The FBI Citizen's Academy: Outreach Experience

this is intended to be kind of a story hour this is kind of a show and tell if you have questions feel free to interrupt me I don't I don't get offended easily but yeah if you have questions feel free to interrupt if you want to make a comment the same thing let's just have let's have a conversation about this every single time I talk about my experience with this too people are like wow I didn't even know the FBA did that and I didn't either until I started working with a couple of x-feds a couple of jobs ago um I was at a startup and long story short I got promoted to see so pretty

quickly it was there for about five months as a ciso but a year and a half before that writing their security program and some of the people we worked with for the platform and the tool are ex-fbi and made friends and they're like you should do this so I applied how to get in is you take a pee test you do a background check you have to come back clean they do a thorough background check but not super thorough and I'll get to that here um and I'll explain why but basically this whole thing is intended to be an Outreach but they're watching you as much as you are watching them most of the people who are attracted to this

type of a program are folks who honestly they're I'll just give the stats they're mostly like middle-aged older um professionals there were people though in there that were like there was one lady who was a ticket taker at Coors Stadium um but then there were like ex fighter pilots you know like I mean it's a whole gamut but basically they then they just started doing it in person again because of covid um but I was like class one of a class of 40. and all walks of life and it was really cool um but basically it's a program where they are taking you through every single branch of the FBI what they do um it's really good for networking and

after spending like 15 plus years in cyber and you don't know what to do next and you've gotten your CSO thing done and you're like I'm over it um this is something that's really fun it's eye-opening and also too in the hacking space it's like spy versus spy right like you're shaking the fed's hands but you've got a bomb behind your back same thing like they're they're suspicious of us and vice versa and after having gone through this I will tell you with full honesty that my heart goes out to everyone who protects us so that we can walk around like I was saying in the hallway like fat and happy every day just walking around everything's safe

it's not and the reason why is um while we've got good people uh supporting us so I'm gonna go ahead and present all right I'm gonna talk um while you guys can read if you'd like but why do they care we've already kind of lightly touched on that but they do want to have a more positive space within our society and our cities in general they would like to have a better relationship with you know John Q public as it were um there are we could go into like the myths and all the rabbit side notes about you know the average FBI agent being like you know white guy suit tie that is not the face of the FBI today it was 60

years ago but it's not today I was actually really um like relieved and surprised to see their you know fair amount of women um people of color it was pretty cool let's see also if I go too fast let me know that too so why should you care um I kind of covered that already too if you want a new experience and you've got the background and you are you know an upstanding citizen go for it it's fun um you'll meet new people you'll get to see things and do things normal people well won't be able to do just because they're not exposed to it um I don't know it's it's a to me it was a

really cool experience and now you know I've got the experience to say that I've been able to do that and I've made connections so it's fun all right it's not a recruiting program you're not going to be like approached by an agent after the 12-week course and being you're not going to be offered a job um if you want to work with them great but there's that's an entire like the vetting process just to do this was like this the vending process to become an agent massive um also they generally look for like younger people like right out of college so if you're thinking about being an agent and you're right out of college apply now

um the life of an agent as a side note while you're reading that um they uh once let's say you get in let's say you get accepted to go be an agent um you have to bid on your city so Denver's actually really coveted because it's the mile high city it's beautiful it's clean it's quiet it's kind of remote there's there's work to be done but you know it's not like here it's not like you know New York um so people bid for cities and they constantly travel they are like you have to drop and go so if you like that lifestyle it would fit okay this is a lot of words on the slide

and I'm sorry but there was a lot of this um these are the things that we went over it was a 12-week course on Wednesday nights the alumni you can join the infra guard as well but you can also join the FBI Citizen Academy alumni and they actually provided us with dinner so you drive to headquarters you park your car in a secure location you badge in you get wanted you sit you listen to their talk whatever the presentation is for the first half you eat dinner that they bring in and you go back and you have another talk these talks were eye-opening um I'm gonna do my best too because I'm also kind of a crier there was some

