same weapons we have. we don t want to have a level playing field. we want to have the upper hand. our mission is to protect the war fighter and in the end they protect us. when i first saw the website, it was like a bad 80s television commercial. it really was sloppy. it was like an amazon or ebay of pirating software, but this is technology that isn t off the shelf. it s not available to even u.s. citizens. it was pretty clear this was a threat to national security. our first investigative step was to send an email. we asked to purchase satellite toolkit for 1 thousand dollars. the retail value of that software was more like $150,000. he wrote us back and in the e-mail he laid out payment instructions. send payment via western union. myself and the agent, we drove to the first western union we could find in the state of delaware and we sent $1,000 to china. not knowing the background of whose running the website, i wasn t confident that we were
so in december of 2009 i had joined the investigations unit for hsi in philadelphia. it sounds very technical, but all it is is just try to prevent u.s. technology from getting into the wrong hands. illegal acquisitions of u.s. goods and technology can assist our adversaries in harming u.s. soldiers. citizens and allies. basically what we do is we go out to companies all around the country so that they know who we are and can call us if they see any wrongdoing. so my first outreach was to a company called agi. they re a u.s. defense contractor. and they produce complex three-dimensional simulation software called stk, satellite toolkit. that wasn t my world. i mean, i was coming from investigating narcotics trafficking. what really opened my eyes to