Straughn
17-03-2006, 07:30
So just how easy should it be to punch up CIA operatives, anyway? I recall certain people screaming bloody murder about public leaks of otherwise classified information, so given the light of Libby *AND* Cheney's recent public notice of empowerment over "classification", what exactly should entail from this?
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0315/dailyUpdate.html
posted March 15, 2006 at 12:00 p.m.
Report: Internet search outs CIA agents
Using publicly available Internet services, Chicago Tribune finds over 2,600 CIA employees, some undercover.
By Arthur Bright | csmonitor.com
The identity of undercover CIA agents is only a click away on the Internet, according to a new investigative report.
In an article published Sunday, John Crewdson of the Chicago Tribune reported that by employing readily available commercial data services on the Internet, the newspaper was able to assemble "a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States."
At the request of the CIA, the Tribune published neither the list nor details that might put those on the list at personal risk. But while the Tribune did not reveal the specific means it used to accumulate the names of CIA personnel, it reports that they were all found through tools available to the public.
Only recently has the CIA recognized that in the Internet age its traditional system of providing cover for clandestine employees working overseas is fraught with holes, a discovery that is said to have "horrified" CIA Director Porter Goss. (Well, someone knew he was good for *something* - O3d.)
"Cover is a complex issue that is more complex in the Internet age," said the CIA's chief spokeswoman, Jennifer Dyck. "There are things that worked previously that no longer work. Director Goss is committed to modernizing the way the agency does cover in order to protect our officers who are doing dangerous work."
The US officials who the Tribune talked to offered varying explanations as to how such information came to be easily available on the Internet.
Asked how so many personal details of CIA employees had found their way into the public domain, the senior U.S. intelligence official replied that "I don't have a great explanation, quite frankly."
The official noted, however, that the CIA's credo has always been that "individuals are the first person responsible for their cover. If they can't keep their cover, then it's hard for anyone else to keep it. If someone filled out a credit report and put that down, that's just stupid."
One senior U.S. official used a barnyard epithet to describe the agency's traditional system of providing many of its foreign operatives with easily decipherable covers that include little more than a post office box for an address and a non-existent company as an employer.
One cause of the ease with which such information is found may be methods the CIA uses to transfer agents from one security class to another, notes former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman.
The problem, Goodman said, is that transforming a CIA officer who has worked under "diplomatic cover" into a "non-official cover" operator, or NOC – as was attempted with Valerie Plame – creates vulnerabilities that are not difficult to spot later on.
The CIA's challenge, in Goodman's view, is, "How do you establish a cover for them in a day and age when you can Google a name ... and find out all sorts of holes?"
In a second Chicago Tribune article, also published Sunday, Crewdson specifically focused on CIA agent Valerie Plame. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, was indicted as a result of the investigation into the leak of Ms. Plame's undercover status.
Crewdson found that Plame's status as a CIA employee was "easily penetrated with the right computer sleuthing and an understanding of how the CIA's covert employees work." (it's interesting then how that whole thing is working out, isn't it? -O3d.)
When the Chicago Tribune searched for Plame on an Internet service that sells public information about private individuals to its subscribers, it got a report of more than 7,600 words. Included was the fact that in the early 1990s her address was "AMERICAN EMBASSY ATHENS ST, APO NEW YORK NY 09255." ...
According to CIA veterans, U.S. intelligence officers working in American embassies under "diplomatic cover" are almost invariably known to friendly and opposition intelligence services alike.
"If you were in an embassy," said a former CIA officer who posed as a U.S. diplomat in several countries, "you could count 100 percent on the Soviets knowing."
However, in his blog on TPM Cafe, counterterrorism consultant and former CIA employee Larry Johnson criticized the Tribune report as "nonsense." Mr. Johnson argues that the Internet can uncover only agents whose names, like Plame's, are revealed publicly.
Well, Valerie Plame was safe until the White House pointed reporters in her direction. Even if Crewdson's assertion that Valerie's cover was "thin" (it was not), what we know for a fact is that her neighbors did not know she worked for the CIA. Only those who had a need to know knew.
