— How can you not laugh out loud when you read this stuff.
When the Tribune searched a commercial online data service, the result was 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.
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.
If you do the crime or job or hobby it will be on the net.There is no getting away from it internet sleuths will uncover every lie misstep or F***up you ever did.
Seems like they are in the same group as the RIAA and MPAA (yesterdays post). And people were wondering about Dubai Ports World giving us less security when in fact it was the US government who let the World Trade Center bombers in and the 9/11 hijackers. Now all the foreign governments have to do is search the internet to see if you are dealing with any covert CIA operatives. Nice job CIA! I guess this one IS a slam dunk!
At least the left can’t blame one of Bush’s people for giving this one up.
Oh yeah, click “home” after the link so you can read it. You don’t have to register.
rus62 — might have the registration requirement fixed, now. They changed the link overnight. Cripes, they set 8 cookies for 1 visit!
“At least the left can’t blame one of Bush’s people for giving this one up.”
Who else?
Eideard, Actually I thought you did it to test any CIA people who may read this blog. Maybe I should’ve waited so you could’ve responded…You must work for the CIA.
What about Condi’s coca gift from Boliva? That was interesting.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/americas/03/11/coca.rice.ap/index.html
…and another didn’t inhale line comes to be.
Saw the Condi story, last night. They’re even chuckling over it in China. If one of the other editors doesn’t pick it up — I’ll probably set it for tomorrow as a Monday morning chuckle.
rus
I don’t understand your quip that :
Porter Goss is a Bush appointee. He has also pushed out many experienced agents, destroyed careers, and brought in so many inexperienced agents and political flunkies with agendas. The covert side is left without any senior leaders.
Since the Reagan administration, there has been much more emphasis on electronic spying, because it is easier and cheaper. Instead of agents in the field, satellites in space were used. Telephone calls were monitored and embassies bugged.
And now, the few field agents left have been decimated by Goss. And what is left of them has been compromised further because Goss has removed the managers and experts that could have caught these errors and corrected them. What is left doesn’t have the expertise to properly cover an agent in today’s world. Which corroborates your other statement comparing what is the CIA now, with the RIAA.
True, he is the Captain. So now the person(s) responsible for allowing this to happen should be held accountable. I don’t know if politician’s definition of accountability is the same as the general public. Hell, if may not even be in their vocabulary (reps. and dems. alike).
What I meant (in#2), this didn’t come from one of his personal appointees as with the Plume incident. In other words, the CIA are not protecting their own people.
There may have been some IT person in the CIA who questioned this but what do they know about IT, they’re just an expert in it. I have been rebuffed by my boss concerning business decisions with Latin American comanies because I’ve been there and done that. This happened twice and each time they went ahead anyway with their decision only to find out later I was right. At least my boss did admit later that I was right which is even rare in the corporate world.
Valerie Plame’s address is listed as an embassy. You literally cannot be covert, it’s against CIA regulations to have NOC (non-official cover) and be en embassy employee or resident, it puts the agents you run at risk, as not a single foreign intelligence service on EARTH sees embassy employees as anything other than spies.
“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.””
Looks like that case is closed, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with anything other than CIA incompetence. The ABB crowd just lost a BIG battle. Let;s see how the press, who has shaped the Plame narrative to date, reacts to this. Should be interesting to watch them try to twist it around. Kind of like Milo up there.
Didn’t congress make it difficult for CIA field agents to work with people in the field if they have done or were doing anything criminal?
Like working with someone honest will really get you good intelligence.
Who is to say this wasn’t started under Tenet?
And I don’t think the right is always or only to blame. After all, there was a Democrat in the oval office after Reagan.
Here is something else from Dec. 2005 about the Chi Tribune finding things out in case you can’t get to that articled linked. Somet details are not in the article linked.
http://prorev.com/2005/12/chicago-tribune-blows-cias-cover.htm
Oh oh! My neighbor is outside smoking a cigarette. I have to go outside and protect my dogs.
A lot of people don’t realize it but the CIA choose the wrong side in the last election.
I apologize for post #8. Apparently something got screwed up when I pasted it into the box. Again, my apologies for the confusion.
Whoever is in charge should get the blame malren. As I said before, who else?
“Whoever is in charge should get the blame malren. As I said before, who else?”
Who was in charge when the data was added to public records? Who was in charge when it was first published to the Internet?
You don’t know, do you?
What *I* know is that this whole fake scandal about Valerie Plame just got blown right out of the water.
“Who was in charge when the data was added to public records? Who was in charge when it was first published to the Internet?”
Doesn’t matter, see below.
“What *I* know is that this whole fake scandal about Valerie Plame just got blown right out of the water.”
The Plume scandal is about someone committing an act that exposed an agent’s identity. If there’s another way of identifying that agent that doesn’t exonerate anyone. It’s like defending counterfiting by saying that other people counterfit. Similarly if this administration has security leaks they are responsible for them; if another administration had the same leaks so are they.
Milo, you’re spinning so hard Crunch wants you to teach a class. Get over it, you can’t pin this on Bush. There’s no way possible that the Office of the President is responsible for micro-managing the datastreams of CIA employees going back ten or 15 years. It doesn’t matter who was or is President, this is simply not a presidential screw-up.
I never said the president.