🎉 Ex-CIA John Kiriakou Joins Our Team, Visits Yale & Goes Global in Salamanca
You'll want to bookmark this one, there's TONS happening!
🤓 We’re Back And Bolder Than Ever
We took a hiatus to reorganize under the Ivy Cyber banner, bringing together our tech, media, and education efforts while welcoming John Kiriakou and Ted Rall to the team. We’ve of course been building out the PrivacySafe hardware and software ecosystem, and now we’re ready to share all of this with the world!
😍 Savvy superfans have been watching us grow in real time, because we build transparently: pushing open source code early and often and not hiding behind hype. We owe a *HUGE THANKS* to everyone who’s been with us these past six months. Your early support, feedback, and encouragement have fueled our journey — and we’re just getting started.
TLDR;
🕵️ John Kiriakou is leading seminars you can book online
📸 We’ve presented at multiple events in the USA and Salamanca, Spain
💻 We’re taking pre-orders for the Launchpad Pro tablet
🔆 You can reserve a PrivacySafe subscription and power up your life
🎙️ We’re revving up independent media at Whistle Post with editor Ted Rall
💪 Ivy Cyber is one amazing team assembled from around the globe
❤️ In Bits On Tape, we bring you bytes of science & tech stories to ponder and paraphrase. Consider upgrading or gifting a paid subscription and get the premium perks we roll out all this year. Share and print the accessible version of this issue.
🍕 John Kiriakou Visits Yale & MakeHaven
At the end of May, John Kiriakou joined his Ivy Cyber team members Sean O’Brien, Cherise Labonte, and Marcia Wilbur in New Haven for a special event celebrating the Free Software Foundation’s 40th anniversary. Hosted at local makerspace MakeHaven, the event featured demos of the PrivacySafe software, which of course meets the Free Software Definition. You probably know “Free Software” as “open source” or “FOSS” but this gathering served as a powerful reminder of its roots: we celebrated the importance of software that is free as in freedom.
John demo’d a video call with Ivy Cyber CTO Mikalai Birukou on the Launchpad Pro tablet and gave a presentation underscoring the importance of both source code transparency and whistleblowing.
Cyber weapons such as those unleashed on the world by the Shadow Brokers are created secretly inside of intelligence agencies, and this creation of vulnerabilities and hoarding of exploits can put millions, or even billions, of people at risk worldwide. Just like the secrets that John and other whistleblowers have bravely exposed, these stockpiles of cyber weapons thrive in the shadows of three-letter agencies: hidden from public scrutiny, immune to oversight. But sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant. Transparency and accountability are essential not only in government but also in cybersecurity, where the risks of secrecy can ripple far beyond national borders and threaten the safety of people worldwide.
This is where software freedom meets software security: we rely upon digital platforms for nearly every aspect of society. Transparent and publicly-auditable software like the PrivacySafe Enterprise Suite is designed to ensure that computers remain trustworthy, resilient, and accountable to the people who depend on them.
The evening featured a packed lineup of demos and talks, with experts such as Sheree Ip, Director of Innovation & Strategy at Ivy Cyber, dialed in from as far away as Australia. Whether attendees were hackers and developers or just curious about technology, the energy in the room was high — and yes, there was plenty of world-famous New Haven “apizza.”
After the MakeHaven event, John and Sean toured the Yale campus and spent hours at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. There, librarians gave them a one-of-a-kind viewing of artifacts from the life and death of Abraham Lincoln: including rare photographs of Lincoln and his cabinet, his handwritten letters, and the very pen he used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. John, who is currently writing a book on Lincoln’s legacy, found the moment especially powerful.
They closed the day with a walk through the colonial-era Grove Street Cemetery. Impossible to pin down, John has also written a soon-to-be-published book about the neglected graveyards of Washington, D.C. — a fitting parallel that grounded the week’s themes in a deeper history of justice and resistance.
This wasn’t just a hacker meetup. It was a gathering of memory and momentum, where software freedom met lived experience, honoring history with people who build toward a brighter future.
🕵️ CIA POV: The View from Behind the Wire
Due to popular demand, we’ve launched the first program in our Ivy Cyber Academy seminar series: The CIA POV with John Kiriakou. These exclusive 90-minute virtual sessions offer an unfiltered look into the world of intelligence, spy techniques, and surveillance self-defense led by, you guessed it, our very own ex-CIA agent John Kiriakou.
