SVR tactics to infiltrate NSA via civilian contractors and hacktivist recruitment

176 Penetrating the NSA and getting access to files from its stove-piped computers was a far more difficult challenge for the SVR. Approaching CIA officers, such as Nicholson, was relatively easy because it was part of the CIA officer’s job to meet with their adversaries. NSA officers, on the other hand, did not engage in “dangles” or even attend diplomatic receptions. They had not reason, other than a sinister one, to meet with a member of the Russian intelligence service. Furthermore, unlike CIA officers who, like Nicholson, are often posted in neutral countries where they can be approached in a social context, NSA officers worked at well-guarded regional bases and are not part of the diplomatic life. Since a known employee of a foreign diplomatic mission could not even approach a NSA officer without arousing suspicion, the SVR would need to use an intermediary, called an “access agent,” whose affiliations with it were not known to the FBI. Such an operation would require establishing a network of illegals in the America, as the SVR did after Putin became President. Even them, the intermediary would have to find a plausible pretext to approach the target with revealing his actual interest. The emergence of computer networks in the 1990s greatly expanded the SVR’s recruiting horizon. It offered an opportunity to penetrate a new layer at the NSA employees: civilian technologists working under contract for the US government. Many of these civilians at the NSA, especially the younger ones, had been drawn from the hacking and game-playing culture. Some had even taken courses abroad on hacking techniques. They presented the SVR was inviting targets for recruitment. As was previously mentioned, Russian intelligence had considerable experience in Germany with hacktavists who tended to be anarchists. There were also supporters of the Libertarian movement. The common denominator was often their resentment expressed in their postings s of the United States and its allies attempting to limit the downloading of copy-righted music, movies and software on the Internet, all of which went under the rubric of “freedom of the Internet.” They also vocally objected to the NSA using built-in backdoors in their software to read their encrypted messages. They were not difficult to find on the Internet. The donors to Ron Paul’s Libertarian election campaign (including Snowden) were a matter of public record, for example. Even if there was no shortage of hacktavists who believed the surveillance of the Internet by the NSA was an evil worth fighting, the SVR still had to find a plausible way of approaching members of this counterculture without offending them. Clearly, the SVR could no longer use out- of-date Communist and anti-capitalist ideology as a lure. Russia was far more authoritarian than the U.S, when it came to the Internet. One viable alternative for the SVR was custom- tailoring false flags to appeal to hacktavists. For this purpose the Internet provided a near perfect realm for false flags. Since it is a place where true identities cannot easily be verified, intelligence services could employ a protean kit of disguises to assume false identities to entice potential dissidents into communicating with them. The KGB’s earlier efforts to use hacktavist groups in Germany had produced little, if any, intelligence because of the “stove-piping” the NSA used to isolate its computers from networks HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020328