I’ve also tasked him (that’s how you say it, right?) with internal security. Basically, his job is chief privacy officer for a bunch of guys who really value privacy. All this technology—phones, the Internet—it’s all great for making money, but the problem is, everything gets logged. My security guy has written and used lots of antiforensic tools to erase those logs, and I’m comfortable telling my boss we have better privacy than the big banks. My security guy knows how to disable the GPS in our cell phones. He’s building some routing programs, sort of like that Onion Router project that, like it says on their website, “prevents the transport medium from knowing who is communicating with whom” so that anything we send over the Internet is scrambled through different routes and hops all over the world, completely anonymous and untraceable. And everything, I mean everything, is encrypted. Say someone stole the servers we keep here at the home office. My guy designed it so that really only two people can access the data: me and him. We have the private keys and no one else does. Not even the boss.

My Kind of Guys
The guys I keep, or keep on a kind of retainer, are the ones that show me something extra. We had one guy who came to us selling a great new way to set up temporary international cell phone accounts, using credentials bought in the identity market. Guys will pay a lot for a disposable international cell phone. We bought some and were so impressed we decided to get into business with him. He set up the phones; we handled distribution. I asked the guy what else he was working on. He flips his laptop around and shows me his own website where he’s auctioning off credit credentials to the highest bidder. Slick. I said to him, “You could be our R&D.” He said, “Cool.” And that was that.

Compared to you guys, I’m pretty lucky with talent. My guys are way ahead on the technology. They work hard. They’re innovative and entrepreneurial. I think they’re some of the most talented IT staff around.

Business-Technology Alignment Among Thieves
Actually, there is one way you and I are different. I read all those stories in CIO about how hard you have to work to align technology with the business’s goals. That’s one problem I don’t have. My bosses don’t let me spend a dime on anything that’s not going to make them money. Why should they? And I wouldn’t even think about investing in a huge project that might fail to live up to expectations. I don’t get play money to buy technology that doesn’t work. I don’t have vendors paying the freight to conferences at swank resorts to convince me to invest in something that’s half-developed and overhyped. I never use jargon. I spend zero time doing PowerPoints.