That story was first made public in a Yahoo News report in 2018, but researchers wanted to know more. Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto announced its findings on Thursday, publishing them in a statement in lieu of a full report.According to the researchers, it was fairly easy for them to figure out how to identify CIA-linked websites, of which they found 885 they could claim “with high confidence” were part of a CIA network.“The reckless construction of this infrastructure by the CIA reportedly led directly to the identification and execution of assets, and undoubtedly risked the lives of countless other individuals. Our hope is that this research and our limited disclosure process will lead to accountability for this reckless behavior.”The websites were active between 2004 and 2013, but Citizen Lab said they are probably not being used by the intelligence agency anymore. They were used to both find informants and maintain contact with them.Reuters has published a much deeper report on Thursday as well, titled “America’s Throwaway Spies: How the CIA failed Iranian informants in its secret war with Tehran.”Yahoo’s 2018 report revealed that Iranian counterintelligence officers had found out about the websites sometime around 2009 and exploited it to hunt down and destroy the CIA’s network in Iran. When they shared their findings with their Chinese counterparts, much of the CIA’s network there was eradicated as well.“Upwards of 70% of our operations had been compromised,” Reidy told McClatchy in 2015; still, the CIA fired him rather than address the problem.
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