Hey did I ever tell about the time I was detained in Iraq and a prime suspect in a treason case...

Yeah, funny story that, let's see where should I start. I was here writing some thank you cards and shipping out some gifts to family I was just talking to Ken about how well things were going and I needed to stock up on my Karma because I'm sure in the near future I'm going to blow it. We had a good laugh about that and I dropped the gifts and cards in the mail. Usually we stay up all hours of the night but I was feeling particularly good that evening and I said I was going to call it an early night.

I wake up the next day feeling more relaxed than I ever had the entire time I was here. It was weird I had a sense of inner peace that I'd never felt before. Well Ken had flipped his schedule and was on his way to bed and I was going to cover the day. He was logging off for the day when two men came in the office. They asked looked at Ken with their hands on their guns and asked if he was Thomas Johnson. We said no I am. Then they said NCIS we need you too step away from the computer and don't touch anything we have a search warrant relating to the possible unauthorized disclosure of classified information and the unauthorized intentional access to government computer systems. Ken and I looked at each other like what the fuck.

So they asked Ken to leave the office and they asked me if I would mind taking a ride with them to their office. In my mind I'm like do I mind? It was as if I had the option to say no. Well let me describe my two new friends one who we will call Special Agent Smoother was the lead investigator he was an older gentleman and he was the "good" cop if you will and Special Agent Giggles was the "bad" cop he was a younger gentleman who had a constant look on his face like you told the world's funniest joke...about his dead mother. So they escorted me out and tell Ken to lock the door and basically take a hike, he can't go to our room or in the office so he had to stay in the MP's office next door to us. Armed guards secured both places. The MPs who I had become friends with were looking like what the hell is going on and Ken had this hopeless look on his face like he wanted to save me.


Well we get into the interrogation room and Smoother tells me that at this time I'm not under arrest just a suspect in a crime that and both offences can put me in federal prison for 20 years. Then he says to me before you say anything I want to let you know you are a suspect in a crime and as a suspect you have the right to an attorney before you answer any questions. I'm thinking to myself where the fuck am I going to get an attorney from around here? It's not like Lionel Hutz lives around the fucking corner. Any lawyer that I could get around here was playing for the team as it were and not my best defense. I hadn't done anything wrong and besides I knew that they were coming eventually and I knew what they would be asking so I was pretty much ready. So I said I'll talk and at that point he takes my fingerprints and mug shot which were sent to the FBI.

Here is the situation I met a Marine out here that I called Toker. I won't go into details you can read about him here. Needless to say one of my skills is the ability to size up a person in six hours or less, about duration of an elementary school day. That was about as much time to decide my alliances in school. My rogue's galleries are implementations of that skill. Basically it is a snap shot of a person that I have observed for six hours. I've done this with everyone I know and for the most part I've never been surprised by how they act. Outside of other military brats who I avoid on principle there has only been one other person I've never been able to figure out but to be fair I don't think she can figure herself out.

That is neither here nor there, what happened is this someone from Toker's unit found my blog and the link to his blog from that they saw that on his blog he was talking
about people in his unit...senior people specifically him. Well this particular individual who we will call Matlock, because of his superior legal skills, was no fan of Toker and scoured his blog for any OPSEC violations. Well Matlock believed that one was found and instead of handling it on the NCO level he took it to the CO. The CO when faced with such allegations had to act and sent it up the chain. Well in this search for OPSEC violations Matlock wandered over to my blog and of course from my
description of Toker Matlock thought we were thick as thieves. Since he was looking for dirt he took some of my entries to the CO and claimed they were OPSEC violations as well. On top of that Matlock alleged that Toker "hacked" into the domain that my computer resided on then hacked my computer and placed this classified file on my
computer. The only problem with this is Matlock had no fucking clue what he was talking about or who he was dealing with. He just had an overriding desire to stick it to Toker and as far as he was concerned because I was "fond" of Toker I could get it in the ass too.


Here was my great crime. When I first got into country I was working with Toker and his unit. In trying to build camaraderie with my new co-workers I downloaded a file of an AC 130 gunship attacking some Taliban targets at the beginning of the Afghan War. Somewhere in the October 2001 range, you can find files like this all over the Internet. While I'm sure they were classified at one point and time they are so easy to find today that I don't think anyone even blinks. So I show the file to members of Toker's unit as a matter of fact Matlock was one of the first people to see it. It confuses me how he could have forgotten that little fact. No matter, it's his problem now.

