A Vine Guide to Communicating Like a Spy

The incredible revelations about widespread US government spying on US citizen's electronic communications have rightly got a lot of people rethinking what they share in their emails, texts, and everything else. So if you've got something really sensitive to share, why worry about the next form of communication to be compromised when you could take it all offline, like a spy?

Twitter was one of the few major tech companies not implicated in NSA data-gathering tactics, so here's a quick and dirty Vine guide to some classic moves from the cloak-and-dagger playbook.

(Now, I know some of you are saying that just because Twitter wasn't implicated in PRISM doesn't mean it's totally safe, which is true. But unlike the NSA, we at Motherboard believe in that whole innocent until proven guilty thing. And plus, using Twitter for secrets is just a dumb idea.)

The first thing you need to set up with your clandestine compatriots is a dead drop, or a known location where you store sensitive materials. You also need a sign to let the other person know that the drop has something in it, so that they don't risk giving it away to surveillance by checking it all the time. In this case, an innocuous strip of tape over my phone was all that was necessary.

The next step after you've set up a hiding place (in this case, a note inside a toilet paper roll) is to develop a code to keep prying eyes from reading your communications. In this case I used an Atbash cipher because I'm lazy; you'd probably want to agree on something more complicated.

You can use a book as a cipher if you and your partner both have the same exact copy of a book. There are various methods, but the most Hardy Boys style one I can think of is using a piece of paper with holes cut out to frame text. It's not very secure, as people who see such a piece of paper generally know exactly what it's for, but if they don't know what page and what book you're using it for, prying eyes are SOL.

Eventually you may have to meet a source you've never seen before. In that case, a secret handshake or James Bondian greeting passcode is the way to guarantee your guy or gal is a friend.

In the old days, if you needed to physically deliver a message over a long distance, you'd use a pigeon. These days, drones are so cheap that pigeons are a thing of the past.

Oh yeah, and if these really are sensitive communications, you're going to need to destroy them when you're done.

@derektmead