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by boppo1 1106 days ago
Maybe it’s bad advice that ne’er-do-wells will try to employ, leaving them susceptible to the CIA.
3 comments

On the contrary: my guess is that it is a method for people to familiarize themselves with the whole topic of tradecraft, knowing that ALL countries have put great effort into exactly this in recent years.

There's just so many spooks and bad actors about. Having some familiarity makes for a more educated populace who are going to be more wary of being manipulated, so there is really no reason to try and reserve this information for an elite. Because the bad actors are very grateful when you do: they will prosper in a field of targets all of whom are super naive.

Wouldn't that be too obvious, wouldn't it be better to plan bogus info elsewhere, especially for and org capable of doing so?

Wouldn't it be dangerous to publish bogus info that can be picked up by nationals and allies, especially since it is branded?

People think this, but it is still highly effective.

Say you want your adversaries to use pencils instead of pens to write their secret notes. You publish information on the risks of pens and how they leak information on an obscure corner of the internet and seed it to a small forum or two. That gets picked up by a government worker in Germany and they put it into their recommendations. That document then gets stolen by the Chinese. Both of these get shared with Iran. The materials are then leaked and you have the Snowden's of the world shouting from the rooftops the importance of using pencils.

While I see what you mean, I can't think of any example right away that are touted by people like Snowden - I see there were many honeypots on crypto, TOR and "encrypted" phones, but other than maybe VPNs I wouldn't know what was shared this way.
> I can't think of any example right away that are touted by people like Snowden

Then it worked perfectly.

In the sense of - are you talking about something or is it all just vague impressions?
Regardless, they have an interesting but relatively sordid history.

Its probably just to drive interest for recruitment since tensions are escalating geopolitically and they are probably finding their projections show they are understaffed. Skilled labor isn't as easy to come by as corporations make it out to be (with everything being replaceable).

Anything published like this would be considered a poison the well attack by any ne'er do wells.