r/espionage

Personal cell phones on protective missions, no threat detection on government-issued devices among the litany of sins.

The US Secret Service’s extremely lax mobile phone security practices - including using unsecured personal devices during mission operations - put America’s leaders’ and agents’ lives at risk, according to a government-issued report. https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2026-06/OIG-26-09-Jun26.pdf

"Secret Service agents’ phones can also reveal mission-related details, geolocation - and, by proxy, the US president, vice president, and visiting heads of state’s geolocations - as well as photos, contacts, and other personal information such as family members and home addresses.

Reading David Wise's book about Robert Hanssen and he talks about putting masking tape on posts as a signal. It's such a trope, I'd think that even then a strip of masking tape on an otherwise empty pole would stick out like a sore thumb. Enough to justify maybe someone tasked with keeping an eye on the general area? Am I overthinking it?

GRU tradecraft has changed, but the aim has not. The old operations broke in, stole, leaked, and sometimes destroyed. The new operation is quieter. It compromises routers, bends DNS, abuses QR codes, linked devices, cloud logins, and OAuth prompts.