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Comment by Sanzig | Hacker News Reader

On Gen Z CIA recruits having pre-existing social media presences:

> They’re shrewd enough either to be circumspect users of social media from the start or to review (and delete) old problematic tweets and posts.

Is this particularly effective, though? Most social media sites have been scraped to hell and back - surely there's archives of the old problematic stuff.

It must be tough working in counterintelligence these days - social media has greatly increased the attack surface for blackmail.

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That. And the fact that one of the best ways to know what's considered of interest or sensitive is to see what's been censored or redacted.

I wonder when will Hollywood make a movie where they hire someone explicitly not social media just because that's the most perfect cover for an undercover position. An then they make a fake social media presence to cover the un-tracks.

You can’t backdate the fake stories in the snapshots of social medias websites that foreign agencies have taken.

Between that and face recognition I just can’t see how you can create a fake identity these days.

When the social media companies get told to make a face account.

A fake identity can be taken from a real person's history.

If you control the search engines you can just make it hard to find.

And see who’s looking for it.

For a private OSINT investigator, sure. But a state-level actor (ie: the sort of groups that the CIA is supposed to butts heads with) could easily maintain their own mirrors.

Hell, if you have a few dozen terabytes of disk space you can download the entire plaintext archive of Reddit comments from Pushshift, regardless of if they've been deleted or not. And that's something a private citizen can do spending a couple grand on hardware. Do we really think that the Chinese Ministry of State Security or Russian GRU aren't keeping archives of Twitter and public Facebook posts for use as blackmail material down the line?

Depends on the social network I'd guess. The Facebook networks are pretty good at keeping full scrapes from occurring for their own financial reasons. Reddit and Twitter are probably game over though. GenZ is probably more likely to be in the commercially balkanized networks like Insta and SnapChat that are next to impossible to fully scrape at scale.

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