The website's visitors, pictured here, were simply Star Wars fans.
What they didn't know was that the site was operated by the CIA for entirely different purposes.
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The site was one of a network of websites run by the CIA in the early 2000s, designed to pass messages to the United States' spy network around the world.
For most visitors, the site delivered exactly what it promised — content covering topics relevant to the popular Star Wars franchise.
But spies could access a hidden area of the site, for example by logging in with a specific username or typing particular characters into the search box.
In that hidden area, they could communicate with their handlers in the United States and receive operational instructions.
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The idea looked good on paper, but its poor execution exposed the entire network and caused the CIA considerable embarrassment.
A spy arrested in Iran in 2010 revealed one of the sites, and an analysis conducted by Iranian intelligence uncovered a network of sites sharing similar designs, similar content, and sequential IP addresses.
This discovery led to the identification of additional spies, and the CIA was forced to shut the network down. If you try to access the site's domain today, it will redirect you to the CIA's official website.
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A concept like this, if designed today, would likely involve information security experts at some level — professionals who would know how to avoid such elementary mistakes.
It's possible that this has indeed already happened, and if the redesign was done properly, we'll probably never hear about it.