The Case of Dickson Yeo

This article was rewritten after I established a new blog here on this new site. The original article was published in 2020, shortly after Yeo’s arrest. What is interesting about this case is that I reported him about 4 years prior to his arrest. Elements in the US Government and Republican Party allowed him to continue.

What can I say about Dickson Yeo? He was the first actual spy that I knowingly encountered. He was also a sloppy amateur. The sad thing is that I reported his activity long before he was arrested, which is a sad commentary on the pettiness of the Republican Party.

I used to be a Republican and served on the Executive Committee of the Allen County (Indiana) Republican Party. I managed campaigns and participated in a Think Tank and also explored running for office. I knew a number of people who went on to be elected to offices. Then, when I was set to run for office, the Republican Party supported a Democrat – so I quit. That’s the short story. The important thing now is that those Republicans just don’t like me; which fine since I find them to be generally repugnant. The difference between us is, I would not risk national security over this grudge; the Republicans did.

I was living in China at the time, where I began my studies of International Relations and National Security as I taught Political Science and History. Through my travels and online activities, I happened to come across a couple of terrorist organizations.s, spies, and others who just wanted to be. Dickson was one of those who seemed to want to be. His motives were quite obvious., his methods were amateurish. I decided to turn to an old friend from the Allen County Republicans who had served in Afghanistan, was elected to Congress, and was involved in Intelligence related Committee work. I wrote  a paper that covered the history of my contact with Yeo and an analysis of his LinkedIn profile and other online activity and sent it to my old friend. What did he do with it? Nothing because the Republicans were still sticking their tongues out at me.

Dickson Yeo is a perfect example of why you need to be extremely cautious on social media sites. After several years of spying on American citizens and trying to recruit spies, he was arrested in Singapore in December 2020. Yeo was not a trained professional and was not part of a actual spy organization. He was a student of international affairs who was trying to sell himself as a consultant and presumably win favor with the Chinese government. He held himself out on LinkedIn as a recruiter who placed security professionals and others for the purpose of collecting resumes and identity information. His plan was to sell this information to the Chinese government

This case of Dickson Yeo was my first experience with Cyber Threat Intelligence, before I even considered it as a career, and in fact served as an inspiration to pursue the field. I learned several things from the experience: how to identify threats on the internet, how to write an intelligence analysis, and that security can be compromised by politics. Yeo was so sloppy that he was bound to get caught eventually, but he was allowed to operate for four years because of petty Republican politics. The other lesson learned in this case is that politics takes priority over security.