I got several minutes of scrolling in and still didn’t see anything resembling a match to the headline. All I got was a thick layer of conspiracy theorism and paranoia.
What they’re saying might be true, but they’re not communicating it very well at all.
I skimmed through most of it, it’s a huge and badly organized info dump, but it seems legit, most of the research was done through the internet archive and everything it listed is verifiable and reproducible, although as far as I can tell the link to the CIA is pretty weak and relies on a single news story with a single example alleged “CIA site” that allegedly leaked out of , it’s not really that hard to believe that they would have such sites. Almost certainly all spy agencies do. It’s totally plausible steganography, like the numbers stations on radio, or botnet controllers quietly directing their army of bots through normal-seeming posts on normal-seeming accounts on social media. Hiding operational information in plain sight allows a useful hidden communication method that doesn’t raise any obvious alarm even if it is noticed to be a bit strange or dumb. It blends in perfectly with all the other strange and dumb content on the Internet.
Obviously all the sites are gone now and there’s nothing of any particular intelligence value there but the appearance and contents of the sites are still available on the archive, and of course there are at least hundreds of them, in various languages, on various topics, with a variety of different technologies in use, but the similarities also seem pretty clear. It’s not much of a conspiracy this is fairly basic stuff although of course we don’t have rock solid proof I don’t think that would really make it any more interesting. If the CIA did come out and say “yep, those were our sites” would it actually be any more interesting? would it be less interesting? or would it be the same interesting? I think it would be the same interesting. But that’s just, like, my opinion.
I have to ask: what is this website, and how credible is it?
Here’s a 404media article discussing it:
https://www.404media.co/the-cia-secretly-ran-a-star-wars-fan-site/
Thanks, that and the linked Yahoo article were much more readable.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250526132003/https://www.yahoo.com/news/cias-communications-suffered-catastrophic-compromise-started-iran-090018710.html?ref=404media.co
https://web.archive.org/web/20250526131856/https://www.404media.co/the-cia-secretly-ran-a-star-wars-fan-site/
I got several minutes of scrolling in and still didn’t see anything resembling a match to the headline. All I got was a thick layer of conspiracy theorism and paranoia.
What they’re saying might be true, but they’re not communicating it very well at all.
I skimmed through most of it, it’s a huge and badly organized info dump, but it seems legit, most of the research was done through the internet archive and everything it listed is verifiable and reproducible, although as far as I can tell the link to the CIA is pretty weak and relies on a single news story with a single example alleged “CIA site” that allegedly leaked out of , it’s not really that hard to believe that they would have such sites. Almost certainly all spy agencies do. It’s totally plausible steganography, like the numbers stations on radio, or botnet controllers quietly directing their army of bots through normal-seeming posts on normal-seeming accounts on social media. Hiding operational information in plain sight allows a useful hidden communication method that doesn’t raise any obvious alarm even if it is noticed to be a bit strange or dumb. It blends in perfectly with all the other strange and dumb content on the Internet.
Obviously all the sites are gone now and there’s nothing of any particular intelligence value there but the appearance and contents of the sites are still available on the archive, and of course there are at least hundreds of them, in various languages, on various topics, with a variety of different technologies in use, but the similarities also seem pretty clear. It’s not much of a conspiracy this is fairly basic stuff although of course we don’t have rock solid proof I don’t think that would really make it any more interesting. If the CIA did come out and say “yep, those were our sites” would it actually be any more interesting? would it be less interesting? or would it be the same interesting? I think it would be the same interesting. But that’s just, like, my opinion.
It starts a few screenshots down from here https://ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites#overview-of-ciro-santilli-s-investigation