Apparently The CIA Once Ran A Fake Star Was Fan Site To Communicate With Spies Overseas

TechSpot- The internet has seen its fair share of weird, but a Star Wars fan site secretly run by the CIA to communicate with overseas spies might top the list. StarWarsWeb.net looked like any other 2010-era fan page, complete with lightsabers, Yoda quotes ("Like these games you will"), LEGO ads, and hyped-up mentions of games like Battlefront 2 and The Force Unleashed II. But behind that nostalgic facade was a covert login system. If you entered the right password into the search bar, you'd unlock a secure line to CIA handlers. Or at least, that was the plan.

This bizarre piece of intel comes courtesy of Ciro Santilli, an independent researcher with a knack for rooting around the dusty corners of the web, who spoke to 404media.

Santili took it upon himself to dig deeper after a Reuters uncovering piece titled "America's Throwaway Spies" revealed a handful of suspicious domains back in 2022. Armed with little more than open-source tools, web dev know-how, and apparently endless patience, he ended up uncovering hundreds of similar sites.

What a bizarre story that broke over the weekend we've got here. Apparently the CIA used to (and maybe still does) run hundreds of fake websites to communicate with spies overseas - and one of them was StarWarsWeb.net, a decoy fan website for the galaxy far, far away. They have ads for Star Wars video games, links to other sites and movie soundtracks, blogs, and more….and there's a non-zero chance I've been on this website before! I was all over every fan site I could find as a kid and plenty of them looked like this!

I'm just curious - how did they use this to communicate with spies? Would they post on the forum saying something like "Hot take: Kit Fisto is the most talented Force wielder ever" and that meant we had eyes on the Bin Laden compound?! That's some real life Andor shit! The CIA has friends everywhere!

I wonder if a stray post could've fucked everything up. You know what I mean? Some random nerd uses all the right keywords and the nuclear codes get unlocked? Like messing up a takeoff because you didn't turn on airplane mode?! I need a full Netflix doc on this site.