The Ex-Google Hacker Taking On The World’s Spy Agencies

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

During his last six years working as an elite security researcher for Google, the hacker known as Morgan Mayhem spent his nights and weekends hunting down the malware used to spy on vulnerable targets like human rights activists and political dissidents.

His new job tasks him with defending a different endangered species: American national security journalists.

For the last month, 34-year-old Morgan Marquis-Boire has been the director of security for First Look Media, the media startup founded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar that has recruited journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras.¹ The website has become the most prolific publisher of NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s remaining secrets. Marquis-Boire’s daunting task is to safeguard those documents, and the communications of reporters who have perhaps the press’ most adversarial relationships with Western intelligence agencies.

Beyond protecting Snowden’s favorite journalists, Marquis-Boire sees his decision to leave Google for First Look as a chance to focus full-time on the problem of protecting reporters and activists as a whole, groups he sees as some of the most sensitive targets for governments globally. “I look at the risk posed to individuals in the real world,” says Marquis-Boire, an imposing, often black-clad New Zealander with earrings, dreadlocks, and a taste for death metal. “In human rights and journalism, the consequences of communications being compromised are imprisonment, physical violence, and even death. These types of users need security assistance in a very real sense.”

Marquis-Boire already has distinguished himself as a relentless counter-surveillance researcher and a vocal critic of the companies that have created an industry hawking spyware to governments. In 2012, he and researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab were the first to identify Finfisher, a stealthy collection of spying tools sold by the British firm Gamma Group that they eventually tracked to command-and-control servers in 25 countries. Later that year he helped trace how a piece of software sold by the Italian firm Hacking Team was used by the government of the United Arab Emirates to spy on a political dissident beaten by thugs. Just last month he revealed new findings that showed how that company’s tools have evolved to target iPhones, Android devices and other mobile targets. And in early 2013 Marquis-Boire and Citizen Lab researchers mapped the spread of surveillance and censorship tools sold by the Palo Alto, California firm Blue Coat to 61 countries, including Iran.

In the detective work required to pin those stealthy spying incidents on repressive governments and Western companies, Marquis-Boire is “extraordinarily talented,” says Ron Deibert, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and Citizen Lab’s director. ”There are some people who are phenomenally adept at forensics, who have an intuitive sense of how to make connections through different pieces of evidence,” he says. “Morgan has those skills…But what I very much appreciate about him is his passion for human rights.”

A Cypherpunk In The Newsroom

First Look and Marquis-Boire aren’t saying much about exactly what he’ll do at the closely-watched new media startup. But Marquis-Boire says he was convinced early in their recruitment meetings that First Look will treat security as a central tenet. (More about First Look’s plans in the video below.) The job also presents a challenge worthy of leaving his high profile position at Google: Protecting the communications between non-technical reporters and their highly-sensitive sources in a post-WikiLeaks and -Snowden era where they’re both increasingly targeted by spooks.