There is no foolproof way to communicate - especially with expediency and urgency - with sources in hostile environments like Iran and China, noted the former officials. The risks posed by the system appeared to have been overlooked in part because it was easy to use, said the former intelligence officials. “Everyone was using it far beyond its intention,” said another former official. “The issue was that it was working well for too long, with too many people. “It was never meant to be used long term for people to talk to sources,” said one former official. officials said the internet-based platform, which was first used in war zones in the Middle East, was not built to withstand the sophisticated counterintelligence efforts of a state actor like China or Iran. The mole hunt wasn’t hard, in large part, because the communications system the CIA was using to communicate with agents was flawed. Angered about the breach, the Iranians went on a mole hunt, looking for foreign spies, said one former senior intelligence official. One of the largest intelligence failures of the past decade started in Iran in 2009, when the Obama administration announced the discovery of a secret Iranian underground enrichment facility - part of Iran’s headlong drive for nuclear weapons. “Dozens of people around the world were killed because of this.” “We’re still dealing with the fallout,” said one former national security official. The government’s inability to address the communication system’s insecurities until after sources were rolled up in China was disastrous. More than just a question of a single failure, the fiasco illustrates a breakdown that was never properly addressed. “When these types of compromises happen, it’s so dark and bad,” said one former official. In a world where dependence on advanced technology may be a necessary evil for modern espionage, particularly in hostile regions where American officials can’t operate freely, such technical failures are an ever present danger and will only become more acute with time. The disaster ensnared every corner of the national security bureaucracy - from multiple intelligence agencies, congressional intelligence committees and independent contractors to internal government watchdogs - forcing a slow-moving, complex government machine to grapple with the deadly dangers of emerging technologies. The previously unreported global problem originated in Iran and spiderwebbed to other countries, and was left unrepaired - despite warnings about what was happening - until more than two dozen sources died in China in 20 as a result, according to 11 former intelligence and national security officials. intelligence community experienced crippling intelligence failures related to the secret internet-based communications system, a key means for remote messaging between CIA officers and their sources on the ground worldwide. The notion that CIA would not work as hard as possible to safeguard them is false.From around 2009 to 2013, the U.S. Our hope is that this research and our limited disclosure process will lead to accountability for this reckless behavior.”ĬIA spokesperson Tammy Kupperman Thorp said: “CIA takes its obligations to protect the people who work with us extremely seriously and we know that many of them do so bravely, at great personal risk. The websites were active between 20 and were probably not used by the CIA recently, but Citizen Lab said a subset of the websites were sill linked to active intelligence employees or assets, including a foreign contractor and a current state department employee.Ĭitizen Lab added: “The reckless construction of this infrastructure by the CIA reportedly led directly to the identification and execution of assets, and undoubtedly risked the lives of countless other individuals. “Knowing only one website, it is likely that while the websites were online, a motivated amateur sleuth could have mapped out the CIA network and attributed it to the US government,” Citizen Lab said in a statement. It found that the websites purported to be concerned with news, weather, healthcare and other legitimate websites. Using just a single website and publicly available material, Citizen Lab said it identified a network of 885 websites that it attributed “with high confidence” as having been used by the CIA. But its limited findings raise serious doubts about the intelligence agency’s handling of safety measures. The group said it was not publishing a full detailed technical report of its findings to avoid putting CIA assets or employees at risk.
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