Simon Willison’s Weblog

How the CIA Staged Sham Academic Conferences to Thwart Iran’s Nuclear Program. “The importance of a conference may be measured not only by the number of Nobel Prize winners or Oxford dons it attracts, but by the number of spies. U.S. and foreign intelligence officers flock to conferences for the same reason that Army recruiters concentrate on low-income neighborhoods: They make the best hunting grounds. While a university campus may have only one or two professors of interest to an intelligence service, the right conference — on drone technology, perhaps, or ISIS — may have dozens.”