Secrets via Social Media
February 28, 2018
Social media has been under fire for its lax policies on fake news. While they are aiming to correct the algorithmic chaos that has led to such an unhappy state of business, this is not the only way in which the format is being used for odd deeds. One of the strangest came from Yahoo! Finance’s story, “NSA Sent Coded Messages Through Twitter.”
According to the story:
“…the National Security Agency used Twitter to send “nearly a dozen” coded messages to a Russian contact claiming to have agency data stolen by the Shadow Brokers. Reportedly, the NSA would tell the Russian to expect public tweets in advance, either to signal an intent to make contact or to prove that it was involved and was open to further chats.”
This made headlines for two reasons. One, because the Russian contact offered the NSA suspicious information on President Trump that the NSA declined to accept. Second, that a spy agency would do its business on such a public forum. For those of us who love a good spy novel or The Americans, we assume this type of clandestine communication is done in the shadows and back alleys. However, Tweeting to spy contacts falls right in line with espionage’s history of using public forums for secret messages. Take, for example, the Cold War tradition of running numbers stations. For decades, spooky coded messages were broadcast on a variety of shortwave radio stations around the globe, which many believe was a worldwide way of spies to communicate…right out in the open. So, think of Twitter as a modern day shortwave radio. The NSA already does.
Patrick Roland, February 27, 2018
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