Physint: The Global Spy Game Where Your Body Is the Cheapest Zero-Day Exploit

Physint: The Planet-Spanning Game Nobody Asked For, Everybody’s Already Playing

By the time you finish this sentence, three governments will have re-branded garden-variety espionage as “physint”—the ugly portmanteau now sliding across briefing folders from Brussels to Brasília. Short for “physical intelligence,” physint is what happens when the world’s spooks realize that hacking elections via Facebook is so 2016, and that the cheapest zero-day exploit is still a human being with rent due. Think of it as HUMINT in athleisure: the same old bribery, blackmail, and pillow-talk, but tracked on a shared Google Sheet nobody remembers sharing.

The pitch is deceptively simple: if data is the new oil, then the human body is the pipeline, and every customs officer, hotel maid, or overworked USB-stick salesman becomes a walking SCADA system. Moscow pioneered the model in 2018, slipping burner phones to port workers in Piraeus so they could photograph U.S. destroyer underbellies for the price of a Moscow mule. Beijing scaled it, recruiting cash-strapped PhD students in semiconductor labs from Eindhoven to Edmonton—because nothing says “global superpower” like paying grad-student stipends in brown envelopes. By last year, the European Union’s own foreign service admitted that 14 member capitals had reported “physint facilitation networks,” a euphemism that roughly translates to “we left the back door open and someone sold it on Wish.”

Washington, naturally, cannot be outdone. The CIA’s freshly leaked “Playbook Q” encourages case officers to target overseas maintenance crews servicing undersea cables—those fragile glass arteries that keep TikTok dancing and SWIFT transfers flowing. The irony? American tech giants laid most of those cables to escape pesky domestic privacy laws, only to watch them turned into the world’s longest confession booths. If you listen closely, you can almost hear the Founding Fathers rotating in their mason-jar embalming fluid.

But physint’s real genius is financial. Recruiting a disgruntled postal clerk in Johannesburg costs less than a single hour of drone fuel, and the ROI would make Goldman Sachs blush. Last March, a Maltese energy clerk was paid €2,000 to copy LNG shipping schedules onto a thumb drive the size of a communion wafer; that data allowed a hedge fund to short European gas futures for a profit north of €40 million. Even after the clerk lost his job and pension, the trade netted enough to buy a modest yacht christened “Material Non-Public.” Somewhere, Gordon Gekko is updating his LinkedIn headline to “Influencer.”

The United Nations, ever the hall monitor arriving after the fight, is now drafting “norms” against physint—voluntary guidelines expected to carry the same weight as a New Year’s gym resolution. Meanwhile, the private sector smells margin. British startup Gogent Ltd. sells AI-enabled lanyards that vibrate when the wearer is being elicited for intel, a feature that mostly startles interns into spilling coffee on ambassadors. Israel’s NSO Group, fresh from its Pegasus hangover, is beta-testing “physical implants” that turn housekeeping keycards into long-range RFID cloners—because nothing says “never again” like monetizing paranoia twice.

All of this is unfolding against the backdrop of a planet that can’t keep its lights on. While one half of humanity toggles between blackout schedules, the other half monetizes the darkness. Physint is the rare growth industry that is recession-proof, carbon-neutral, and requires no supply chain fancier than a bar tab. It is also the only field where incompetence is a feature: every botched recruitment, every drunken embassy flasher, creates just enough noise to keep the carousel spinning. In that sense, physint is the most honest mirror we have: a global confession that everything—your passport, your paycheck, your pillow talk—has a market price, and the bid is only going up.

So the next time you hand your phone to a hotel concierge or let a chatty Uber driver hold forth about his National Guard stint, remember: you’re not just living your life, you’re tendering an IPO. And somewhere in the churn of that transaction, a bored analyst is updating your personal risk score with the enthusiasm of a teenager logging calories. The world isn’t going dark; it’s going physical—one regrettable handshake at a time.