Former CIA geek may be reading the emails you send to Steve Cohen

    A computer virus is no laughing matter

    Doug Haynes may be reading your emails. Or the code he creates may be checking to see if you are trying to send naughty tips to Steve Cohen, the hedge fund manager pushed out of business by the feds.

    The regulators never caught Cohen. But they got close enough to his inner circle to force SAC to pay $1.8 billion dollars in fines relating to insider trading and restrict Cohen from managing other people’s money.

    Now the wickedly smart hedgie has set up a family office named Point72 Asset Management and it is Haynes job as president to ensure that there isn’t even a whiff of insider trading, according to Greenwich Times.

    Haynes says that Point72 is relying on new technology to monitor emails, texts, and other communication that may contain illegal information or watch word triggers.

    “It’s amazing — we have to make sure all that is in compliance,” Haynes said. “Humans can’t do it, so we use very advanced technologies to do it. … We can intercept a lot of it before people ever see it, so if there is something that creates even a yellow flag — even a concern — it can be picked out.”

    Before turning to finance, Haynes worked as a programmer for a joint CIA-National Security Agency Group in Maryland. Part of his job there as a recent college grad was to look at natural language processing, and pulling terms and context from massive quantities of data, technology he relies on today.

    DealBreaker may be cynical about the Haynes interview, but at least he’s trying to keep the firm on the up and up.

    Photo: iStockPhoto.com.