Slashdot Mirror
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."
The reason I didn't... such a sword cuts both ways. If I put his mom in play, all moms became fair game.
But this was 8 or 9 years ago, and the only thing that reporter cited that I wasn't able to do then was examine satellite photos of Spamford's mom's house.
- G
Start a happiness pandemic
I think the purpose of the article is to show that with the very little info that was leaked on the CIA agent, that it is very easy to use it to identify them. I believe one of the defense's Karl Rove and his people have been trying to use is, "We didn't give out THAT much, we didn't spell out the name or anything." When in fact the article proves that any leak, however small is too dangerous to risk.
I kinda worry I just completely stated the obvious.
Just a boy doing unproffesional IT work that's way above his head.
Of course it's not that hard to find out where someone is working (in this case, the existence of Brewster-Jennings wasn't a secret, but the fact that it was a CIA front was).
But the CIA would have had more time to make sure its agents and assets were secure if the company hadn't been listed on her election contribution records. You can see them at Open Secrets
I'm not saying that campaign contribution disclosure is a bad thing. It's essential to the media and bloggers investigating governmental corruption.
But this is more pathetic evidence that Karl Rove, and everyone else involved at the White House, just didn't care. They were far more interested in retaliation and their own political gain than in the lives that were endangered, and the millions of dollars that were wasted.
So Google lets you look at satellite photos of addresses. Which photos have already been available, even on the Internet, for a few bucks to anyone. So what? Foreign spy agencies have the bucks for satellite photos. And if they can't find the home address of an Ambassador's wife, they're not very good spies - they're not going to pull off ther rest of their spy operation on her house.
The entire point here is that someone *cough*Karl Rove*cough* released the secret association between Valerie Plame's identity, and her job as CIA operative. That is the point in the dataflow that is sensitive. It has nothing to do with Google. Hell, I'd like to see you Google someone's house based on their Slashdot userID, let alone a CIA secret identity, without someone leaking that less than "top secret" association.
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make install -not war
I think that the point needs to be made that this is not new information. That is, Lazarus' search was done using publically available real estate information. This has always been public information (in the U.S.). The difference now is that instead of having to call various county clerks/assessors, etc. he was able to do it from his computer. The internet does make it a lot easier though.
Dumbass, If you ever were a clandestine operative your identity must remain secret to protect the CIA front company, other current operatives, and to not tip off all of the people you have been interacting with over the years of your clandestine service.
Your insinuation that if she wasn't out in the field doing a clandestine operation at the time she was outed there was no harm done, is complete nonsense! Her career got F'ed up because of some politician didn't like her husband spilling the truth out to the press. Jail all the bastards involved.
...comes great responsibility. Seriously, as more information becomes more readily available you're going to need to be able to trust everyone else more. What's the reason that most crime isn't committed? Because its too hard due to a lack of information. In other words, most of today's security is still obtained through obscurity. The burglar doesn't break into your house cause he doesn't have the blueprints to plan escape routes. The more you know the easier it is to plan an attack. A similar increase in information does not produce the same attack resistance, since an attacker must only choose one vector, while you have to protect against all of many possible vectors of attack. More information exposes more attack vectors and effectively weakens your defenses. You better start loving your neighbor, cause its only going to get easier for him to attack.
The second part is the more important one. Finding information is easy, most of the time. Deciding what's relevant is the key issue.
Photos of Valerie Plame has not exactly been floating around (Except that "mysterious" Vanity Fair photo), but a few weeks ago when using Google image search, I found this page. Scroll a bit down, and Valerie and Joseph is posing for the camera. Not only that, the web page author is scaling the picture with the img tag. Enter the image url directly, and voila -- 2048x1536 goodness. If not a fake, it must be the most detailed picture that can be found of her on the internet.
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
Brewster Jennings was a front group that only existed on paper. They had a PO Box, but Plame (and presumably their other employees) reported to actual CIA offices. The idea that this was "deep cover" or any sort of cover is laughable.
Couple that with her marriage to a high profile ambassador and it becomes highly improbable that she was NOC.
But let's ask a co-worker of her's:
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.
"Wait, so now people are slagging journalists for actually doing their jobs? Don't do that! We should praise them."
Praise them for disclosing the names of undercover CIA agents?
Personally I would call that treason.
That sounds great until you look at the facts. Novak told Rove about Plame, not the other way around. Rove was also informed of her status by another member of the media. There's speculation Miller may have been the original source. But how could she have leaked it? Simple, she couldn't. Multiple sources have already stated Plame's status as a CIA analyst was widely known in political/media circles.
Fred Rustmann (a former CIA agent and teacher of plame) has been saying for awhile now that her status was well known publically. You can't go to work everyday in Langley while being married to a high profile state department employee and honestly claim to be undercover.
All of this also ignores the fact that if Joe Wilson had not lied in his NYT op-ed we wouldn't be here.
She might, or might not, have suggested her husband, but everyone knew Joe Wilson and knew of his record in Niger. He had a ton of contacts that and had worked there repeatedly.
So they approached him and he offered to make a pro bono eight-day visit to what is, according to the CIA, 'one of the poorest countries in the world with minimal government services', Niger, which he spent visiting contacts and doing his job.
However, don't take my word for it. Demand Joe Wilson pay for his lovely eight-day vaction to Niger. So if the GDP per capita is $900, divide that by 365, we get roughly...three dollars a day manufactured per person.
Let's assume he ate and slept in the best places, costing up to, oh, twenty dollars a day! (The equivalent of 2000 dollars a day here.)
So if eight days costs, oh, about 200 dollars, plus 150 dollars airfair, so 350 dollars for that vacation. Or it would be if anyone ever wanted to go to Niger.
Of course, you'd then have to pay him for his job. How much is eight days of diplomatic research worth?
Jesus. When did Niger become the Switzerland of Africa, with people jaunting off on vacations to it? They barely have paved roads there.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Whether it was a crime, or where Rove learned the information, that stuff we don't know. But don't pretend like we don't know anything.
Anybody who's read anything about Plame knows that Karl Rove led the campaign to get her name in the papers. There was never any doubting it, not in 2003, and not in 2005. Now we have a confession of sorts from the lawyer, and Republicans are all of a sudden trying to do damage control on what Rove did, changing their story from "we would never do such an awful thing" to "it wasn't a crime."
Are they right to say that it isn't a crime? I don't know. But let's not pretend that this is a consisent message.This part is just plain not true. Have you seen the New York Times piece where they interview people from her neighborhood?
I'm from the DC area and I know someone who met Plame at a Washington party, where she gave him a business card. Years later he was shocked to see this whole thing about her being a CIA agent. He checked the business card and sure enough it was the same name. I've heard similar stories about others around here who knew her, and experienced the same shock. It's no bullshit.