DOJ Confirms Former eBay Security Chief’s CIA Past As Cyberstalking Civil Suit Heads For 2026 Trial
Recently released documents expose new details about the eBay cyberstalking scandal, Senior Security Director Jim Baugh's CIA past and how revolving door between Big Tech and the US national security apparatus threatens free speech and press freedom.
The bizarre corporate plot unfolded in the summer of 2019, targeting journalists Ina and David Steiner for their reporting on eBay at EcommerceBytes and seeking to unmask the identity of unsuckEBAY (also known as FidoMaster/Dan Davis), an anonymous source and commenter who also sparked the ire of top executives at the company.
Court records revealed sordid details of the stalking and harassment campaign that included disturbing deliveries of live insects, bloody pig masks and funeral wreaths as well as threatening messages, doxxing that ultimately escalated to in-person surveillance and an attempted break-in at the hands of high-level eBay security personnel led by Jim Baugh.
Baugh, Director of Global Resiliency David Harville, Security Manager Philip Cooke, Sr Manager Special Operations Brian Gilbert, Sr Manager Global Intelligence Stephanie Popp, Global Intelligence Manager Stephanie Stockwell, and Security Analyst Veronica Zea all pleaded guilty and were sentenced for their roles in these crimes.
eBay signed a deferred prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice that forced the company to pay a $3 Million fine and undergoing 3 years of enhanced compliance monitoring in order to avoid further criminal prosecution related to this matter.
But importantly, that fine was paid to the US Treasury, not the victims, leaving the Steiners to pursue compensation through an ongoing lawsuit which named the seven criminal defendants plus eBay, ex-CEO Devin Wenig, ex-Communications Chief Steve Wymer, ex-SVP Global Operations Wendy Jones, and security company Progressive F.O.R.C.E Concepts (PFC), claiming direction and support for the harassment came from the very top of eBay's c-suite.
The claims against PFC were dismissed in summary judgement and the Steiners have since inked deals with Baugh, Cooke, Popp, Stockwell and Zea to release them from the lawsuit in exchange for their willingness to testify against the executives at a trial now scheduled for March 2026.
Liz Morton
During his criminal sentencing, Baugh offered details of his previous work for the CIA as a potential mitigating factor, alleging eBay hired him specifically for his prior government experience which demonstrated an "ability to solve difficult problems through unconventional means."
Liz Morton
Baugh noted this practice is not uncommon in corporate America, citing a New York Times article about a former CIA officer who was employed by Uber as one example.
His attorneys also argued that imposing the maximum sentence would send a message of impunity to corporate executives that they can distance themselves from the actions of their security personnel by carefully maintaining enough distance from operational specifics.
Baugh's letter to the judge in the criminal case was surprisingly candid about his government intelligence background - including claims that he worked for the CIA after a stint at Microsoft and that he assisted the CIA and FBI with intelligence gathering activities on a voluntary, unpaid basis after returning to the private sector as an independent security consultant.
The letter also revealed Baugh's supposed CIA and FBI code names as well as claims that during his private sector career, he assisted with recruitment of
foreign agents and electronic surveillance of foreign leaders; reported observations from international travel and business meetings; and recruited colleagues (including a CEO) to assist the government by allowing the use of their private sector resources.
The details in Baugh's statements raised serious questions about what role this background may have played in his hiring at eBay, whether the executives involved knew about his history and how that might have contributed to the criminal events unfolding in the manner in which they did.
Strangely, after this letter was initially filed on the public docket, the Department of Justice stepped in to have the document sealed and inserted itself into discovery and depositions in the civil lawsuit, insisting the letter contained classified national security information.
While many considered DOJ's actions to be a tacit admission that at least some of Baugh's claims were likely true, the Government had not officially, explicitly confirmed his CIA employment - until now.
The revelation came in a letter the DOJ sent to all of the lawyers involved in the civil suit in advance of Jim Baugh's deposition in July 2025.
...the Government confirms that Mr. Baugh worked for the National Clandestine Service of the CIA for a period of less-than-a-year, more than ten years before December 2022.
Given that Mr. Baugh’s National Clandestine Service employment occurred before December 2012, probing Mr. Baugh’s actions or experiences risks eliciting testimony that would constitute Protected Information...
...The Government also confirms that, after Mr. Baugh’s period of brief employment with the CIA, Mr. Baugh subsequently volunteered his services to assist the CIA, but that CIA ceased contact with Mr. Baugh before the criminal activity for which Mr. Baugh was convicted.