John’s signature style of presentation and storytelling is grounded in lived experience as both a high-ranking intelligence operative and a whistleblower hunted, jailed, and harrassed by the US government.
This is not theory: you’ll learn what operational security (OpSec) looks like in practice. With added cyber support and expertise from Sean O’Brien, these sessions are as practical as they are powerful.
Class sizes are intentionally small and spots fill up fast. Sign up before it’s too late, and be ready to move beyond the headlines and get real about surveillance.
🇪🇸 Stepping Onto the Global Stage in Salamanca
By the end of June, our team was making headlines in Spain. At the Salamanca Tech Summit, we delivered back-to-back presentations thanks to the support and sponsorship of GeoRisk Solutions. John and Sean are part of the GeoRisk team of international experts, and they have partnered to distribute the PrivacySafe brand of hardware and software products.
John wowed the audience with tales from his time as a top-tier CIA agent, weaving in the importance of geopolitical collaboration between people around the world despite the many ways intelligence agencies have strained international trust.
Sean tackled the so-called TikTok question, urging the crowd to think deeper than geopolitical finger-pointing. To prove his point, Sean demonstrated ultrasonic tracking: a side-channel attack that uses high-frequency sound, inaudible to humans, to transmit data from one device to another via microphone. Using an app with its origins in a European app store, he showed how “silent audio” could send advertisements to a phone that wasn’t even connected to the internet — with literal gasps from the crowd. This stark example of an app exploit, with its origins in the EU, was a visceral reminder that smartphone surveillance isn’t confined to any one country.
We want to extend our heartfelt thanks to the entire GeoRisk team, the University of Salamanca, and the Spanish people for their gracious hospitality. In a time of rising global tensions, gatherings like this remind us of the power of dialogue, collaboration, and shared purpose. We’re honored to have taken part in such a meaningful exchange and grateful for the opportunity to build bridges across borders in the spirit of international goodwill.
🤖 AI & Privacy at the Public Library
Back home in New Haven, Sean gave a public talk during the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, demystifying AI and its impact on creativity, privacy, and power. From ChatGPT to Cursor.ai, he broke down how generative tools really work and how they’re reshaping education, authorship, and autonomy.
The event drew a packed crowd of librarians, parents, engineers, and curious citizens. The tone was accessible but urgent: AI is built on our data, and we need to stay informed and alert — not panicked, and not lulled into blind adoption. Thanks to the New Haven Free Public Library for sponsoring the talk and Promoting Enduring Peace for their promotion of the event.
🗽 PrivacySafe at the NYC CxO Security Forum
Sean O’Brien has also been joining a private roundtable with the NYC CxO Security Forum, connecting with security leaders and enterprise experts to discuss the growing need for privacy-respecting infrastructure. These events, held right in the center of Manhattan in Times Square, have been an incredible opportunity to chat with business leaders about our PrivacySafe products and gain insight into the cybersecurity landscape at one of the world's most influential business hubs.
We look forward to working more closely with members of the NYC CxO community in the months ahead. They loved StickTock.com — proving our audience isn’t restricted to the #TikTokRefugee after all! 😉
💻 PRE-ORDER PrivacySafe Software & Hardware
It hasn’t all been public appearances. Behind the curtain, our devs and operations staff have been pushing hard. The next 90 days will be big, but we’ll let you read about it yourself:
Launchpad Pro tablets start shipping September 2025
PrivacySafe subscriptions for individuals, teams & businesses start in October
We’re also building relationships with mission-aligned partners and have teams from the PrivacySafe Pilot Program actively using our software in the USA and China. After that, we’re onboarding teams in the EU and Middle East.
🙏 Thank You For Reading!
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Bits On Tape™ is a weekly newsletter that replays science & tech stories with commentary from the experts at Ivy Cyber. We deliver dispatches on cybersecurity and the frontlines of digital freedom, including the latest updates on the PrivacySafe software and hardware ecosystem. These bits are put to screen by Sean O’Brien, cybersecurity scholar at Yale Law School and founder of Yale Privacy Lab, and are cross-posted at Whistle Post, the independent media platform led by award-winning political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou.
© Ivy Cyber Education LLC. This project is dedicated to ethical Free and Open Source Software and Open Source Hardware. Ivy Cyber™ , Bits On Tape™ and Whistle Post™ are pending trademarks and PrivacySafe® is a registered trademark. All content, unless otherwise noted, is licensed Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 International.