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."
So the reporter was able to identify her by name and her maiden name. He was also able to dig up information as to where she lives and details regarding their home. What he was unable to do with this search is define what it is Ms. Plame actually did for a living. This information could be dug up via a search of tax records documenting her employer, but even this will not describe responsibilities within that employer. For instance, any W-2s I might have had would say that the listed person was an employee of the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency but they would not say anything about what job was actually performed.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Isn't there already one reporter jailed over this story?
Does David Lazarus want a big can of Patriot-Act whoop-ass to come down on him or what?
I'm a big tall mofo.
Nerds playing at being intelligence operatives. Cute.
She probably shouldn't have joined that "CIA Spooks Only" group at Google groups.
Which is more scary, that privacy in general is a hard to obtain or that the Internet makes it readily available to anyone with too much time on their hands.
I guess if privacy wasn't such a commodity, it wouldn't come as a shock when disrupted.
I know what you're thinking. Did I forward 65,535 packets or 65,536 packets?
...if someone wrote that about my house I'd be worried that they WANTED someone to break in. It reads like tactical analysis.
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
Information Pollution, one of Arthur C. Clarke's insights pointed out some years back, that a time would come when the amount of noise within that enormous repository of information would become detrimental. In this case, the government might seek to inject as much contradictory information as it can.
their wallet and jewelry box they could look for the "I am a certified spy" card and secret decoder ring.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Did Google present some nice associated ad-links for James Bond cameras, trenchcoats, and Le Carre books while you were doing these searches?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
What's his scare tactic for next week? How about "Did you know that your name and address are recorded in a privately-produced book that's located in every house and street corner in your town? For a city like New York, that's over 10 million copies of your private information."
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
It is no guarantee, but to maximize your privacy, you must say nothing, do nothing, and be nothing.
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.
The idiocy of the argument that Rove hasn't done something illegal because he only referred to Plame as Wilson's wife is underscored by articles like this. Whether he referred to her by name, or by a unique association to someone else (who is easily searchable) still picks out a unique individual, and thus still identifies her.
Likewise, I'd go to jail just the same if i was threatening the life of George Bush or the President of the United states.
There are lives at stake here!
They already do. It's called Fox News...
--- Pork is not a verb.
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: "And I now possess all this information simply because I know (from Karl Rove, via Matt Cooper) that Joseph Wilson's wife "apparently works at the agency on WMD issues.""
the World Wide Web, the Information Super Highway
1990 called, they want their PR bullshit back...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The Irish terrorists attacking Jack Ryan's house in Patriot Games comes to mind.
- G
Start a happiness pandemic
post David Lazarus address, phone number and google map coords? I'm interested in, uh, how accessible his house is by large van...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
dlazarus(a t)sfchronicle.com
Mr. Lazarus,
I fail to see what you achieved that was ground-breaking. Given a name, you determined the name of the spouse? And then you found out where they live? Maybe I missed the point of your article.
Sincerely...
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
A house in a residential area? With easy access by car? And no moats or dragons near by? This must be some sort of top secret CIA house of the future!
Sensationalism at its finest.
-Peter
Doesn't make Bob Novak any less of a tool.
- G
Start a happiness pandemic
Essentially it lets me peek at a street address in NYC sitting here in Bangalore. I can plan and co-ordinate my ops to snuff out someone - especially if the operatives are expendable. Recon became a lot easier , especially of the aerial map kind.
<sarcasm> How long before we hear that a terrorist attack was planned using Google Maps ? </sarcasm>Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Imagine if the Terminator had access to the net, as it is now. "Taking Out" all Sarah Conners within a given mile radius is a simple matter of mapping software, addressbooks, and a name+area to target.
Now, you could locate and plan "events" around individuals throughout the US/world.
No need for super computers... with a few PCs and access to the various API's on the net, you too can have your own war-room and tactical planning system.
Winged Power Photography
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.
Jesus, could this "story's" headline be any less thought out? When Adm. Poindexter was leading the Total Information Awareness project, this sort of digital dumpster diving was news three years ago. If someone wants to report on something fresh, they'll need to exploit search engines to find agents when you don't know who they are.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Now, if the joint Cisco/CIA joint development project Bullets Over IP, or BOIP would have some successful field tests... /The Man With The Golden Cable Modem
MadOgre.com
haw haw haw! better luck next time, Dems.
Also consider this
What about associates of hers from when she did work oversees as a spy? If any of them are also clandestine agents, then they're compromised.
And looks similar to many other properties all throughout the country ...
