Stephen Watt is the lead developer of Dark Mail's reference implementation. With a recent past as interesting as (albeit a bit more checkered than) Levison's, Watt faced an unusual, landmark 2008 federal indictment in the TJ Maxx intrusion. For merely writing the software used in the breach, Watt was given a 2 year federal prison sentence and ordered to pay $171.5 million in restitution. Because he refused to cooperate at all with the federal investigation into himself and his friends, he emerged from prison with his pride in tact.

Since his 2011 release Watt has spoken at several security conferences about his extraordinary legal experience. By joining the Dark Mail initiative, he hopes to continue a lifelong pattern of developing massively disruptive software with complete indifference to getting rich from it.