nights though that I was just telling some of my friends in the lobby where I live about 45 minutes an hour from headquarters in Colorado and they would tell us stuff in class at night that we weren't allowed to speak about so I couldn't like just call and get a friend to like cry on his shoulder um because I know I would say something um there were some nights though that I just drove home in tears so all right it's fun um if you just go to Google Maps and if you look up your own local branch of the FBI look at the comments on the reviews it's fun it's funny there's I know like

the hacking Society we have all these little jokes and memes and like you know there's all sorts of that the feds do it too they just do it in different ways um breadsticks uh escorts out there yes and it's also open carry um let's see what I want to tell you about this slide oh yeah the bomb squad so you know the little bomb robots in movies you know they like come in and they're like and you can like you know they disarm the bomb those things are real I got to touch them they're adorable I don't know if I have a picture of them in here but we were also allowed to take pictures

um super cool the bomb squad guys are probably my favorite because they're about on my same personality Vibe they were just perky upbeat happy like they love their job the gentleman who was explaining to us about um pipe bombs and how to make them I now know how to make them uh without losing my hands which I probably shouldn't know not that I'll ever need that skill but now I know and his boss is standing next to him and he's like shut up they don't need to know this but you get you get passionate and you get excited and you overshare um the regional computer forensics lab in Colorado is amazing they have it's I mean it's like if you've ever

been inside of a giant like office building maybe four times the size of this room and it's filled with I.T equipment and it's filled with like black box stuff it's neat um and they walk you through it and they show you everything but it's really also not like you know button-down tie necktie like stuffing it's normal people doing normal work well normal work at that level let's see any questions so far I know I'm probably leaving things out and I've got a thousand things to say but I don't want to go over my time it's either well he told me he's like I'm not gonna be rude but so all right oh there it is there's the

little bomb squad guys they were literally so cute like if I was the best night was the first night there we also did fats training that night which is firearm uh training and security training State Firearm Training safety it's literal like they it's it's like a video game but you're standing and you have a literal like weighted Weapon It's not a real gun but it feels like it and you go through a scenario and you need to shoot the bad guys that was pretty cool um we went through what weapons of mass destruction actually are um I had no idea but like ryzen actually grows native to Colorado and it's everywhere but a lot of people don't

know it um let me grab some water real quick

um but there are and also too the um do you remember back from like I don't know if you go through like antique shops or whatever and the old radioactive class it's still around especially in Colorado we have a ton of old antique shops and you can find it and it's and you can actually buy it and people do it and they do bad things with it so um crisis negotiation this is something you can all use in your families in your work at your school with your kids with your spouse your partner whatever um minimal encouragers open any questions reflecting emotional labeling labeling paraphrasing effective pauses in summary just remember more pies Google it later or watch this recording

I've actually used that at work um having been in this field for 15 plus years and doing what I do I'm not like I'm a much hardened person as I was 15 years ago I wish I'd had more pies back then because I would have been able to be more confident early on but this helps diffuse a situation so in a hostage to negotiation scenario or if your kid is like I am not going to be I'm not going to sleep tonight okay minimal encourages all right open and quick why don't you want to go to bed tonight how come it works I swear to god it works my kids are almost six and seven if it works on them it works

on everyone else okay so this is me being ignorant yeah I've been in security for a while but I don't know everything none of us know everything about security if you ever encounter someone who's like I'm the guru of it no they're not I had no idea that there are people who consider themselves to be Sovereign citizens in the United States they do not per their own minds to your left I was like blown away this night in their mindset they don't have to pay taxes they will not like they are literally on like they're living face to face with you but they're off grid they are not paying taxes they're not paying for anything

they will not partake in normal like normal societal supported normalcy that we all just kind of do this is a fake license plate that the feds grabbed from a car um that's it's not real they put it on their car so they didn't have to pay taxes and so they wouldn't get flagged by police driving down the road um and FIFA and all of the the various like uprising of like Angry youth those are some of actual uh Shields and armor that they had made for themselves and again like I don't know if I'm going to share the slides but I can definitely give you a copy but take a minute and like look what they've run

