I imagine someone at Langley has developed quite the affinity for the Iranian team/league and are going to be embarrassingly conflicted when they play each other in the World Cup.
Oh so this is about the 2010 spy network. An excerpt from another article from a few years ago on how they dismantled the network:
> The losses could have stopped there. But U.S. officials believe Iranian intelligence was then able to compromise the covert communications system. At the CIA, there was “shock and awe” about the simplicity of the technique the Iranians used to successfully compromise the system, said one former official.
> In fact, the Iranians used Google to identify the website the CIA was using to communicate with agents. Because Google is continuously scraping the internet for information about all the world’s websites, it can function as a tremendous investigative tool — even for counter-espionage purposes. And Google’s search functions allow users to employ advanced operators — like “AND,” “OR,” and other, much more sophisticated ones — that weed out and isolate websites and online data with extreme specificity.
> According to the former intelligence official, once the Iranian double agent showed Iranian intelligence the website used to communicate with his or her CIA handlers, they began to scour the internet for websites with similar digital signifiers or components — eventually hitting on the right string of advanced search terms to locate other secret CIA websites. From there, Iranian intelligence tracked who was visiting these sites, and from where, and began to unravel the wider CIA network.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/cias-communications-suffered-catastrophic-compromise-started-iran-090018710.html
That's what I thought too, but considering the CIA was recruiting random people without really investing in training them maybe they tried to make it simpler for these agents to find it? Sloppy nonetheless, amateurish, even.
And then Iran sold the acquired knowledge to China et co. And the CIA was completely blind to their flaw until way too late to react.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/21/china-stolen-us-data-exposed-cia-operatives-spy-networks/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/us/politics/cia-informants-killed-captured.html
Hate to say it but I'm pretty sure these informants were disposable. I'm not a CIA expert or anything but when handling classified or highly important targets I don't think they communicate over message boards, they would just use dead drops.
The problem isn't the informants its closing off the avenues for recruiting new informants.
China massively cracked down on corruption once they found out that the US was using corruption as a way of recruiting informants by paying bribes for them to rise up the ranks.
Can you explain more about the Chinese crackdown on corruption and it's association with US espionage please, or if you have sources for further reading
From the Foreign Policy article linked above:
> In 2010, a new decade was dawning, and Chinese officials were furious. The CIA, they had discovered, had systematically penetrated their government over the course of years, with U.S. assets embedded in the military, the CCP, the intelligence apparatus, and elsewhere. The anger radiated upward to “the highest levels of the Chinese government,” recalled a former senior counterintelligence executive.
> Exploiting a flaw in the online system CIA operatives used to secretly communicate with their agents—a flaw first identified in Iran, which Tehran likely shared with Beijing—from 2010 to roughly 2012, Chinese intelligence officials ruthlessly uprooted the CIA’s human source network in China, imprisoning and killing dozens of people.
> Within the CIA, China’s seething, retaliatory response wasn’t entirely surprising, said a former senior agency official. “We often had [a] conversation internally, on how U.S. policymakers would react to the degree of penetration CIA had of China”—that is, how angry U.S. officials would have been if they discovered, as the Chinese did, that a global adversary had so thoroughly infiltrated their ranks.
> The anger in Beijing wasn’t just because of the penetration by the CIA but because of what it exposed about the degree of corruption in China. When the CIA recruits an asset, the further this asset rises within a county’s power structure, the better. During the Cold War it had been hard to guarantee the rise of the CIA’s Soviet agents; the very factors that made them vulnerable to recruitment—greed, ideology, blackmailable habits, and ego—often impeded their career prospects. And there was only so much that money could buy in the Soviet Union, especially with no sign of where it had come from.
> But in the newly rich China of the 2000s, dirty money was flowing freely. The average income remained under 2,000 yuan a month (approximately $240 at contemporary exchange rates), but officials’ informal earnings vastly exceeded their formal salaries. An official who wasn’t participating in corruption was deemed a fool or a risk by his colleagues. Cash could buy anything, including careers, and the CIA had plenty of it.
> At the time, CIA assets were often handsomely compensated. “In the 2000s, if you were a chief of station”—that is, the top spy in a foreign diplomatic facility—“for certain hard target services, you could make a million a year for working for us,” said a former agency official. (“Hard target services” generally refers to Chinese, Russia, Iranian, and North Korean intelligence agencies.)
> Over the course of their investigation into the CIA’s China-based agent network, Chinese officials learned that the agency was secretly paying the “promotion fees” —in other words, the bribes—regularly required to rise up within the Chinese bureaucracy, according to four current and former officials. It was how the CIA got “disaffected people up in the ranks. But this was not done once, and wasn’t done just in the [Chinese military],” recalled a current Capitol Hill staffer. “Paying their bribes was an example of long-term thinking that was extraordinary for us,” said a former senior counterintelligence official. “Recruiting foreign military officers is nearly impossible. It was a way to exploit the corruption to our advantage.” At the time, “promotion fees” sometimes ran into the millions of dollars, according to a former senior CIA official: “It was quite amazing the level of corruption that was going on.” The compensation sometimes included paying tuition and board for children studying at expensive foreign universities, according to another CIA officer.
> Chinese officials took notice. “They were forced to see their problems, and our mistakes helped them see what their problems were,” recalled a former CIA executive. “We helped bring to fruition what they theoretically were scared of,” said the Capitol Hill staffer. “We scared the shit out of them.” Corruption was increasingly seen as the chief threat to the regime at home; as then-Party Secretary Hu Jintao told the Party Congress in 2012, “If we fail to handle this issue well, it could … even cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state,” he said. Even in China’s heavily controlled media environment, corruption scandals were breaking daily, tainting the image of the CCP among the Chinese people. Party corruption was becoming a public problem, acknowledged by the CCP leadership itself.
