Speaker 1: Welcome back, everybody. Today, we're gonna be taking a different look.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be looking at the park bench problem. Housepies
Speaker 1: really meet their source. You see you in a hundred times.
Speaker 1: A man walks into a park sits on a bench.
Speaker 1: A second person appears a few minutes later and sits
Speaker 1: beside him. Neither looks at the other. They stare straight
Speaker 1: ahead while quietly exchanging classified information. Because my favorite part,
Speaker 1: one of them casually slides a envelope towards the other.
Speaker 1: The circ second person takes it, stands up, and walks away,
Speaker 1: and apparently nobody notices. Watching home man I saw Sall
Speaker 1: Bearnson engage in variations of this classic spy movie behavior.
Speaker 1: You might be asking yourself, well, this is actually doesn't
Speaker 1: this actually look more suspicious if two people legitimately knew
Speaker 1: each other? Wouldn't it look more natural if they were talking,
Speaker 1: or drinking coffee or laughing? The answer introduces us to
Speaker 1: a fascinating problem in real world espionage, what I would
Speaker 1: call the park bench problem. Real intel officers aren't simply
Speaker 1: trying to looking suspicious. They also try to avoid creating
Speaker 1: evidence of a relationship. Those aren't necessarily the same thing.
Speaker 1: So back through Saul Berenston, imagine he was actually talking
Speaker 1: to a Russian intelligence officer, and imagine what that would
Speaker 1: look like. Secretly meeting an American intelligence officer. A random
Speaker 1: person walking through the park probably doesn't matter. But if
Speaker 1: Russian or American counterintelligence is already following you, now everything changes.
Speaker 1: They're documenting where you go, when you arrive, who appears long,
Speaker 1: how long they remain, where they go afterward, and where
Speaker 1: the same person appears again next week. Suddenly having coffee
Speaker 1: and laughing together isn't necessarily better either. You've just demonstrated
Speaker 1: that you know each other, and that brings us to
Speaker 1: our first intelligence concept, the pattern of association. Intelligence services
Speaker 1: don't always need to hear what two people are saying. Sometimes,
Speaker 1: simply establishing the person A repeatedly encounter's person B is
Speaker 1: extremely valuable. If a CAA officer station under diplomatic cover
Speaker 1: repeatedly appears near an employee of the Russian government, counterintelligence
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily need a recording of their conversation. The relationship
Speaker 1: itself becomes interesting. So intel officers face a paradox. You
Speaker 1: need to communicate with your source, but communicating creates evidence
Speaker 1: that the relationship exists. Another trade care AFT concept does
Speaker 1: cover for action, which means having an innocent explanation for
Speaker 1: what you're doing. Imagine again, the intelligence officer repeatedly entering
Speaker 1: the same cafe not suspicious if there's no reason for
Speaker 1: him to be there. But suppose the cafe is across
Speaker 1: the street from his office. If he buys coffee every morning,
Speaker 1: Now his presence has a perfectly reasonable explanation. The best
Speaker 1: clandestine behavior often isn't something that looks secret, it's something
Speaker 1: that looks boring. However, another problem. Before meeting a sensitive
Speaker 1: source and an intel officer may need to determine whether
Speaker 1: someone is following him. This introduces the surveillance detection route,
Speaker 1: sometimes abbreviated the SDR. The basic concept to straightforward. Before
Speaker 1: conducting an important clandestine activity, the officer must move through
Speaker 1: environment in ways that provide opportunities to determine whether surveillance
Speaker 1: is present. That doesn't mean dramatically looking over your shoulder
Speaker 1: every fifteen seconds. In fact, doing that could advertise that
Speaker 1: your surveillance conscious. Instead, the objective is to identify whether
Speaker 1: the same people, vehicles, or surveillance elements continue appearing during
Speaker 1: otherwise explainable movements and sophisticated surveillance teams make this extremely difficult.
Speaker 1: Professional surveillance isn't necessarily one guy in sunglasses following you
Speaker 1: for six blocks. Teams can rotate, personnel, vehicles can change
Speaker 1: Observers can position themselves ahead of the target, and that's
Speaker 1: why spy movies may sometimes underestimate the difficulty of determining
Speaker 1: where they're actually clean. Now, suppose you don't want to
Speaker 1: risk a meeting at all either. One of espionage's oldest
Speaker 1: solutions the dead drop, which allows information and material to
Speaker 1: be transferred without the two participants meeting, just leaving something
Speaker 1: got a predetermined location and later retrieving it huge advantage
Speaker 1: for the intelligence. Cara intelligence identifies the sun savenants can
Speaker 1: potentially reveal who services it. Another technique is the brush past.
Speaker 1: The idea is a very brief encounter during which material
Speaker 1: changes hands while both individuals continue moving through an ordinary environment.
Speaker 1: The attraction is obvious instead of sitting together for twenty
Speaker 1: minutes to contact last seconds. But again, professional surveillance changes everything.
Speaker 1: If one participant is already being closely watched, even a brief,
Speaker 1: unexplained interaction may become significant, which brings us back to
Speaker 1: Paul to Saul sitting on the bench. Is it completely ridiculous, No,
Speaker 1: there's some logic behind it. If two people sit near
Speaker 1: one another without obviously acknowledging each other, a casual observer
Speaker 1: might not ever realize they're communicating. The distinction is causal
Speaker 1: observation and professional surveillance are completely different things. The stranger
Speaker 1: walking his dog may notice nothing, but a trained surveillance
Speaker 1: team already interested in Saul may notice everything. From a
Speaker 1: filmmaking perspective, it's brilliant. The audience immediately understands secret information
Speaker 1: has changed hands. From a counter intelligence perspective, you just
Speaker 1: create a potentially observable physical transaction. And modern technology makes
Speaker 1: the problem even greater. With high resolution cameras, face recognition,
Speaker 1: license plate information also and communication metadata can establish patterns,
Speaker 1: so a real time detection and retrospective detection. This is
Speaker 1: an important distinction. Maybe nobody realizes today that your park
Speaker 1: bench encounter mattered, but six months later investigators discovered that
Speaker 1: the person's sitting byside you was a Russian intel officer.
Speaker 1: Now they can go backward. Where else were you both present?
Speaker 1: Did your phones appear in similar locations? Did either person's
Speaker 1: behavior change after the encounter. Did sensitive information disappear? Suddenly
Speaker 1: that harmless park bench becomes evidence. And that's the fundamental
Speaker 1: problem of clan destined communication. Every contact creates potential information,
Speaker 1: and meeting creates a location. Phone call creates metadata physically change,
Speaker 1: it creates an observable event. It's the meeting that produces
Speaker 1: It's the meeting that produces no meaningful intelligen for the adversary.
Speaker 1: Sometimes that means creating an innocent explanation for being together.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it means minimizing contact. Sometimes it means communicating in directly.
Speaker 1: That's why the classic Hollywood park bench isn't completely fictional,
Speaker 1: It's simply and complete. Real espionage isn't about wearing sunglasses
Speaker 1: and staring straight ahead and whispering the package has arrived.
Speaker 1: It's about understanding something much more difficult. Your adversary doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily need to hear what you said that. You only
Speaker 1: need to discover who you were sitting next to.