who he knows will do something.
He doesn't need this.

Speaker 2 (01:01:59):
This is Civix an extremely important point, and I do,
I do want to stop and focus on this because
this happens all over the place. You create a culture,
but it is in many cases intentionally set up so
that if there is backlash year you get caught doing
something that you can say, well, there was no order

(01:02:22):
telling them to do this. Yeah, and so trying to
pin it on you with these nebulous terms of well,
but you rewarded similar behavior 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 it's hard and

(01:02:43):
in this criminal this criminal case, I think it's going
to turn out to be true. It's hard to pend
it on the guy at the top that kind of
set the stage for it to happen, right, And the
people who really know what they're doing, they make sure
that it's run this way.

Speaker 1 (01:02:58):
Yeah, yeah, And it's this is not just eBay, but
eBay is a particularly extreme example. Now under bog As,
he becomes like is he's basically running this security division
within the company. eBay develops a pretty paranoid set of
internal security policies. I should note, you know, because we're

(01:03:20):
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 twenty nineteen
with the Steiners, there's a mass shooting at YouTube's headquarters
in San Bruno, California. The shooter in this case was
Nassim Najafi Agdam, who's a vegan activist YouTuber who believed

(01:03:42):
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

(01:04:03):
for some reason, and like it's not a non factor. Right.
So there's this obsession Bog 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

(01:04:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:04:32):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:04:32):
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

(01:04:54):
regular mass shooter drills, and as always, he would play
clips from action movies and spy through 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,

(01:05:15):
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

(01:05:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:05:47):
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 senses. There is
a type of hyper performative masculinity that is all about
being scared all the time. Yes, and these are the

(01:06:08):
guys that have a pump shot gun like 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 spend
and they think of it as being tough guy, but
they're scared. They're scared to death. They go to the

(01:06:29):
zoo with you know, a gun on their ankles, like
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

(01:06:50):
afraid of everything all the time.

Speaker 1 (01:06:53):
Yeah, I uh. We have a lot of problems with
this exact kind of guy, right, and Bog 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 because he
was a CIA agent, we don't get a lot of
specifics of his career, but I think that he probably

(01:07:16):
has you know, one of the big one of the
two Watergate guys, the Dute, 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 chain shit in Central America, but not doing like
exciting murdering people or handing over guns, mostly like making

(01:07:37):
sure payments went where they needed to go in 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

(01:07:58):
is convinced, well, I was at the sea 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.

Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
Yeah, they don't actually know how. This stuff is done
by the people that are actually good at doing the
dirty tricks.

Speaker 1 (01:08:14):
Right right, Yeah, And that is the feeling that I
get with Bog.

Speaker 3 (01:08:19):
So.

Speaker 1 (01:08:20):
Bogg's team consists of about a half a dozen analysts,
which when he gets hired, are all are I think
mostly men. But by May of twenty eighteen, 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

(01:08:41):
he would explain it to them anyway by playing a
video of Facebook Cheryl Sandberg giving a speech on how
there aren't enough female leaders. And I'm going to quote
from the New York Times again, Miss 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 miss z, which is one of his young employees,
wasn't about to point that out. Women got fired too,

(01:09:04):
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's 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 joke about it,

(01:09:26):
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.

(01:09:48):
Which it just sounds like a nightmare working for this team. So,
with his Charlie's Angel style hr violation of a team
in place, Bog started watching the sty website like a hawk.
As you know. In May of twenty nineteen, the CEO
began sending more and more messages about their content. That month, May,

(01:10:10):
Ena published an article revealing that Devin Winnig 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

(01:10:32):
bar is important, Like I think it's a popular bar.
I think it's just a bar. Winning thought was cool,
So he spent shareholder money building a perfect replica, and
it opened at three pm 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

(01:10:53):
some of the decisions that are going to be made here.
ENA's article on the construction of this pub has the
same slightly critical professional tone is 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. Bog

(01:11:16):
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
won a fight back, looking forward to talking asap to
get your assessment of how to do that most effectively,

(01:11:38):
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 honor.
About May thirty first, twenty nineteen, Executive two in Executive
three exchanged messages regarding Ena Steiner in e Commerce Fights

(01:12:01):
and Relevant Part, Executive two described an e Commerce Bights
article discussing Executive one that's the CEO's presentation to shareholders
during eBay's twenty nineteen annual meetings as shockingly reasonable. Executive
three preferred to Ena Steiner as a cow. Executive two
responded her day is coming. Executive three stated, I can't wait.

(01:12:21):
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

(01:12:41):
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's
a cow. And then they start making these increasingly like
movie let like threats her day is coming, will make

(01:13:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:13:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:13:35):
Why did you spend all that money at a bar?

Speaker 2 (01:13:38):
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 hadn't made that up,

(01:14:01):
if that was fake, well it's easy you can just
don't go out and disprove it and say, hey, this
is a lie, this is a libelis it's the fact
that what she was saying is true that made us
so a damaging So now focus on why why is
it that what she said was true? That was your
own actions?

Speaker 1 (01:14:20):
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 in everything, because they you know, that's 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

(01:14:40):
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 in NBA, right, you didn't have to let
them publish an article about it on their website. Not
think anyone would notice anyway. Bog after this point, gets

(01:15:05):
the go ahead to actually begin offensive actions against the Steiners,
and on June sixth, he tasks his team with tracking
all of INA's articles and social media posts concerning eBay.
On June seventh, he sends a contractor, a retired police
captain named Gilbert, to surveil the Steiner's home in the
Boston area. The day after this, Bog himself called the

(01:15:27):
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

(01:15:48):
escalate pretty rapidly from here, and we're going to cover
that and more Jason on Thursday's episode. Right now, we're
going to cover your books that people can buy or
in one case, pre order right now.

Speaker 2 (01:16:02):
Yes, the new book is called I'm starting to worry
about this Black Box of Doom. Yeah, it's up for
pure It is that on September twenty fourth. 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. Yeah,

(01:16:24):
it's available in every format, including an audio, ebook, hardcover.
I do not read the audiobook. I'm not an audiobook narrator.
People keep asking me that that would be a disaster.
They hired a professional.

Speaker 1 (01:16:36):
Yeah, I would love it if if the same thing
happened to you. That happened to uh, oh shit, what's
his name? Tom Clancy that one time where he like
accidentally described a nuclear submarine so accurately the government had
to sit down with them. Anyway, you know, read Jason's
books before he is arrested for accurately describing aspects of

(01:16:58):
our nuclear defense. Try and listen to the remaining podcast
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 dot com, or check

(01:17:22):
us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.

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