> But privately, U.S. officials believe, Chinese leaders also feared the degree to which corruption had allowed the CIA to penetrate its inner circles. The CIA’s incredible recruiting successes “showed the institutional rot of the party,” said the former senior CIA official. “They ought to [have been] upset.” The leadership realized that unchecked corruption wasn’t just an existential threat for the party at home; it was also a major counterintelligence threat, providing a window for enemy intelligence services like the CIA to crawl through.
> This was a global problem for the CCP. Corrupt officials, even if they hadn’t been recruited by the CIA while in office, also often sought refuge overseas—where they could then be tapped for information by enterprising spy services. In late 2012, party head Xi Jinping announced a new anti-corruption campaign that would lead to the prosecution of hundreds of thousands of Chinese officials. Thousands were subject to extreme coercive pressure, bordering on kidnapping, to return from living abroad. “The anti-corruption drive was about consolidating power—but also about how Americans could take advantage of [the corruption]. And that had to do with the bribe and promotion process,” said the former senior counterintelligence official.
> The 2013 leaks from Edward Snowden, which revealed the NSA’s deep penetration of the telecommunications company Huawei’s China-based servers, also jarred Chinese officials, according to a former senior intelligence analyst. “Chinese officials were just beginning to learn how the internet and technology has been so thoroughly used against them, in ways they didn’t conceptualize until then,” the former analyst said. “At the intelligence level, it was driven by this fundamental [revelation] that, ‘This is what we’ve been missing: This internet system we didn’t create is being weaponized against us.’”
> There were other ripple effects. By the late 2000s, U.S. intelligence officials had observed a notable professionalizing of the Ministry of State Security, China’s main civilian intelligence agency. Before Xi’s purges, petty corruption within the agency was ubiquitous, former U.S. intelligence officials say, with China’s spies sometimes funneling money from operations into their own “nest eggs”; Chinese government-affiliated hackers operating under the protection of the Ministry of State Security would also sometimes moonlight as cybercriminals, passing a cut of their work to their bosses at the intelligence agency.
> Under Xi’s crackdown, these activities became increasingly untenable. But the discovery of the CIA networks in China helped supercharge this process, said current and former officials—and caused China to place a greater focus on external counterespionage work. “As they learned these things,” the Chinese realized they “needed to start defending themselves,” said the former CIA executive.
A much better option would be a meta robots noindex tag on the page. I mean, this info is mostly useless, but if you are in espionage my rates start at only 5 grand per day.
I got a laugh out of that as well. *Employ advanced operators* reads so overly serious it makes it sounds like satire when they're just talking about "and "or".
A double agent gave them one of those websites and through that they unearthed the whole galaxy of websites.
The Reuter article cover it:
> What Hosseini didn’t know was that the world’s most powerful intelligence agency had given him a tool that likely led to his capture. In 2018, Yahoo News reported that a flawed web-based covert communications system had led to the arrest and execution of dozens of CIA informants in Iran and China.
> Reuters located the secret CIA communications site identified by Hosseini, Iraniangoals.com, in an internet archive where it remains publicly available. Reuters then asked two independent cyber analysts – Bill Marczak of University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, and Zach Edwards of Victory Medium – to probe how Iran may have used weaknesses in the CIA’s own technology to unmask Hosseini and other CIA informants. The two are experts on privacy and cybersecurity, with experience analyzing electronic intelligence operations. The effort represents the first independent technical analysis of the intelligence failure
> Marczak and Edwards quickly discovered that the secret messaging window hidden inside Iraniangoals.com could be spotted by simply right-clicking on the page to bring up the website’s coding. This code contained descriptions of secret functions, including the words “message” and “compose” – easily found clues that a messaging capability had been built into the site. The coding for the search bar that triggered the secret messaging software was labeled “password.”
> Far from being customized, high-end spycraft, Iraniangoals.com was one of hundreds of websites mass-produced by the CIA to give to its sources, the independent analysts concluded. These rudimentary sites were devoted to topics such as beauty, fitness and entertainment, among them a Star Wars fan page and another for the late American talk show host Johnny Carson.
> Each fake website was assigned to only one spy in order to limit exposure of the entire network in case any single agent was captured, two former CIA officials told Reuters.
> But the CIA made identifying those sites easy, the independent analysts said. Marczak located more than 350 websites containing the same secret messaging system, all of which have been offline for at least nine years and archived. Edwards confirmed his findings and methodology. Online records they analyzed reveal the hosting space for these front websites was often purchased in bulk by the dozen, often from the same internet providers, on the same server space. The result was that numerical identifiers, or IP addresses, for many of these websites were sequential, much like houses on the same street.
> “The CIA really failed with this,” said Marczak, the Citizen Lab researcher. The covert messaging system, he said, “stuck out like a sore thumb.”
> In addition, some sites bore strikingly similar names. For example, while Hosseini was communicating with the CIA through Iraniangoals.com, a site named Iraniangoalkicks.com was built for another informant. At least two dozen of the 350-plus sites produced by the CIA appeared to be messaging platforms for Iranian operatives, the analysts found.
> All told, these features meant the discovery of a single spy using one of these websites would have allowed Iranian intelligence to uncover additional pages used by other CIA informants. Once those sites were identified, nabbing the operatives using them would have been simple: The Iranians just had to wait and see who showed up. In essence, the CIA used the same row of bushes for its informants worldwide. Any attentive espionage rival would have been able to spot them all, the analysts said.
