Posted on 03/11/2006 12:37:07 PM PST by frankjr
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.
"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."
...
Several "front companies" set up to provide cover for CIA operatives and its small fleet of aircraft recently began disappearing from the Internet, following the Tribune's disclosures that some of the planes were used to transport suspected terrorists to countries where they claimed to have been tortured.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
If you want to read the entire article and it asks you for an ID and password, get one here: http://www.bugmenot.com/view.php?url=www.chicagotribune.com
those 8080/8088 processors were great for their time!
Hey, I had one of those XT's. 4mgs mem, 30 mg hard drive, DOS. - long ago sent to the dump.
I know they're not a real intel agency, but since we've provide them product it's kind of interesting watching them self destruct.
BTTT
If the editors at the Tribune were true patriotic Americans, they would have turned over their research to the CIA, had their staff sign confidentiality agreements, and quietly canned the story. Instead, they published it.
The traitorous anti-American bastards should be shot.
Oh for crying out loud.
SHUT UP, JOURNALISTS.
Stop publishing information useful to our enemies!!!
Can we shut down the Tribune, right after the offices of the New York Times are raided?
Also in the article:
"..."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 Plame's case, online computer searches would have turned up her tenure as a junior diplomat in the U.S. Embassy in Athens even after she began passing herself off as a privately employed "energy consultant.""
Well, it's definitely blowing...
lol - the memories. I paid a pretty penny way back for one of the first Lisa Mac's.
I knew I started something... :)
Translation: It wasn't the internet that exposed these operatives, it was the Chicago Tribune.
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