The other day we took note of the fact that the chief of Red Hat's Board was in fact a military general (albeit retired), who bragged about how war (overthrowing the leadership of another nation) introduced him to Red Hat. Red Hat's connections to the NSA are an area we covered in about half a dozen articles more than half a decade ago, e.g. [1, 2, 3]. The NSA (and DoD at large) is one of Red Hat's biggest clients and they work closely together in several areas, not only SELinux. The same for IBM...

"The interesting bit says he's still on the board of Hortonworks, which is closely connected to the NSA in a number of ways (staff, strategic, and even projects like Apache NiFi)."Now, what about the new CEO and President of Red Hat? Well, Red Hat's details about him are rather limited and we think we can see why. Wikipedia's page about him is virtually empty, it's a stub. You might expect the CEO of a large company to have more than 10 words about him in Wikipedia.

A little bit of digging reveals that he came to Red Hat less than 2 decades ago from BindView (now part of Symantec), where he was "senior vice president of research and development" after his original employer, Netect, was acquired. It was established in 1996 and still operates as a private entity. Cormier joined it in 1998 (two years after it was born) and was "vice president of Research & Development and Chief Technology Officer," according to Red Hat (IBM). "From 1996 to 1998," the same page says, "Cormier first served as director of Engineering, Internet Security and Collaboration Products and then as senior director of Software Product Development, Internet Security Products for AltaVista Internet Software, a web portal and internet services company (previously Digital’s Internet Software group)."

Nothing wrong with that!

"Red Hat calls it "data software company," which is a gross understatement."The interesting bit says he's still on the board of Hortonworks, which is closely connected to the NSA in a number of ways (staff, strategic, and even projects like Apache NiFi). Red Hat calls it "data software company," which is a gross understatement. Over the years I've noted almost 100 times the connection between the NSA and Hortonworks. It's not so secret; there's plenty of open source (publicly accessible) evidence about it... but we never got around to doing a comprehensive article about it, so the pieces are all scattered, so to speak.

"He [Cormier] was an original member of the Hortonworks board of directors and was instrumental in driving its 2018 merger with Cloudera," Red Hat boasts. ⬆