Crewdson insinuates, but doesn't demonstrate, that a simple search of the internet enables one to easily identify CIA employees. The true story is more complicated. Crewdson's searches were conducted after the names of individuals and companies appeared in the news. He searched on those names and found links to the U.S. Government. Nowhere on the internet will you find a list of undercover folks that says, "they really work for the CIA". Crewdson is right about one point, the CIA has done a lousy job of developing effective cover positions. But that is a failure of leaders like Tenet rather than officers, such as Valerie Plame.
A scathing commentary on independent news site AlterNet wonders how the Bush administration, which frequently cites the need for secrecy in the midst of terrorist threats, could let such an oversight occur.
What's disturbing is that the CIA seems to just now be realizing this basic premise at a time when we are facing, according to this administration, unprecedented terrorist threats. And yet, when confronted with the Tribune's revelations, senior U.S. officials are saying things like this: "I don't know whether Al Qaeda could do this, but the Chinese could."
Forget the ethnicity, affiliation, or country of origin – a seven year old could do this. It just begs the question – if our security is in the hands of these people, how safe could we really be? President Bush, in his defense of the secretive nature of the NSA wiretaps, has repeatedly implied that riding roughshod over Congress and the law was necessary to keep al Qaeda from finding out that the NSA is listening in on phone calls. For those with functioning minds (come on... the NSA is known as "the big ear") this simply makes no sense. But we see this naivete (purposeful or not) rearing its ugly head again.
Martin Schram, a political analyst for Scripps Howard News Service, notes the similarity of the Tribune report to his own experience some 32 years earlier, when he stumbled across an ill-concealed CIA spy school in an apartment building on K Street in Washington D.C.
Slowly, a pattern emerges. In fact, a pattern within a pattern. For in both cases, the journalist revealed to the CIA an intelligence gap within its midst that stunned and embarrassed the agency – but provided the CIA with info it needed to try to recover its secrets, post haste. And in both cases, the Chicago Tribune and Newsday journalists opted to not publish the identities or other distinguishing characteristics of the CIA operatives whose covers had been blown.
Mr. Schram writes that the revelation of the CIA's failings helped the organization improve its security in 1974, and that he believes will be true with the current situation as well: "The Tribune gave the CIA a life-saving gift: Disclosure of an Internet age intelligence gap that was both dangerous and discoverable."
---
This should be consulted as well ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4799174.stm
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0315/dailyUpdate.html
posted March 15, 2006 at 12:00 p.m.
Report: Internet search outs CIA agents
Using publicly available Internet services, Chicago Tribune finds over 2,600 CIA employees, some undercover.
By Arthur Bright | csmonitor.com
The identity of undercover CIA agents is only a click away on the Internet, according to a new investigative report.
In an article published Sunday, John Crewdson of the Chicago Tribune reported that by employing readily available commercial data services on the Internet, the newspaper was able to assemble "a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States."
At the request of the CIA, the Tribune published neither the list nor details that might put those on the list at personal risk. But while the Tribune did not reveal the specific means it used to accumulate the names of CIA personnel, it reports that they were all found through tools available to the public.
Only recently has the CIA recognized that in the Internet age its traditional system of providing cover for clandestine employees working overseas is fraught with holes, a discovery that is said to have "horrified" CIA Director Porter Goss. (Well, someone knew he was good for *something* - O3d.)
"Cover is a complex issue that is more complex in the Internet age," said the CIA's chief spokeswoman, Jennifer Dyck. "There are things that worked previously that no longer work. Director Goss is committed to modernizing the way the agency does cover in order to protect our officers who are doing dangerous work."
The US officials who the Tribune talked to offered varying explanations as to how such information came to be easily available on the Internet.
Asked how so many personal details of CIA employees had found their way into the public domain, the senior U.S. intelligence official replied that "I don't have a great explanation, quite frankly."
The official noted, however, that the CIA's credo has always been that "individuals are the first person responsible for their cover. If they can't keep their cover, then it's hard for anyone else to keep it. If someone filled out a credit report and put that down, that's just stupid."
One senior U.S. official used a barnyard epithet to describe the agency's traditional system of providing many of its foreign operatives with easily decipherable covers that include little more than a post office box for an address and a non-existent company as an employer.
One cause of the ease with which such information is found may be methods the CIA uses to transfer agents from one security class to another, notes former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman.
