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Googling for CIA Agents
yali writes "As the heat turns up on the investigation into how an undercover CIA officer's identity was leaked to the press a technology columnist at the SF Chronicle, David Lazarus, shows how easy it is to identify individuals via the Internet. Even with little information, using widely available tools like Google and LexisNexis, it is possible to turn up startlingly relevant details." From the article: "I then went back to Google and got a map of Plame's neighborhood and directions to her home. Google also allowed me to study a high-resolution satellite photo of Plame's house. I could see that the property appears to be in a quiet residential community and looks approachable from all sides. It also offers ready access by car to major thoroughfares."
Ahem.
It's both.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Actually their defense is that she wasn't undercover, her status as a CIA employee was widely known by DC social circles, and Karl learned about it from the media (possibly Miller.)
Don't know how you got modded as insightful since you obviously didn't read the article. Note the comment in the article where it states:
You don't know much about the Agency do you? Do you have any idea how many analysts work there? Do you realize that all analysts are not "agents" working in secret as supposed employees of the State Department? Do you realize that agents working under-cover are often analysts? Determining who is actually a "spook" can be difficult and that is the problem with this case. If Ms. Plame was actually an under-cover operative, then an egregious violation of protocol and law has occurred.
As an aside: You should also know that there are a significant number of employees working for the agency that are doing nothing in the way of classified work.
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Let's remember that this is the NYT reporter who wrote stories citing that anonymous sources knew that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Actually, the reason Rove hasn't done anything illegal is because Plame was not a clandestine agent when her name was revealed. In fact she hadn't been a covert agent for several years before her name was revealed. Also, Plame was never a deep cover NOC.
From a Washington Times Article:
"A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times."
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
Her husband, when pressed (cuz it's kinda dopey to complain about bureaucrats being outed...) admits as much.
No he didn't.
"In stating that "My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity," Wilson was simply noting that Plame's identity was no longer secret after Novak publicly revealed it."
http://mediamatters.org/items/200507150003
The AP has already run a correction to the story you link to. Nice try though.
Also FTA:
"In an interview Friday, Wilson said his comment was meant to reflect that his wife lost her ability to be a covert agent because of the leak, not that she had stopped working for the CIA beforehand."
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Nope, Karl specifically stated that he did not leak the name of the agent. When it turned out that he *did* in fact reveal her identity, the White House then claimed that Karl was telling the truth because he didn't actually spell out the name of the agent, he just gave enough information to completely identify her (as this article demonstrates).
We actually do not know for sure what her status was as that information has never been released to the public and knowing the history of the employer, likely will not be.
OTOH, you can have great fun outing CIA agents by googling "Brewster Jennings" and seeing who claims to work for them.
You should know that there are many, many companies and organizations hire "consultants". Brewster Jennings is a company that was indeed real, but set up as a cover company who may have in fact hired other folks that were not "cover". I am unaware of any specifics that have been published on this. However, you should also know that there are many other real companies that hire consultants. Companies that deal in construction, or real estate, or defense products, or science can all have "consultants" installed and working as cover for other purposes. Many of these companies can be found as customers of Dun & Bradstreet, but I will tell you that there are legitimate companies and cover companies they do business with and they can both do classified work or neither. My point is that just because someone is listed as an employee of such a company, that really means nothing as to their status or identity as a potential NOC. To paraphrase Freud, "A secretary may in fact just be a secretary."
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Isn't calling her a reporter a bit generous? :)
She didn't officially work for the US government in any capacity, neither for the CIA or the State Department, where almost all the non-NOCs operatives pretend to work.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Is Public Information Research's Namebase. They hate Google too: Google Watch
Regardless of the ongoing investigation, his quotes could cut either way
True, which is why he clarified it today.
"In an interview Friday, Wilson said his comment was meant to reflect that his wife lost her ability to be a covert agent because of the leak, not that she had stopped working for the CIA beforehand."
Findlaw.com
/ chapters/15/subchapters/iv/sections/section_426.ht ml
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/casecode/uscodes/50
Under "The term ''covert agent'' means"
"(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and
(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States"
You haven't heard it because the main stream media hasn't said a thing about it. Read, or listen, to some alternative media sources and you might get some more facts.
The reporter was jailed for obstruction of justice for not revealing the source through which she obtained the information. Now, the information is public knowledge. In other words, what this reporter did in searching for her name on the internet is in no way illegal and, furthermore, has nothing to do with why the other reporter was jailed.
> 'Brewster Jennings & Associates' was a CIA front, or at the very
> least it had been infiltrated by CIA.
Yeah, or for the slower witted spies, you could just wait for Novak to publish his second article where he identified Brewer Jennings & Associates as a CIA front company:
> In making her April 22, 1999 [to Gore], contribution, Valerie E.
> Wilson identified herself as an "analyst" with "Brewster-
> Jennings & Associates." No such firm is listed anywhere, but
> the late Brewster Jennings was president of Socony-Vacuum
> oil company a half-century ago. Any CIA employee working
> under "non-official cover" always is listed with a real firm, but
> never an imaginary one.
