Cyber Privateers: When the Government Gives Hackers a Letter of Marque

What do 18th-century privateers, ransomware gangs, and the modern cybersecurity industry have in common? More than you might think.

A few hundred years ago, if you owned a fast ship, had a crew willing to fight, and weren't particularly bothered by the possibility of getting shot at, there were basically two career paths available to you. You could become a pirate, or you could convince a government to give you a piece of paper and become a privateer.

The distinction was important. A pirate attacked ships for his own benefit and was considered a criminal. A privateer might perform many of the same actions, but carried a letter of marque and reprisal issued by a government authorizing him to attack specified enemies. Same ocean, similar ship, similar cannons, completely different legal status.

Fast-forward a few centuries and the Trump administration may have just created the beginnings of a similar model for cyberspace. Only this time the ships are cybersecurity companies, the oceans are networks, the cannons are exploits, and the targets are ransomware gangs, cybercriminal organizations, botnets, scam networks, and the infrastructure supporting them.

Welcome to the age of the cyber privateer.

From Hack Back to Government-Sponsored Hack Back

For decades, cybersecurity professionals have lived under a pretty clear rule: you can defend your network, but you cannot attack theirs. If someone breaks into your environment, you can block them, isolate systems, collect evidence, rebuild servers, trace what happened, and call law enforcement. What you generally cannot do is follow the attacker home, penetrate their infrastructure, and destroy it.

There have been repeated attempts to change that. The Active Cyber Defense Certainty Act proposed creating exceptions to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that would allow victims to take certain actions outside their own networks. Those proposals went nowhere, and there were good reasons for the hesitation.

Attribution is hard. Attackers compromise innocent systems, infrastructure crosses international borders, and the server you think belongs to a ransomware gang might actually belong to a hospital in Germany that was compromised six months ago. The Internet isn't a shooting range with neatly labeled targets.

But on August 12, 2026, the Trump administration took a different approach. Instead of broadly legalizing corporate hack back, the administration created a framework under which vetted private companies can conduct offensive cyber operations under federal authorization and supervision.

That distinction matters. Your CISO still can't tell the security team, "They encrypted our servers. Go burn theirs down."But the federal government may be able to tell an approved cybersecurity contractor, "We've identified the target, we've authorized the operation, now go disrupt it."

That is something very different from traditional corporate cybersecurity. And historically, we've seen this movie before.

The Original Private-Sector Military

Before countries maintained enormous professional navies, governments had a scaling problem. Britain, France, Spain, and eventually the United States had thousands of miles of ocean to defend and enormous amounts of enemy commerce they wanted to disrupt. Building enough naval vessels to accomplish that was expensive, slow, and beyond the resources of many governments.

The private sector, however, already had much of what was needed. Merchants owned ships. Experienced sailors were readily available. Private capital could finance expeditions, and there were plenty of entrepreneurs willing to accept considerable risk in exchange for considerable reward.

Governments developed a remarkably effective solution: authorize private ship owners to attack enemy commerce. The mechanism was the letter of marque and reprisal.

Privateers outfitted their own vessels, recruited their own crews, and hunted enemy shipping under government authority. Captured ships and cargo were brought before prize courts, and successful privateers received a share of the proceeds. In other words, privateering became a business model for extending national military power without requiring the government to own every ship conducting the mission.

America was particularly good at it. During the War of 1812, American privateers captured far more British merchant vessels than the relatively small U.S. Navy could have managed on its own. The model was important enough that the Founders explicitly incorporated it into the Constitution, with Article I giving Congress the authority to "grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal."

Think about that for a moment. The Constitution contains an explicit mechanism for allowing private actors to conduct certain forms of government-authorized hostilities. We just haven't had much reason to think about it for a very long time.

Cyberspace may change that.

Why Privateering Worked

The economics of privateering were obvious. The government didn't have to build the ship, recruit the crew, maintain the vessel, or necessarily even find the enemy. Private industry supplied much of the infrastructure, expertise, capital, and operational capability. Government supplied something the private sector couldn't provide for itself: legal authority.

Sound familiar?

