wanted to foster a loose culture on the hacking team, to help engineers remain innovative and, when necessary, blow off steam. But Silicon Valley was known for tricking out offices with foosball tables and climbing walls, and it’s likely that the C.I.A. Sometimes people got carried away, and work was paused for some sustained bombardment. guys brought Nerf guns to work-not mere pistols but big, colorful machine guns-and they would occasionally shoot darts at one another from their desks. official, named Karen, who acknowledged that the members could get “boisterous,” adding, “Folks could get a little loud, a little bit back and forth.” Some O.S.B. The group’s ultimate manager was a more senior C.I.A. When another brought food into the office one day, but didn’t share it with some members of the team, his colleagues bestowed a new handle: Dick Move. One unit member, who got braces as an adult, became known as Train Tracks. The coders were mostly young men, and they came up with nicknames for one another. There was banter, plenty of it, much of it jocular, some of it juvenile.
Like the crew of a submarine, they forged strong bonds-and strong antagonisms. Their office was a classified sanctum, a locked vault. Because of national-security concerns, they couldn’t take work home, or talk with anyone on the outside about what they did all day. engineers bore some resemblance to the Apple TV+ drama “Severance,” in that each morning they entered a milieu with its own customs and camaraderie-one sealed off from the rest of their lives. “We were kind of known as the social branch,” another O.S.B. A dozen or so people clocked in every day. There was a bullpen of cubicle workstations. was, in other respects, just like any office. (With a few exceptions, this piece refers to agency employees by pseudonyms or by their first names.)īut, while these jobs were cutting edge and-at least vicariously-dangerous, the O.S.B. “That branch was really good at taking ideas and prototypes and turning them into tools that could be used in the mission, very quickly.” According to the man who supervised the O.S.B., Sean, the unit could be “a high-stress environment,” because it was supporting life-or-death operations. “built quick-reaction tools,” Anthony Leonis, the chief of another cyberintelligence unit of the C.I.A., said.
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exploited a software vulnerability that turned it into a listening device. “It often was somebody who was willing to plug a thumb drive into the machine.” In this manner, human spies, armed with the secret digital payloads designed by the Operations Support Branch, have been able to compromise smartphones, laptops, tablets, and even TVs: when Samsung developed a set that responded to voice commands, the wizards at the O.S.B. “It could be somebody who was willing to type on a keyboard for us,” Weber said. officer or an asset recruited to work secretly for the agency-a courier for the terrorist the finance minister’s personal chef-must surreptitiously implant the malware by hand. Such operations are incredibly dangerous: a C.I.A. Sometimes a foreign terrorist or a finance minister is too sophisticated to be hacked remotely, and so the agency is obliged to seek “physical access” to that person’s devices. These are hacks, or “exploits,” designed for individual targets. This is not dragnet mass surveillance of the kind more often associated with the National Security Agency. was focussed on what we referred to as ‘physical-access operations,’ ” a senior developer from the unit, Jeremy Weber-a pseudonym-explained. It is the agency’s secret hacker unit, in which a cadre of élite engineers create cyberweapons. office with an ostentatiously bland name: the Operations Support Branch. Inside, on the ninth floor, through another door that requires badge access, is a C.I.A. When employees enter the building, they must badge in and pass through a full-body turnstile. The facility is surrounded by a high fence and monitored by guards armed with military-grade weapons. One of these buildings, at an address that is itself a secret, houses the cyberintelligence division of the Central Intelligence Agency. In fact, they hold Top Secret clearances and work in defense and intelligence. To the casual observer, they resemble anonymous corporate drones. Employees in civilian dress get out of their cars, clutching their Starbucks, and disappear into the buildings. Nestled west of Washington, D.C., amid the bland northern Virginia suburbs, are generic-looking office parks that hide secret government installations in plain sight. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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