... one shouldn't be surprised to hear of spys living in typical houses in boring neighborhoods in which no one is the wiser to who they truly are.
... if anything, the internet can be a plus for those spys who (and/or their support staffs) understand how to create/maintain a pseudo-personality in cyberspace that doesn't truly reflect reality; people often believe what they see on the internet (goes for TV, etc too) without much thought.
If there were large walls around the property and/or other unusual structures, etc, then that certainly could raise suspicions - the best spys are typically those who blend in
To expand on this thought - I don't see how search engines like Google is any real threat to real spys
Ron
Fine by me, but if Black and White Thinking (TM) survives the present administration, it'll be a freaking miracle.
Say hello to my little sig.
For example strategies that the government discussed like this one: "These e-mails would come from a .com return address rather than .mil to hide the Pentagon's role."
They could as easily conceal through information polution the info that showed up in these google searches.
Now the government can be paranoid too, not just me!
-Palal
The point is how much detail you can gather about someone, their personal information, and where they live just through a search engine. Google isn't the only possible culprit for this kind of thing either. If you take a look at most search engines that have an image only search, you can gather a wealth of information and scanned records that allow so many people out there to commit identity theft without even sorting through the trash.
I'm not trying to give (bad) advice, but some people have information about them on the net that they never knew was out there. Back in the early days of the identity theft scare, there were plenty of articles online urging people to be careful about what information they disclose about themselves on the internet and what may be out there without them even posting anything (see also: telephone directories).
Never before have I been happier to keep myself unlisted.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
Well, the problem with this approach is that, while it does generate a lot of hits in Google, it's very hard to get specific information about people. In other words, it's really hard to match specific boobies to CIA-agents.
When the policeman of the tie, rule you violate, hello punishment of the kitty?
I doesn't matter that the author was able to look her name in Google. He had to find out that she was a covert operative before he would know to look her up.
And for what it's worth, it would have been faster to look in "Who's Who in Washington". It list Joseph Wilson, and that he is married to Valerie Wilson. However, nothing this writer looked up told him that she was a covert operative.
THe information he found had nothing to do with her status at the CIA. He knew who someone was and looked up their name. I can see it now:
NEXT ON FOX: covert CIA operatives' cover busted by... COLLEGE FACEBOOKS. COULD IT HAPPEN TO YOU?
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.
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.
--
make install -not war
In this case, the government might seek to inject as much contradictory information as it can.
Which happens every time a White House Administration official appears on FoxNews.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
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.
>
>
There are people could tell you, but they already know their own residences' ingress and egress routes, and they think these routes are just fine the way they are. If you asked her on her TV show, someone like Martha Stewart would probably say something to the effect that, regardless of how easy the ingress route may be to use, and regardless of the fact that all relocation and refurnishing expenses are covered by the taxpayers, residences with egress routes involving 90 miles of salt water are not a good thing.
Hey, who the hell are you? WTF? No, I don't mean to imply that Marth*thumpthumpthump*Nothing for you to see here. Move along.
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.
So Karl Rove told Cooper(and probably Novak) that she was CIA.
Someone looking up Valerie Wilson(aka Plame) to find out where she worked, would find her working at 'Brewster Jennings & Associates'. But being the intelligent sort, they would go "Hmm, didn't Novak say she was CIA?" and by logical extension they'd arrive at the conclusion that 'Brewster Jennings & Associates' was a CIA front, or at the very least it had been infiltrated by CIA.
The point being... the problem wasn't leaking Wilson's wifes name. The problem was linking her to the CIA.
if anything, the internet can be a plus for those spys who (and/or their support staffs) understand how to create/maintain a pseudo-personality in cyberspace that doesn't truly reflect reality; people often believe what they see on the internet (goes for TV, etc too) without much thought.
This is true. For example, in reality I work for the FBI. However, in the AOL chatrooms I frequent, everyone thinks I'm a sexy 13 year old girl whose parents are always leaving her alone and who is curious about sex and wants an older man to teach her.
"my wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity."
One interpretation of this statement is that on the day Bob Novak blew her identity, she was a clandestine officer. His blowing of her identity ment that she was no longer considered clandestine.
clandestine adj : conducted with or marked by hidden aims or methods;
Once outed, you can no longer be clandestine.
-- john
If you actually read the article you will note that his wife stopped being a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her cover. She wasn't a bureaucrat. She was a NOC.
From the SAME Newsday article
"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.
His wife's "ability to do the job she's been doing for close to 20 years ceased from the minute Novak's article appeared; she ceased being a clandestine officer," he said."
