The Digital Purloined Letter
March 28, 2018
Want to keep a Secret? Do it in public?
We spend a lot of time worrying about how secure our private data and messages are. If the internet has proven anything to us, it’s that if someone wants to get into your info, they’ll do it. So, one of the world’s most clandestine agencies has started using social media to do perform some of its most secret activities out in the open. We learned more from the recent Engadget piece, “NSA Sent Coded Messages Through Twitter.”
According to the piece, the NSA paid about $100,000 to Russian informants and did most of the communicating in secret messages on Twitter.
“It’s unknown how common this practice is, both on other social networks and from other agencies. However, it wouldn’t be surprising if there have been other instances. This lets intelligence bureaus orchestrate clandestine communications with little effort, and no way of knowing about the secret meaning (outside of leaks like this, of course) if you’re not directly involved.”
This certainly sounds like something straight out of a spy movie, but this level of secrecy is actually available to the general public. You just have to know where to look. For example, as recently as 2016, Facebook had a secret Messenger app that allowed for coded messages and for disappearing messages, not unlike Snapchat. So, if you are thinking of passing secrets to someone, social media is, oddly, a great place for it.
Patrick Roland, March 28, 2018
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