Well all the people at the unit that saw it loved it and they wanted copies for themselves. So Toker saved it on their unclassified shared directory so people could get it they wanted it. NCIS had been reading my blog for weeks trying to gather information and wanted to see if what I was talking about was classified data. Since I've spent my entire career in Information security I have a good idea of what does and doesn't constitute OPSEC.

I left and when back to my home base forgetting to get a copy of the file for myself. So I emailed Toker a few days later and asked him if he could email me the file. He tried and the file was too big. Since he and I were on the same Domain he provided me with the path to the file and I saved it to my computer. No harm no foul case closed.

Let me explain domains in a simple form. Think of a domain as your house. Within your house you have access to everything in your house and you can move it around freely. There is nothing wrong with that. You next-door neighbor lives in another house, (domain) the only way you can go to into their house is if they give you
permission. If they don't give you permission and you go in anyway that is a crime.

Now then lets talk about physical and logical separation. Let's say you have two
homes one in New York and one in California they are both your domains but they are physically separated So these homes are physically separated but logically they both
belong to you, you can access them anytime you want, and you can move things around if you choose. Everyone who lives in your house lives in your domain and has access to all the common (shared) areas of your domain (living room, dining room, kitchen, bathrooms etc.) if you have a book in your room and someone asks for it then you place it on the kitchen table then tell them they can find the book on the table that isn't a crime two people who live in the same house that share a book are not committing a crime. This is basically what happened here Toker put a file in the shared area for me to get since we were on the same domain.

Because we were physically separated SA Smoother thought that we were on different domains thus a crime committed but after explaining to him that we were on the same domain a lynchpin in this case fell apart. Then when I told them about the file and any descriptions of that file were not part of any active operations then the second part of the lynchpin fell apart. On top of that nothing in my blog ever discussed any current missions. They asked me about some of the descriptions of events on my blog and I told them much like I've told every reader on my blog is that not everything I write is to scale. The ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘why’ are always changed and are very rarely exact. My stories are just to give a feel to people who are not here what it is like or what a possible situation is like. For them to get Toker, I had to be complicit in a crime. No crime was committed so the case went away. Toker had a host of other legal issues that he was dealing with that they didn't let me in on.

You could see the anger and flat out confusion in Smoother's face. Giggles was still processing the funnies about his mom. They wasted weeks of surveillance on my
blog and they came up with nothing. Well after Agent Smoother realized that Matlock just wasted their fucking time his attitude changed toward me a bit. He became a bit more talkative and we talked about his wife and his son who was about my age. And then he asked me how my family was doing. I said huh? He said how is your family coping with the loss of your cousin. Of all the things he said to me, the crime I was alleged of doing, the years I was looking at, the idea of never seeing freedom again, that was what floored me. Here was this guy that I had never seen before in my life and he knew things about me, personal things and the thing was that I could tell it was a natural concerned for my family and not something to get in with me. This man spent weeks reading my blog and gleaming every bit of information out of it. He knew pretty much everything about me he took notes on me. That was the first time in decades that I felt open and unprotected. It was the most sickening feeling that I've had in my life and it is something that I'm going to have to cope with when I get back stateside. There are hundred of people now who know every detail about me. I've never been a person who liked people to know things about me. I’ve prided myself on not being known. We talked about some other blogs that were linked to me, on of the reasons I got rid of all the links was due to guilt by association. I get people who want me to read their blogs all the time and when I first started doing this I had a rule. If someone liked my work and they had a blog I would post a link up to their blog regardless of content. There were some blogs that I didn't like or agree with the content but, if they liked me enough to tell me then I would link to them it was only fair. Again I didn't always agree with people and I thought that some blogs and bloggers were out and out fakes (a fact confirmed by Agent Smoother) but I realized that a whole bunch of people were getting wrapped into Matlock's problem with Toker. As a result I removed the links.

Well, as you can see they had a search warrant that they had to execute as part of procedure. By this time they felt they had enough information to know that I wasn’t guilty of anything. But, they had to execute the search warrant and this by far was the worst part. I had just started getting books from some of my readersnof the blog. So on my desk as big as day was this book “Google Hacking: Explore the Dark Side of Googling”.

Agent Smoother asks me if this is my book and I'm like "Fuck!" that's in my mind. I say yes. He thumbs through the book and then puts it down then looks on my shelf and see my books on learning German, Arabic, and Spanish. He looks at me again and says you are going to be quite the linguist I see. This isn't a complement from someone who is accusing you of unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

I respond well it's my belief that you should know at least the basics of the native language of the people you interact with. He said that's a good thing an then he goes
into this story about his interaction with a cabbie that he underestimated but, come to find out that the guy knew like five or six languages.