Oops. She was a spy dumbass
Thalasar
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.
Yes...but that was fiction...
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
He uses google? Well, I'm sure many amateurs using google and searching on Valerie Plame Wilson would probably raise the relevancy of the findings. "Leaks can snowball" should be pretty obvious. I just fail to see the
As an aside, whoever leaked this information was both well trusted (to have that level of information) and very willing to sacrifice someone's life. In such a situation, regardless of who it is, I think a conviction of treason (the only capital federal crime) is the only "appropriate" punishment for treating someone else's life so nonchalantly.
Hilarious! Nothing else needs to be said in this thread.
All the article demonstrates is that LexisNexis knows womens' maiden names. It demonstrates nothing about outing undercover agents. The only reason the reporter knew to even look for Wilson's wife's name was because "two officials" (allegedly Rove and someone else) leaked the fact that his wife worked for the CIA. That was the source of the privacy/security breach, not Google or LexisNexis.
And in any case, a maiden name isn't exactly private information - many acquaintances of a person have access to it, as the woman has used the name publicly for many years. (There are organizations foolish enough to use this as a security-screening question, but the insecurity of this practice is not new to the information age).
Neither is your address private information - addresses have been publically available for free in phone books for decades.
If anything, the real shocker (besides the leak itself) should be that the CIA had an undercover agent using as cover their maiden name. Assuming that the CIA is not run by imcompetents, I'd say they must not have cared all that much about her cover if that was the only obfuscation they chose.
A lot of county GIS systems are available as public information on the Web. Given an address, you can view things such as recent (low altitude) aerial photos (in color), list of residents, purchase price of house, purchase history of house, current assessment, and perhaps even floor plans, and recent building permits. There's a trade-off between the public's "right-to-know" and an individual's privacy. Usually I see articles in newspapers that come out strongly for the public's "right to know'. But I guess it all depends on the current agenda of the article's author.
[Insert pithy quote here]
The Don't-Out-CIA-Agents law that was passed to bust future Agees is now being used to possibly bust G.W.Bush's henchmen, probably his handler Karl Rove. The law makes it more illegal if you have access to classified information (which Rove does, but may or may not have used) and use that to reveal the identity of covert agents, but also makes it illegal to out them using publicly available information.
The White House has been weasel-wording about "Rove didn't tell Cooper Plame's name, just that she was Wilson's wife", but not only does the law talk about identifying people, not just specifically naming them, but somehow Novak, Cooper, and probably Judith Miller all found out she was an agent, so it wasn't just a "casual remark" intended to "correct mistaken impressions" - it was a well-organized campaign, and Novak apparently talked to two different Administration sources. Not only is Rove guilty, but he's trying to cover it up.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Regardless of the ongoing investigation, his quotes could cut either way. On its own, that quote: "My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity" could mean that she wasn't a NOC because of Novak, or that she wasn't a NOC even before Novak's story came out.
"In fact, when host Wolf Blitzer specifically asked Wilson if his wife 'hadn't been a clandestine officer for some time before' Novak's column was published, Wilson responded that he could not comment on her past status as an undercover officer"
So he's not saying one way or the other whether she was a NOC on that day...gotta watch them bureaucrats...always mincing words. Let's hold tight and see what the investigation reports.
...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.
Exactly. No one knows my real name is Rex Banner.
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
Is Public Information Research's Namebase. They hate Google too: Google Watch
The second part is the more important one. Finding information is easy, most of the time. Deciding what's relevant is the key issue.
Its funny because this CIA operative in question was already publicly identified at a hacker conference by an uperanking official of the CIA. If you listen to this weeks broadcast of off the hook they have documented audio proof it. You can dl the broadcast at http://www.2600.com./ Might possibly have been last weeks broadcast, my memory fails me.
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."
No they don't. Read my quotes. They clearly state that she waqs no longer a NOC because her cover was blown - Also blowing the cover of every associate of hers at her cover company and undoubtedly many of her sources.
Wilson saying he couldn't comment is the minimum you are supposed to do. That data was classified and her past status is classified. That's why you don't talk about it.
Thalasar
The courts and republican administrations have done everything they can to take away all privacy. Check out the promises the republican national committie and the City of Boston made during the conventions. Boston installed thousands of cameras throught the city, to provide added security for the republican convention. Boston promised to take them down as soon as the convention was over. Guess what? Those cameras are still up, the city said it cost so much to put them in place, they might as well keep them. Chicago followed next, adding 3,000 cameras.
But the internet is worse. Anyone can put any information on the internet, and it is hard to find the source.
