Black Hat USA 2013 - OPSEC failures of spies
Black Hat3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2016–2019
talk · general · evergreen · 2016–2019 on HN
Journalist Matthew Cole's Black Hat 2013 talk on the CIA's operational security failures in the 2003 Milan kidnapping. Phone and location metadata exposed the team and led to arrest warrants.
Recommended as a non-technical, concrete case study of how metadata and phone records expose covert operations.
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5 comments from Hacker News
It also seems like phones have their own tracking ids that they report, it's not just the sim card. There was a great talk about some of this from black hat; how the CIA renditioned Abu Omar out of Italy and how they were found out: ▶ this video
Your phone's location can be silently triangulated based on what cellphone towers can see your phone and the strength of the signal to them. This is being done and you can buy the data from LocationSmart. This was discussed on HN a few weeks ago [0]. This data was used in Italy to catch CIA agents after they extrajudicially extradited (so to speak) a terrorist[1] in 2003 ▶ this video . The whole talk is worth watching. The cost of storing this forever is negligible and going down. The government would be foolish or (in my opinion irrationally) principled not to hold on to this for the next 1,000 years. [0] link [1] link
Longer video (25 minutes) of a talk from BlackHat 2013, about how metadata was used to expose an illegal(?) 2003 CIA operation carried out in Italy. It's by a non-tech journalist, so it's also largely non-technical and provides a very interesting overview of what metadata can expose. ▶ this video
Going to be hard and would be ineffective. For one, America still has several military bases in Germany alone e.g. Ramstein, which was used by the CIA in the Milan kidnapping [0][1]. [0] link [1] Black Hat talk: ▶ this video
Both the SIM and the phone's serial number are available to the network. An analyst looking to correlate your activities can do so trivially. In fact, this is how Italian investigators were able to prove the link between a CIA cell and the American embassy. No one used the same SIM to talk to both groups, but they did use the same phone. ▶ this video