That timeline also confirms previous exclusive reporting from Value Added Resource which showed documents from Baugh's eBay personnel file corroborated many of his claims about his prior work history - including that he was part of the Microsoft Executive Protection Unit directly responsible for the safety of then Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer from April 2002 to September 2006.
After leaving Microsoft in September 2006, Baugh's resume shows he was a Strategic Planner at defense contractor Northrop Grumman for 11 months - which aligns with the time period in which both Baugh and now the DOJ say he was working in Clandestine Services, confirming that was likely either a cover or Baugh may have been contracted to CIA through Northrop.
Coincidentally, shortly after Baugh joined Microsoft in 2002, his department came under new leadership when the company hired 20+ year CIA operations veteran Mike Howard to manage all physical security operations as Chief Security Officer.
In an appearance on The Team House podcast earlier this year, Howard revealed that his final CIA assignment was in National Resources, a division whose main function is to conduct voluntary debriefings of US citizens who travel overseas for work or family, and to recruit foreign students, diplomats, and business people to become CIA assets when they return to their countries.
...then my last assignment in the agency was...national resources. So national resources for those of you who don't know...it's the domestic arm of the agency.
The agency has no remit to conduct [domestic] intelligence operations per se...
So what we do is we work with the Bureau [FBI] on possible targets and we work with business...if there are business people that are willing let's say in their travels and they have access to different information, to give us information or atmospherics of personalities, we kind of report on that.
That sounds exactly like the work Baugh later did for the CIA and FBI on a voluntary basis, raising questions about whether Howard may have played a role in recruiting Baugh to work for the CIA during his time at Microsoft and/or connected him with National Resources.
In Baugh's now sealed sentencing letter, he claimed his covert work for the CIA took a severe toll on his family and personal life, resulting in his return to private security work at Bill Gates' personal services company and think tank bgC3 (later renamed to Gates Ventures/Gates Notes) providing protection for CEO Larry Cohen in August 2007, where he continued to "coordinate with foreign and domestic law enforcement and intelligence agencies."
Coincidentally, Bill Gates, Larry Cohen and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar all attended the annual EDGE Billionaire's Dinner in 2009 - an event where Baugh could have possibly been present or involved at the periphery as part of Cohen's personal protection detail at that time.
The Gates Foundation and Omidyar's various philanthropic endeavors have considerable overlap in many areas, including partnerships with USAID like the 2012 Better Than Cash alliance which called on governments and NGOs in Peru, Kenya, Colombia, and the Philippines to adopt the use of electronic payments for programs that support people living in poverty.
Baugh's sentencing memo also included a signed letter from then Vice President Joe Biden, thanking him for his patience and professionalism as part of the team that provided additional security services when he appeared at the 2016 Oscars.
Pierre Omidyar and eBay's first president, Jeffrey Skoll were also in attendance at the Oscars that year where Spotlight, the film they had helped produce about the Boston Globe's uncovering of the Catholic Church child abuse scandal, won Best Picture - 6 months later, Baugh was hired at eBay.
Angely Montilla
Yasha Levine, author of Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, explains how eBay turned into an arm of the US National Security State very soon after going public, as Omidyar's utopian ideas of a self-regulating marketplace didn't scale with the massive popularity of the platform and couldn't handle the influx of fraud and scams which proliferated across the site.
Yasha Levine
This transformation — from cybernetic dream into a police-backed big money machine — started in 1999, not long after eBay’s IPO. That year, the company hired a law-enforcement power couple to run its new policing division: Angela Malacari and her husband Rob Chesnut.
Angela was poached from the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Immigration and Naturalization Services, where she spent her time “kicking down doors of New York tenements and brothels.”
Her husband Rob came to eBay after serving as a U.S. Assistant Attorney General in the eastern Virginia District, where he handled high profile cases, including the trial of double agent Aldrich Ames who spied for the Russians while working at the CIA.
The two had deep ties to America’s intelligence and law enforcement apparatus and they assembled an internal policing team that looked like it had come straight from some kind of private spook mail-order catalogue.
Shortly after news of the cyberstalking scandal went public, current CEO Jamie Iannone issued an internal memo on corporate ethics encouraging employees to "see something, say something" - and also hosted an all hands event bringing Rob Chesnut back to eBay as a guest speaker to provide a company-wide presentation on corporate ethics and integrity.
Since I rejoined eBay earlier this year, and particularly over the last couple of months, the eBay Leadership Team has frequently discussed how openness, honesty, respect and doing business with integrity drives our success...
...And, here's the thing...ethics is everyone's responsibility. We all need to see ourselves as being personally accountable for our commitment to doing business ethically.
