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The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has done a lot of strange things over the years, but this is one of their more interesting attempts. It has now been revealed that the CIA created and ran a fake Star Wars fan site for use as a tool to communicate with its spy network.
The CIA-ran website StarWarsWeb.net had all the usual items one would expect to see on a Star Wars fan site: news, images, video games, toys, books, and so on.
What it also contained, according to 404 Media, a covert communication channel that the CIA could use to acquire information from spies in other countries.
404 Media reports that StarWarsWeb.net was “part of a network of CIA sites that were first discovered by Iranian authorities more than ten years ago before leading to a wave of deaths of CIA sources in China in the early 2010s.”
In November 2018, Yahoo News published a blockbuster investigation into the CIA’s covert communication channels and how they were exposed. That exposure originated in Iran before more than two dozen CIA sources died in China in 2011 and 2012, according to the report. The CIA ultimately shut down the covert communications tool.
The website was discovered by amateur security researcher Ciro Santilli, who also appears to have found many other likely CIA-run websites including a comedian fan site, an extreme sports website, and one featuring Brazilian music.
Santilli writes in a lengthy explanation of what he found and how he found it on his website, “Of particular interest is that based on their language and content, certain of the websites seem to have targeted other democracies such as Germany, France, Spain and Brazil.”
“It reveals a much larger number of websites, it gives a broader understanding of the CIA’s interests at the time, including more specific democracies which may have been targeted which were not previously mentioned and also a statistical understanding of how much importance they were giving to different zones at the time, and unsurprisingly, the Middle East comes on top,” Santilli told 404 Media.
Considering StarWarsWeb.net now directs to CIA.gov, it appears that Santilli has definitely stumbled on to something very interesting.