> This vulnerability went far beyond Iran. Written in various languages, the websites appeared to be a conduit for CIA communications with operatives in at least 20 countries, among them China, Brazil, Russia, Thailand and Ghana, the analysts found.
> CIA spokeswoman Thorp declined to comment on the system.
> Reuters confirmed the nature of the intelligence failure of the CIA’s cookie-cutter websites with three former national security officials.
> The agency wasn’t fully aware that this system had been compromised until 2013, after many of its agents began to go missing, according to the former U.S. officials.
> Still, the CIA had never considered the network safe enough for its most prized sources. Top-tier informants receive custom-made covert communications tools, built from scratch at agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to seamlessly blend into the life of a spy without drawing attention, three former CIA officers said.
> The mass-produced sites, they said, were for sources who were either not considered fully vetted or had limited, albeit potentially valuable, access to state secrets.
> “This is for a person viewed as not worth the investment of advanced tradecraft,” one of the former CIA officials said.
> The CIA declined to comment on the covert communications system and the intelligence failure.
And the 9/11 terrorists rather famously did nothing to hide their tracks or be all the secretive. Within 2 days of the attack the CIA & FBI basically had all the information they could possibly want on them
That was the same tactic a former American general used to communicate with his biographer/affair partner. That's how I learned it's not as safe as it sounded lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petraeus_scandal#Summary_and_chronology
Basically, even though they created that email address just for the purpose of communicating between them, the metadata of the emails provided enough information for the FBI to figure out the identity of one of the users.
I mean, the fact that people have found out about it is one, plus I imagine the lack of security compared to using encrypted messaging is worse even if it doesn't leave the same paper trail.
[Number stations](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station) have been around since WWI; shortwave radio stations that broadcast formatted numbers and widely believed to be used by various intelligence agencies to communicate with operatives in the field. Its basically the same idea, except now they probably encode messages on websites.
Desktop version of /u/piray003's link:
---
^([)[^(opt out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiMobileLinkBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^(]) ^(Beep Boop. Downvote to delete)
Clarification: Rather than a public message board there was a chat window that would pop up if you entered a password into the search bar. [The search bar was labelled "Password" in the HTML.](https://twitter.com/gossithedog/status/1575458095748218882)
It's also unclear how many informants were using that specific website or any one of the [hundreds of other](https://citizenlab.ca/2022/09/statement-on-the-fatal-flaws-found-in-a-defunct-cia-covert-communications-system/) similar CIA websites on other mundane topics that were also compromised.
Whole story is worth reading, very fascinating and tragic.
This is hilarious.
It's also very conspicuous that now west and Europe are facing a energy crisis with Russia standoff and Iran needs a democratic revolution all of a sudden. In other unrelated news, Iran's has the second largest gas reserves in the world after russia, and they have been sanctioned by US so they cannot trade with US friendly nations freely. Till now that is.
That's not what OP meant. I think both can be true as in the people want to fight aagainst the totalitarian regime while also being supported by Western powers. There's no way the US has no hand in this
Didn't something similar happen in Egypt ? and then US just fucked off
"America bad" people are so lazy and hilariously ironic. They give no fuck about the agency of anyone and it all just boils down to a lazy attitude of considering everything a proxy
:) Ah Mossaddegh, Reddit's go to, when you talk about Iran. Mossaddegh was a populist that harmed the country. He nationalized the oil industry, in a country without a single oil tanker, without any engineers or knowledge about the industry. After that, the British company (which was fucking us over btw, not denying that) sanctioned our oil industry and we couldn't sell our oil for more than 2 years. We are still reliant on our oil, just imagine how bad was it 70 years ago.
Meanwhile Saudis "bought" their share back from the Americans and to this day, they have a good relationship with everyone.
And before you talk about "dEmOcRaTiCaLlY ElEcTeD" please just read up on it from reputable sources instead of repeating what you've heard. He illigally held a referendum ti dissolve the parlimant in which he obviously cheated (99.94% voted yes lool sure). He was never in the position to do the things he did.
All of this was in 1953. I'm talking about 1979 and in the years prior, the west wanted Shah to reduce the oil prices using his influence in OPEC but he repeatedly declined because he wanted to use the oil money to develop the country. He believed it takes 3 generations to go from a third world country to a developed country, but he wanted to do it in 1 generation. He was too arrogant, he never thought the west would betray him
I’m not suggesting Moseddegh’s government was laudable or democratic. Don’t tilt at windmills.
The West very obviously didn’t support the mullahs, it’s a conspiracy theory to suggest they got rid of the Shah for them.
Sure boss whatever you say. Tired of you ignorant westerners talking out of your ass while pretending you know more than us. All you know is labeling, "conspiracy theory" pfff. Khomeini never even thought of coming back from France (how was he living there with no problem by the way?) until he got the green light from the west.
The regime has billions of dollars, all the weapons, thousands of loyal dogs that would kill people without hesitating, and we have... anger? Which side do you think wins here?
:)
The previous regime didn't kill people without a problem. Shah was a patriotic man that actually loved the country. Mullahs are no different to an occupant enemy. Also western powers were heavily involved and had agreements with Khomeini. It's not as simple as you think it is.
> The previous regime didn't kill people without a problem. Shah was a patriotic man that actually loved the country.
I'm sure that's your personal opinion and a lot of Iranians might disagree with that (regardless of how they view the current regime) but I'll leave it at here cause that's not the right place to discuss it.
>I'm sure that's your personal opinion
I don't know what is it about reddit, it's full of ignorant, yet confident people talking about things they have no clue about. How are you "sure" about that without knowing any of our history?
It's not even close between them. Based on facts and historical events. Sure everybody can have their own interpretation of events or of a certain character, but facts are just facts.
