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CIA And The Internet: Now We Know
John Stith
Staff Writer
2006-03-13
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The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) must fight a new enemy in maintaining the secrecy of their undercover agents: the Internet. In an era of terrorism, the rules for covert operatives are changing, however the Internet makes remaining undercover extraordinarily difficult.
 | | CIA Fights to Maintain Secrecy |  |
The Chicago Tribune ran a story in the Sunday edition discussing how easy it's become to track much of the CIA's activities via the Internet. With the ability to seek out just about any information, including names, addresses, phone numbers, privacy is impossible. Using certain pay search services allows even more information to be gleaned. The Internet allows the identities of thousands of operatives to become public.
The Tribune said in the article they were able to find more "2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States."
The Tribune quoted CIA's chief spokeswoman, Jennifer Dyck, "Cover is a complex issue that is more complex in the Internet age. 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."
According to the story, there are some consistent problems with maintaining cover anyway. One is traditional operatives doing embassy work aren't the same types of operatives needed to carousing in the streets of some middle-eastern city. They also pointed to the fact that there are few mentors to properly train newer operatives appropriately. Inexperience is a major problem. And of course there's the Internet.
The Tribune said the CIA didn't realize how extensive the problem was until they went to the CIA to talk about the issue and while the paper didn't reveal any names, they are certainly there for people to find if they do the proper research.
This shows a couple of problems prevalent in some of the government agencies of today. They've not done very well at updating their techniques, accommodating for modern technologies. At one time, organizations like the CIA were on top of many areas, but it seems they've not kept their edge.
With the FBI taking a second crack at updating their computer networks and the CIA seemingly not having a good grasp on how to protect themselves from identity leaks over the net, this shows another blazing hole in our nation's security, particularly around the Internet. With the military being hacked last year and the CIA having thousands of operatives available for viewing on the net, how can citizens reasonably expect to be truly safe?
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About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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