The problem, Goodman said, is that transforming a CIA officer who has worked under "diplomatic cover" into a "non-official cover" operator, or NOC – as was attempted with Valerie Plame – creates vulnerabilities that are not difficult to spot later on.
The CIA's challenge, in Goodman's view, is, "How do you establish a cover for them in a day and age when you can Google a name ... and find out all sorts of holes?"
In a second Chicago Tribune article, also published Sunday, Crewdson specifically focused on CIA agent Valerie Plame. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, was indicted as a result of the investigation into the leak of Ms. Plame's undercover status.
Crewdson found that Plame's status as a CIA employee was "easily penetrated with the right computer sleuthing and an understanding of how the CIA's covert employees work." (it's interesting then how that whole thing is working out, isn't it? -O3d.)
When the Chicago Tribune searched for Plame on an Internet service that sells public information about private individuals to its subscribers, it got a report of more than 7,600 words. Included was the fact that in the early 1990s her address was "AMERICAN EMBASSY ATHENS ST, APO NEW YORK NY 09255." ...
According to CIA veterans, U.S. intelligence officers working in American embassies under "diplomatic cover" are almost invariably known to friendly and opposition intelligence services alike.
"If you were in an embassy," said a former CIA officer who posed as a U.S. diplomat in several countries, "you could count 100 percent on the Soviets knowing."
However, in his blog on TPM Cafe, counterterrorism consultant and former CIA employee Larry Johnson criticized the Tribune report as "nonsense." Mr. Johnson argues that the Internet can uncover only agents whose names, like Plame's, are revealed publicly.
Well, Valerie Plame was safe until the White House pointed reporters in her direction. Even if Crewdson's assertion that Valerie's cover was "thin" (it was not), what we know for a fact is that her neighbors did not know she worked for the CIA. Only those who had a need to know knew.
Crewdson insinuates, but doesn't demonstrate, that a simple search of the internet enables one to easily identify CIA employees. The true story is more complicated. Crewdson's searches were conducted after the names of individuals and companies appeared in the news. He searched on those names and found links to the U.S. Government. Nowhere on the internet will you find a list of undercover folks that says, "they really work for the CIA". Crewdson is right about one point, the CIA has done a lousy job of developing effective cover positions. But that is a failure of leaders like Tenet rather than officers, such as Valerie Plame.
A scathing commentary on independent news site AlterNet wonders how the Bush administration, which frequently cites the need for secrecy in the midst of terrorist threats, could let such an oversight occur.
What's disturbing is that the CIA seems to just now be realizing this basic premise at a time when we are facing, according to this administration, unprecedented terrorist threats. And yet, when confronted with the Tribune's revelations, senior U.S. officials are saying things like this: "I don't know whether Al Qaeda could do this, but the Chinese could."
Forget the ethnicity, affiliation, or country of origin – a seven year old could do this. It just begs the question – if our security is in the hands of these people, how safe could we really be? President Bush, in his defense of the secretive nature of the NSA wiretaps, has repeatedly implied that riding roughshod over Congress and the law was necessary to keep al Qaeda from finding out that the NSA is listening in on phone calls. For those with functioning minds (come on... the NSA is known as "the big ear") this simply makes no sense. But we see this naivete (purposeful or not) rearing its ugly head again.
Martin Schram, a political analyst for Scripps Howard News Service, notes the similarity of the Tribune report to his own experience some 32 years earlier, when he stumbled across an ill-concealed CIA spy school in an apartment building on K Street in Washington D.C.
Slowly, a pattern emerges. In fact, a pattern within a pattern. For in both cases, the journalist revealed to the CIA an intelligence gap within its midst that stunned and embarrassed the agency – but provided the CIA with info it needed to try to recover its secrets, post haste. And in both cases, the Chicago Tribune and Newsday journalists opted to not publish the identities or other distinguishing characteristics of the CIA operatives whose covers had been blown.
Mr. Schram writes that the revelation of the CIA's failings helped the organization improve its security in 1974, and that he believes will be true with the current situation as well: "The Tribune gave the CIA a life-saving gift: Disclosure of an Internet age intelligence gap that was both dangerous and discoverable."
---
This should be consulted as well ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4799174.stm