Wolfgang Hammersmith Fraud & Liar

[Richard]

Born in 1950 into a Military family and handed over to a USMC program at the age of twelve, Wolfgang Hammersmith was raised in the world of the US Marine Corps. He graduated from the program at the age of eighteen,...

Sounds like one of those troublemaking bedwetters that invertebrate parents with absolutely no parenting skills send to the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, TX.

"He Came to Us a Young Boy...He Graduated a Young Man!"

Richard

[gundog]

Here we go agian. Thank god this one is a wannabe Marine. I sure hope those folks have someone as dedicated as our Team Seargent who will relegate this knucklehead to the extant "where did Billy Boy Hiller go?" status. And to think guys like Jack Lucas MOH (RIP Warrior) can't get their hands on him.

Look at this guys picture, do you really think he ever heard a shot fired in anger?, I don't.

Since they refuse to learn, we will just have to keep on bustin their chops.

[JJ_BPK]

Sounds like one of those troublemaking bedwetters that invertebrate parents with absolutely no parenting skills send to the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, TX.

"He Came to Us a Young Boy...He Graduated a Young Man!"

Got to remember this quote, I like it..
Tx, Richard..

[CSB]

The Call of Duty: Gunfight!

It was once called ‘The President’s Army,’ disbanded when President Reagan took Office, because no President should have that much power. One survivor from a group of 100 secret warriors, Wolfgang Hammersmith shares the stories from 86 missions across 41 countries and many life and death Gunfights!

Leading Teams into battle at the age of 18 until he retired at 37, his Teams were comprised of highly-trained men and women from all branches of military service. Their job was to kill and destroy in the name of the United States.

These never before revealed stories will draw you in as if you were part of the Team, under fire in forests, deserts, parking lots, on freeways and even the in the frozen Arctic.

Follow Hammersmith and his Teammates chasing traitors, recovering stolen intelligence, hunting illegal arms dealers, and destroying enemy weapon stockpiles throughout the world.

These Teams always knew they were going to a Gunfight! This book isolates the action of each battle and includes the tactics and training scenarios used for their survival.

WOW

Originally Posted by CSB

WOW

WOW nothing, wait until you see the quality here....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZGyJgTlEEg

[Paslode]

Lt. Col. Wolfgang Hammersmith

He and Hillar must correspond

[perdurabo]

Originally Posted by wet dog

to my room with her walker down the hallway. Man, have I got it good.

Can someone this weekend swing by his office and say, "Super Dave says hello".?

Someone will have to camp out in front of Mail Box, etc. and wait for Wolfgang to appear.

Thanks in advance.

I thought his website was funny, but some of your responses of disbelief made me spew beer, thanks for that.

Here's another good snippet from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/3...Real_World.php

To storied career soldier Wolfgang Hammersmith, gunfight tactics and pistolcraft are an art. The USMC Lt. Colonel, Vietnam War and Black Ops veteran was born into a military family in a time when it was wholly appropriate to take your 8 year old out into the desert and shoot at him so that he'd learn not to fear it -- this was in fact part of his childhood.

As a 12 year old in the Bull Pups program, part of the "desensitization training" [COLOR="rgb(244, 164, 96)"]involved group field trips to the morgue, scalpels in hand, to better understand corpses and vital organs.[/COLOR] Hammersmith tells me that that particular program was eventually discontinued due to outcry from parents.

The usual nosy information terrorist I am, I looked him up in my evil databases.

He's had many aliases over the years. Real name is Steven, looks like he legally changed to his new bad ass name in 1992-1993. Have his current home address and phone #s.

He's up in the SEATAC area. He also runs a company called Vadium Tech (vadiumtech.com) that sells snake oil encryption products. Corporate world HQ address is, of course, a PMB in one of the crappiest strip malls I've seen.

Somehow he's been suckering GameStop stores into letting his set up a table at the "Black Ops" video game events so people can buy his book and talk with a real Delta RDF Marine Black Ops LTC.

I'd be happy to pass what info I have along to any crufty USMC peeps (or Feds, if they still deal with these tools).

[Paslode]

http://www.bullshido.net/forums/showthread.php?t=101818

Wolfgang Hammersmith is also the founder of an encryption technology firm (Vadium Technology) that has claimed an "unbreakable" One Time Pad encryption product since 2004, something that industry encryption experts have been skeptical of. (OTPs are a perfect theoretical encryption process, akin to perpetual motion or cold fusion claims...often bullshit).

