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The Dead Drop Although electronic communication and surveillance is widespread and big business, secret service agents know that the simple ways of passing messages are often the best, and the dead drop is the most simple. In the 2001 film “A Beautiful Mind”, the unbalanced but brilliant mathematician John Nash acts out a spy fantasy in his hallucinations. He imagines that he is using his analytical genius to crack cryptographic messages hidden in newspaper articles. When he leaves his findings in a letterbox at an abandoned house, he demonstrates the dead drop communications strategy fundamental to espionage tradecraft. The theory is that the Intelligence Officer for whom John is an agent will later come and collect the ‘intelligence’ he provides. Unfortunately for John, when he comes round to the idea that his cryptological career might be a delusion, he visits the box and finds months’ worth of his messages mouldering and un-opened. Caught Red Handed Although this tradecraft is well-known enough to be shown in the movies, the “dead letter box” is still a real-life strategy for communication between operatives. Famously, in 2006, Russia claimed to have caught four British diplomats exchanging mysterious items under a rock in a suburban Moscow park. Allegedly, the rock was plastic and hollow to enable it to contain a small telecommunications device. This is a great example of a dead drop going wrong; the authorities even caught the exchange on camera. In the novels of John Le Carré (a masterful author who draws on his real-life experience of the foreign secret service) numerous dead drops go off without a hitch. A park bench, an empty street, a rotten wall... it’s a matter of choosing a location that won’t arouse suspicion. If the right place is chosen, this basic communication strategy can protect the identities of those involved because there’s no need to risk meeting. The operatives then only need to ensure that they weren’t followed to the drop. A pre-designated marker such as a feather or a newspaper left in a certain way can be used as a signal - like the small flag on an American post box – to show that a message is waiting. This means if you need to you can walk right on by without having to search for secreted documents, money or instructions. E-spionage Of course, in the computer age, electronic messaging technology has come on in leaps and bounds. Nonetheless, some modern covert communication strategies that utilise the internet are not as high-tech as you might expect. Rather than using an email account as a transmitter of data the way normal people use them, in the last ten years foreign agents have been caught using email accounts as ‘dead drop’ boxes. The e-dead drop box communication strategy works in a rather low-tech way. An operative sends their secret message from a temporary email account to an intentionally faulty address, which then bounces the message. The recipient then later logs-in to the same account and reads the rejection notice containing the secret message. It’s little different to leaving a note under a plant pot.
Article Source: http://www.bharatbhasha.net Article Url: http://www.bharatbhasha.net/internet-and-computers.php/223598 Article Added on Friday, March 12, 2010
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