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Black Hat USA 2013 - OPSEC failures of spies

Black Hat · 53.9K views · 2013-12-04 · 25:11

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

Recommended as a non-technical, concrete case study of how metadata and phone records expose covert operations.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2016–2019

Topics

Security & hackingPrivacy, surveillance & cybercrimeGeopolitics & foreign policy
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opsecciametadatasurveillanceextraordinary renditionblack hat

What people said

theossuary · 2019-10 · Recommendation

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: [VIDEO]

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shpx · 2018-06 · Recommendation

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 [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]

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Robadob · 2016-04 · Recommendation

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. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Black Hat, played through YouTube.

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