flashboy dot org

Much fun is being had with the claims by Russian state television about British embassy officials conducting espionage using a big fake rock. Never ones to miss the chance for a James Bond reference or fifty, the news presenters have been wiffling on about “outlandish” schemes and “weird and wonderful” devices.

All very jolly… but, er, isn’t this just a modern version of the timeworn old Cold War technique – a bluetooth Dead Letter Box? One person downloads their message onto the device as they walk past, then a second person can upload it hours later. In fact, it solves the only weak point in the dead drop protocol – the need to stop, unobserved, to deposit or pick up the material – because you don’t need to make physical contact with the DLB, or even necessarily to stop walking. It’s pretty obvious, it’s simple to build and run, and frankly you’d be astonished if half the bins and Evening Standard boxes in Whitehall didn’t have similar devices in them. The most complicated bit would be making the fiberglass rock – because, you know, they always look like bits of a crappy old Star Trek set. Having said that, you can buy low-tech versions of them to keep your keys in.

Indeed, it’s not like the Russians could act terribly surprised about it – as their own spy in the FBI, Robert Hanssen, suggested a similar system to them in 2000, using Palm VIIs:

As you implied and I have said, we do need a better form of secure communication – faster. In this vein, I propose (without being attached to it) the following:

One of the commercial products currently available is the Palm VII organizer. I have a Palm III, which is actually a fairly capable computer. The VII version comes with wireless internet capability built in. It can allow the rapid transmission of encrypted messages, which if used on an infrequent basis, could be quite effective in preventing confusions if the existance [sic] of the accounts could be appropriately hidden as well as the existance [sic] of the devices themselves. Such a device might even serve for rapid transmittal of substantial material in digital form.

Of course, as the Register article “FBI traitor suspect had mad C skillz” makes clear, the Russian agency never took him up on the suggestion – probably on the basis that that, in geek language, the phrase for “this technology is essential for the future of your organisation” is exactly the same as the one for “I want a new toy”. Hanssen was eventually arrested, making an old-fashioned dead letter drop of classified documents in a park in Virginia.

In short, it seems that this was very nearly the perfect covert information-gathering scheme… with the nitpicking exceptions being that the streets of Moscow aren’t normally covered in large boulders, and the bit where one of the British officials casually picked up the rock and carried it away. But yeah, apart from that, flawless.

UPDATE: In an article that pretty much confirms my interpretation, the Grauniad includes the beautiful, priceless line, “Interfax, the Russian news agency, reported that the FSB had fanned out across Moscow to check other potentially suspicious rocks.” Fantastic.