Eric Wojtkun, Former FBI Agent Joins!

**Nigel Guy Relford** (0:00)
My name is Nigel Guy Relford, licensed firearms instructor, 2A attorney filling in for Hammer. We'll go straight to the hotline and bring on Eric Wojtkun, former FBI counterintelligence agent, worked a beat here in Indiana for a number of years. Eric, welcome to the program. How are you?

**Eric Wojtkun** (0:20)
I am awesome. Thank you for having me on the show today.

**Nigel Guy Relford** (0:22)
There are a couple of headlines that I've been disturbed by. One, I think, largely went unnoticed. We'll get to the, we'll definitely get to the, how the FBI disrupted the drone and sniper plot for UFC Freedom 250 But back when the, back a couple of days ago, when the World Cup was starting, one of the headlines I saw, Iran linked hackers claiming breach of FBI drone program threaten World Cup security.
My question is, do you know anything about this? What happened? Is this true? Or is this just Iran getting squirrely in the face of signing this thing with Donald Trump?

**Eric Wojtkun** (1:13)
Well, if I did know, I wouldn't say it because the reason is, we have to take one, we take every threat seriously.
If we know, how many operations do you have? Because this is a cat and mouse game. This is all asymmetric warfare. Sometimes people will make a claim to make us jump because they want to see what we're going to do. When they do this, that could be it. I mean, it's like, hey, just imagine when you're playing soccer, you're playing football, right? What's the first thing the coach is going to say? Hey, you know, let's see what happens if we call this play, and then somebody shifts in the backfield, what's the defense do?
Right? And then you know what the play is. You know what the tell is. Our enemies do the same thing to us. So if we do whatever we know, we are still going to respond, but how we respond will be based on the credibility of the threat, what we want to display, what of our capabilities. We don't want to tell them everything, right? So that's the thing that we do. And when you're playing intelligence, it's a cat and mouse game. And just think of it like playing football, call on a play to see what the tell is going to be from the other side.

**Nigel Guy Relford** (2:27)
Now, interesting stuff.
I'm always, this is Guy, by the way, I'm always very cynical about anything I see on these types of issues discussed in the media for exactly the reasons that you mentioned, sir, which is that we don't necessarily want to reveal what our responses truly are going to be, and we don't even want to reveal what it is we know. Isn't it true that for those of us who are just ordinary citizens and consumers of mass media, we really can't trust what we hear reported on things that involve serious security matters?

**Eric Wojtkun** (3:02)
Everything has a time and place to come out into the public sphere.
However, when we're working with national security, having worked with it, protecting those secrets is very important, because if you know something about anybody, you start following that person back 5, 10, 15 years, you know where they were, you know who they talked to, and then you do your own link analysis. This is the world of AI. What does AI do better than anything the world has ever seen? Draw correlation from data. It's an absolutely terrifying thing. That's how they know when you walk into Home Depot right now, the intelligence on you from your phone will make sure that they point you in the right direction for what you want to buy.

**Nigel Guy Relford** (3:47)
Wow.

**Eric Wojtkun** (3:49)
So imagine that on the intelligence side, looking for bad guys or trying to make your activity go to beat the game.

**Nigel Guy Relford** (3:56)
Eric Wojtkun is a former FBI counterintelligence agent. What does it mean to be, before we move on here, what does it mean to be an FBI counterintelligence agent? What were some of your duties? I know you spent a significant time here in Indiana.

**Eric Wojtkun** (4:12)
So Indiana was my very first stop, and I thought I would be a counterintelligence agent way back when I came out of the Academy in January 2004 Instead, they sent me to Gary, Indiana and I worked gang, violent gangs, drugs, crimes against children. I became a cyber agent before there were cyber agents, then I worked public corruption and discrimination housing. So my Indiana time, I got to do all the basics and it taught me everything. I got like five years of experience in 30 months. It was awesome. Then I got to go around the FBI and I picked up crisis response and WMD and finally got into counterintelligence.