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from the only-the-shadow-knows...-and-has-head-up-its-ass dept.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used a quick and dirty web-based system to communicate with its agents around the world. Easy-to-use but not sophisticated. Iran and China used this system to find U.S. spies and convert or kill many agents, including entire national spy networks, starting around 2008.
Once you recognized the system, counter-spies could simply use Google to find the CIA's communication sites. They could then use standard traffic analysis to find out who visited the sites, identifying the spy networks.
Iran found spies using the system, converted some to double agents, while killing dozens of others. Iran may have passed the info to China, who wiped out the CIA network there, turning and killing 30+ agents. Iran then went spy hunting across the Middle East, too.
The absolute kicker: a CIA tech contractor identified the problem, that the network was compromised and spies were disappearing due to it, and reported it up the chain in 2008. He was ignored, punished and fired. Part of the reason we know this all happened is because he filed a federal whistleblower protection lawsuit.
So many/most of these U.S. agents would not be dead if CIA management AND the CIA inspector general had listened and acted on the report of a technical/security problem. Instead they denied they had a problem, burying their heads and their agents in the sand. Not only is the CIA riddled with terrible torture monkeys, but also deadly, incompetent, and inept management.
Article: The CIA's communications suffered a catastrophic compromise. It started in Iran.
Previously: CIA Informants Imprisoned and Killed in China From 2010 to 2012
Ex-CIA Officer Arrested, Suspected of Compromising Chinese Informants
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday November 05 2018, @10:05PM
Not quite as simple as you make it out to be.
First, numbers stations do still exist. Many of them are now thought to only be backups for other systems, but they are still out there and still transmitting.
There are a couple of problems with numbers stations. The most obvious: They are one-way traffic. If you have someone out there as an agent they are there because there is something they are reporting back. That traffic can also be OTP encoded, but must be transmitted differently because obviously the sender can't just fire up a transmitter.
The second problem: Shortwave radios were common. Every major country in the world used to have an at-least daily broadcast of information over shortwave. Now, however? Here's [radioworld.com] an interesting article about the state of shortwave. Sure, VOA and BBC still exist in some select areas. Radio Havana Cuba still transmits nightly the last time I checked a few months ago. But these days being a shortwave listener marks you as distinct and different. There are certainly areas of the world where having a computer might also mark you. But a lot less so than shortwave these days.
One problem with an OTP solution is that the pads must still be distributed. There must still be a way, using tradecraft, to occasionally get the decoding materials into the hands of the receiver. Your pad can only last for the number of messages it was set up for. And those pads have to be kept somewhere. You can note that computers [wikipedia.org] didn't help the Wasp Network much.... but neither would have a code book for decipherment - by the time they got to physical searches of those people they already had a clue and likely would have found hardcopy code books had they existed. And... shortwave didn't help them, either, instead giving the smoking gun evidence needed to convict them.
Finally, remember that their failures often do get exposed. But the successes? Not so much. Keep in mind that the CIA is certainly still in contact with sources today. Using shortwave? I doubt it. Maybe they learned and upped their game too, no?
This sig for rent.