This was at the beginning of Novak attempting to dismiss Wilson's conclusions about his trip because he was "partisan" (even ignoring the fact that Wilson gave money to Bush and Gore, and he served under both parties' presidents). It's considered to be a logical fallacy, but it hasn't stopped Republicans from trying it in the past two years of this WMD debacle. The fact that they exposed information about the CIA for political gain is unconscionable.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Nevermind the fact that Patriot isn't even in use here, and has nothing to do with this subject. But hey, don't let facts get in the way of your trolls. I am sure some /.er will moderate you up for it.
This is somewhat off-topic, but Judith Miller is the same reporter that the New York Times had to apologize for because she was single-sourcing stories from the administration (and Chalabi, which kind of amounted to the same thing in that time period).
So, yeah, given that there's a history of her being a mouthpiece for the administration, she could very well be protecting Rove.
He never said Cheney sent him. That's simply a lie. What he said was that the office of the vice president requested the CIA look into this Niger matter. The CIA chose Joe Wilson as he already done this sort of work before (Valerie did not send him to Niger on here own. That's just silly.) He was an ambassador to Niger and Gabon and knew all the players in the area and had completed covert work for the CIA before.
Here's the quote
"In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake -- a form of lightly processed ore -- by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office."
Media repeated false GOP talking point on authorization for Wilson trip to Niger
Thalasar
Clearly Doc Ruby did not readeth the Article. In the article, the only way the author connected the name Valeri Plame with the story is becuase he already knew it. If as we are told KR said thet Wilson's wife arranged for the trip go from there. The article did.
Now let us think about something here. You get to be a female "secret agent". You need a fake name. DO you
a) pick your MAIDEN NAME
b) pick a name not previously related to you in any way
Uh gee Wally, you pick option b.
According to the stories (so far), KR did not ID her as an operative, just someone working for the CIA.
Accordign to Novak, KR's story rings true:
Here he says he heard from a non-"gunslinger" the scoop and another confirmed he heard the same thing. Would you describe KR as not a "partisan gunslinger"? I doubt many would. Combine this with KR's recent statements that say Novack told him and it rings true.
Further, there *appears* to be no dispute that she fall sunder the protection of the aforementioned Act of 1982. She apparently had a desk job and had not been a NOC for over 5 years, removing her from that category.
Again though, to me using your previous/maiden name as your "undercover name" is not an affirmative action to keep your identity secret. If she used a different name, not one publicly tied to her, the trail would have gone cold quite quickly.
Think about it. Assume she did go overseas undercover, and used that name. Any foreign government worth it's salt could track her down quite easily even in the 1990s. All they'd have had to do would have been to search on her name and follow the trail the other way. When it didn't match the story they got they'd assume her an agent. Any connections to her they found would be assumed agency covers or other agents.
The point? Your alleged "Secret CIA identity" was not a secret. Even if "apparently works for" was left out, the mere mention of Wilson's wife being involved would have sent any reporter looking to see who she was. Following that trail as it is woudl have raised *many* questions all of it's own accord.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
The article talks about Googling not for CIA agents in general, but for a very specific agent, one whose identity had been leaked to the press (in a possibly illegal manner, gottal love habeas corpus). I doubt he'd have any luck with finding information Random Spook #3269823.12, unless some "senior administration officials" feel the need to tell us his or her identity...
CIA wouldn't have refered the matter to DoJ, and DoJ wouldn't have formed a Grand Jury unless they thought someone broke some laws, Mr Rustmann's analysis notwithstanding.
And the official position of CIA (not just 'someone who supervised her') is that she was a NOC. You can spin that however you like, but I doubt the Special Counsel will listen to you.
-EvilMagnus
In an interview Friday, Wilson said his comment was meant to reflect that his wife lost her ability to be a covert agent because of the leak, not that she had stopped working for the CIA beforehand.
As I posted in another thread, it was pretty clear that Wilson's comment was a sarcastic jab at Novak. It's amazing how this quote has been twisted around and used as "proof" of the opposite.
Your phone call to my home at 5:58 pm was documented. You did nothing illegal, but please know that even though it was tagged as anonymous, statistics were recorded. Please keep reading.
You should know that I was hired, partly based upon my history and honesty. So, I am going to be honest with you now: I am hiding nothing and prefer my life that way so that I can focus on my work and not on what was said or when it was said. Because of this, many facts about me are available to the general public and on the Internet. However, because of research collaborations, there are "sensitive" projects that we are engaged in. Those sensitive projects require that I report contacts such as phone calls that are *hang ups* and queries as to identity among other specifics. Most of them are telemarketers, but very rarely, some of them have ulterior motives. Your phone call was documented and reported as are the contents of my postings on Slashdot concerning your call. It's a hassle, but I am required to do so. Please understand that I am not upset or angry with you at all and appreciate your point with respect to the article and the phone call, but am telling you this to be totally honest with you. I am also documenting that your phone call was not malicious in nature and that it was linked to this discussion, so don't worry about it as nothing will happen as a result of this specific incident. I just wanted to be straightforward with you about this.
With the best of intentions....
BWJones
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