That's why I strongly encourage you to join me, Marie Oh Huber, Chief Legal Officer, and Molly Finn, Chief Compliance Officer in conversation with Rob Chesnut, an eBay alum and highly-regarded ethics and integrity expert.
When eBay moved Molly Finn to VP Deputy General Counsel M&A and looked for someone to replace her as Chief Compliance Officer in the wake of this scandal, they settled on Ryan Jones - who just happened to work directly under Chesnut for 5 years as Chief Compliance Officer Payments at AirBnB.
Liz Morton
Omidyar's decades long connections to the US security state have also been well documented by MintPress News, revealing there is far more to the billionaire recluse than the auction site he is famous for founding.
Alexander Rubinstein, Max Blumenthal
While it's not clear exactly what brought Baugh to eBay in 2016, the corporate security and surveillance apparatus in place at eBay at that time didn't just appear overnight or in a vacuum - it was the intentional result of years of corporate decision-making at the highest levels of the company.
Notably, Omidyar was still an active member of eBay's Board of Directors when these criminal events occured.
He stepped down in September 2020, 3 months after the scandal became public, but is still a major shareholder and retains the honorary title of Director Emeritus.
That title may not come with voting rights, but that doesn't mean Omidyar no longer has any influence at the company as there are still 4 current Board members who were serving alongside Omidyar when the scandal happened, including current Chairman of the Board, Paul Pressler.
Liz Morton
In yet another twist of irony, Omidyar also founded the Intercept, which became famous for publishing Edward Snowden's NSA leaks before halting research on the files and locking them down from any further public access in March of 2019.
Margot Williams, Henrik Moltke, Micah Lee, Ryan Gallagher
Given that history, one might think Omidyar would have some interesting thoughts about journalists being harassed and threatened in an attempt to influence their reporting and uncover the identity of an anonymous source.
However, he has never made any public statements about the eBay scandal and mainstream media has apparently not seen fit to ask where the elusive founder was when everything went off the rails at the company which enabled him to amass the vast fortune he now spends on various "world-shaping" endeavours.
Omidyar also has tangential ties to the studio and team which produced a documentary about the eBay cyberstalking scandal called Whatever It Takes, which debuted at the South by Southwest Film Festival last year and is finally slowly making its way to streaming services in Canada and Australia, though a US release date has yet to be announced.
The film was produced by Allyson Luchak and Ben Travers, who had previously worked with the Steiners' original attorney in the civil case, Rosemary Scapicchio, on Trial 4, a documentary series about the fight to free Sean Ellis from wrongful conviction.
Whatever It Takes had backing from Concordia Studio, which is funded by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, who has previously collaborated with Omidyar on various philanthropic and media endeavors.
Whatever It Takes executive producers Jonathan Silberberg and Nicole Stott from Concordia Studio both worked directly with Omidyar's Luminate Media in 2020 to produce A THOUSAND CUTS - a documentary about CEO/Founder of news site Rappler, Maria Ressa, and press freedom in the Philippines.
Ex-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte's government targeted Ressa and Rappler, alleging they were part of CIA-backed regime change efforts in the region with funds funneled through USAID, the US State Department, and National Endowment for Democracy through Omidyar Network and other organizations.
The Committee to Protect Journalists and other press freedom organizations (many of which receive grants and other financial support from the Gates Foundation, Larry Cohen, Omidyar Network, and George Soros' Open Society Foundations and other left-leaning billionaire backed sources) stepped up to defend Rappler, saying the accusations were "lies being propagated by persons allied with President Duterte to discredit independent journalism."
Shawn W. Crispin/CPJ Senior Southeast Asia Representative
At issue was Omidyar's major investment in Rappler starting in 2015 which lead the Philippine government to revoke Rappler's operating license in 2018, citing concerns that "foreign ownership" of the company (Omidyar's investment) violated the country's constitution.
Philip Wang,Helen Regan
Strangely, the Omidyar Network website removed all links and mentions of their financial involvement and support for Ressa and Rappler in July 2024, just a few weeks before Rappler won their appeal to have their license reinstated.
Omidyar dropping Ressa and Rappler down the memory hole is even more interesting in light of the recent spotlight which has been placed on USAID corruption by former US State Department official Mike Benz and others.
And ironically, when Wenig leaned heavily into the fidget spinner fad in 2017 to get a short term boost in Active Buyers for eBay, he tweeted a picture of one of the toys emblazoned with the seal of the US Central Intelligence Agency, saying "I'm sure it's fine to leave this on my desk during meetings."