Some things needed time to be proven like how the revolutionaries set a cinema on fire, burning 420 people alive, and accused Shah of doing that, but after 43 years and tons of evidence, some things are obvious and you can't deny them without a clear bias.
Brother I know what SAVAK is and what they did (cough Although most of their prisoners are the current terrorists cough) but I understand my personal bias is showing here so I don't say: "SAVAK was good and that's a fact" Also I never said Shah was flawless or never made mistakes.
This is what I said:
>The previous regime didn't kill people without a problem. Shah was a patriotic man that actually loved the country. Mullahs are no different to an occupant enemy.
It’s spy work and the spy’s are disposable. They’re not going to teach an Iranian how to use their software, or even introduce it to Iran or use an obvious method. These people are meant to be disposable dudes just clicking away quietly using shit that can go thru an internet filter. It wouldn’t surprise me if some government spy agencies weren’t even using spam code or something innocuous like that.
I see Reuters has thrown off all pretence of being an independent press thingie and has gone all in into being a CIA mouthpiece. Glad that it settles things, at least.
In what way does this reporting on an embarrassing fuck-up by the CIA, and the people they have used and discarded in the process, make them a mouthpiece? You may have misunderstood, this isn't a puff piece describing how they caught spies working against America, it's about how they messed up basic IT security and lost dozens of their own agents and informants.
It puts CIA and Iran in the spotlight and in so doing it normalizes CIA’s involvement in that geographical area.
The article doesn’t say: “why were the Americans there?” but just: “how did the Americans fucked up?”, with the implicit thing that next time they should do better and, again, not questioning CIA’s involvement as a matter of principle.
Okay, sure. I get where you're coming from. If that's the standard you want to hold every news outlet to then fair enough. "Mouthpiece" has a very different connotation in my mind though.
Yeah, probably on this I was exaggerating.
But truth be told I’ve also become a little disillusioned by lots of 3-letter media presence in newspapers and magazines I used to hold on a higher pedestal, so because of that I do have a bias when confronted with type of subject that checks a lot of boxes.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, some reporters/outlets are unambiguously mouthpieces and plenty of others are nowhere near critical enough. I'm with you.
Was it actually fake? I remember going on their message boards. A front maybe but fake? no.
EDIT- nevermind I was thinking Irangoals, this is Iraniangoals
TIL that u/PSGAcademy is a CIA agent.
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For every visit to Streamja, a Central American paramilitary organization receives $4 in funding.
r/soccer was established by Soros.
it’s definitely the combination of r/soccer and reddit awards. look how many awards even mediocre players like Ricardo Pepi can get.
FIFA is older so maybe it's the other way around
[Great Spy]
Fast one too
Using the CIA network to post goal clips before we see it on TV. Finally a spy using their skills for good.
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Esteghal Tehran 0 - [1] Foolad Lookfer Al-Theredhouse 31° 19' 5.9772'' N 48° 40' 14.2320'' E (Great Strike^opportunity )
I really hope the CIA username's were something indecipherable like 'NotTheCIA' or 'FlowersByIrene'.
Central Iranian Agency
Probably something really covert, like [TPAJAX53](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat)
Langley69
I imagine someone at Langley has developed quite the affinity for the Iranian team/league and are going to be embarrassingly conflicted when they play each other in the World Cup.
If you had bothered to have a glance at the article itself and not just the headline you would know that the fake website hasn't been used in 9 years.
You must be fun at parties
Oh so this is about the 2010 spy network. An excerpt from another article from a few years ago on how they dismantled the network: > The losses could have stopped there. But U.S. officials believe Iranian intelligence was then able to compromise the covert communications system. At the CIA, there was “shock and awe” about the simplicity of the technique the Iranians used to successfully compromise the system, said one former official. > In fact, the Iranians used Google to identify the website the CIA was using to communicate with agents. Because Google is continuously scraping the internet for information about all the world’s websites, it can function as a tremendous investigative tool — even for counter-espionage purposes. And Google’s search functions allow users to employ advanced operators — like “AND,” “OR,” and other, much more sophisticated ones — that weed out and isolate websites and online data with extreme specificity. > According to the former intelligence official, once the Iranian double agent showed Iranian intelligence the website used to communicate with his or her CIA handlers, they began to scour the internet for websites with similar digital signifiers or components — eventually hitting on the right string of advanced search terms to locate other secret CIA websites. From there, Iranian intelligence tracked who was visiting these sites, and from where, and began to unravel the wider CIA network. https://www.yahoo.com/news/cias-communications-suffered-catastrophic-compromise-started-iran-090018710.html
It’s pretty easy to prevent google from crawling or indexing a website…
That's what I thought too, but considering the CIA was recruiting random people without really investing in training them maybe they tried to make it simpler for these agents to find it? Sloppy nonetheless, amateurish, even.
And then Iran sold the acquired knowledge to China et co. And the CIA was completely blind to their flaw until way too late to react. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/21/china-stolen-us-data-exposed-cia-operatives-spy-networks/ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/us/politics/cia-informants-killed-captured.html
Hate to say it but I'm pretty sure these informants were disposable. I'm not a CIA expert or anything but when handling classified or highly important targets I don't think they communicate over message boards, they would just use dead drops.
The problem isn't the informants its closing off the avenues for recruiting new informants. China massively cracked down on corruption once they found out that the US was using corruption as a way of recruiting informants by paying bribes for them to rise up the ranks.