I'll give one example from my local newspaper. Someone at the local high school snapped some pictures of a girl he disliked, her naked and I don't know what else, and he put that on the internet. Then he emailed his classmates telling them what website to look at. The girl was humiliated. Could you go back to highschool if everyone saw you naked? How can you concentrate in math class when you feel like everyone is staring right through your clothing. And the jokes, they can be very cruel. Who is going to pay for her counceling, for her pain and suffering?
What is the solution?
We need to remember that privacy is important. Where I live is my buisness, it should not be in a database for anyone to look up.
I will give one example. Say there is Joweski and Co Construction. They build million dollar mansions, and the owner, Mr. Joweski is very rich. Should I be able to google him up, find out all his buisness, where he goes, his home address, and find a way to ambush him, to steal his money, to steal his identity. Or should be be relativly anonymous to 99% of the people. If he steals or srews someone over, the police have the drivers license data, his taxes, they can track him down. But what once was private is now everywhere on the web.
We need a law that says anything which personally identifies a person must be removed from a website unless that person gives continuing concent to keep it up (like agreeing again every 6 months).
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
DejaNews http://dejanews.com/">December 1996
DejaNews today
DejaNews started in 1995 and aimed to carry every mainline newsgroup from May 1995 on, plus as many older articles as it could get.
here is an article dated Fri May 15 18:01:16 1981. If the link goes stale, just use Google's advanced search to search by date.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I can see the day where we all change our last name to "Smith" or something of that nature.
I seem to recall seeing a movie about that.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
What he said was more along the lines of "my wife ceased being a clandestine officer the day Robert Novak blew her identity." That has exactly the opposite spin of your phrasing, and for good reason - although she was still operating out of Langley, she was still working in the field of WMDs, and she was doing so undercover, with a staff of other undercover agents.
I don't know why treason is now considered acceptable by the Republican Party, but secret agents like Plame work hard and risk their lives (she travelled with an ordinary passport, and was likely to be executed if caught as a spy) to protect our country. I think we owe them better than to out them because of mean-spirited, lying political B.S.
If she wasn't a covert agent, smart guy, then why does the CIA insist that she was - they wouldn't have reported it as a crime if she weren't still a covert agent. If there was no crime, then why did a special prosecutor (appointed by Bush, no less) feel this issue was so important he was willing to send 2 reporters to jail unless they named their sources, one of whom is still in jail now?
It's interesting that he was able to dig up the name/maiden name/address of the wife of a former ambassador/editorialist, but he was not able to dig up any connection of hers to the CIA or any other information that would even be *close* to newsworthy. Yet, the article's views-to-news is that he was able to do this in ~30min. But, this is having apriori knowledge that she was working for the CIA.
Had the reporter started from scratch, his methodology would have been:
1. Pick a random friend/enemy.
2. LexisNexis for as much info as possible.
3. Google Map it.
4. Drive up to the home address and ask: "Are you a CIA agent?"
5. Repeat 1-4 until the answer is yes.
6. Profit!
and now back to the fallout shelter...
It depends on what the meaning of "was" was.
Hahahahaha! Sanford was one of my customers at an ISP I worked at. He hosed our machines feeding filth, and we cut him off. As I did every day at 3:00, I put on Black Sabbath, and deleted the abusers and non-payers. I remember that day...
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
That will help a lot when they're getting details for their maps with pictures from satellite. And I'm sure everyone would love to list fake phone numbers - after all, you don't need to ever actually use your phone right?
You're right, but that doesn't go far enough. Now, anyone associated with the front organization will be suspected of involvement with the CIA, correctly or not.
Here's what I typed, it should've worked. I should've previewed :(.
t tp://dejanews.com/">December 1996</a>
/. put it there to keep /. links from being used for nefarious purposes.
DejaNews <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/19961219174859/h
Note the extra space between ht and tp was NOT there when I typed it! I assume
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
At that point she hadn't really been undercover anymore for quite a while, and most of her neighbors knew she was with the CIA as well as a number of journalists. So not only Novak knew.
I think we are coming close to seeing a classic recursive stack overflow in the reporting of this matter, when there is finally a loop of people telling each other she was with the CIA.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
IANAL:
However, the media has stated time and time again that the law applies to outing a covert agent within 5 years of the agent being overseas. Valerie Plame stopped field work when she came back to the US on her last rotation, she then got married to Wilson and had twins. She worked at the Langley office as an analyst for the past six years. So I doubt anyone broke the law here. She is not technically an active NOC.
