CIA 2010 covert communication websites / USA spying on its own allies Updated 2025-08-08
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Being Brazilian, Ciro Santilli was particularly curious about the existence of a Brazil-focused mentioned in the Reuters article, as well as in other democracies.
WTF the CIA was doing in Brazil in the early 2010s! Wasn't helping to install the Military dictatorship in Brazil enough!
It is worth noting that democracies represent just a small minority of the websites found. The Middle East, and Spanish language sites (presumably for Venezuela + war on drugs countries?) were the huge majority. But Americans have to understand that democracies have to work together and build mutual trust, and not spy on one another. Even some of the enlightened people from Hacker News seem to not grasp this point. The USA cannot single handedly maintain world order as it once could. Collaboration based on trust is the only way.
Snowden's 2013 revelations particularly shocked USA "allies" with the fact that they were being spied upon, and as of the 2020's, everybody knows this and has "stopped caring", and or moved to end-to-end encryption by default. This is beautifully illustrated in the 2016 film "Snowden" when Snowden talks about his time in Japan working for Dell as an undercover NSA operative:
NSA wanted to impress the Japanese. Show them our reach. They loved the live video from drones. This is Pakistan right now [video shows American agents demonstrating drone footage to Japanese officials]. They were not as excited about that we wanted their help to spy on the Japanese population. They said it was against their laws.
Of course we tapped the entire country anyway.
And we did not stop there. Once we owned their communications systems, we started going after the physical infrastructure.
We'd slip these little sleeper programs into power grids, dams, hospitals. The idea was that if the day came when Japan was no longer an ally, it would be "lights out".
And it wasn't just the Japanese. We were planting malware in Mexico, Germany, Brazil, Austria.
I mean, China, I can understand. Russia. Iran. Venezuela, okay.
But Austria?!
[shows footage of cow on an idyllic Alpine mountain grazing field, suggesting that there is nothing in Austria to spy on]
Video 1.
But Austria?! scene from Snowden (2016)
Source.
Another noteworthy scene from that movie is Video 2. "Aptitude test on communication networks scene from the 2016 Snowden film", where a bunch of new CIA recruits are told that:
Each of you is going to build a covert communications network in your home city [i.e. their fictitious foreign target location written on each person's desk such as Berlin, Istanbul and Bangkok, not necessarily where they were actually born], you're going to deploy it, backup your site, destroy it, and restore it again.
thus somewhat mirroring what actually happened with these real world websites.
Video 2.
Aptitude test on communication networks scene from the 2016 Snowden film
. Source.
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How to contact Ciro Santilli Updated 2025-07-26
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Ciro Santilli is very happy to meet people with related interests, he really loves his like-minded online friends. Even if you don't have something a specific goal in mind for the contact, please just say hi.
To contact Ciro publicly about any general subject that is not covered in a more specific GitHub repository, including saying hi or suggestions about his website either:
Publicly viewable contact is preferred if possible to more effectively share Ciro's wisdom with the world.
But if you feel more comfortable with private contact, no problem, either:
For other less good methods that will also likely work, use direct messages of the following profiles from under Section "Accounts controlled by Ciro Santilli":
Ciro's Twitter DMs are also open, but note that Ciro receives endless Chinese language SPAM there which Twitter is doing nothing to combat, so it's not as reliable.
If you are a privacy freak or are going to tell Ciro state secrets Ciro has this GNU Privacy Guard public key: pubkey.gpg, but it's not something that he has ever really used.
Disqus comments were removed from his website in 2019-05-04, a manual dump is available here, removal rationale at: why Ciro Santilli removed Disqus comments from his website in 2019-05-04.
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Good Updated 2025-07-16
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Governments should provide basic Internet infrastructure Updated 2025-07-16
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Companies are getting too much power to distort regulations and destroy privacy.
Taxes pay for the physical car roads, so why shouldn't they also pay for the "online roads" of today?
Other less simple ones that might also be feasible:
All of them should have strong privacy enabled by default: end-to-end encryption, logless, etc. Governments are not going to like this part.
And then if you ever forget a password or lose a multi-factor authentication token, you can just go to an ID center with your ID to recover it.
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Jitsi Updated 2025-07-16
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As of 2020: end-to-end encryption optional and turned off as default, and marked as experimental...
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Signal (software) Updated 2025-07-16
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Other cool stuff:
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The perfect privacy messaging software features Updated 2025-07-16
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Haven't found the one yet:
Optional but really ideal:
  • can delete messages from the device of the person you sent it to, no matter how old
  • decentralized, your username is a public key
The state of messaging is ridiculous as of 2020.
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Why did Facebook buy WhatsApp? Updated 2025-07-16
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Obviously with the single intention of killing a competitor.
It is impossible to make money off WhatsApp as it is because of end-to-end encryption.
Facebook just clearly bought it to prevent it from actually growing further and killing facebook.
It is mindblowing that the sale wasn't cancelled due to anti trust.
The outcome of this is that WhatApp will remain with the same feature set forever, while other competitors have been growing, notably Discord and Slack.
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