Black Hat USA 2013 - OPSEC failures of spies

Why HN readers recommended it

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

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Black Hat

Topic

opsec and metadata

Format

talk

Level

general

HN recommenders in dataset

3

HN mentions in dataset

5

Recommendation years in dataset

2016–2019

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• 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 …

• 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 …

• 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 …