I encountered this man with the unforgettable name a few years ago while reading my favorite cryptography blog: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archive...ouse_va_1.html. If you scroll down you will see a good number of posts made by Mr. Hammersmith himself.

He then got into a 6-year-long comments battle on Bruce Schneier's site (Bruce is a world-renowned crypto guru) talking about how Bruce doesn't know what he's talking about, and Vadium Technology is the best thing for computer security, ever. Oh, and it's unbreakable by the way.

He even appeared to post some sockpuppet entries in support of himself, got caught doing it, and claimed it was a friend sitting at his computer.

I did some background research on this. None of this will positively prove Hammersmith wrong, it does provide some context. I just don't think it adds up.

The standard history of 1st SFOD-D is that Col. Beckwith saw a capability gap in the SOF community and felt the Army needed an American SAS -- more mature than young Rangers, more focused on Direct Action than SF, able to bridge the gap between CIA paramilitary action and traditional military roles. he met a great deal of obstruction from the military establishment. It wasn't until the rise of terrorism in the 1970's that the benefits of such a unit in the counter-terror role were recognized.

During the time period Hammersmith is describing, there also was MACV-SOG operating in Southeast Asia -- specifically formed to provide a black ops capability. And there was also the Son Tay Raid, which was executed by an Ad Hoc unit drawn from SF. SOG was officially disbanded in 1972, although there was a follow-on unit active until about 1975. Delta was stood up in 1977, although it wasn't operational until 1979. During the stand-up period, 5th SFG had a DA/CT unit known as "Blue Light."

So where in this mix is there room for a Combined Services? Why create Delta if Combined Services already exists? Why form ad hoc SOF formations for specific tasks if Combined Services already exists? Why disband Combined Services as a supertrooper secret squirrel unit and replace it with Delta (and later the whole Joint Special Operations Command structure)?

Hammersmith claims his unit predated Delta Force, and generously there's a 5 - 7 year period (1972 - 1979) when such a unit might've existed. He seems to imply he was active in this black ops outfit during the majority of his career. It was supposedly referred to as "The President's Army." I've scoured my extensive collection of SOF military history books and can't find any timely reference to either "Combined Services" or "The President's Army." (I know, it was way too secret to appear in a history book.)

Hammersmith also claims the unit was disbanded under Reagan because "no president should wield such power!" This is during the whole SOF build-up that gave birth to the modern Special Operations Command (SOCOM, a unified command) organizational structure. Somehow another secret squirrel unit, the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), managed to survive this reorganization, and find brief references in the better history books.

I can't say it's impossible, but I don't buy it.

By way of comparison, I would like to point to
Richard "Dick" Meadows
Richard_Meadows Richard_Meadows
, who actually lived the life Hammersmith is claiming during the same time period.
Last edited by Styygens; Yesterday at 05:24 PM.

[perdurabo]

Originally Posted by Paslode

http://www.bullshido.net/forums/showthread.php?t=101818

He seems to think that "One Time Pads" are a specific encryption scheme, but they're a type of encryption. I couldn't find a whitepaper on his AlphaCipher crypto scheme, which in the cryptography world, generally leads to snake oil.

Bruce Scheier (author of Applied Cryptography, one of the bibles in the crypto world) declared it dubious, so it's a safe bet it's... dubious. AlphaCipher is probably just a hacked-up software application that uses high-level AES APIs.

From Bullshido:

We used to have a kids group of some kind show up yearly at the Infantry Training School on Camp Pendleton.

Can't remember the name of the group, but seeing the kiddies in cammos and officer's insignia was kind of a joke.

I was actually in this group in jr high and high school for several years in the 80s. It was called "First City Rifles" (http://www.fcrc.org/), and it's still around in a very different form. It was shady. It was run as a "Military Explorer"-affiliated group (I'm not sure what that means). It attracted the Rambo/military wannabe kids.

The leaders were AD Army, discharged/retired Army, and Army NG personnel. One fellow (name was "Coloumb" or thereabouts) was or claimed to be SF, he knew a lot about weapons and comms, he had a lot of legitimate field experience, but I don't know to what level of Army training.

But somehow, they got us on Pendleton every year and we got to shoot M16s, M60s (caused a brush fire a few times), throw grenades and go on long ruck marches across Pendleton with packs and unloaded M1 Garands and get "ambushed" by our leaders or actual Army infantry units on the base to train, or we'd get taught how to ambush them. We went to some shoot house on base and they taught us how to enter a building, how to "pie" corners, etc.

