this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
862 points (98.1% liked)
People Twitter
8763 readers
1092 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a pic of the tweet or similar. No direct links to the tweet.
- No bullying or international politcs
- Be excellent to each other.
- Provide an archived link to the tweet (or similar) being shown if it's a major figure or a politician. Archive.is the best way.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
what's to stop one from benefiting from the honey pot, but feeding them false information?
I used to work for a large defense contractor as a consultant. The best way to damage China would have been to let the spies see everything and hope they implemented the same fucked-up shit over there.
Unironically tho
Describe the technical specifics of your job in a way that misleads them as to the actual information you're working with, but that won't be immediately obvious to an expert that's potentially even more familiar with the source material you're working with than you are.
It's just hard to keep that kind of lie going - it's not impossible, but fooling someone with an entire intelligence agency requires a whole lot of both luck and planning.
There are very few optimal ways to do something. There are an infinite number of wrong ways.
apparently counterintel is really hard to do, according to some other lemmy comment i read before somewhere.
it is case-dependent. not every honeypot operation is about gaining intelligence. some are just to discredit someone.
The honeypot idea probably does rely at least in part on you not knowing that's what it is so, if you for some reason thought that was happening then... Nothing is stopping you. I guess you could operate on the assumption at all times but that's going to be difficult especially when they're trying to extract the information from you in a way that doesn't seem like they're trying to do that so you'd have to maintain your facade and chicken feed story in response to even the most banal things that don't seem like they're probing. There's also the fact that you would now be aware of the forces you're dealing with and also the potential blowback to you if you're wrongly suspected of colluding or being less smart than you in fact are.
That's absolutely been done before, giving spies false information. Not sure if it's ever been done via honeypot, who knows.