Discord leaks underline importance and complexity of signals intelligence
Tom Rogan
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The government believes it has caught the person responsible for the intelligence leaks that made their way onto the Discord social media platform. That said, those leaks reemphasize the extraordinary importance of so-called “signals intelligence,” or SIGINT, in U.S. intelligence operations.
The vast majority of the publicized Discord leaks appear to have been generated by SIGINT, most of which will have been generated by the National Security Agency. True, one of the leaks hints at a possible CIA source, human agents being the most prized and protected of all foreign intelligence efforts. Still, major leaks related to intelligence collection targeting South Korea, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere all appear to have been derived from SIGINT. While other intelligence methodologies are often used to corroborate or expand on SIGINT reporting, this methodology holds obvious value in allowing its users to hear or read information or synthesize data straight from the source’s mouth.
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SIGINT isn’t a perfect art form, however. Human fallibility, such as ego, can misrepresent what is heard as the same as what is happening. The Russians are notorious, for example, for sharing priceless secrets while being listened to by the United States or its allies but also for sharing deliberate lies designed to misdirect anyone who might be listening.
But while much of SIGINT work involves applying innovative and often boutique technical devices, computer viruses, and other methods to gain access to foreign communications, an understated part of the U.S. SIGINT effort rests with human skill and courage. Yes, NSA operators often remotely sneak into communications/data systems and create de facto bugs that transmit that information back to the NSA’s legion of supercomputers for decryption. And yes, allies love these capabilities even if they know that sometimes they might be the target of them. Belgium, France, and Germany have all relied upon the NSA’s work to save their citizens from lethal terrorist plots. Britain’s GCHQ takes great advantage of its exceptionally close NSA alliance for Russia-related and priority national interest operations.
Yet sometimes, it’s not enough simply to rely on exceptional hackers possessing extraordinary resources.
Sometimes, you actually need someone to plant a physical device or enter a line of code into the heart of a foreign target’s operations. Getting that mission done often involves joint CIA-NSA operations, which involve CIA officers or agents, and sometimes NSA officers, planting de facto “taps,” bugs, or other hardware/software inside targeted networks. This allows NSA operators back at the agency’s Fort Meade headquarters or its foreign embassy stations to access otherwise highly encrypted information within the target’s networks in real time. Again, Russia has been particularly vulnerable to these efforts.
Top line: There are necessary debates over how and to what purpose the U.S. government collects data on its citizens. But when it comes to foreign espionage, the Discord leaks underline the instrumentality of signals intelligence to national security.