This article is about covert agent communication channel websites used by the CIA in many countries from the mid 2000s until the early 2010s, when they were uncovered by counter intelligence of some of the targeted countries, notably Iran and China, circa 2010-2013.

This article uses publicly available information to publicly disclose for the first time a few hundred of what we feel are extremely likely candidate sites of the network. The starting point for this research was the September 2022 Reuters article "America’s Throwaway Spies" which for the first time gave nine example websites, and their analyst from Citizenlabs claims to have found 885 websites in total, but did not publicly disclose them. Starting from only the nine disclosed websites, we were then able to find a few hundred websites that share so many similarities with them, i.e. a common fingerprint, that we believe makes them beyond reasonable doubt part of the same network.

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The discovery of these websites by Iranian and Chinese counterintelligence led to the imprisonment and execution of several assets in those countries, and subsequent shutdown of the channel by the CIA when they noticed that things had gone wrong. This is likely a Wikipedia page that talks about the disastrous outcome of the websites being found out: 2010–2012 killing of CIA sources in China, although it contained no mention of websites before Ciro Santilli edited it in.

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.

If anyone can find others websites, or has better techniques feel free to contact Ciro Santilli at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli". Contributions will be clearly attributed if desired. Some of the techniques used so far have been very heuristic, and that added to the limited amount of data makes it almost certain that some websites have been missed. Broadly speaking, there are two types of contributions that would be possible:

The fact that citizenlabs reported exactly 885 websites being found makes it feel like they might have found find a better fingerprint which we have not managed to find yet. We have not yet had to pay for our data. If someone wants to donate to the research, some ideas include:

Disclaimers:

May this article serve as a tribute to those who spent their days making, using, and uncovering these websites under the shadows.

This section contains some of the most interesting and a few representative screenshots of the websites found.

We intentionally omit the screenshots already reported by the Reuters article.

Similar to a college, but led by religious denomination leaders rather than fellows.

All IP ranges have some holes in them for which we don't have a domain name.

It is because there was nothing there, or just because we don't have a good enough reverse IP database?

It is possible that DomainTools could help with a more complete database, but its access is extremely expensive and out of reach at the moment.

Censys is another option that would be good to try.

Putting 140 USD into WhoisXMLAPI to get all whois histories of interest for possible reverse searches would also be of interest.

TODO is there a publicly visible list?

Ways in which it can happen:

Does this contain any structured data? E.g. can you list all papers by a given author besides just searching and hoping there are no homonyms?

whoisxmlapi WHOIS record on April 28, 2011

He's a bit overly obsessed with polynomials for the taste of modern maths, but it's still fun.

A conjecture is an open problem in mathematics for which some famous dude gave heuristic arguments which indicate if the theorem is true or false.