Chris Giancarlo, the former CFTC chairman who proposed hiring private hackers to go after crypto thieves, said the narrower program the White House ordered in August is “a very mature, thoughtful document.”
Reading the memo, Giancarlo said on Unchained in an episode recorded Oct. 26, he almost went back and asked, “Wow, did we embarrass ourselves by proposing this privateer issue without any of these restrictions that are placed here?”
Acknowledging that “some may argue it doesn’t go far enough,” he added, “I like the idea of starting small and building from there, and I quite frankly think that this has probably got it just about right for the time being, and then let’s see where it goes.”
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From Letters of Marque to Vetted Contractors
In a February 2025 op-ed written with Bits + Bips co-host Chris Perkins after the Lazarus Group’s $1.4 billion Bybit hack, Giancarlo called for letters of marque that would let American companies “retrieve funds controlled by OFAC-sanctioned governments, entities or individuals,” shielded from U.S. prosecution. He pitched the idea at the White House Crypto Summit the next month.
The Aug. 12 memo departs from that plan on both points. It limits targets to foreign criminal groups “not an institutional part of a foreign government or wholly operated under a foreign government’s direction,” and treats a group as non-state unless clear intelligence shows otherwise, a carve-out Unchained reported in August. It offers no immunity and lists the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act among the laws the program must follow.
Participants are vetted contractors of the Justice Department or Homeland Security who may be required to post a bond or escrow of at least $1 million. Each operation needs written approval from the program’s executive directors at DOJ and DHS. Operating procedures were due by Oct. 11. Unchained found no public release of them as of Oct. 27.
Who Makes the Call
Asked whether privateering could escalate a conflict, Giancarlo said that risk is why he sees the memo as prudent. “I think that was always the flaw, perhaps, in our approach to privateering,” he said, pointing to the question of whether private companies should be trusted with judgments on statecraft that have traditionally belonged to elected officials. Those choices, he said, “can be the choice of life or death for a lot of our fellow citizens.”
Ari Redbord, global head of policy at TRM Labs and a former federal prosecutor, said on the same episode that under the memo, escalation is a decision for DOJ and the government. “So the private sector is not making that call,” he said.
Related Listen: Why America’s New Cyber Privateers Can’t Go After North Korea