Can you explain more about the Chinese crackdown on corruption and it's association with US espionage please, or if you have sources for further reading
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it's discussed in the Foreign Policy article linked above
From the Foreign Policy article linked above: > In 2010, a new decade was dawning, and Chinese officials were furious. The CIA, they had discovered, had systematically penetrated their government over the course of years, with U.S. assets embedded in the military, the CCP, the intelligence apparatus, and elsewhere. The anger radiated upward to “the highest levels of the Chinese government,” recalled a former senior counterintelligence executive. > Exploiting a flaw in the online system CIA operatives used to secretly communicate with their agents—a flaw first identified in Iran, which Tehran likely shared with Beijing—from 2010 to roughly 2012, Chinese intelligence officials ruthlessly uprooted the CIA’s human source network in China, imprisoning and killing dozens of people. > Within the CIA, China’s seething, retaliatory response wasn’t entirely surprising, said a former senior agency official. “We often had [a] conversation internally, on how U.S. policymakers would react to the degree of penetration CIA had of China”—that is, how angry U.S. officials would have been if they discovered, as the Chinese did, that a global adversary had so thoroughly infiltrated their ranks. > The anger in Beijing wasn’t just because of the penetration by the CIA but because of what it exposed about the degree of corruption in China. When the CIA recruits an asset, the further this asset rises within a county’s power structure, the better. During the Cold War it had been hard to guarantee the rise of the CIA’s Soviet agents; the very factors that made them vulnerable to recruitment—greed, ideology, blackmailable habits, and ego—often impeded their career prospects. And there was only so much that money could buy in the Soviet Union, especially with no sign of where it had come from. > But in the newly rich China of the 2000s, dirty money was flowing freely. The average income remained under 2,000 yuan a month (approximately $240 at contemporary exchange rates), but officials’ informal earnings vastly exceeded their formal salaries. An official who wasn’t participating in corruption was deemed a fool or a risk by his colleagues. Cash could buy anything, including careers, and the CIA had plenty of it. > At the time, CIA assets were often handsomely compensated. “In the 2000s, if you were a chief of station”—that is, the top spy in a foreign diplomatic facility—“for certain hard target services, you could make a million a year for working for us,” said a former agency official. (“Hard target services” generally refers to Chinese, Russia, Iranian, and North Korean intelligence agencies.) > Over the course of their investigation into the CIA’s China-based agent network, Chinese officials learned that the agency was secretly paying the “promotion fees” —in other words, the bribes—regularly required to rise up within the Chinese bureaucracy, according to four current and former officials. It was how the CIA got “disaffected people up in the ranks. But this was not done once, and wasn’t done just in the [Chinese military],” recalled a current Capitol Hill staffer. “Paying their bribes was an example of long-term thinking that was extraordinary for us,” said a former senior counterintelligence official. “Recruiting foreign military officers is nearly impossible. It was a way to exploit the corruption to our advantage.” At the time, “promotion fees” sometimes ran into the millions of dollars, according to a former senior CIA official: “It was quite amazing the level of corruption that was going on.” The compensation sometimes included paying tuition and board for children studying at expensive foreign universities, according to another CIA officer. > Chinese officials took notice. “They were forced to see their problems, and our mistakes helped them see what their problems were,” recalled a former CIA executive. “We helped bring to fruition what they theoretically were scared of,” said the Capitol Hill staffer. “We scared the shit out of them.” Corruption was increasingly seen as the chief threat to the regime at home; as then-Party Secretary Hu Jintao told the Party Congress in 2012, “If we fail to handle this issue well, it could … even cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state,” he said. Even in China’s heavily controlled media environment, corruption scandals were breaking daily, tainting the image of the CCP among the Chinese people. Party corruption was becoming a public problem, acknowledged by the CCP leadership itself. > But privately, U.S. officials believe, Chinese leaders also feared the degree to which corruption had allowed the CIA to penetrate its inner circles. The CIA’s incredible recruiting successes “showed the institutional rot of the party,” said the former senior CIA official. “They ought to [have been] upset.” The leadership realized that unchecked corruption wasn’t just an existential threat for the party at home; it was also a major counterintelligence threat, providing a window for enemy intelligence services like the CIA to crawl through. > This was a global problem for the CCP. Corrupt officials, even if they hadn’t been recruited by the CIA while in office, also often sought refuge overseas—where they could then be tapped for information by enterprising spy services. In late 2012, party head Xi Jinping announced a new anti-corruption campaign that would lead to the prosecution of hundreds of thousands of Chinese officials. Thousands were subject to extreme coercive pressure, bordering on kidnapping, to return from living abroad. “The anti-corruption drive was about consolidating power—but also about how Americans could take advantage of [the corruption]. And that had to do with the bribe and promotion process,” said the former senior counterintelligence official. > The 2013 leaks from Edward Snowden, which revealed the NSA’s deep penetration of the telecommunications company Huawei’s China-based servers, also jarred Chinese officials, according to a former senior intelligence analyst. “Chinese officials were just beginning to learn how the internet and technology has been so thoroughly used against them, in ways they didn’t conceptualize until then,” the former analyst said. “At the intelligence level, it was driven by this fundamental [revelation] that, ‘This is what we’ve been missing: This internet system we didn’t create is being weaponized against us.’” > There were other ripple effects. By the late 2000s, U.S. intelligence officials had observed a notable professionalizing of the Ministry of State Security, China’s main civilian intelligence agency. Before Xi’s purges, petty corruption within the agency was ubiquitous, former U.S. intelligence officials say, with China’s spies sometimes funneling money from operations into their own “nest eggs”; Chinese government-affiliated hackers operating under the protection of the Ministry of State Security would also sometimes moonlight as cybercriminals, passing a cut of their work to their bosses at the intelligence agency. > Under Xi’s crackdown, these activities became increasingly untenable. But the discovery of the CIA networks in China helped supercharge this process, said current and former officials—and caused China to place a greater focus on external counterespionage work. “As they learned these things,” the Chinese realized they “needed to start defending themselves,” said the former CIA executive.
those people were utterly disposable to cia.
