8/6/2023 0 Comments Surveillance by secret agentsZoe Thomas: Is this leading to new technologies being created or maybe old technologies being relied upon a bit more? And that takes a lot more time and costs a lot more money just to do one single operation. It's like if you've ever seen the Mission Impossible movies where you have Tom Cruise go in and do his thing, but backing up is a whole team really of technical people who are monitoring the surveillance, alerting the CI officer to when he might be in danger. It becomes much harder for one person to do this. What's called telematics, which is cars that are now have all sorts of electronics in them that ping out where they're going and how fast they're going and what their direction is, et cetera, et cetera. When I say surveillance, we're talking about cameras, we're talking about cell phones that are tracked everywhere. You can't do that anymore because of the surveillance. And in doing this, they would be in touch with CIA headquarters of course and other people, but it was pretty much a lonely profession. And they would make the arrangements to meet that source and control them and pass documents back and forth. They would arrange to recruit a source, a foreign official let's say, who would provide information about a adversary, countries, the plans and intentions. And they wouldn't be operating completely on their own, but they'd be pretty much out there, on their own. They're often masquerading as US diplomat or a businessman. It used to be that you would have what the CIA calls a case officer, somebody who's posted in a foreign country. Espionage is sometimes calls the world's second oldest profession, so it's evolving a lot. And this has been going on for decades or centuries. Warren Strobel: Well, it's a constant cat and mouse game, of course. Zoe Thomas: Then how are spies evolving? How are they dealing with modern-day technology? And you just really can't do that anymore because it's just harder to pass yourself off as somebody else. And he said he used to have nine aliases and nine matching credit cards. And I spoke to one guy for this article, I can't name his name, but he is a very, very senior former European intelligence official. But beyond fingerprints, other sorts of biometric scanning that will tell the border control people exactly who you are. Now if you go to many airports, increasing number of airports, there are biometric scanners that will scan your retina, fingerprints. Obviously it took some training to do this, but once you were trained up, you could do this. And they could easily go from country to country, crossing borders, switching out passports and credit cards and other documents they needed and nobody was the wiser. I mean, first thing is most spies, for decades really, pretended to be somebody else, they had an alias. Warren Strobel: That's a really good question. If I'm a spy going about my usual daily business, why can't I hide as well as I used to be able to? Zoe Thomas: Warren, tell us a little bit about this. And joining me to discuss is WSJ National Security reporter, Warren Strobel. So what's a spy in the 21st century to do? I'm Zoe Thomas from the Wall Street Journal. The digital footprints we all leave behind means agents are easier to track and their cover identities are harder to fake. Now the problem facing modern spies goes beyond just surveillance cameras and phones. I should note in all three cases, the governments deny or wouldn't comment on the operation. And last December, the investigative website Bellingcat used phone and travel data to link Russian spies to the poisoning of opposition politician, Alexei Navalny. In 2017, days before the half brother of North Korea's leader was assassinated, he was caught on a hotel security camera holding a meeting with a suspected US intelligence officer. In 2010, operatives widely suspected of working for Israel's Mossad spy service were on in a operation to kill a Palestinian militant living in Dubai, but surveillance cameras caught their every move, including before and after they put on disguises. Zoe Thomas: Spies on covert missions naturally try to avoid detection, but modern technology has made that a lot harder. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated. This transcript was prepared by a transcription service.
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