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<https://www.livemint.com/technology/tech-news/biometrics-smartphones-surveillance-cameras-pose-new-obstacles-for-us-spies-11638108311550.html>
Operatives widely suspected of working for Israel’s Mossad spy service
planned a stealthy operation to kill a Palestinian militant living in
Dubai. The 2010 plan was a success except for the stealth
part—closed-circuit cameras followed the team’s every move, even
capturing them before and after they put on disguises.
In 2017, a suspected U.S. intelligence officer held a supposedly
clandestine meeting with the half brother of North Korean leader Kim
Jong Un, days before the latter was assassinated. That encounter also
became public knowledge, thanks to a hotel’s security camera footage.
Last December , it was Russia’s turn. Bellingcat, the investigative
website, used phone and travel data to track three operatives from
Moscow’s FSB intelligence service it said shadowed and then attempted to
kill Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny. Bellingcat named the
three. And published their photographs.
Espionage and covert action aren’t what they used to be.
A trained CIA case officer could once cross borders with a wallet full
of aliases or confidently travel through foreign cities undetected to
meet agents. Now, he or she faces digital obstacles that are the
hallmarks of modern life: omnipresent surveillance cameras and biometric
border controls, not to mention smartphones, watches and automobiles
that constantly ping out their location. Then there is “digital dust,"
the personal record almost everyone leaves across the internet.
Combined with advances in artificial intelligence that allow rapid
sifting of this data, the technologies are fast becoming powerful tools
for foreign adversaries to root out spies, according to current and
former U.S. and Western intelligence officials.
“It’s really bad," a former top U.S. counterintelligence official said
of the impact on U.S. espionage operations. “It really challenges the
fundamental assumptions and approach of how you do business."
“Ubiquitous technical surveillance," as it is known, is now a pervasive
concern at the CIA, forcing it to devise new, often more
resource-intensive ways of recruiting agents and stealing secrets, the
officials said.
In the new environment, it is “much more complicated to conduct
traditional tradecraft," CIA Director William Burns acknowledged during
his February confirmation hearing. “The agency, like so many other parts
of the U.S. government, is going to have to adapt." He added: “I’m
entirely confident that the women and men of CIA are capable of that."
In the Dubai case, Israel has never confirmed or denied its involvement.
The CIA has declined to comment on its ties to the North Korean leader’s
half brother. Russia has denied poisoning Mr. Navalny.
A January report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies
think tank said that while advanced digital technologies will also help
U.S. spy agencies gather intelligence and spot adversaries, the
advantage lies with authoritarian societies like China and Russia that
can exert greater control over them.
CIA officers “will struggle to maintain cover and operate clandestinely
and face a persistent risk of exposure—of themselves, their agents, and
their operational tradecraft," said the report by a CSIS task force.
In an interview, a senior CIA official disputed suggestions that the
agency’s operating space is shrinking, and said it would employ both new
and traditional spy tradecraft. “We go to extraordinary lengths to avoid
detection of our officers, and the sources we are meeting."
“Humint isn’t dead, not by a long shot," the official said, using the
acronym for human intelligence.
Others aren’t so sure.
“The foundational elements of espionage, I argue, have been
shattered—they have already been broken," said Duyane Norman, a former
CIA station chief who led an early agency effort to adapt spying for the
digital age, called “Station of the Future."
As an example, he asks, how can a CIA officer purport to work for
another government agency or private enterprise if his cellphone isn’t
regularly present at that entity’s location, there is no record of him
making ATM withdrawals or paying for lunch with a credit card in the
vicinity, and no sign of him on video cameras there?
Having no electronic “signature"—as in not carrying a cellphone and
having no presence on the internet—is itself a tipoff to adversary spy
services, Mr. Norman and others said.
In a 2018 speech, Dawn Meyerriecks, who was then deputy CIA director for
Science & Technology, said that in about 30 countries, foreign
intelligence services no longer bother to physically follow agency
officers “when we leave our place of employ," an apparent reference to
U.S. embassies. “The coverage is good enough that they don’t need to.
Between CCTVs and wireless infrastructure."
A recent top secret cable from counterintelligence officials at CIA’s
headquarters to stations and bases world-wide warned that a large number
of agency informants in foreign countries were being captured, according
to officials familiar with its contents. The cable suggested a more
difficult operating environment for U.S. spies abroad, in part as a
result of pervasive digital surveillance. It was first reported by the
New York Times.
Intelligence officials, citing operational secrecy, declined to discuss
further details of how such surveillance in the hands of Chinese,
Russian, Iranian and other governments potentially crimps the CIA’s
mission—or how the agency is responding.
But they offered outlines of what the future of spying might look like.
Crossing international borders under an assumed name is rapidly becoming
yesteryear’s tradecraft, because of biometrics like facial recognition
and iris scans, several former officials said.
“It’s more difficult for intelligence officers to masquerade under
alias," said a retired Western intelligence officer who estimated he had
nine false identities during his career, and credit cards for each.
More spying will be done in “true name," meaning the spy won’t pose as
someone else, but “live their cover" as a businessperson, academic or
other professional with no obvious connection to the U.S. government.
Moscow and Beijing have sent “a massive influx" of what are known as
nontraditional intelligence collectors abroad globally, said former U.S.
counterintelligence chief William Evanina. Asked if the U.S. would do
likewise, he replied: “That would be a great presumption on your part."
Spying is also becoming more of a team sport. Where once a lone spy
conceived and conducted an operation—meeting an agent, retrieving cached
documents—in the future, it will require a group to help watch for
digital surveillance and guide the CIA officer around it.
Ms. Meyerriecks in her 2018 speech described how, as a test, a CIA team
compiled a map of surveillance cameras in the capital of a U.S.
adversary she didn’t name, along with the type of camera and the
direction each was pointed. Using artificial intelligence, the team
plotted a surveillance-free route that a CIA officer could travel.
While headquarters colleagues monitor over a computer dashboard, the CIA
officer on the street might wear a smartwatch telling her if she is
“green"—free of digital surveillance—yellow, or red.
These undertakings require more time, personnel and other resources.
It is more “Mission Impossible" than James Bond, and “implies fewer
operations, total" with a smaller pool of foreigners recruited to spy
for the U.S., said Mr. Norman. “You’re going to spend a lot more energy
working on the few that are important."
There are also endless digital tricks to play in what Mr. Evanina called
“the technological version of cat and mouse." For example, it is
possible to “spoof" a cellphone’s location, misleading foreign
spycatchers to think their quarry is in one place, when he is safely in
another, current and former CIA officials said.
The officials say the CIA, which turns 75 next year, has faced and
overcome profound technological challenges before. In Cold War-era
Moscow of the 1980s, it was long assumed the agency couldn't recruit and
meet Soviet spies under the KGB’s nose. A former station chief and his
colleagues devised ways, including new methods of short-range
communications with agents and of disguise, and the agency during that
period was able to run one of the most valuable Soviet spies of the Cold
War, Adolf Tolkachev.
“Most technological challenges are surmountable," the senior CIA
official said. “We play great offense, and aren’t sitting around in a
defensive crouch."
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