The modern U.S. government has extraordinary cyber capabilities inside NSA, Cyber Command, FBI, DHS, and the broader intelligence community. But the government doesn't own most of the Internet, and some of the best visibility into cyberattacks doesn't necessarily exist inside Fort Meade or a federal SOC.

It exists inside Microsoft, Google, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, Cisco, AWS, telecommunications providers, threat-intelligence companies, cryptocurrency analytics firms, and hundreds of specialized security vendors. Collectively, these organizations can see an enormous amount of malicious activity occurring across the global Internet.

A cybersecurity company may see a ransomware campaign develop across thousands of customers before a government agency understands the scope of what is happening. A cloud provider may know exactly where the attacker's infrastructure resides. A cryptocurrency intelligence company may be able to trace the payments. An endpoint vendor may have telemetry from thousands of compromised machines.

We have essentially recreated the strategic imbalance that existed during the age of sail. The government has extraordinary authority and capabilities, while the private sector has enormous operational reach and visibility. Eventually someone asks the obvious question: why aren't we combining the two?

The New Letter of Marque

The Trump administration's program does not actually issue historical letters of marque, and the legal mechanism is different. But functionally, the similarities are difficult to ignore.

Under the new framework, approved companies can potentially conduct what the administration calls Cyber Surveillance Operations and Cyber Effects Operations against designated foreign cyber-enabled criminal organizations. Surveillance can include covertly accessing foreign computer systems without the owner's authorization. Effects operations can go further, including disruption, denial, degradation, manipulation, and potentially destruction of systems, networks, data, and infrastructure.

That represents a significant departure from the traditional commercial cybersecurity model. We're no longer talking about an EDR platform identifying malicious PowerShell or a SOC analyst isolating an endpoint. We're talking about private companies potentially executing offensive operations outside the United States on behalf of the federal government.

Before everyone dusts off Kali Linux and starts playing pirate, there are some important limits. This is not open season on cybercriminals. Participating companies have to be vetted, operations require government approval, targets have to meet specific criteria, contractors operate under federal supervision, and there are bonding and compliance requirements.

In other words, this isn't piracy. That's precisely what makes the privateer analogy interesting.

Pirates and Privateers Look Surprisingly Similar from the Other Ship

History also gives us a warning. Privateering worked, sometimes extremely well, but it created a lot of problems along the way. Privateers had financial incentives to be aggressive, targets were occasionally misidentified, neutral vessels got caught in the middle, and governments routinely disagreed about whether particular actions were legitimate.

Sometimes the distinction between an entrepreneurial privateer and a pirate became remarkably thin. The issuing government might consider an attack completely lawful while the country whose ship had just been captured viewed the same captain as nothing more than a criminal.

The same problem exists in cyberspace, except identifying the flag flying over the ship is much harder.

Imagine intelligence identifies a ransomware command-and-control server and the government authorizes a contractor to disrupt it. That sounds simple enough until you discover that the server is running inside a European cloud provider, the ransomware group doesn't actually own it, and the machine was compromised months ago. Alongside the malicious workload are legitimate systems belonging to dozens or hundreds of other customers.

Now what?

That's the cyber equivalent of seeing a ship through the fog in 1812 and trying to determine whether it's an enemy vessel, neutral merchant, captured ship, privateer, or pirate. Except on the Internet the cannonball moves at the speed of light and the collateral effects can propagate around the world.

Attribution Becomes the Most Valuable Commodity

This is where I think the cybersecurity implications become much bigger than simply creating a few offensive-security contracts. If you're going to authorize destructive operations, you need extraordinary confidence in attribution.

"This IP address looks suspicious" isn't going to cut it.

The government will need something much closer to an intelligence targeting package. Who controls the infrastructure? Where is it physically located? What other workloads exist there? Is it actually owned by the criminal organization, or merely compromised? Could disrupting it affect innocent users? Is the organization truly independent, or is it quietly working for a foreign intelligence service? What happens downstream if the infrastructure disappears?

Suddenly threat intelligence isn't simply helping a security team prioritize an alert. It becomes part of the targeting system itself.

Malware telemetry, identity intelligence, cryptocurrency tracing, infrastructure mapping, dark-web intelligence, domain attribution, cloud telemetry, human intelligence, and AI-assisted correlation all become pieces of the same puzzle. The ability to say not just who attacked us, but exactly which infrastructure can be acted against with acceptable collateral risk, becomes enormously valuable.

