Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Is a spy on the other end of that LinkedIn invite?
Experts say state actors using network to recruit
LONDON — Katie Jones sure seemed plugged into Washington’s political scene. The 30-something redhead boasted a job at a top think tank and a who’s-who network of pundits and experts, from the Brookings Institution to the Heritage Foundation. She was connected to a deputy assistant secretary of state, a senior aide to a senator and the economist Paul Winfree, who is being considered for a seat on the Federal Reserve.
But Katie Jones doesn’t exist, The Associated Press has determined. The persona was part of an army of phantom profiles lurking on the professional networking site LinkedIn. And several experts said Jones’ profile picture appeared to have been created by a computer program.
“I’m convinced that it’s a fake face,” said Mario Klingemann, a German artist who has been experimenting for years with artificially generated portraits and said he has reviewed tens of thousands of such images. “It has all the hallmarks.”
Experts who reviewed the user’s LinkedIn activity say it’s typical of espionage efforts on the professional networking site, whose role as a global Rolodex has made it a magnet for spies.
“It smells a lot like some sort of state-run operation,” said Jonas Parello-Plesner, program director at the Denmark-based think tank Alliance of Democracies Foundation, who was the target several years ago of an espionage operation that began over LinkedIn.
Last month, retired CIA officer Kevin Mallory was sentenced to 20 years in prison for passing details of top secret operations to Beijing, a relationship that began when a Chinese agent posing as a recruiter contacted him on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is oriented toward job seekers and headhunters, people who routinely fire out resumes and build webs of contacts. That approach helps fill the millions of job openings advertised on the site, but it also provides a rich hunting ground for spies.
British, French and German officials have issued warnings over the past few years detailing how thousands of people had been contacted by foreign spies over LinkedIn. In a statement, LinkedIn said it routinely takes action against fake accounts, yanking thousands of them in the first three months of 2019.
The Jones profile was first flagged by Keir Giles, a Russia specialist with London’s Chatham House think tank. Giles was recently caught up in an entirely separate espionage operation, so he was suspicious when he received an invitation from the profile.
The user claimed to have been working for years as a “Russia and Eurasia fellow” at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, but Giles said that, if that were true, “I ought to have heard of her.”
CSIS spokesman Andrew Schwartz told AP, “No one named Katie Jones works for us.”