How do intelligence agencies communicate? 🕵️ And their secret agents?

Communications are sometimes born a little weak, and that’s what keeps in business the people who later improve them. To talk about how intelligence services communicate I sit down with David Marugan, alias Radio Hacking, an electronic security consultant with thirty-five years spent in the world of radio.

We start in 1903, with the prank a magician pulled on Marconi during a public demonstration: a man in the middle in Morse code, in plain text and with no authentication, which made a mockery of the whole idea of secure communications. From there we jump to Echelon and the UKUSA agreement, to the Russian illegal agents captured in 2010, to dead drops, the fake Moscow rocks, numbers stations and One Time Pad encryption. David draws on real cases and on the series The Americans to illustrate it.

We also talk about Crypto AG and Operation Rubicon, about why privacy is a collective problem and not an individual one, and about radio as the last frontier when everything else goes down. He closes by recommending three books: El enemigo conoce el sistema, by Marta Peirano; Libertad Vigilada, by Nacho García Mostazo; and Resistencia digital. A conversation to understand that not all espionage lives inside a computer.