Agent Giggles hasn't said anything he is just observing the room and observing me seeing if I'm making any sudden movements or if he can read anything on me. As much as they are watching me, I'm watching them. Well after they go through my books and stuff they start to back and tag all of my electronic equipment. All my memory sticks, computers, hard drives, music CDs, tutorial CDs everything. This is the part that actually made me mad. Matlock's accusations was now starting to cost me money.

Basically they were taking every piece of data that I had relating to my job. All of my own personal music CDs and pretty much everything I need in order to function in Iraq. They said they had to send back state side for it to get analyzed for classified information. I asked how long and this was the first time Giggles had anything to say, "As long as it takes"

I said I could have figured that out by myself Agent Obvious! IN MY MIND. It came out like "I understand, you all have to do what you need to do and I'm happy to help."

Well after the bagged ever piece of evidence which was every piece of electronic/digital equipment I had. We had to go to my room. At my room was an armed guard. I foundout later that there was an APB out on me and that they were authorized to use force in order to detain me. I laugh to myself when I think about that because as far as threatening Black men go, I rank right between Will Smith and Cuba Gooding Jr.

We get in my room and the Smoother asks me the strangest question I have ever heard in my life. He asks if I have any snakes or any other poisonous critters in my room. Surely they didn't gleam that off the blog. I'm thinking what is he thinking? Like I have two attack rattlesnakes loaded on my arm to launch out and make my escape.

DEAL WITH THESE COPPERS! Whoosh! Whoosh! ARRRGH!

Matlock couldn't have been that off the mark. I say no I don't and he goes to tell me about one time he was on an assignment looking for some drugs or something and they went to this guys house. The guy was getting jumpy when people went to near his garbage can so Smoother went to search the garbage can and was met by several pit vipers. Needless to say I would assume you only have to live that experience one time in order to ask it every time after that.

Well while they are searching my room for stuff and as they suspected they didn't find anything because I keep everything but clothes and toothbrushes in the office. So after they search my room they take me back to the office. I tell Smoother if you need anything else let me know I'll be happy to help. He said that wouldn’t be necessary, we won't be seeing one another again. Even though I haven't seen Agent Smoother I'm sure NCIS and at least one other federal law enforcement agency checks this blog daily just to make sure that I'm still playing by the rules.

So I get back in the office and Ken who looks like he just had a heart attack asked me if everything was ok. I just looked at him for a second. HE didn't have the look of a co-worker; he had the look of a father that couldn't help his son. He looked so relieved at that moment. I told him everything was ok and he gave me this big hug. It was a real hallmark moment. It was a stressful time for the two of us. So I was free to go no harm, no foul, with the exception of the fact that I had no computer or any memory devices so basically Matlock screwed my check.


Now then let's look behind the curtain.

I knew that some sort of questioning was coming because when I found out when Toker first got in trouble he was ordered not to speak to me anymore. What really let me on, and if you want to talk about OPSEC, was when an anonymous poster wrote some tirade on my blog.

I knew exactly who it was and what it was about so if I had done something illegal I would have known right then and there that I was being watched and I would have covered my tracks. Anonymous basically blew their whole case by out and out lying about what he knew, implicating me in a non-crime, and alerting a prime suspect in a federal crime that he was being watched.

Good job on that one Matlock thank Christ you are on our side.

But the kicker is this one here. Matlock started emailing people that came to my blog. Well of course all the emails he sent out came to me with his name and everything. So much for anonymous huh? Matlock's problem is that he was too zealous and makes the mistake everyone does when they think with emotion, they miss critical details, he made the mistake of underestimating his opponent thinking that I was some KBR trash that washes his clothes or cleans his toilets. Reading is fundamental.

If he would have looked behind the Black skin and the nappy afro he would have seen that my GS grade is 13 which happens to be unlucky for him and also makes me rank equivalent to an O-5 or Lt. Colonel there are people that will spent their entire life in the service and not reach the status of GS-13. Why am I where I am? Because I'm one of the best to ever do it. I've spent my career in information assurance and there are very few weapons or surveillance systems that haven't had my fingerprint on in the last 8 years. This isn't bragging this just is. What pissed me off is that my integrity was questioned, my word is the only currency I have and I value it more than anything. But, its ok I'm still here and Matlock can hate me everyday for it. Motivation.

But the cool thing is I got this nifty document that say the United States of America VS. Tommie Hustle. That is kind of cool how many people do you know that go up against the United States of America with just his own wit, grit, charm, and integrity and win? Well now you know at least one.



Tommie Hustle AKA the Black MacGuyver