dead drop
Spy-catcher saw “stupid” tech errors others made. FBI says he then made his own.
The wrong way to get out of Trump’s America.
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Twenty-eight-year-old Nathan Laatsch was, until yesterday, a cybersecurity employee at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). He had a Top Secret clearance and worked in the Insider Threat Division. Laatsch spent his days—you’ll understand the past tense in a moment—”enabling user monitoring on individuals with access to DIA systems,” including employees under surreptitious internal investigation.
Given that Laatsch was one of those who “watched the watchers,” he appears to have had supreme confidence in his own ability to avoid detection should he decide to go rogue. “Stupid mistakes” made by other idiots would “not be difficult for me to avoid,” he once wrote. DIA couldn’t even launch an investigation of Laatsch without him knowing that something was up.
The Greeks had a word for this: hubris.
Stupid mistakes
Laatsch, who earned a cybersecurity degree from Florida Polytechnic in 2018, soon found himself with access to serious government secrets at DIA, which he joined in 2019. He eventually had not only a Top Secret clearance but was also read in to various “special access programs”—some of the government’s deepest secrets. He appears to have been relatively gruntled about his work, but the political upheavals of the last decade shook his faith in what America stood for and the objectives his work was serving.
By March 2025, Laatsch achieved full disgruntlement and allegedly sent an anonymous email to a “friendly foreign government,” offering to share classified information with them. The email said that the “recent actions of the current administration are extremely disturbing to me… I do not agree or align with the values of this administration and intend to act to support the values that the United States at one time stood for.”
The FBI was soon “provided with” this email, and it quickly found out that Laatsch was not nearly as good at security as he thought he was. Let’s count the “stupid mistakes” here:
1) REDACTION FAIL: The anonymous email included two photos showing the front and back of a US government ID card of the kind used in the intelligence community. The name and photo of the bearer were redacted. According to the FBI, however, “through other information that was not redacted on one of the US Government IDs, law enforcement was able to determine that the US Government ID belonged to Laatsch.”
2) EMAIL ADDRESS FAIL: The FBI quickly gained access to the “anonymous” email account used to send the message. They found that, on the day that this account was set up, it received a message from a second email account—possibly as a test—which turned out to be one of Laatsch’s and contained his name as part of the email address.
3) EMAIL ACCOUNT FAIL: This second email account, when the FBI examined it, had been set up using Laatsch’s full name, date of birth, and phone number.
4) IP ADDRESS FAIL: Both the first and second email account had been logged into from the same IP address, suggesting they were controlled by the same person. And the IP address that was used for them both resolved to… Laatsch’s residence.
The leaker did suggest moving the conversation to an encrypted messaging platform, but the damage was already done.
The FBI immediately began a sting operation, posing as the “friendly country,” asking Laatsch to copy some juicy data and provide it in a “dead drop” at a park in northern Virginia. Laatsch allegedly then went in to work at DIA, using his deep knowledge of DIA computerized tracking systems to avoid detection by… copying secret documents into notebooks by hand, then ripping out the sheets of paper and stuffing them in his socks.
This appears to have worked well enough—except for the fact that internal DIA “video monitoring” was watching him do it, with FBI agents noting even the ways Laatsch tried to “hide his notebook” when co-workers walked by. Whether Laatsch was aware of this video monitoring system is unclear.
On May 1, 2025, Laatsch allegedly wrote up his notes, stored them on a thumb drive, and dropped them as requested at an Alexandria park. The drive was later retrieved by the FBI. On May 8, Laatsch told his contact that he wasn’t seeking money but “citizenship for your country” because he didn’t “expect things here to improve in the long term, even in the event there is a change in the future.”
Laatsch was arrested yesterday, May 29.
