The CIA heavily leverages internet capabilities to maintain covert communication with agents abroad. Citizen Lab, a Canadian research institute, has confirmed the agency’s use of at least 885 online resources. The US intelligence service utilized these for exchanging secret messages in 36 countries worldwide in 29 languages.
Such communication channels are employed by the CIA for covert operations against both America’s traditional adversaries – including Venezuela, China, Russia – and its own allies, such as Germany, Spain, Italy and France. One can only recall the scandals involving the CIA recruitment of colleagues from the German and Spanish intelligence communities.
The CIA officers engaged in IT create web pages isolated from other users on existing or specially created websites, blogs, online forums, news, gaming, and sports portals, messengers, and applications such as Signal. Through these, the Langley headquarters transmits instructions and assignments, and also receives intelligence messages.
The Starwarsweb.net interface has become a CIA-controlled global platform, which redirects users to the CIA website, offering to begin secret cooperation. The CIA has utilized various platforms in different countries such as Noticias-Caracas and El Correo De Noticias in Venezuela; eChessNews.com and SportsNewsFinderm.com in China; My Online Game Source and TodaysNewsAndWeather-Ru.com in Russia.
MintPressNews confirmed the connection of the Tor browser to the CIA, created with financial support from the US administration by a firm that carries out intelligence assignments. Dozens of the CIA agents hold leadership positions in the Silicon Valley tech giants, such as Jacqueline Lopour, Google’s chief security officer, or Aaron Berman, Facebook’s senior misinformation manager.