Interestingly, before Baugh took a plea deal in the criminal case, he filed a motion to compel discovery which sought records of his government service from 2014-2018 - which could indicate he may have still been engaged in "voluntary" activities for the CIA and FBI while working at eBay.
While the DOJ's letter confirms Baugh's official work in Clandestine Services ended before 2012, they leave the exact date of ending his "volunteer" status and ceasing contact open to interpretation - only saying it was "before the criminal activity for which Mr. Baugh was convicted."
That means Baugh could have still been actively engaged with the CIA when he joined eBay in 2016 up to and including any time prior to when these crimes were committed in 2019.
eBay has predictably painted this entire debacle as a small group of employees going rogue and acting beyond the legitimate scope of their employment, but for those concerned about the implications of the company's close ties to the US security state and how eBay security operates today, there's still more to the story.
For example, current "de facto" Chief Security Officer/ Senior Director Global Head of Security, Real Estate, EH&S, & Facilities, Eric Donelan, spent almost 15 years in various roles with the US State Department, then 2 years leading security at Korean ecommerce giant Coupang before joining eBay in 2022 with an executive leadership scope that includes "neutralizing threats" using "Protective Intelligence."
Under Donelan's leadership, eBay has continued their long history of public/private partnerships with various government and law enforcement agencies, including hosting a recent fireside chat with the US State Department Overseas Security Advisory Council, instructing Diplomatic Security Service special agents on concepts and best practices of Executive Protection.
Considering eBay is still under DOJ-mandated compliance monitoring and involved in ongoing civil litigation due to their ex-CIA agent led security department committing multiple federal felonies using corporate resources in response to executive directives, one might think they are in no position to be instructing anyone on best practices for Executive Protection - except maybe to serve as a cautionary tale.
The scandal and subsequent ongoing brand damaging debacle should have been seen as an opportunity for eBay to chart a different course for how the company, under new Chief Communications Officer Gigi Ganatra Duff, will handle press relations going forward.
Unfortunately, a job posting for a Crisis Comms position earlier this year showed that eBay hasn't learned much from this situation, as they were actively seeking to hire someone with "a history of developing, pitching, preventing and securing high-impact media coverage" - a chilling thought considering what happened the last time eBay became overly concerned with preventing high-impact media coverage.
Liz Morton
A truly free and independent press is crucial for holding power of all kinds to account - which is why governments and corporations alike pour vast resources into controlling and countering media narratives, often employing "catch and kill" practices to prevent information from going public.
Thus it's not surprising that much of Omidyar's philanthropic work has centered around funding "pro-democracy" journalism around the globe, just as it's no coincidence that Omidyar Network "supports" tech whistleblowers or finances "tech accountability" organizations like Accountable US and Accountable Tech - who, oddly enough, never seem to find any reason to mention eBay.
The public narrative around the eBay scandal has largely focused on the bizarre nature of the harassment campaign, painting a picture of a rogue security director going too far in a twisted quest to "protect the company."
But the criminal and civil cases in this matter have revealed a much deeper story of historic and ongoing systemic corporate governance failures and a shockingly reckless disregard for free speech, press freedom, and the rule of law by a private security force largely trained by and still in public/private partnership with government intelligence, military and law enforcement agencies.
This history is not unique to eBay of course - it is endemic to much of Silicon Valley and, as Levine's Surveillance Valley, as well as THE CODE: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O’Mara and others have revealed, it underpins the very creation of the internet itself.
And in an unrelated but eerily similar story, independent investigative journalist Jack Poulson recently exposed how the CEO of gig-work data collection firm Premise Data used ex-cops, private investigators and dirty tricks to remove articles from Google search all in an attempt to unmask his publication's sources.
Jack Poulson
Information which has since been revealed through discovery and depositions in the Steiners' civil case could warrant reopening the criminal investigation against eBay in this matter, but that seems unlikely given the government's repeated and heavy-handed intervention to prevent any further exploration of the role that Baugh's CIA past, and the degree of eBay's knowledge about it, may have played in the crimes that were committed.
That likely leaves the civil courts as the last hope for the Steiners to receive justice - and hopefully a judgement large enough to act as a deterrent not just for eBay, but for other tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Meta who have even greater security and surveillance power at their fingertips and even closer ties to the US security state.
The case is Steiner et al v. eBay Inc. et al case number 1:21-cv-11181 in US District Court of Massachusetts.
Stay tuned for updates as the eBay cyberstalking lawsuit continues and remember - VAR+ subscribers get exclusive access to the Value Added Resource eBay cyberstalking case document archive!
