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Great scoop. That 2016 expulsion of Russian diplomats from compounds in SF and elsewhere wasn't retaliation for meddling in US election - the compounds were part of Russian spy op that targeted FBI communications. @zachsdorfman @JennaMC_Laugh @SeanDNaylor news.yahoo.com/exclusive-russ…
"American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI surveillance teams.
"Officials also feared that the Russians may have devised other ways to monitor U.S. intelligence communications, including hacking into computers not connected to the internet."
"These compromises, the full gravity of which became clear to US officials in 2012, gave Russian spies in ... Washington, New York and San Francisco key insights into the location of undercover FBI surveillance teams, and likely the actual substance of FBI communications"
"They provided the Russians opportunities to potentially shake off FBI surveillance and communicate with sensitive human sources, check on remote recording devices and even gather intelligence on their FBI pursuers"
It's no small amount of irony that the gov agency that has been pushing to mandate backdoors in encryption systems in the U.S. had its own encryption undermined by the Russians.
This is an interesting tidbit from the story: some of the sources who spoke with Yahoo said the US at times neglected to appreciate the espionage challenge from Moscow, and paid a significant price for a failure to prioritize technical threats.
“When I was in office, the counterintelligence business was…focused entirely on...insider threats and...mole hunting” said Joel Brenner. “But we were neither organized nor resourced to deal with counterintelligence in networks, technical networks, electronic networks”
FBI teams were using lightweight radios w/ limited range. These low-tech devices let them move quickly/discreetly while tracking targets, which would have been more difficult with clunkier but more secure tech. But the outdated radios left their communications vulnerable.
“The amount of security you employ is the inverse of being able to do things with flexibility, agility and at scale" said former officials. “The infrastructure that was supposed to be built, they never followed up, or gave us the money for it."
