How I found a Star Wars website made by the CIA

The website was a supposed soccer fan website, Iraniangoals.com, and it was (opinion) criminally badly designed. Type in a search bar request and it's really your password, that then goes right to a secret messaging app...

  > Marczak and Edwards quickly discovered that the secret messaging window hidden inside Iraniangoals.com could be spotted by simply right-clicking on the page to bring up the website’s coding. This code contained descriptions of secret functions, including the words “message” and “compose” – easily found clues that a messaging capability had been built into the site. The coding for the search bar that triggered the secret messaging software was labeled “password.”

>McClathy DC reported on "Intelligence, defense whistleblowers remain mired in broken system" that CIA contractor John A. Reidy had started raising concerns about the security of a communication systems used by the CIA and other sources mention that he started this in 2008 The focus of the article is how he was then ignored and silenced for raising these concerns, which later turned out to be correct and leading to an intelligence catastrophe that started in 2010

It's a rare insight into how espionage works but it was a major failiure.

>Another very interesting mention is the platform had been over extended beyond its original domain application, which is in part why things went so catastrophically bad:

    Former U.S. 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. “It was never meant to be used long term for people to talk to sources,” said one former official. “The issue was that it was working well for too long, with too many people. But it was an elementary system.”

> This article uses publicly available information to publicly disclose for the first time a few hundred of what we feel are extremely likely candidate sites of the network. The starting point for this research was the September 2022 Reuters article "America’s Throwaway Spies" for the first time gave nine example websites, and their analyst from Citizenlabs claims to have found 885 websites in total, but did not publicly disclose them. Starting from only the nine disclosed websites, we were then able to find a few hundred websites that share os many similarities with them, i.e. a common fingerprint, that we believe makes them beyond reasonable doubt part of the same network.

The CIA Secretly Ran a Star Wars Fan Site - https://www.404media.co/the-cia-secretly-ran-a-star-wars-fan... - May 26th, 2025

I wouldn't be surprised if Cardan Grille + HN would be preferable (even though that too should be obviously unacceptable). I think it's to the degree that the people to whom these communication methods were suggested should themselves have said no.