on it it's psychotic it's just it's angry and it's driven and it's passionate and for that I'm like but the purpose of it all is just scary and these people are like again we walk down the street and we're fat and happy so it's good stuff color of law too I don't have enough time to get in here into here within my my little window of talking but I get pretty passionate about that it's it's anyone who's a minority or a hidden minority or anything there's still not that equal justice there's no equal representation still and that's something that if you're passionate about it just Google it and read and then get involved um all right murder and innocence

so uh let's see this is the slide where I can get off onto like a side track and get a little emotional so I'll try not to um let's talk about the happy thing I'm a car guy I love vehicles I erase go-karts I fly planes love all the things with that you can get in and maneuver that is a tactical uh tank essentially they can drive it up to someone's house go through it if they want to the spike you see right there is literally so they can shove it in the ground and the thing will not move uh it's bulletproof it is it's and you can't really see um I tried to zoom it in a little bit

and let's step away from the mic for just a second but again this is their humor they're people just like us somebody didn't put diesel in it once and so they have a sticker diesel you [ __ ] just remember the right fuel so anyway these guys they're cool they're but they're they're also like highly trained highly technical they're not scary I mean they look scary but they're not scary they're just normal people like us um one of the nights that I drove home in tears though we this was so I presented this at besides Denver in September last year and at that time I was still not able to talk about it openly it's been long enough now and

it's in the news but Gabby Patito was that little girl who drove with her boyfriend from Florida up to like road trip right up to Wyoming he killed her moved her body her but she her body was found 50 feet from federal territory so like there was like Forest Service land and then dead girl because she was that close like that far in it became the feds it was their problem um the things I couldn't say back then was they were using his cell phone to triangulate where they were um and then they were trying to get him on murder charges before he drove back and killed himself in the swamps by his house they were trying to get him on theft and

um stuffed because he was using her credit cards postmortem he was getting into her bank account spending her cash to for gas and food to come back and said yeah the whole thing was really messed up they didn't really show Too Many graphic photos like it wasn't a horse like a little horror movie but like just the way she died and like there were so many things that happened the two police that had initially pulled them over the night before um and after like he had beat her up a bit they were like just sleep separate tonight you know whatever and then he wound up killing her the next day so the families of the deceased are now suing

those cops and it's a mess so that was that was the first night that was the first half of my night that night we went and had dinner it was very like somber came back in and then we talked about trafficking it's awful um big car car is good car is good actually um picture this one of the pictures they did share in that that night was that's just a regular like four-door sedan right they have the doors open and you take a picture of this think about that in your head and there's no one in the car they're like where are the people in this car and everybody's like there were two in behind the firewall behind the

dash they had cut the fabric out of the seat and then sewn them into the seats um we'll talk about that more about that it's awful but people do get trafficked in and we do have slavery here in America still there are undocumented workers and slaves literally today um plantations Farms really wealthy people it's a it's a shadier world than you know all right I will show you as of the end of my slides um I don't have enough time for a minute a video okay um that's me looking super happy at the end of the event you get to go to uh shoot guns out of firing range and get some gun trading and uh

yeah it was really fun and I've got a video of um a SWAT demonstration and then I have other stories too but if you want to talk to me about it later I can tell you about that later all right oh that's right did you notice spot the FED there are two in this room right now I mean you can look around I'm not going to point them out but I know there are two in this room right now I said hi to him earlier um we did not study serial killers we passed it in brief but we did not study serial killers at all and then this was last year it was shut the [ __ ] up Friday

so all right let me show you the video and then uh we'll be good

hold on I'll start it over there we go

perfect

I don't know I'll surrender

there was a guy and in the back literally dresses like a human just it was cool that's a flash bomb flash grenade another one

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so the entire class we're up on like a catwalk above the demonstration room and the SWAT team of the Rolex is using live rounds um this is a to show you what a typical house rate

