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Comment by possiblelion | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone decompiled the .jar files used for covert communication? Would be quite interesting to see how they work.

On another note it is easy to shame the CIA for making such a basic mistake as using subsequent IP numbers/same file layouts on sites. Of course they should be, but funnily enough mistakes such as these happen in every intelligence service. As example would be the Russian military intelligence (GRU/GU) who have for years sent agents abroad with fake/cleaned Russian passports. Only problem being of course that the passport numbers were sequential and as in the case of the CIA websites, if you identified one agent and his passport, you could look up the next ones in line on databases and identify all the other active agents as well.

Reference for GRU passports: https://www.voanews.com/a/russia-gru-operatives-unmasked/460...

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The US government had its own issues faking Soviet passports — Soviet staples were made of regular steel but US staples were made of stainless steel, so a genuine Soviet passport would have rust stains in it while a fake passport made by the US would not.

That report is about them registering their vehicles at their GRU office address, nothing to do with passport numbers.

Here's one about two agents with passports 3 digits apart: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2018/09/20/skr...

> Has anyone decompiled the .jar files used for covert communication? Would be quite interesting to see how they work.

I took a very cursory look, since they are obfuscated and reading obfuscated code sucks. I see swing (gui) drawing code, a few references to flash and activex, as well as code to load rsa and look for a program do to encryption/decryption: PGP, OpenPGP, CFB, OFB, SIC, GTCR. And a bit of url loading. So, probably nothing one didn't expect: It receives message over a network connection and uses these programs to decypher them, then shows it .. I don't know? directly in the gui probably. And the other way around.

But that's really just me looking for ten minutes. I could also be wildly off the mark here.

> but funnily enough mistakes such as these happen in every intelligence service

There's advantage in appearing incompetent and creating traps to distract from actual active capabilities that are working.

We have no element to let us think that the actual active capabilities are any better than that. Do you know any elite who goes working for agencies? How can they remain elite if they don’t write on their work, share it with others, recoup best practices during conferences, etc.?

I've no idea how to interpret your comment in way that isn't bizarre. You seem to state you think competitive advantage in intelligence activity - and in military activity for that matter, as they are deeply intertwined - doesn't exist.

And that the reason it doesn't is because everyone involved has to constantly leak and brag all their confidential secrets out in the open so they will be considered hireable by other agencies tasked with secret-keeping?

Have I read that right?

Elites that stay elite do so by remaining understated, basing the majority of their reputation on the results of their work, and only sharing their techniques when they know they are in the right crowd.

If the internet knew, it wouldn’t be an elite op anymore.

People seem to have been killed by this CIA mistake. If it wasn't actually a mistake, but purposefully putting people in danger to protect others, I don't know who would ever agree to be a mole for them in the future

> purposefully putting people in danger to protect others

Doesn't this describe all armed forces, everywhere, ever?

Lots of operations put small amount people in danger in order to protect a larger group, that's essentially the whole idea behind police, military, special forces and related groups.

People become moles for the greater good, usually, or protection. Sometimes it works out, sometimes not.

It's the opposite, the folks willing to become moles for the US are usually the most corrupt and least scrupulous of their cohort. Or at least that's the common sentiment in the bureaucracy of every Asian country I've heard of.

For example, rumours in the grapevine suggest that by 2013 all the efforts of the various agencies combined managed to plant a grand total of 1 mole into the State Council of China.

That's after 40 years of trying since the CIA office in Beijing was established, and likely hundreds of billions spent trying to secure promotions, favours, pay bribes, etc. Allegedly, the CIA had kept index cards on every prospective career official in China, and the filing cabinets took up a football pitch of floorspace.

This amounted to nothing pretty soon after, which would explain the geopolitical movements since.

As history has shown over and over (and thats just cases which surfaced, most did not and will not), its a stupid idea in all situations.

The cases where people walk away unscathed and achieve some proper good instead of long bad prisons, torture or outright execution are miniscule. You can be sacrificed by some bureaucrat which has lower intelligence than you, doesnt care a bit, is corrupt or just treats you as a pawn in some bigger game.

Greater good my ass, its almost never the case, its rather one of above.

Thats why they always go for desperate people, who they manipulate, extort, threaten to harm families etc. Normal balanced well off folks have no business with such, you can only lose.

Even more silly to me is that certain Russian operatives had accounts on Russian social media under their real name, with profile pic and everything. So once under suspicion it was embarassingly easy to confirm who they were.

One of them was arrested this year here in Norway.

Some Russian operatives weared their "Mangust" boots when they were in Ukraine in 2014, so it was easy to spot them just by looking at their boots.

For those curious: https://www.sovietmilitarystuff.com/airsoft-tactical-boots-u...

Do we know of a GRU officer that brought this flaw up and was fired for it? As that seems to be what happened to John Reidy.

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