Ex-NSA whistleblower says she and other US ex-spooks targeted Americans on behalf of UAE

Lori Stroud is an ex-NSA spy who also contracted with the NSA through Booz Allen, who says that after she left the NSA, she was recruited to work on Project Raven, a secret, offensive surveillance and digital attack squad working for the autocratic United Arab Emirates regime alongside other ex-US intelligence operatives, working with the knowledge and approval of the NSA.

Stroud says that while she originally believed she was only targeting non-US persons for surveillance and electronic attacks -- primarily journalists and dissidents, including children who had spoken out against the UAE's rulers -- she eventually realized that Project Raven was also targeting US people, including journalists and activists.

Stroud was responsible for hiring Edward Snowden, and after he blew the whistle on wrongdoing in the NSA, she says she and her colleagues were in such bad odor with the NSA that she left. She was recruited by Cyberpoint, a Maryland-based cybersecurity company founded by Karl Gumtow, and relocated to a converted mansion in Abu Dhabi codenamed "the Villa."

Reuters has obtained documents from Cyberpoint that say that while Project Raven was publicly tasked with defensive targeting of terrorists, that a secret "Black Briefing" described a second "offensive, operational division," called Project Dread, that " will never be acknowledged to the general public."

Stroud worked at the Villa for years, and some of the dissidents she helped target have since been arrested and tortured by the UAE. But what really made the situation untenable was eventual attempts by the UAE to force Cyberpoint to sell out to a UAE-based company, and the subsequent power-struggle that saw the US Project Dread staffers isolated from their UAE counterparts, who had their own target lists, including -- as Stroud eventually discovered -- Americans. Read the rest