My oldest son is a West Point graduate training to fly Black Hawks. My youngest brother spent his career as a Green Beret Weapons Sergeant. Between the two of them, I have spent a couple of decades getting used to the idea that this country's security sometimes depends on people the government trusts enough to arm and point at a problem. On August 12, President Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum that applies the same logic to cyberspace, and conservatives should recognize the idea immediately, because the Founders wrote it into the Constitution 237 years ago.
The memorandum, titled "Expanding Capabilities to Combat Transnational Cyber-Enabled Crime," authorizes vetted American companies to conduct cyber surveillance and offensive cyber operations against foreign criminal organizations that prey on Americans, under the direction and control of the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. The White House built the case on a number that ought to make every reader's stomach turn: the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged more than $20.8 billion in reported losses to cyber-enabled fraud in 2025, a 26 percent jump over the year before, with over a million complaints filed. Ransomware crews with names like LockBit, Akira, and BlackCat treat American hospitals, school districts, and small businesses as a subscription revenue model.
I have spent three decades in financial services, including years running private credit and hedge fund strategies, and more recently serving as a court-designated expert witness in fiduciary duty and investment cases. I have sat across from fraud victims in depositions. The pattern never changes. A criminal group operating from a jurisdiction with no functioning extradition treaty drains a retiree's account, and the retiree's only recourse is a case number and a form letter. Federal law enforcement is capable, but it is stretched across a planet's worth of servers with a fraction of the staff these criminal syndicates can hire. This memorandum finally puts America's considerable private-sector talent to work closing that gap.
Here is the part most commentary has missed: this is not some novel expansion of executive power. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the authority to grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, the exact mechanism the young republic used to deputize private ship captains to hunt down pirates and enemy raiders it lacked the navy to chase down itself. John Paul Jones did not wait for the Navy to build enough frigates. The Founders understood that a government with limited resources and unlimited threats needed the option to mobilize private capability under public control. Ransomware gangs operating out of jurisdictions that will never answer an FBI subpoena are the modern Barbary pirates, minus the eye patches.
The memorandum is not a blank check, and skeptics deserve a straight answer on the safeguards. Participating companies must sign contractual agreements with DOJ or DHS, pass a vetting process for technical competence and reliability, and post a bond of at least $1 million that the government can seize for noncompliance. Every operation requires federal approval before it happens. Anything touching a so-called "critical outcome," and anything that could affect a U.S. person, triggers additional legal review. Picture a licensing and command structure closer to how the Navy has always managed civilian contractors, just applied to a battlespace that did not exist when most of our cyber statutes were written.
To be sure, the critics raise points worth taking seriously. Cybersecurity veterans like Chris Wysopal have noted, fairly, that a hack aimed at a scammer's data center could spill over and knock a hospital offline in the process, since criminal infrastructure often sits inside shared hosting environments. Former Cyber Command official Jason Kikta has warned that paying contractors by the operation creates an incentive to keep finding targets, whether or not the target list should keep growing. And the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the 1986 statute this program leans on for legal cover, has never been tested by an appellate court in a scenario quite like this one. These are legitimate engineering and legal questions, not reasons to scrap the program. They are reasons for Congress to do its job and pass authorizing legislation that locks the guardrails in statute instead of leaving them to whichever administration happens to hold the pen. A memorandum can be rewritten by the next occupant of the Oval Office in an afternoon. A statute cannot.
I am not naive about government programs that sound tidy on a fact sheet and get messy in practice. I have built businesses inside regulatory frameworks for 25 years, and I know that oversight promises are only as good as the officials enforcing them and the reporting that makes failures visible. Congress should require the National Coordination Center to publish an annual, unclassified accounting of operations approved, denied, and any domestic collateral effects, the same way agencies already report on other sensitive authorities. Sunlight is still the best disinfectant, to borrow from Justice Brandeis, and a program built to fight criminals thrives under scrutiny rather than shrinking from it.
What this memorandum gets right is the underlying instinct: America's private sector is the most capable technical workforce on the planet, and pretending otherwise while retirees get fleeced by a criminal syndicate in a country with no extradition treaty is not a serious national security posture. My son trains for a fight he hopes never happens because the country decided decades ago that overwhelming capability, kept under tight civilian control, deters trouble better than restraint alone. The same logic applies here. Deputize the talent, keep it on a short federal leash, and make Congress write the leash into law. The pirates figured out the internet years ago. It is long past time we treated them like pirates.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.