Australian Signals Directorate ex-employee sold back doors to Russia

There is fresh news today about Peter Williams, alias John Taylor, who admitted selling trade secrets to Russia in exchange for cryptocurrency. He was prosecuted, he entered a guilty plea in 2025 and he was sentenced to jail this week.

If the seized cryptocurrency is Bitcoin then it may now enter into the US Government's strategic Bitcoin reserve. If Bitcoin itself is a scam created by the intelligence agencies then it is foolish to see them drinking their own cool-aid in this manner.

News reports refer to trade secrets. What they are really talking about are back doors and other security vulnerabilities. Technically, in the US law, the name of the crime concerns trade secrets.

News reports tell us he has betrayed America. This is an understatement. He has betrayed all the countries who use American technology. Android and iPhone devices are used throughout the world today.

Peter Williams was apparently employed at the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), equivalent to the NSA or GCHQ, in an earlier stage of his career. Technology changes quickly and it is not clear if any back doors he discovered at ASD would be relevant today.

Nonetheless, it does raise questions about both the ethical standards and competence of people employed in spy agencies.

At the time of the offences, he was allegedly affiliated with L3Harris Trenchant. Their web site tells us they sell "Vulnerability and exploit research" and "Device and access capabilities" for "end-point intelligence solutions", in other words, getting into other peoples' phones and desktop computers.

Spare a moment to think about the victims of the Debian suicide cluster. To what extent did the group behaviour get into their heads such that Frans Pop wrote a suicide note the night before Debian Day?

Earlier in 2025, before Williams entered a guilty plea, another former employee of Trenchant felt his phone was hacked by his own employer. This is not so creepy: remember the Blackberry? Many companies issued Blackberries to their staff because they could all be linked together and monitored by the IT department. While the details of Trenchant's activities are classified, the concept is hardly new.

Earlier this week, British authorities arrested former US ambassador Lord Mandelson. Mandelson said the police were tricked to arrest him based on rumours he was about to flee the country.

If the police were tricked, we can't blame them for over-reacting. The notorious Kim Philby of the Cambridge Five fled to Russia when he felt the net was closing on him. Philby had served as first secretary to the British Embassy in Washington. He used that post to obtain secrets for the Russians. It was a huge embarassment for the British. In the case of Lord Mandelson, we can hope the British will be more thorough and transparent.

While ASD is the equivalent of the NSA, the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), which uses the British spelling of Organisation, is the equivalent of the CIA.

 

Those who believe cryptocurrency is anonymous have been fooled. If the spies themselves are unable to use Bitcoin securely then it is unlikely anybody else can use it successfully for truly anonymous drug deals, bribes and ransom payments. It might be time to get a real job.

In other blogs, I looked at how Pauline / Maria / Alice Climent-Pommeret claims to be doing offensive malware development under a different name and one of the Debianists spreading rumours about my family was employed by French cyber intelligence ANSSI.

You don't need to be an intelligence agency employee to notice a pattern here: the time and energy these people exert enriching themselves and attacking their allies far exceeds the effort exerted against the real enemy.

Continue reading the inconvenient truth about cryptocurrency.

The author holds an MIT MicroMasters in Data, Economics and Development Policy. He does not hold any crypto "assets". Swiss financial regulator FINMA will neither confirm nor deny an investigation on this blog precipitated the resignation of their deputy CEO .