The cybersecurity company of the future may not simply tell the government, "We believe this is LockBit." It may deliver something more like: "These 37 systems support the operation. Twelve are compromised third-party infrastructure. Seven are located in allied countries. Four contain shared workloads. These nine can be safely disrupted. Confidence is 97 percent."

That's a very different product.

The Cybersecurity Industry Gets a New Market

For most companies, this policy changes very little operationally. Your security team still defends, your SOC still monitors, and your incident-response team still contains breaches. You still cannot launch a retaliatory attack because someone stole your data.

But for a relatively small group of cybersecurity companies, this potentially creates an entirely new industry. Think about the capabilities required: threat intelligence, malware reverse engineering, exploit development, red teaming, infrastructure reconnaissance, identity correlation, cryptocurrency tracing, operational security, intelligence analysis, and government clearances.

Suddenly the boundary between cybersecurity vendor and defense contractor gets blurry.

Companies such as CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Google/Mandiant, and Microsoft already possess huge amounts of threat telemetry and deep knowledge of adversary behavior. Traditional defense contractors understand classified operations, government mission environments, and the mechanics of operating under federal authority. Smaller offensive-security firms have specialized operators who understand how to penetrate difficult systems.

Combine those capabilities and something new begins to emerge. You can call it offensive cyber contracting, active defense, or government-sponsored disruption. History gives us another name for the underlying model: digital privateering.

The Cloud Providers Have a Problem

This gets particularly interesting for Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Cloud providers have some of the best visibility into cybercriminal infrastructure on Earth because attackers use their services, victims use their services, and enormous amounts of security telemetry flow through their platforms.

That makes them incredibly valuable to the government. It also creates a problem.

Cloud providers spend billions of dollars convincing customers around the world that their infrastructure is neutral, secure, and trustworthy. Imagine Microsoft simultaneously telling a European bank, "Trust Azure with your most sensitive workloads," while another part of the company participates in offensive cyber operations for the U.S. government.

Technically those businesses could be separated. Politically and perceptually they won't be. Foreign governments would notice, sovereign-cloud initiatives would notice, and competitors would certainly notice.

My guess is that the hyperscalers may ultimately be more comfortable providing intelligence, telemetry, and infrastructure cooperation than actually pulling the cyber trigger. The operators conducting the most aggressive effects operations may instead come from specialized cybersecurity companies and traditional defense contractors.

Insurance Lawyers Are Going to Have Fun With This

Normal cyber insurance assumes something fairly straightforward: you are the victim. Someone attacks you, damage occurs, and the insurer helps cover the consequences.

Now imagine insuring a company whose business includes intentionally penetrating and potentially destroying computer systems in foreign countries. That's a very different risk model.

What happens if the contractor hits the wrong server? What happens if a foreign government considers the operation illegal? What happens if the target retaliates? What happens if collateral damage affects a multinational corporation? What happens if employees involved in the operation later travel to a country that considers what they did a criminal offense?

The administration's framework includes bonding requirements, which makes sense. But a million-dollar bond isn't particularly interesting if an operation accidentally disrupts infrastructure supporting a billion-dollar company.

There may eventually be an entirely new insurance category around offensive cyber operations. Twenty years ago that sentence would have sounded ridiculous. Today it sounds like a product roadmap.

The Constitution Is Sitting Quietly in the Corner

There is another issue that hasn't received enough attention. Remember that language in Article I? Congress has the constitutional authority to grant letters of marque and reprisal.

The Trump administration isn't calling these authorizations letters of marque. It is relying on executive-branch law-enforcement, national-security, and contracting authorities. Legally, those are different things.

But imagine the program evolves. Today a contractor receives approval for a specific cyber operation. Tomorrow a contractor receives broader or standing authority to conduct operations against a designated foreign organization.

At what point does a government cyber contract become the functional equivalent of a letter of marque? And if it does, does Congress have to authorize it?

I'm not a constitutional lawyer, and I suspect a lot of constitutional lawyers are about to have very expensive opinions on the subject. But the historical parallel isn't merely academic. The Founders specifically contemplated the problem of private actors conducting government-authorized hostilities outside the country and assigned Congress a role in authorizing them.