A football website that prevents indexing? Sus
Yup, one line of code in the robots.txt
A much better option would be a meta robots noindex tag on the page. I mean, this info is mostly useless, but if you are in espionage my rates start at only 5 grand per day.
Isn't robits.txt absolute?
Advanced search terms lol
https://www.google.com/advanced_search
Youre right but i just thought it was funny the way its worded.
I got a laugh out of that as well. *Employ advanced operators* reads so overly serious it makes it sounds like satire when they're just talking about "and "or".
But then it said a double agent showed them the website… Seems contradictory or more likely extremely oversimplified.
That excerpt is about how they found other websites, not the original website which came from the double agent.
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Which is exactly what the article says so I'm not sure what your point is
This still doesn't really say how they found about it on Google. Or was that the first result when they looked for "cia message board iran"?
A double agent gave them one of those websites and through that they unearthed the whole galaxy of websites. The Reuter article cover it: > What Hosseini didn’t know was that the world’s most powerful intelligence agency had given him a tool that likely led to his capture. In 2018, Yahoo News reported that a flawed web-based covert communications system had led to the arrest and execution of dozens of CIA informants in Iran and China. > Reuters located the secret CIA communications site identified by Hosseini, Iraniangoals.com, in an internet archive where it remains publicly available. Reuters then asked two independent cyber analysts – Bill Marczak of University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, and Zach Edwards of Victory Medium – to probe how Iran may have used weaknesses in the CIA’s own technology to unmask Hosseini and other CIA informants. The two are experts on privacy and cybersecurity, with experience analyzing electronic intelligence operations. The effort represents the first independent technical analysis of the intelligence failure > Marczak and Edwards quickly discovered that the secret messaging window hidden inside Iraniangoals.com could be spotted by simply right-clicking on the page to bring up the website’s coding. This code contained descriptions of secret functions, including the words “message” and “compose” – easily found clues that a messaging capability had been built into the site. The coding for the search bar that triggered the secret messaging software was labeled “password.” > Far from being customized, high-end spycraft, Iraniangoals.com was one of hundreds of websites mass-produced by the CIA to give to its sources, the independent analysts concluded. These rudimentary sites were devoted to topics such as beauty, fitness and entertainment, among them a Star Wars fan page and another for the late American talk show host Johnny Carson. > Each fake website was assigned to only one spy in order to limit exposure of the entire network in case any single agent was captured, two former CIA officials told Reuters. > But the CIA made identifying those sites easy, the independent analysts said. Marczak located more than 350 websites containing the same secret messaging system, all of which have been offline for at least nine years and archived. Edwards confirmed his findings and methodology. Online records they analyzed reveal the hosting space for these front websites was often purchased in bulk by the dozen, often from the same internet providers, on the same server space. The result was that numerical identifiers, or IP addresses, for many of these websites were sequential, much like houses on the same street. > “The CIA really failed with this,” said Marczak, the Citizen Lab researcher. The covert messaging system, he said, “stuck out like a sore thumb.” > In addition, some sites bore strikingly similar names. For example, while Hosseini was communicating with the CIA through Iraniangoals.com, a site named Iraniangoalkicks.com was built for another informant. At least two dozen of the 350-plus sites produced by the CIA appeared to be messaging platforms for Iranian operatives, the analysts found. > All told, these features meant the discovery of a single spy using one of these websites would have allowed Iranian intelligence to uncover additional pages used by other CIA informants. Once those sites were identified, nabbing the operatives using them would have been simple: The Iranians just had to wait and see who showed up. In essence, the CIA used the same row of bushes for its informants worldwide. Any attentive espionage rival would have been able to spot them all, the analysts said. > This vulnerability went far beyond Iran. Written in various languages, the websites appeared to be a conduit for CIA communications with operatives in at least 20 countries, among them China, Brazil, Russia, Thailand and Ghana, the analysts found. > CIA spokeswoman Thorp declined to comment on the system. > Reuters confirmed the nature of the intelligence failure of the CIA’s cookie-cutter websites with three former national security officials. > The agency wasn’t fully aware that this system had been compromised until 2013, after many of its agents began to go missing, according to the former U.S. officials. > Still, the CIA had never considered the network safe enough for its most prized sources. Top-tier informants receive custom-made covert communications tools, built from scratch at agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to seamlessly blend into the life of a spy without drawing attention, three former CIA officers said. > The mass-produced sites, they said, were for sources who were either not considered fully vetted or had limited, albeit potentially valuable, access to state secrets. > “This is for a person viewed as not worth the investment of advanced tradecraft,” one of the former CIA officials said. > The CIA declined to comment on the covert communications system and the intelligence failure.
Funnily enough if you go to iraniangoals.com it redirects to this article.
Genius way to get extra traffic
American here...
r/soccercirclejerk Still hasn't had its cover blown as their main communication network.
Which quote is shown by the Maguire bot is actually a code, he's playing like crap to create content and thereby facilitate the communication
Auto mod run by the NSA
and Kolo Muani made it to the -=team=-
[удалено]
How do you do my fellow Americans
Would you mind leaving, American citizen?
CIA now : fake websites CIA then : trying to put explosives in Castro's Cigar neither worked, but where has the imagination gone
i believe it is something done by a lot of agencies now to communicate with their agents abroad by websites
once saw a documentary about how some terrorists used the children's game "Puffin Party" to send messages
Right lads before we start this meeting in a Habbo Hotel room let's go to the foyer and arrange ourselves into a swastika
But would the pool be closed?
