This Star Wars fans website seems totally harmless. Actually it is part of a CIA network to recruit spies

In 2010, the Star Wars website – Beyond the Unknown, which was in the Starwarsweb.net domain, was pure Internet fan of the time. Hórrido design for current standards, visual chaos and very biased content towards the point of view of the fans … at the time. That is, perhaps something naive for current criteria. However, after it an operation orchestrated by the CIA was hidden to communicate with its agents. An unusual purpose with the best possible cover.

Force communication. The main purpose of StarWarsweb.net, which today directly redirects To the CIA websiteIt was covert communication with informants from other countries. But the Iranian authorities discovered, just over a decade ago, that the website was part of an entire network of CIA sites. The consequence of that discovery was a wave of deaths of informants of the CIA (approximately two dozen) in China in the early 2010s.

Espionage network. The fan of security issues Ciro Santilli (Owner of a website that is also pure Feeling of the internet of the twentieth century), began to investigate in the case, among other things, for its interest in Chinese politics and for monitoring the operations of the CIA in countries such as yours, Brazil. He tried to find out what these camouflaged websites were and owned by the American Intelligence Agency, and It was he who reached the fan of Star Wars among othersand whose themes were from tributes to actors such as the American comedian Johnny Carson to meteorology or sports pages. They were in up to 29 different languages ​​and remained active between 2004 and 2013.

The IP of the CIA. Santilli discovered which websites belonged to the CIA network, but the journalistic research that uncovered these activities gave rise to An Yahoo News 2018 article. Also, above all, to a 2022 reuters dossier entitled “American spies to use and throw“And that started from the deaths of the agents in Iran to get rid of the story. It is counted in the text, other CIA errors that compromised the coverings were the IP addresses of the siteswhich were sequential. Discovering one was possible to find other websites of the same network.

Fans work. This is just an example of the multiple errors made by the CIA in the 885 web pages that made up the network, as he found out Another group of researchers After the Reuters investigation came to light. For example, these spoke of “outdated technology, even for their time”: the communication mechanisms between spies and the CIA were programmed in JavaScript or Flash, which offered very few security guarantees.

And a pinch of extortion. However, the most scandalous case of the case is not, obviously, a ugly and outdated ‘Star Wars’ website, but the methods used by the CIA to recruit the spies explained by Reuters: “After an Iranian delivered a request (through the websites), diplomatic officials had instructions to examine whether their work history or their family ties could make them valuable. promising applicant could receive a phone call asking him to return to the consulate to answer more detailed questions. “

From there, the meetings became more and more demanding and “for when Iranian realized that he had given information to an intelligence agent, the involuntary informant had already revealed that they could lead to jail.”

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