Cyberspace may force us to decide what that eighteenth-century language means in the twenty-first century.

Why Privateering Disappeared

Privateering didn't disappear because it was ineffective. It disappeared partly because it was messy.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, major European powers increasingly viewed privately conducted warfare as incompatible with a more orderly international system. The 1856 Declaration of Paris stated simply that "Privateering is, and remains, abolished." Concerns about abuse, international commerce, neutral shipping, and private actors conducting warfare for profit increasingly outweighed the benefits.

At the same time, professional navies became larger and more capable. Governments no longer needed to outsource naval warfare on the same scale, and states increasingly consolidated military power into professional armed forces.

The United States never signed the Declaration of Paris, although it largely followed the anti-privateering norm afterward. The practice eventually faded into history.

Until, perhaps, now.

The Problem Is Everyone Else Gets Privateers Too

This may be the most important part of the discussion. If the United States establishes a legitimate model for government-authorized private cyber operations, other countries will study it closely.

China already has a complicated ecosystem of private cybersecurity companies, contractors, and state-linked hackers. Russia has spent years operating in the gray zone between cybercriminal organizations and state intelligence interests. Iran uses contractors and affiliated groups, while North Korea combines state operations with financially motivated cybercrime.

The United States can build a highly regulated system with lawyers, targeting packages, bonds, interagency reviews, and federal oversight. But once the principle is established that private companies may conduct offensive cyber operations under government authority, other governments can adopt the same concept while defining "oversight" rather differently.

That's where the pirate analogy becomes less amusing.

The United States may distinguish carefully between a federally authorized contractor and an independent criminal hacker. Russia or China may point at their own "private" cyber organizations and make precisely the same claim. Internationally, separating legitimate privateering from state-sponsored piracy could become every bit as contentious as it was on the oceans two hundred years ago.

The Internet Becomes the Ocean

For most of cybersecurity's history, we've treated the Internet primarily as infrastructure: networks, protocols, endpoints, applications, clouds, and data centers. But geopolitically, it increasingly behaves like something much older.

It behaves like the ocean.'

For centuries, no country completely controlled the seas. Commerce crossed them, criminals exploited them, governments fought over them, and private companies operated across them. Determining whose laws applied became increasingly complicated the farther you traveled from shore.

The Internet has many of the same characteristics, except geography has largely disappeared. A Russian criminal can compromise an American company using a German server hosted by an American cloud provider, through a Dutch VPN, while collecting payment into a cryptocurrency wallet controlled from Dubai.

Whose jurisdiction is that?

Potentially everyone's. Practically, sometimes nobody's.

That is exactly the kind of environment in which privateering historically emerged. Governments had legitimate interests to protect across a domain they could not fully control, while private actors possessed ships, knowledge, infrastructure, and operational reach the state could never completely reproduce.

Today the ships have become networks and cloud platforms, but the underlying problem looks surprisingly familiar.

The Road Ahead

We are early. The administration still has to build the operational rules around this program, companies have to decide whether they actually want to participate, insurers have to determine how to price the risk, and lawyers will debate the CFAA, foreign computer-crime laws, sovereignty, and perhaps eventually the Constitution's Letters of Marque Clause.

Allied governments will have opinions. So will adversaries. And sooner or later, someone will make a mistake. That's when we'll find out whether this model actually works.

For decades, the cybersecurity industry has operated around a relatively simple division of responsibility: companies defend their networks while governments conduct offensive national-security operations. That boundary is beginning to move.

The government has legal authority and national-security capabilities, but it cannot possibly see every corner of the Internet. The private sector has the telemetry, infrastructure, talent, and increasingly the offensive capability, but historically hasn't had the authority to use those capabilities outside its own networks.

Put those two together and you get something the world hasn't seen at meaningful scale for a very long time: privately operated offensive capability acting under sovereign authority.

The technology is new. The idea isn't.

Three hundred years ago, governments handed private captains a letter, pointed toward the horizon, and told them which ships they were allowed to attack. In 2026, we may be constructing the digital equivalent.

The difference is that there are no ships and there is no horizon. The ocean is the Internet, the weapons are software, and every country is connected to the same sea.