If you speak Russian or Mandarin Chinese then there is an easy way to obtain instructions on how to secretly communicate with the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): watch one of the official CIA YouTube videos on the subject. This slickly-produced video portrays a fictional Russian scientist showing missiles to military officers as his voiceover rues the ‘wolves’ who rule his country. Another CIA video depicts a downtrodden bureaucrat against the towering cityscape of Shanghai, toiling for long hours while his corrupt boss enjoys the luxuries of life. Both videos encourage the viewer to contact the CIA through its official TOR site at ciadotgov4sjwlzihbbgxnqg3xiyrg7so2r2o3lt5wz5ypk4sxyjstad.onion.
The CIA’s use of the world’s most popular video sharing platform to draw potential spies to its darknet site illustrates one of the key tensions in modern communications: there is simultaneous demand for communication that openly reaches very many people and for communication which is unknown to anybody but the sender and the intended recipient. Governments which condemn end-to-end encryption in one context will rely upon it in another. The dark net is lambasted when used by criminals, but espionage is also a crime when you do it for the other side. However much politicians will assert there is a need for rules to govern how people may communicate, or that unbreakable privacy represents a threat to national security, they will readily make exceptions whenever it suits them. When it comes to measuring how much secrecy is required for electronic communications, there will never be one size that fits all.
Many telcos will have a secret squirrel: somebody who serves national security by compromising the privacy of communications, although it may not be clear which nation’s security they serve. I compare them to a character from a children’s television series because they take themselves seriously although their reasoning is cartoonishly simple. They spy on the bad people as instructed by the good people who pay them to do it. And what happens if the people who pay them are later discovered to be not as good as first thought? Presumably they keep on spying anyway. Using electronic communications for espionage is desirable because it is so cost-effective. That also increases the danger to all of us.
The temptation to use security as a justification for systematically undermining privacy will never go away. It is the reason why WhatsApp was recently awarded USD168mn in damages from NSO Group, after a court found that the infamous Israeli spyware company had used WhatsApp’s servers to infect the handsets of 1,400 users. It is also the reason why other companies will be lining up to replace NSO Group as a supplier of spyware to government agencies worldwide. The overwhelming majority of cybersecurity experts are right to seek the end-to-end encryption of communications that politicians routinely oppose because unbreakable encryption avoids any moral ambiguities. That there are politicians who think differently tells us what we need to know about their moral outlook.
One of the nuisances created by the secret squirrels is that they breed cynicism. Morality gets very arbitrary when people in power say they govern for the good of all but then abuse their authority in order to undermine the rivals and journalists who might challenge it. Some fans of Barack Obama describe the current President of the USA as a fascist. If they were worried about the dangers of authoritarian control then they should have been more angry at the discovery that Obama oversaw the development of an illegal communications surveillance infrastructure that was unprecedented in human history.
The spy recruitment videos produced by the CIA are designed to appeal to disaffected individuals who have lost faith in the regime. It is the right psychological ploy. It works because there are disaffected people everywhere. Some Russians will oppose their government and want to undermine it; some Americans will feel the same. Meanwhile, telcos are massively reducing their headcount, increasing their reliance on artificial intelligence, outsourcing decisions about who is trustworthy, and planning to use automation to monitor private communications. They are making these changes while doing the minimum to check for backdoors even though a well-resourced security audit program can ultimately prove ineffective. National security requires more than the exploitation of malcontents on the other side. Security is unlikely without applying some thought and effort to maintaining the loyalty of your own side.
One of the CIA’s Mandarin videos can be seen below.
