Maj. Eric Kleinsmith
speaker
35 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Maj. Eric Kleinsmith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
2005, I believe. This is September 2005, the first testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Right.
It was, well, yes and no. Because before the destruction, we were giving a cease and desist order down through DOD to stop what you're doing because you're violating intelligence oversight rules on how you collected that information.
Right, right. One of the problems that... Yeah, that was a much younger me. Nice time. But what we learned, again, we were running several different operations. This was a very young organization. It was only, I think, two years old by the time this started up. I was the first military chief of the intelligence branch.
So it was an operational unit designed to help the Army or support the Army in fighting information warfare, information operations, psychological deception, operational security, that kind of thing. So we had operational teams, but I had a 24-person intel branch within that group.
And we were getting, because of the power that we were given with these new data mining tools, and I'm telling you, they were bleeding edge. We were doing a lot of things that we were making mistakes along the way. I got called in one morning because apparently I had conducted a denial of service attack against DIA, and then now NGA, their proxy server, shut the whole thing down.
Only because we were training a harvesting tool to pick up different information, and it hit DIA on a classified network and started harvesting the entire agency. And so, you know, denial of service, they shut the whole thing down. So I got blamed, you know, I got called out on the carpet for that one morning.
That's what I mean, like the types of technology we were trying to wrestle with and figure out. Once we had gotten those down, and it was a great combination of the data that we were bringing in, the tools that we were using, but also, more importantly, the people and the processes that we had put in place and the folks that I had assigned to different tasks.
We had first done an operation using data mining to show Department of Defense how our technology was being stolen. specifically by China and some other countries. And we were able to map it out by using a single technology as a sample. That became a firestorm because it had gotten leaked that we were doing this work.
We received a subpoena from Congressman Dan Burton that he wanted all that information. So we spent a weekend making 30,000 copies to deliver it by a data set on paper to do that. But that got us on the map, and that's why Tony came to see us.
No.
Here's the rub, because it was myself and one of my warrant officer analysts who was on the team. We had to have a deep discussion, because we were told, if you're collecting information that has information about U.S. persons from an intelligence standpoint... I mean, they beat this regulation into your head every year as a requirement. So we were warned.
Oh, by the way, all this stuff that you had collected, and it wasn't just one chart. It was dozens of charts. We had dozens of connections. We had cells in... Northern Africa, we had cells in the Middle East, we had cells in the Far East, and then we started seeing cells pop up within the U.S.
My hometown of Plymouth, Michigan popped up as a potential operation, a front organization that was using my little hometown outside of Detroit to funnel money into the organization. So it was more than just operatives. So it wasn't just operatives. It was an entire support and sympathetic footprint.
Part of it is when you're doing data mining, you're harvesting everything. Including open source. Intelligence collectors are very restricted on what we can collect when a U.S. person comes up. But when a tool does it, it gets everything. And so you have to be able to go through that and excite all the information about U.S. persons.
This is a throwback from Vietnam days and Pike and Church Committee 75, that kind of stuff. So they wrote these regulations for intel collection, but they never updated them, again, because we were the first data mining operation.
So on the evening of 9-11, we were all on the phone with each other because we knew it was coming. We had deep conversations the entire time we were running this operation that we knew something was coming. So 9-11 happens. We're all talking to each other. And the watch phrase was, so it begins. We knew this was coming out. And that was, you know.
We knew something was coming. They were coming offensively, and they had already established a deep footprint.
Yes, that was before Able Danger.
No, that was a different effort. He had subpoenaed it, so we had to make copies of it and send it to Capitol Hill. But the rest of it you destroyed, I guess. Yeah, then in November is when the Able Danger started. It was in March, spring the next year, that we were given the cease and desist. And while that was going on, when you collect information about U.S.
Showing 1–20 of 35 · page 1 of 2
Next →