Spycraft - Melton [257]
Publicly accessible Internet databases enable the remote and anonymous aggregation of comprehensive personal and financial profiles. Types of information readily available include employment, profession, educational history, job-change patterns, health, marital status, address, social security number, driver’s license number, income, personal debts, credit card numbers, travel patterns, favorite restaurants, lawsuits, and bankruptcies.
An examination of a computer user’s database information can further reveal potential recruitment vulnerabilities. Examples include:
• Recurring purchases at a liquor store or bar might suggest problems with alcohol.
• Large expenditures at pharmacies or a hospital might reveal undisclosed health problems.
• Bankruptcy or bad credit reports could indicate financial strain.
• Travel patterns and expenditures might point to extramarital relationships.
• Frequent job changes could mask failed career expectations.
• Recreational interests in dangerous or thrill-seeking activities such as scuba diving, sky diving, or motorcycle racing, could identify a risk taker who might also be inclined to accept espionage as living even more “on the edge.”
For the recruiter of spies, Internet information becomes an efficient tool for identifying targets to develop and discarding those without access or apparent vulnerabilities.
Internet accessibility to commercial databases has made the creation of effective cover and the use of disguise more problematic. The traditional identity details of address, profession, and association membership become immediately verifiable using Google or other common search tools. Because the effectiveness of cover and disguise can erode quickly under examination, light commercial cover could be compromised by a curious hotel check-in clerk with Internet access. In the hands of a counterintelligence professional, even a well-backstopped cover can be pierced by identifying anomalies and dates involved with the created identity. Because so many details of a person’s identity are now publicly available, it is difficult to create sufficient supporting records to construct an individual’s entire life history including records of education, credit cards, residence, family, children’sschools, neighborhood associations, library cards, and driver’s licenses. The amount of information needed to legitimize identity has made sustaining a cover identity over an extended period nearly impossible if a determined adversary has the ability to exploit the Internet.
Light disguises that include fake beards, mustaches, hair coloring, hats, or scars may fool the human eye, but not a camera with face-recognition software that is linked to a database. Biometric data such as iris scans, passports with memory chips, digital fingerprinting, and electronic signature matching have all emerged as new industries for commercial security and intelligence requirements.
Digital technology offers options for concealing data in forms never possible during the Cold War. The tens of thousands of pages of sensitive information collected by Kuklinski over his nine-year spy career could be compressed and stored on a memory card much smaller than a postage stamp. Embedded computer chips in toys, cameras, digital music players, calculators, watches, automobiles, and many home consumer products make it possible to alter the memory in any device to conceal secret information. An agent no longer needs to possess compromising concealment devices for hiding film, one-time pads, secret-writing chemicals, and escape instructions, since all of