Even then, who is the NYTimes reporter protecting? I mean she's the one sitting in a prison (albeit a nice modern one with common areas and plexi glass doors instead of bars) refusing to testify to the grand jury. She sure as heck is NOT protecting Rove of all people! Also, what about Robert Novack? He's the one who first published Plame's name! Why hasn't he been questioned by the grand jury yet?
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.
So he's not saying one way or the other whether she was a NOC on that day...gotta watch them bureaucrats...always mincing words.
He could not comment on that because that information is quite probably still classified. Just because a covert operative's cover gets blown doesn't mean it's automatically OK to go around talking about that covert operative's activities; doing so could result in the exposure of even more classified information.
As for the parsing of Wilson's statements, sure, it could be read in a number of ways. One could divine, for example, that Joe Wilson is stupid enough to actually think that Robert Novak physically blew a big puff of air onto his wife's identity. One could also conclude that Wilson is claiming that Novak had oral sex with Plame's identity. One could even surmise that Wilson is suggesting that Plame was on a little 24-hour vacation from the whole clandestine agent thing, and that day just happened to be the same day that Novak outed her.
Of course, you'd need to be a mendacious ass bent on discrediting Joe Wilson by any means possible to even begin to think the sort of linguistic acrobatics detailed above are accurate representations of the point Joe Wilson was trying to get across.
Then again, if you want to play the quotes game, I'll give you a few to chew on, courtesy of the Associated Press:
Sept. 29, 2003 [White House Briefing]
Q: You said this morning, quote, "The president knows that Karl Rove wasn't involved." How does he know that?
A [Scott McClellan]: Well, I've made it very clear that it was a ridiculous suggestion in the first place. ... I've said that it's not true. ... And I have spoken with Karl Rove.
Q: It doesn't take much for the president to ask a senior official working for him, to just lay the question out for a few people and end this controversy today.
A: Do you have specific information to bring to our attention? ... Are we supposed to chase down every anonymous report in the newspaper? We'd spend all our time doing that."
Q: When you talked to Mr. Rove, did you discuss, "Did you ever have this information?"
A: I've made it very clear, he was not involved, that there's no truth to the suggestion that he was.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Yes, but the point is that Rove supplied the CIA link, which enabled the subsequent "outing" of a CIA agent. It is unlikely that he didn't know what he was doing when he disclosed the career information considering Rove's long history of leekage (See the documentary 'Bush's Brain')
"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."
So he meant that she lost her ability to be a covert agent...that doesn't mean she was covert at the time of Novak's story. It doesn't mean she wasn't covert at the time either. It just means from that point onward, there's no way she could ever be covert.
You might not get the results you were thinking of. You need to refine your search. Try "President Bush," "hot wet bush" or perhaps "shaved bush" depending on what you were actually trying to find.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
What about her cover company Brewster Jennings & Associates? There's a reason you don't out intelligence agents. There is a HUGE amount of collateral damage. It's got a Wikipedia entry as a front company for the CIA now. No damage done to intelligence there.
Thalasar
http://www.zabasearch.com/
The easiest way to find out about someone. Just type in a name...
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
You have zero creditability talking about "Talking Points" while linking to a site that is named "Talking Points" to refute it. Thanks for playing though!
No, you have zero credibility when you cluelessly dismiss a site by its title. The "Talking Points" in "Talking Points Memo" is specifically referring to Republican talking points, and was originally set up to alert people to the latest ones being circulated around. It does a good job, too- pointing out when the same lie or distortion suddenly appears worded exactly the same way from several supposedly independent sources. Joe Wilson's a liar. Plame's covert status wasn't protected well by the CIA. It was just a short phone call. Rove really wanted to speak about welfare reform. He didn't say her name, he said "Wilson's wife". Wilson said Cheney sent him to Africa. Plame sent Wilson to Africa. Rove leaked Plame's identity in the interests of good journalism. Wilson went on too many TV shows. Rove is the whistleblower here. Rove deserves a medal. Etc etc etc.
(BTW, Rove did not know she was undercover. He got the name from Novak: [links to latest talking point deleted])
The evidence for Rove "not knowing she was undercover" probably boils down to an allegation coming from Rove's attorney, but it doesn't matter anyway. As a matter of law, intelligence professionals cannot confirm information that is classified even if they receive that information from a non-classified source.
I won't say his name, but he is fat, stupid-looking, evil, and works as George Busch's closest advisor.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
We should turn this into a sport - lets see how many secret agents can be outted via the internet. I went to Cryptome and found this article, that indicates that Cheri Leberknight, Eunjoo Ann Kensinger, Dave Robertson, