Source: Orlando Sentinel
With the power of the "internets," anyone with simple knowledge could piece together a list of current CIA operatives.
WASHINGTON--She is 52 years old, married, grew up in the Kansas City suburbs and now lives in Virginia, in a new three-bedroom house.
Anyone who can qualify for a subscription to one of the online services that compile public information also can learn that she is a CIA employee who, over the past decade, has been assigned to several American embassies in Europe.
The CIA asked the Tribune not to publish her name because she is a covert operative, and the newspaper agreed. But unbeknown to the CIA, her affiliation and those of hundreds of men and women like her have somehow become a matter of public record, thanks to the Internet.
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.
Two-thousand and six-hundred agents outted with the use of one database. The CIA's failure to stay ahead of technology is laughable at best. Billions spent on defense and increasing intelligence capabilities, and we get this? Where's the money being spent? They can't even protect the identities of their agents, but they can protect us from "terrorist threats"?
More of the "blind leading the blind" again, it seems.
The lack of leadership in an organization always has a trickle-down effect. It was only a matter of time before it got back to the CIA.
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