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I think we're going to correct right so what they're doing and with the laser so we may have a positive

yeah let me dropped another lash printing below one that guy foreign

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[Music] they're hearing um

Casey fan here and they're about to go into the second bedroom of this house and the scenario is that a bad guy has hostage so there to get in there till the bad guy get the debt out foreign

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they're reiterating what they did they're walking around now picking up stuff they're making it clean there's a lot of we need this all right a couple of the things since I do have time and I talked way too quickly which is because I'm nervous and I'm not really good I don't feel like I'm very good at this but um one of the things that they did do was like I mentioned a background check oh thank you thank you so uh they do a background check on you to make sure that you're you know not a loony bin when you go in and you're going to be at FBI headquarters they didn't do a thorough enough background check another

night that I had uh some emotional stability issues I'll say was when they divided the group into four teams to go and see the little demonstration on how they lift tire prints and other demonstration on how they lift Footprints and fingerprints another demonstration on that is a chemical that is corrosive and toxic to people how do we get rid of it how do we identify it how do we properly handle it and then ballistics um so I overshare but this is googleable like I've been married twice my last name used to be yowler y'aller and his sister and my ex-brother-in-law were at the theater the night the shooting happened at Aurora so I was not prepared

for this and I literally I like hand to God legit had to go to therapy after that happened we were already divorced at that time but I was still connected to their family you know you don't stop caring about people um I wasn't there that night but I did get calls in the morning the next day and found out that Matt so anyway we did all the difference demonstrations ballistics was last for me and it's in Colorado and we have a lot of shootings there too many like way too many and the special agent in charge was standing right next to me him and his wife were the first two responders at the boulder king supers Grocery Store

shooting so he's standing here I'm standing here there's this big muscly ex-military like dude here and he starts mansplaining after they bring out a two by three foot glossy photo no bodies but blood and ballistics everywhere right here and I'm like I thought I buried this ghost a long time ago I thought I had been over it I literally put myself through firearms training when that happened because all of a sudden I developed a phobia of guns I'm not afraid of guns you just need to know how to handle them like we were talking about so anyway I thought I had buried that ghost right thought I was over it photo comes out army guy well it's a parent he

starts mansplating the murder the parent that the shooter was just randomly aiming at people and he obviously stood in one's face I'm like and usually I'm really professional and like you're at FBI like everybody's watching you you're dressed up you're nice right usually I have my poop more in a group and I realize that we have a young person in the audience I'm watching my mouth for you my love so um I lost it I was like sir you're effing wrong the shooter went and methodically walked down the aisle and my brother died right there so so I started you know this and uh I couldn't pull together but it's also you're at FB headquarters you cannot

just step into the hallway and take a break you are flanked everywhere you go I couldn't like you were asking to the bathroom like a woman will come in the bed like not in her stall but like she'll walk in the bathroom with you so I just stood there like rage crying and this back like I was like he's like grabbed my arm and he's like okay I'm like I'm fine it's fine they all left and then I just like lost it and he's like do you need a chaplain do you need anything like they were genuinely concerned about this now this is why I can't be an AJ because I can't handle this stuff and there are people though

that deal with that and 10 times 100 times worse on a daily basis that keep us safe so I think the whole like 1950s 1960s spy versus spy I'm shaking your hand but I've got my you know bomb behind my back that stuff needs to go away we need to partner better like the the term hacker I know it's a scary one but we're not bad people they know we're not bad people and I think it's more about like let's get on the same page and see what we can do to protect each other um we had a really long talk last night about critical infrastructure as well I work in critical infrastructure now and

we need to be able to as the as the generations retire we need to be able to take all of that and protect it you know get it to the point where it is not a concern and not a threat so anyway I could go off on like 10 different things does anyone have any questions for me yes it was 12 weeks and then you got to spend a day on the Range um found out that I'm a really good shot with a scatter a shotgun had no idea like it was probably like me to well probably like Mita the guy in the red shirt but I got it like it was pretty cool um we also got to fire a couple of other

