White House Green-Lights Scam-Hunting Raiders Using Old Sailor Trick
Over $20.8 billion was stolen from Americans in 2025 from cyber-enabled crime.
President Donald Trump signed a memorandum Monday establishing a formal program that brings old-world privateering into the modern age.
Privateering is a historical practice in which governments issued letters of marque and reprisal to private ship owners and captains, authorizing them to attack, seize, and capture enemy ships and cargo during wartime. The practice was common for over 300 years and, in the U.S., was most notably used during the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. The point was to disrupt enemy commerce and expand naval power without having to pay to build or maintain large standing navies.
The White House has brought this practice to the modern era. Instead of sending private ships to sea, Trump is authorizing American cyber companies to surf the internet in targeted searches of foreign enemies, representing one of the most significant shifts in U.S. cybersecurity policy.
Wake up babe the new @WhiteHouse cyber privateering construct just dropped https://t.co/cAtBYi3QM7
— joshua steinman (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) (@JoshuaSteinman) August 12, 2026
Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum, titled, “Expanding Capabilities to Combat Transnational Cyber-Enabled Crime,” enabling vetted private U.S. companies to conduct Cyber Surveillance Operations and Cyber Effects Operations against foreign Cyber-Enabled Transnational Criminal Organizations (CE-TCOs).
Under the memorandum, a CE-TCO is defined as “any foreign group that conducts cyber-enabled crime against the United States Government, a United States person, or United States interests, and that is not an institutional part of a foreign government or wholly operated under a foreign government’s direction.”
The move shifts the private sector from its role as predominantly defensive and intelligence-sharing actors to authorized participants in offensive cyber operations for the U.S. This role was previously reserved almost exclusively for government agencies. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)
Monday’s memorandum builds on Trump’s March E.O. 14390, which detailed the threat environment the U.S. faces from industrial-scale global scam centers or Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs). These organizations pose a growing threat through sustained cyber fraud campaigns.
“It is the policy of the United States to protect Americans from, and harden our financial and digital systems against, these threats. The United States shall counter attacks on Americans with a commensurate response that includes law enforcement, diplomacy, and potential offensive actions,” Trump’s executive order states.
Qualified U.S. companies are now authorized to conduct two types of missions against foreign CE-TCOs under this memorandum. The first is a continuation of cyber surveillance involving the collection of information or intelligence, including unauthorized access, with the express intent to remain undetected by these organizations. The other is a more active approach called Cyber Effects Operations. The government wants these companies to attack information systems, networks, and data against foreign CE-TCOs.
This won’t be open season on foreign actors, unlike classic privateering, which involved relatively independent action under a standing commission with prize courts and profit shares. Here, every operation requires case-by-case approval, continuous federal control, detailed reporting, and financial security. U.S. companies will act exclusively as agents of the federal government, not independent operators.