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NSA Sent Coded Messages From Its Twitter To Communicate With Foreign Spies (gizmodo.com)

Matt Novak reports via Gizmodo: During the first Cold War, American and British spies would sometimes place coded messages in newspaper classified ads to communicate with each other. And according to new reports in the New York Times and The Intercept, the National Security Agency (NSA) has updated the tactic, using its public Twitter account to send secret messages to at least one Russian spy. That's just one relatively small detail in much more salacious articles about NSA and CIA agents traveling to Germany in an effort to recover cyberweapons that had been stolen from U.S. intelligence agencies. A Russian spy allegedly offered up the stolen cyber tools to the Americans in exchange for $10 million, eventually lowering his price to just $1 million. The Russian spy allegedly claimed to even have dirt on President Trump.

According to the reports, the unnamed Russian met with U.S. spies in person in Germany, and the NSA sometimes communicated with the Russian spy by sending roughly a dozen coded messages from the NSA's Twitter account. The one important question: Were the messages sent via direct message or were they sent out as public tweets? The New York Times report leaves some ambiguity, but according to James Risen in The Intercept they were very public.

4 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Meh. by PPH · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Russian spy allegedly claimed to even have dirt on President Trump.

    Who doesn't?

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    1. Re: Meh. by Betty+Crocker · · Score: 5, Informative

      This is nothing new. It's just a different medium of something that has been done since at latest the Cold War. Numbers stations have been used for DECADES. Broadcast something publicly over shortwave (or perhaps MW or LW) in a sometimes unending stream. It is garbage to anyone who doesn't have the means to decode it.

      Famous Soviet/Russian UVB-76, "The Buzzer" where someone was sitting at a chair and pushing a key every second or two
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcv_cGLjxCY

      Chinese numbers station
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhpqZpfb03c

      A C= decoding one being used in CW mode
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pawOMIlMfIw

      Some being jammed
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGxEnnzrwmc

  2. Of course they're public. by BitterOak · · Score: 4, Informative

    The one important question: Were the messages sent via direct message or were they sent out as public tweets? The New York Times report leaves some ambiguity, but according to James Risen in The Intercept they were very public.

    Of course they're public. The whole point is that no one can see who is receiving the messages. They're coded, of course, so only the intended recipient will know what they mean, but possibly even the sender doesn't know who that person is. If DMs were used, that would entirely defeat the purpose: might as well use a secure communications app. The points of classified ads in the past, or tweets today, is that they can be read anonymously, even from a public computer terminal without typing in any login credentials.

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  3. Re:Russia collusion by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Oh, so no evidence and you claim Page is a traitor.

    There is plenty of evidence against Carter Page that we know about. The evidence we don't know about, which was used to get a FISA warrant against him, is in the Intelligence Committee Memo that the Democrats want to put out but Donald Trump refuses to allow. But as I said, what we know is plenty:

    https://www.politico.com/magaz...

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