The Spy Who Drove Me

People are terribly sloppy at not discussing sensitive work, even when they've been trained and should know better, never even thinking about security implications. As a retired military guy with certain specialized, though rather dated, knowledge, I happened to be sitting in a restaurant prior to a business meeting a few years ago near a military base that has a large civilian contract support and research presence near it. There were a couple of guys having lunch at the next table and apparently "catching up". One guy was chatty. In the half hour I was there, I learned of his organization's budget cuts, where their resources were going to be refocused and what the priorities were, the likely reason certain things were cut because of specific technical issues, how much new work they were expecting on a certain program, and a dozen other things that a military or corporate spy would have loved to hear. I glanced over once and he was wearing his security badge right out in public so I was able to identify his name and organization. Idiot.

The Engadget link is a weird blog repost of https://www.gq.com/story/spy-or-uber-driver, which is actually a well written and fascinating story.

I was taking a lyft to the airport in St. Louis a couple months back coming home from a geospatial conference and the driver heard me talking to my coworker about maps and mentioned that he too worked on geospatial data as he worked for the national geospatial intelligence agency.

Considering how government salaries go I feel like this is the more likely spy in your Uber.

This "older woman, somewhere in her 60s" probably just consumes a lot of news, as is common for people in that age group.

"DNI" isn't exactly a secret acronym for Director of National intelligence; if you enter the acronym into a news search engine you'd see it's commonly used in news articles. Also the website is literally DNI.gov.

I'd agree the North Korea thing is weird, but maybe she was just making conversation and dug herself into a hole. Plenty of Uber drivers have also told me vague stories about times they visited Country X long ago (many of which I thought didn't check out, but smiled and nodded anyway) just to keep the conversation going.

Certainly it is a possibility that the Uber gig could be some sort of cover, but I think it's unlikely.

It seems unlikely that "Gloria" was a spy, because if she was, she's not very good at it. A real spy wouldn't have mentioned having visited North Korea. Mentioning that just calls her out as someone who isn't your typical Uber driver, and a real spy's whole M.O. is to blend into the background.

What seems more possible is that she was what intelligence types call an "asset" -- some non-spy person who's in a position to get their hands on information a real spy is interested in. The job of the spy is to convince the asset to put their hands on that information, and then to hand it over to them. If the spy does this right, the asset doesn't even realize they're handing the information over to a spy -- at least, not until long after the spy has reported the info back to HQ and vanished.

It's not hard to imagine a real spy, knowing that lots of highly trusted security types were going to all be together in Aspen at a conference, sidling up to all the Uber drivers in the area and making them an offer: "keep a list of the names of all your passengers and where you drove them from and to over these four days, bring me that list when the four days are over, and I'll pay you $1,000. And if you can get any of those people to tell you anything about North Korea, bring me those tips and I'll pay you an extra $500 each." If they ask why you want that info, you tell them you work for a defense contractor who's looking for an inside track in the acquisitions sweepstakes. They're not going to check, so you just need a cover story plausible enough to quiet their conscience.

Driving for Uber isn't exactly the royal road to riches, so that would be a pretty attractive offer for the driver. Most wouldn't go for it, but maybe a few do. And most of the information those few would bring you will be useless, but who knows, maybe there'll be a diamond hidden in there somewhere -- someone actually blabs something meaningful about North Korea, or the driver logs a trip taking some natsec big shot to meet their mistress, thus furnishing you with possible blackmail material. Even if all the drivers in Aspen take you up on it the total cost will be miniscule in terms of the amounts intelligence agencies throw around, so it's OK that it's a long shot.

> Shane, who had also come to see our suspicions of Gloria as silly and paranoid, was now suspicious all over again, as was I. "What were you doing in North Korea, Gloria?" he asked again. "Tell me, Gloria."

Over here in Eastern Europe this way of putting questions would have gotten that passenger out of the taxi in a matter of seconds (especially the "tell me, Gloria" part), with some departing swear words for good measure.

Maybe she had travelled to north Korea as part of a low-key religious delegation, hence the reluctance to discuss. Or maybe she hadn't been there at all and was just trying to make interesting conversation.

Seriously though - this article is not newsworthy. I mean, at the very least do some basic research. FB profile, interview friends. Take a bunch of different Ubers and fish for trends in questioning.

I'll just point out that there's nothing particular to Uber that makes being a hired driver a honeypot job for foreign agents. The headline seems like clickbait for the #DeleteUber crowd, especially with lines like this:

> Thanks to Uber and Lyft's gig economy it's much easier. No union, no problem (for them at least).

How does being in a union make you less likely to be a spy for a foreign government?

The original story that this one is referencing: https://www.gq.com/story/spy-or-uber-driver

Whenever I visit a foreign country for work and my host company provides a car and driver, I always assume that the driver is being paid to listen in on our conversation - either that, or the car is bugged. That may not be the case, but it’s sloppy to have a sensitive business conversation in front of a third party and just assume that he or she can’t understand what you are saying.

Kind of funny that the first thing I see on this page is Oath begging me to let them spy on me.

IMHO Gloria is just choosing targets, that's why she was deliberately asking provocative questions. The real spies will handle them at their hotel. You'd think that by asking questions about north Korea and Russia, they'd be targeting left leaning political activists, you might be wrong, they might be on the contrary targeting right wing radicals. An angry reaction from the passenger towards Russia/North Korea might be what she's looking for

If "Gloria" were truly a spy then this would imply that whatever government she worked for was inside Uber's network enough to send certain targets to their chosen drivers. And are probably able to track whomever they want like the "celebrity stalker" thing Uber was doing a while back.

Or "Gloria" was just sitting on the event because she knew that's where the money was, was up on politics and knew who Julia Ioffe is because she (somewhat famously) got fired for saying on the twitter that Trump was having sexual relations with his daughter but didn't want to say that's how she knew she was Russian.