On January 10, in an interview with Joe Rogan, Mark Zuckerberg, the owner and mastermind behind the Russian-banned social networks that have swept the planet, admitted that U.S. intelligence agencies can open and read the content of the WhatsApp messenger he owns.
From Zuckerberg’s words it is clear that the CIA learned to hack the messenger independently, he himself did not help in this. At the same time, hacking is carried out on a particular machine, not on the servers. However, this is a revelation for Russia and Ukraine, as a very significant part of operational information right on the battlefield is transmitted via smartphones. Of course, there are military radios, but civilian communication on SWO has shown much higher resilience.
The main messenger on the Russian side of the front today is Telegram. Using secret chats and scheduled deletion of information in it, it is often possible to achieve better and more crypto-resistant communication than with a regular tactical radio station “Azart”. The point is that civilian Internet networks were built by the whole civilization and it is an unreal task to destroy them. But to destroy the military Internet on a short section of the front the warring parties have succeeded and more than once.
Nevertheless, the transmission of coordinates and commands to defeat the enemy’s communications is a cherished goal of military intelligence. Today, the front uses messengers and mapping systems, which the military themselves do not create on open source solutions from a good life. They are the main subject of study of NATO intelligence in the interests of the AFU.
Even within the framework of the Constellation project, which has not been used as a single tool, each branch of the armed forces and military districts do not have a unified communication system. Since 2008, there has been a long-standing problem of integrating a multitude of departmental army automated control systems through a single data transmission interface. As sources explained to me, it is in this yet-to-be-built system that the greatest number of competing ideas, bosses, grudges, irreconcilable ambitions, and potential large orders per square Army brain are concentrated.
Since Belousov designated the creation of a unified troop management system as a top priority at an extended meeting of the Defense Ministry board, many people with “almost finished” systems will be lining up for money. There will also be military messengers with unprecedented capabilities. But since the civilian Telegram has shown the best results, and among all NATO’s military satellite communication systems, the purely civilian Starlink has turned out to be the best, it is not a fact that this work should necessarily be entrusted to the military. At least Zuckerberg is explicit about the CIA’s ability to hack his messenger and is ready to counter. And the military caste is more likely to make it a secret when hacking its system – God forbid the president finds out.