The training seemed pretty ad-hoc and disorganized. I learned how to land nav there, not because they actually taught us, but because they dropped us off in bumfuck egypt somewhere on Pendleton with a map and compass and eventually we figured it out. They taught us how to sabotage infrastructure (I remember them using the CIA Freedom Fighter's handbook and the Army Incendiary Guide for these particular lessons). We mostly used the sabotage crap to cause trouble at school (soaking sponges in starch, squeezing them, wrapping string around them, letting them dry in the sun, remove string, throw in toilet, flush fast).

The boys, we all wore BDUs, but didn't have ranks at the time. I learned a lot of stuff but half the time it felt like it was hazing for their entertainment.

After I left and went into the military, it supposedly got a lot less shady. And I'm left boggled on how we were able to get onto a military base and do all of that. We met at an Army NG Armory in California. The group leaders had access to the weapons in the armory. This all sounds like BS but is 100% completely true. If anyone has any clue as to how they could do this, fill me in.

[GratefulCitizen]

Originally Posted by perdurabo

He seems to think that "One Time Pads" are a specific encryption scheme, but they're a type of encryption. I couldn't find a whitepaper on his AlphaCipher crypto scheme, which in the cryptography world, generally leads to snake oil.

Bruce Scheier (author of Applied Cryptography, one of the bibles in the crypto world) declared it dubious, so it's a safe bet it's... dubious. AlphaCipher is probably just a hacked-up software application that uses high-level AES APIs.

Technically speaking, true one-time pad encryption (properly used) is unbreakable.

So where does he get true random numbers for his DOTPs?
How does he get matching sets securely to sender and receiver?

OTPs aren't technical marvels.
They also aren't very useful for most people's purposes.

[perdurabo]

Originally Posted by GratefulCitizen

Technically speaking, true one-time pad encryption (properly used) is unbreakable.

So where does he get true random numbers for his DOTPs?
How does he get matching sets securely to sender and receiver?

OTPs aren't technical marvels.
They also aren't very useful for most people's purposes.

Right, OTPs aren't marvels in the least. And there's no AlphaCipher whitepaper that I'm aware of, so it hasn't been peer-reviewed. This would be even more important in light of recent reports of weaknesses in AES-256 and now 128.

I didn't see anything mentioned on how he handles key distribution, which also must be secured with most (all?) OTP schemes. This would be an important thing to explain for a legitimate encryption product, as the key is the key to the kingdom.

I'll just stick to PGP/GnuPG, thanks Wolfy!

[Richard]

Somehow he's been suckering GameStop stores into letting his set up a table at the "Black Ops" video game events so people can buy his book and talk with a real Delta RDF Marine Black Ops LTC.

I'd be happy to pass what info I have along to any crufty USMC peeps (or Feds, if they still deal with these tools).

Please send me the guy's info and I'll pass it on to the CEO of GameStop - Dan DeMatteo is a personal friend (his son is a 2005 grad of my old school) and stand-up guy, and I'll see he gets it...along with my POV of this clown.

Richard

[JJ_BPK]

This guy has got to go...

2. What was your toughest mission?

Working against human traffickers and drug distributors, I was blown out of a building. It happened when a guy I was chasing threw a satchel charge into the room I was entering, and it went off as I was attempting to jump out of a broken window, throwing me thirty feet out on to the front lawn, breaking L5 and S1. My legs didn’t work for two weeks, and then they slowly recovered, but I also had to recover from secondary effects where one’s immune system attacks the organs that are healing. That part took six months! I was kind of walking after two weeks, and then it was back to work again – no back repairs until years later when I had a five-and-a-half hour back operation to remove the broken bones and complete repairs

http://www.bullshido.net/forums/showthread.php?t=101818

Here is an interesting article about Vadium Technology..

http://andrewfry.blogspot.com/2010/0...y-profile.html

[1stindoor]

I'm speechless. He's even more entertaining than Hillar was...and I thought that was nearly impossible.

[Richard]

From a BusinessWeek bio on his company:

Mr. Hammersmith is an expert in security matters with extensive international experience. He is also a licensed Ship's Master, a licensed Armed Private Investigator and Agency Principal in Washington State, and a helicopter pilot.

http://investing.businessweek.com/bu...nvestors%20LLC

His business is listed at:

5303 Pacific Highway East
Tacoma, Washington 98424

Google Map it and then check the satellite and street views -

And so it goes...

Richard