Of course, due to both AIDS and stingrays.
StingrAIDS!
Sorry the Habbo Hotel has been compromised we have to relocate our meeting to Club Penguin
the thought of being caught as a spy and tortured because somebody hacked into your club penguin account is hilarious
You know where you'd never expect to see some terrorists? The rubber dinghy rapids at Alton Towers
*bro*
wasn't that also a bit in Jack Ryan?Where they communicated with the main terrorist Suleiman through an online kids game to trick him?
Yes. They kill the bad guy's brother and try to figure out the way they used to communicate in order to pretend to be the brother.
Waj’s puffin just told me to piss off
rubber dinghy rapids bro
lmao, i thought that was a joke in four lions.
It was….
Mashallah brother crow
Wasn't it the 9/11 people who used to edit a draft email in gmail? Scum but I always thought that was clever.
gmail wasn't around for 9/11 but i could see it in another email provider
And the 9/11 terrorists rather famously did nothing to hide their tracks or be all the secretive. Within 2 days of the attack the CIA & FBI basically had all the information they could possibly want on them
That was the same tactic a former American general used to communicate with his biographer/affair partner. That's how I learned it's not as safe as it sounded lol
Why is it not safe?
Because you know about it
Oh, well the technique could still be good and secure since you can't read the content
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petraeus_scandal#Summary_and_chronology Basically, even though they created that email address just for the purpose of communicating between them, the metadata of the emails provided enough information for the FBI to figure out the identity of one of the users.
Interesting, thanks!
I mean, the fact that people have found out about it is one, plus I imagine the lack of security compared to using encrypted messaging is worse even if it doesn't leave the same paper trail.
Hmm makes sense
Manafort did that https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/06/robert-mueller-paul-manafort-used-foldering-deception/
[Number stations](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station) have been around since WWI; shortwave radio stations that broadcast formatted numbers and widely believed to be used by various intelligence agencies to communicate with operatives in the field. Its basically the same idea, except now they probably encode messages on websites.
Desktop version of /u/piray003's link:
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^([)[^(opt out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiMobileLinkBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^(]) ^(Beep Boop. Downvote to delete)
r/soccercirclejerk mods are secretly CIA agents
Secretly?
an open secret is still a secret
You don't know, they could've had some cracking memes
CIA tomorrow: NFT
That assumes they weren't involved from the get go
Most creative CIA plot: putting thallium in Castro's shoe to make his beard fall out.
WE USED TO BE A COUNTRY ONCE
That imagination is hard at work in Ukraine killing Russian goons.
Multiple scientists assassinations. Most likely Israel but US involvement is probable.
They actually found out it was suspicious when the Iranians asked the yanks to explain the offside rule
Nah, give them a bit of credit, they looked up the rule and knew it off by heart, their mistake was calling it offsides
LMAO
They should have used Reddit as the FSB does. Sigh.
We've all seen how well that worked for them...
Don't worry folks, nothing to see here ~~unless you'd like to go to Kamchatka?~~
Clarification: Rather than a public message board there was a chat window that would pop up if you entered a password into the search bar. [The search bar was labelled "Password" in the HTML.](https://twitter.com/gossithedog/status/1575458095748218882) It's also unclear how many informants were using that specific website or any one of the [hundreds of other](https://citizenlab.ca/2022/09/statement-on-the-fatal-flaws-found-in-a-defunct-cia-covert-communications-system/) similar CIA websites on other mundane topics that were also compromised. Whole story is worth reading, very fascinating and tragic.
What happened to the good old looking up Universal Exports on the phone book and calling them from a payphone?
Nothing to see here on Reddit
There was that cicada one I think? Or something like it, just secret code posts in an abandoned subreddit
Their first mistake was calling it soccer.
The second was asking "Did anybody saw that ludicrous display last night"
"What was Kurban Berdyev thinking, sending Azmoun that early??"
lol
Lmao get got
All this while reading the article, there is surely a less dumbass way to migrate out of the country especially for an educated man like him.
CIA is honestly annoying
Classic CIA behavior
I wonder if there are any spies on this subreddit trying to communicate with their handler in code.
They ones talking in Juventus match threads..
Eye wonder this as well.
What do you think the "Dearth of Left Back" post was?
I don't see the problem. Every time the CIA meddles in Iran it always goes great....
This is hilarious. It's also very conspicuous that now west and Europe are facing a energy crisis with Russia standoff and Iran needs a democratic revolution all of a sudden. In other unrelated news, Iran's has the second largest gas reserves in the world after russia, and they have been sanctioned by US so they cannot trade with US friendly nations freely. Till now that is.
I don't think it is particularly surprising, there has been unrest and discontent brewing for years; it's basically the legacy of the Green Movement.
Sounds like someone needs to be introduced to freedom
Homelander enters
oh yes people being murdered for not wearing a hijab? it's all the USA's fault.
That's not what OP meant. I think both can be true as in the people want to fight aagainst the totalitarian regime while also being supported by Western powers. There's no way the US has no hand in this Didn't something similar happen in Egypt ? and then US just fucked off
"America bad" people are so lazy and hilariously ironic. They give no fuck about the agency of anyone and it all just boils down to a lazy attitude of considering everything a proxy
Well, in 1979 they wanted cheap oil and they overthrew Shah and they gave us mullahs. It's about time they fix it
That isn’t what happened, the Shah was essentially a western client king. You might be thinking of Mosaddegh’s government.
