hear Andrei Masalovich tell it, the 62-year-old former KGB agent turned YouTube influencer is a master of the dark arts of Web surveillance who claims to have worked with everyone from the Vietnamese government to Vladimir Putin’s spy agencies. To others, he's a scoundrel or snake oil salesman — a bullshit artist.
Not that Maslovich cares. With a book to sell and a growing audience of 95,000 subscribers for his YouTube channel Cyberded , he toldhe was happy for the publicity. “I awoke that morning and found myself famous,” he said the day after the Treasury’s sanctions. Therein lies the paradox of Masalovich: He appears legit. But he's hard to take seriously — a Shakespearean jester with KGB connections.
Whether he’s for real, a troll or somewhere in between, Masalovich pitches his software and services somewhere between Palantir, the $20 billion Peter Thiel-backed juggernaut contracted by various American defense and intelligence agencies, and Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct British online manipulation specialist that exploited Facebook data to help its government customers, Donald Trump included.
With his work across online manipulation and surveillance, Masalovich has spooked not just the U.S. and Meta, but climate activists, thanks to his clients in the energy space, which includes the country’s nuclear giant Rosatom, as confirmed by a former employee. For the last two years, Masalovich’s personal website has also listed subsidiaries of oil giants Rosneft and Gazprom as customers.
Sanctioned in clownishly hypocritical fashion. The US government illegally tracks, records, and stores everything done on all digital devices worldwide. Only a few covert exceptions.
Laughable!
Interesting