NSA Sent Coded Messages From Its Official Twitter Account to Communicate With Foreign Spies
NSA Sent Coded Messages From Its Official Twitter Account to Communicate With Foreign Spies
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 a 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 US 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 US 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:
Officials gave the Russians advance knowledge that on June 20, 2017, at 12:30 p.m., the official NSA Twitter account would tweet: “Samuel Morse patented the telegraph 177 years ago. Did you know you can still send telegrams? Faster than post & pay only if it’s delivered.”
That tweet, in exactly those words, was issued at that time.
The NSA used that messaging technique repeatedly over the following months, each time officials wanted to communicate with the Russians or reassure them that the U.S. was still supporting the channel. Each time, the Russians were told the text of the tweets in advance and the exact time they would be released. Each tweet looked completely benign but was in fact a message to the Russians.
Gizmodo has reached out to the NSA for confirmation, though we’re not holding our breath about getting an on-the-record confirmation either way.
Samuel Morse patented the telegraph 177 years ago. Did you know you can still send telegrams? Faster than post & pay only if it's delivered.
The detail from the story that’s getting all of the attention, of course, is the fact that US intelligence agencies may have been willing to buy dirt on President Trump, including an alleged videotape of Trump with sex workers that was taken in 2013. The portions of the tape shown to US spies couldn’t be verified as actually being Trump and US intelligence suspected that they might be getting set up by the Russian government.
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