BBC: Twitter glitch allows CIA informant channel to be hijacked. “A cyber-security researcher has exploited a glitch on the CIA’s official Twitter account, to hijack a channel used for recruiting spies. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) account on X, formerly known as Twitter, displays a link to a Telegram channel for informants. But Kevin McSheehan was able to redirect potential CIA contacts to his own Telegram channel.”
Engadget: Even the CIA is developing an AI chatbot. “The CIA and other US intelligence agencies will soon have an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT. The program, revealed on Tuesday by Bloomberg, will train on publicly available data and provide sources alongside its answers so agents can confirm their validity.”
Space: The CIA knows a lot about other nations’ space programs. You can too with its new ‘World Factbook’ update . “The United States Central Intelligence Agency, better known as the CIA, has released a new entry in its World Factbook that catalogues the programs and milestones of NASA, as well as other space agencies around the world. Over 90 countries and the European Union are represented in the new Space Programs section of the agency’s factbook, spanning from Algeria to Zimbabwe.”
Variety: CIA Launches First Podcast, ‘The Langley Files,’ Which Reveals That Working at the Agency Is More Boring Than Hollywood Makes It Seem. “It seems like everyone is launching a podcast these days — and now comes the Central Intelligence Agency. But don’t expect any major revelations from CIA’s ‘The Langley Files,’ which is really a PR-outreach initiative to burnish the agency’s image as well as dispel notions that it’s a glamorous line of work as often portrayed in pop culture.”
NBC News: Preserving the history of America’s ‘secret war’ in Laos. “A new initiative is aimed at raising awareness about a dark and often forgotten chapter of U.S. history: the secret bombing of Laos during the Vietnam War. Nearly half a century later, most Americans — and even many young Laotian Americans — know little about the clandestine, nine-year, CIA-led military campaign informally called the ‘secret war.’…The mission of the Legacies Library, a project of the Washington, D.C.-based group Legacies of War, is to keep the secret war from being lost to time.”
Washington Post: CIA instructs Russians on how to share secrets with the spy agency. “On Monday, the CIA published instructions for how Russians can covertly volunteer information using an encrypted conduit to the agency’s website. The hope is to attract intelligence — and potentially gain more access to official Russian secrets — from disaffected people who have been trying to contact the CIA since the war began, officials said.”
BBC: Lawmakers allege ‘secret’ CIA spying on unwitting Americans. “Two US senators have raised concerns that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is again spying upon unwitting Americans. The agency has ‘secretly’ conducted warrantless surveillance through a newly disclosed programme, Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich alleged.”
The Intercept: CIA Headquarters Got Vaccinated In Early January, Rankling Intelligence Officers Abroad. “IN EARLY JANUARY, as much of the country awaited the Covid-19 vaccine, personnel at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, had already begun receiving their shots, according to three former CIA officials with knowledge of the matter. Yet the agency has lagged in getting vaccines to overseas personnel, according to former officials.”
CNET: Alien fans, get lost in a huge UFO archive of declassified CIA documents. “Do UFOs exist? ‘Unidentified flying objects’ are definitely a thing, but do they have alien origins? I’m on the side of the skeptics, but there are plenty of true believers and UFO-curious folks eager for official information from the government. Thanks to The Black Vault, an online archive of declassified government documents, you can now dig through a massive trove of information the CIA has collected on UFOs over the years.”
Excuse me a moment while I headdesk? Washington Post: Elite CIA unit that developed hacking tools failed to secure its own systems, allowing massive leak, an internal report found. “The theft of top-secret computer hacking tools from the CIA in 2016 was the result of a workplace culture in which the agency’s elite computer hackers ‘prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems,’ according to an internal report prepared for then-director Mike Pompeo as well as his deputy, Gina Haspel, now the current director.”
Washington Post: ‘The intelligence coup of the century’. “The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software…. But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.”
Motherboard: The CIA Will Use its New Dark Web Site to Collect Anonymous Tips. “On the heels of the CIA announcing its brand new Instagram account, replete with amateur artwork of some of its operatives and stories featuring Director Gina Haspel’s first ID card, the American spy agency is going to the dark web.”
Mashable: CIA director promises agency will soon launch an Instagram account . “Espionage it for the ‘gram! During an address at Auburn University in Alabama, CIA Director Gina Haspel unveiled some de-classified information about the CIA’s next big move: it’s launching an Instagram page.”
CIA: Sixth Installment Available of “The Daily Summary: Informing President Truman”. “The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) today released the last of six sets of declassified daily intelligence reports President Harry Truman received from CIA and its predecessor organization, the Central Intelligence Group. Known then as the Daily Summary, the product continues now as the President’s Daily Brief.”
Ars Technica: How did Iran find CIA spies? They Googled it. “A covert ‘transitional’ channel used for communicating with sources that Central Intelligence Agency handlers couldn’t reach directly was exposed and infiltrated by Iranian intelligence in 2009. The breakdown in operational security—which apparently relied heavily on security through obscurity—was the result of Iranian intelligence officials simply using Google to locate the websites used as the communications channel after a double-agent exposed the method used by the CIA, according to a report from Yahoo News’ Zach Dorfman and Jenna McLaughlin.”
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