guns that they've retired because the mechanically they're just you need to be able to think and react quickly and these guns kept jamming so we got to play with like old Tech so that was fun um yeah

totally yeah I don't think there's an age limit on the minimum and I know now that I'm alumni uh my kids because I paid for like to join for the lifetime support whatever I get to be invited to the range every year I get to go again on May 5th or no May 6th um but then my kids will have opportunities to join like the FBI like Junior groups as they get older if they want to do this and my seven-year-old's already determined to be a CIA agent and that's a whole other Branch so excuse me it's something the feds are more like government police cia's like government spies so it's two different but anyway yeah you go for

it like um and if you if you do want to connect with me on LinkedIn feel free to try to find me I've hidden it a bit but if you can find me um and I think my LinkedIn is actually linked within the presentation send me a note as to like hey I saw your talk because I get a lot of requests and a lot of people that I don't know if you don't put a note in there I won't open up to you because it's my only social but um if you need help with it I can help write a letter of recommendation we can talk more about it in depth um I have a friend that's

going through it now and she's she's a hacker in Denver she's doing the academy this year and actually they sense here I'll read this to you she sent me a picture of the email she got because of me being uh emotional as I am but let me find her real quick I know terrible anti-climatic pause so they sent out an email that said all next week you will hear about our evidence response team I need to know in advance if any of you have any connection to the Aurora theater shooting as we'll be talked about during the presentation portion and there will be some maybe graphic photos on the demonstration if you have any sort of connection let

me know and I'll figure out a plan so that you're not uncomfortable or standing in tears so I've made my legacy my legacy is known not a great legacy but nonetheless um yeah

to like help partner um I think yes but actually they were just breached about six months ago and they've shut the platform down I had to go through a re-screening and submit other information to like become on the list and I don't know what they're when they're going to reopen it back up I think infraguard is a good first step I think it's very reactive though and it's very much them feeding information to us but it's not for any relationship to work it's got to be symbiotic like we should be helping them as well but it's hard to like if you if you've grown up in a society of like suspicion and anxiety and I don't trust you it's hard

to then reach out to the thing that you don't trust and say let's work together so that's that's part of what this is trying to do um I think there could be improvements made I mean I I've been part of it now for a little while and it's it's informative but there are there are better ways to do it I think but who's going to take on that challenge too so anyone yeah anybody with John from the program huh yeah there was there was a school teacher in my class um she didn't like it about halfway through and she just stopped coming what about like post-graduation like you locked in for life oh well see that's the thing I know

will the FBI follow me around for the rest yeah I'll be if they already are so yes and here's the deal so when the infra guard got Pops I actually have a friend who is an ex-fed and I've known him since I was little I called him up and I'm like so they just got popped I went through the academy and might now whenever I apply for a job that needs a background check it takes twice as long because I have an FBI marker on my profile like behind the scenes so now they have to check all the databases all of them like she's not being looked for by Interpol she's you know whatever so

it always takes twice as long and I have a really common name also so that's it is what it is um but I am on a list but to quote my friend and I love him so I'm not you know not dogging him but he's like no one's gonna come after a chubby middle-aged single mom in the suburbs you're fine so they probably you're on a list but we're all on lists I mean our information gets stolen and traded and sold daily so it's not bad list to be on but no they're not gonna like as soon as they like it's usually like you make the check box of you're a good person you're fine you have nothing to worry

about anybody else did it convince anybody to try this thing yeah for the pass who are the Vets at the end the FBI oh in here I don't know if I want to reveal themselves look around uh who would you guess let me let me ask who would you guess it's not me

it's Caesar just kidding now I'm gonna if they want to reveal they can I don't want to about them um I'll also be at Defcon and um sorry not besides Vegas I don't know if I'm gonna be there for that but I'll be a Defcon and black hat this year too so if you want to hang out I'll be there also I'll be at the day of security in a month I know she curity it's silly but I'll be there in a month talking in California as well on just basic security Frameworks so connect with me I know people I can help help you know other people that are good so that's it that's all I got

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