Proofpoint Investigation: Fraud and Government Email Tampering
By Duane Thresher, Ph.D. January 10, 2020
The research for Net Neutrality: Who Controls the Communications of the Communications Controllers? led to further investigation of Proofpoint Inc., the IT incompetent email service provider for the IT incompetent Federal Communications Commission (FCC). It was discovered that Proofpoint is also the email service provider for the IT incompetent Department of Commerce (DOC) and that Proofpoint is illegally reading and blocking emails from people trying to contact both the FCC and the DOC based on Proofpoint's own arbitrary criteria, probably political or profit-seeking. Moreover, it was discovered that Proofpoint's Cybersecurity Executive Vice President (EVP), Ryan Kalember, is an IT incompetent fraud who has widely lied about his qualifications.
Ryan Kalember is a publicity hound who goes around pretending to be an IT expert, particularly about cybersecurity. The ridiculous photo above, even before the Pinocchio nose was rightfully added, is another of his self-promotions. That's a bike lock around his laptop. Such self-promotions are a good indication he's hiding being unqualified.
As mentioned in Net Neutrality: Who Controls the Communications of the Communications Controllers? and expanded on in Ryan Kalember's old IT Incompetents Hall Of Shame entry, now updated, Kalember's claimed IT education, the most important IT qualification, was highly suspicious.
On Proofpoint's Leadership Team webpage, Kalember claims "He received his bachelor's degree from Stanford University, where he studied fault tolerance, cryptography, and authentication algorithms." That list is not a major, just a random collection of cybersecurity-sounding buzzwords.
On LinkedIn, THE place for government and business IT incompetents to advertise themselves to each other, Kalember's LinkedIn webpage only says "Education: Stanford University, BA". I tried to contact Kalember through LinkedIn for clarification on what his major was but he refused to respond.
On Ryan Kalember's Bloomberg business profiles webpage he states "Education: Bachelor's degree, Stanford University Graduate School of Business". Not only is that not an IT education, it is also a flat-out lie. Stanford's Graduate School of Business does not confer undergraduate/bachelor's degrees and Stanford does not have an undergraduate business major.
Like most universities these days, Stanford does not do its own degree verifications, it outsources them to the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), a private company that charges an exorbitant fee to do degree verifications (which explains why so few employers actually verify degrees anymore, allowing corrupt IT incompetents like Ryan Kalember to succeed).
I agreed to pay the exorbitant fee to verify Kalember's Stanford degree, including major. Days later, NSC indicated that Kalember might have blocked the release of his records ... or not attended Stanford at all.
I've dealt with such coverups before — it's very common with IT incompetents — so used less official but more productive methods: I contacted Stanford University Library and had them look Ryan Kalember up in the alumni directory, which is just another book in the library.
Stanford University Library responded that, as suspected, Ryan Kalember only has a "BA in History in 2000, Classics 2001", which is about as far from an IT education as you can get.
Digging a little more, including back in time, I found a Los Angeles Times article, Ventura County Valedictorians, from 15 June 1997 that listed:
Oak Park High SchoolSo even in high school Kalember planned on being a leader in the computer industry, apparently by whatever means necessary. It is not known whether Kalember even attempted IT courses at Stanford and just couldn't cut it — real IT courses are hard — or planned all along to be a fraudulent IT incompetent leader in the computer industry.
Ryan James Kalember
College: Stanford
Career goal: Leader in the computer industry
Life goals: I’d like to work in the computer industry for the next several decades. Upon retiring, I plan to give a large sum to charity, move to Europe and become a philosopher/author.
Ryan Kalember did actually make some large charitable donations, which exposed his — and Proofpoint's — liberal political activism. According to the Federal Election Commission, in July 2016, while he was Proofpoint Cybersecurity EVP (since June 2015) Kalember donated $2,700 — the max — to Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential election campaign. (Interestingly, Kalember would be no more qualified to have run Hillary's hacked private email server, which may have cost her the election, than the IT incompetent who did, Bryan Pagliano.)
Kalember's and Proofpoint's liberal political activism leads to their government email tampering.
Recently, when I tried to email a tip to the Washington Post, I discovered it was blocked by the Post's email service provider ... Proofpoint. (Hey Wash Post, this is why your biggest story these days was a ridiculous one about secret messages in Melania Trump's clothing.)
From Net Neutrality: Who Controls the Communications of the Communications Controllers? I had noted that Proofpoint was also the email service provider for the FCC (@fcc.gov), as well as the Department of Commerce (@doc.gov). I had been meaning to email the FCC and DOC about Proofpoint anyway so I did, using email addresses the FCC and DOC make publicly available for contact by the American people.
My emails to both the FCC and DOC, about Proofpoint, were blocked by Proofpoint.
The criteria for blocking my emails are arbitrarily set by Proofpoint. They claimed the IP address of my email server had a "bad reputation" but I had not had any such problems for quite some time — since I first got the IP address and immediately "scrubbed" it — and after numerous successful emails to others. Further, my IP address was not on the bad reputation list of any of the major companies that make such lists (Proofpoint is not one of these).
It's far more likely that after Net Neutrality: Who Controls the Communications of the Communications Controllers? Proofpoint decided it was going to block my emails wherever it could. It can tell my emails are from me and about them by reading my emails, which, make no mistake, email service providers do, one way or another, unless the emails are encrypted.
That's how spam filters work, by reading your emails. Email service providers pretend that only computers read your emails so it's OK but that is ridiculous. Someone has to program the computers to read your emails and they can program in whatever they want: check for emails from/to specific people and about specific subjects.
So Proofpoint, working for the U.S. Government so subject to its restrictions, blocked me, a U.S. citizen, from contacting my federal government (like the vast majority of Americans I don't care about the Washington Post). It is not as well-known, but the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (part of the Bill of Rights) also guarantees the people "the right to petition the government for redress of grievances". Obviously, if you are blocked, by the U.S. Government (via Proofpoint), from even contacting the U.S. Government that right has been violated. A lawsuit to that effect is being prepared.
If Proofpoint reads my emails and blocks me from contacting the U.S. Government, of course it does the same to further its liberal political agenda or to increase its profits — the FCC and DOC handle matters directly affecting the businesses of Proofpoint and its liberal Silicon Valley cronies, like Google — since a lot more power and money is involved. That was the point of Net Neutrality: Who Controls the Communications of the Communications Controllers?.