Ex-CIA spy points stark public WiFi warning and VPN use
A former CIA officer has warned that you’d have to be “out of your mind” for using public WiFi without protection, claiming agencies can monitor devices and urging people to use a VPN
Jason Hanson(Image: Jason Hanson / Youtube)
A terrifying warning from a former CIA operative suggests you might want to think again before using public WiFi. Veteran spy Jason Hanson has lifted the lid on the digital dangers lurking in plain sight, bluntly labelling anyone who connects to open networks without protection as “out of their mind”.
Hanson, who entered the CIA at 23, now utilises his expertise to run Spy Briefing, a company providing specialised safety training for celebs and the general public.
Following the publication of his book , Spy Secrets That Can Save Your Life, he continues to warn that “every government agency on Earth” has the capability to monitor users via their phone.
In a recent feature for LADbible Stories, Jason explained: “Every government agency on Earth can listen through your cell phone, can listen through your laptop, can listen through your cameras. It doesn’t matter what it is.
“If you think you have a cell phone that is gonna be like magic and the Agency’s not gonna listen in, they can.” To protect his own privacy, Hanson opts for a basic flip phone rather than a smartphone, ensuring he doesn’t have “all this stuff tracking him”.
He was particularly blunt about unprotected digital habits, labelling those who use open WiFi as being “out of their mind”, LADbible reported. “If I log into public WiFi, the only time I would ever do it is if I’m using a VPN, a virtual private network,” Jason said.
He continued: “So basically it encrypts my traffic, all that kind of stuff. But I’m not just going to my hotel, or I’m not going when I’m flying on an aeroplane and logging into that public WiFi without a VPN.”
The former operative further clarified: “So I wanna make sure that my traffic’s encrypted. I wanna make sure it makes me look like, even though I live in Utah , when I’m on my VPN the other day, I said it lived, I was in New Jersey.
“But yeah, if you log into public WiFi without using a VPN or something else, you’re absolutely out of your mind because they’re just gonna read your mail, they’re gonna know everything about you. It is very unsafe.”
His advice serves as a serious reminder to reconsider our connectivity habits while out in public. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) works by sending your internet traffic through a remote server run by the VPN company.
You open the VPN app, choose a server (often in a different city or country), and connect. From that point, the information leaving your phone or laptop is scrambled into unreadable code (encrypted) before it travels across the network.
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