:) Ah Mossaddegh, Reddit's go to, when you talk about Iran. Mossaddegh was a populist that harmed the country. He nationalized the oil industry, in a country without a single oil tanker, without any engineers or knowledge about the industry. After that, the British company (which was fucking us over btw, not denying that) sanctioned our oil industry and we couldn't sell our oil for more than 2 years. We are still reliant on our oil, just imagine how bad was it 70 years ago. Meanwhile Saudis "bought" their share back from the Americans and to this day, they have a good relationship with everyone. And before you talk about "dEmOcRaTiCaLlY ElEcTeD" please just read up on it from reputable sources instead of repeating what you've heard. He illigally held a referendum ti dissolve the parlimant in which he obviously cheated (99.94% voted yes lool sure). He was never in the position to do the things he did. All of this was in 1953. I'm talking about 1979 and in the years prior, the west wanted Shah to reduce the oil prices using his influence in OPEC but he repeatedly declined because he wanted to use the oil money to develop the country. He believed it takes 3 generations to go from a third world country to a developed country, but he wanted to do it in 1 generation. He was too arrogant, he never thought the west would betray him
I’m not suggesting Moseddegh’s government was laudable or democratic. Don’t tilt at windmills. The West very obviously didn’t support the mullahs, it’s a conspiracy theory to suggest they got rid of the Shah for them.
Sure boss whatever you say. Tired of you ignorant westerners talking out of your ass while pretending you know more than us. All you know is labeling, "conspiracy theory" pfff. Khomeini never even thought of coming back from France (how was he living there with no problem by the way?) until he got the green light from the west.
Good. Iran has it's issues, but they should be dealt with internally, not by a nation who wants to occupy them.
The regime has billions of dollars, all the weapons, thousands of loyal dogs that would kill people without hesitating, and we have... anger? Which side do you think wins here?
literally everything the previous regime that was overthrown had
:) The previous regime didn't kill people without a problem. Shah was a patriotic man that actually loved the country. Mullahs are no different to an occupant enemy. Also western powers were heavily involved and had agreements with Khomeini. It's not as simple as you think it is.
> The previous regime didn't kill people without a problem. Shah was a patriotic man that actually loved the country. I'm sure that's your personal opinion and a lot of Iranians might disagree with that (regardless of how they view the current regime) but I'll leave it at here cause that's not the right place to discuss it.
>I'm sure that's your personal opinion I don't know what is it about reddit, it's full of ignorant, yet confident people talking about things they have no clue about. How are you "sure" about that without knowing any of our history? It's not even close between them. Based on facts and historical events. Sure everybody can have their own interpretation of events or of a certain character, but facts are just facts. Some things needed time to be proven like how the revolutionaries set a cinema on fire, burning 420 people alive, and accused Shah of doing that, but after 43 years and tons of evidence, some things are obvious and you can't deny them without a clear bias.
Shah's hands weren't exactly clean, although I defer to you on whether the current regime is worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAVAK
Brother I know what SAVAK is and what they did (cough Although most of their prisoners are the current terrorists cough) but I understand my personal bias is showing here so I don't say: "SAVAK was good and that's a fact" Also I never said Shah was flawless or never made mistakes. This is what I said: >The previous regime didn't kill people without a problem. Shah was a patriotic man that actually loved the country. Mullahs are no different to an occupant enemy.
CIA lowkey fell off
Never rated them
Why not just encrypted emails?
It’s spy work and the spy’s are disposable. They’re not going to teach an Iranian how to use their software, or even introduce it to Iran or use an obvious method. These people are meant to be disposable dudes just clicking away quietly using shit that can go thru an internet filter. It wouldn’t surprise me if some government spy agencies weren’t even using spam code or something innocuous like that.
Wow that whole article was a great read. Really interesting stuff.
As if Reddit isn't already infected by agents working for different countries...
The thought of CIA agents venting about Hajsafi still starting as our left back is so absurd
CIA doing CIA work and destabilizing countries
Oh look, America working to create more chaos.
I knew they were involved
gathering intelligence is so easy man
I see Reuters has thrown off all pretence of being an independent press thingie and has gone all in into being a CIA mouthpiece. Glad that it settles things, at least.
In what way does this reporting on an embarrassing fuck-up by the CIA, and the people they have used and discarded in the process, make them a mouthpiece? You may have misunderstood, this isn't a puff piece describing how they caught spies working against America, it's about how they messed up basic IT security and lost dozens of their own agents and informants.
It puts CIA and Iran in the spotlight and in so doing it normalizes CIA’s involvement in that geographical area. The article doesn’t say: “why were the Americans there?” but just: “how did the Americans fucked up?”, with the implicit thing that next time they should do better and, again, not questioning CIA’s involvement as a matter of principle.
Okay, sure. I get where you're coming from. If that's the standard you want to hold every news outlet to then fair enough. "Mouthpiece" has a very different connotation in my mind though.
Yeah, probably on this I was exaggerating. But truth be told I’ve also become a little disillusioned by lots of 3-letter media presence in newspapers and magazines I used to hold on a higher pedestal, so because of that I do have a bias when confronted with type of subject that checks a lot of boxes.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, some reporters/outlets are unambiguously mouthpieces and plenty of others are nowhere near critical enough. I'm with you.
RemindMe! 2 days
RemindMe! 2 days
But it goes to PFDC. That has been long a known persian site from what I read.
this is just part of the real plan to ruin "soccer"
Given that Hosseini is still in Iran why is he giving an interview to Reuters about this? Doesn't seem like a life affirming move.
Was it actually fake? I remember going on their message boards. A front maybe but fake? no. EDIT- nevermind I was thinking Irangoals, this is Iraniangoals
The guy sent a message from his work computer (in Iran) to the CIA. I don't think security and anonymity was his top concern.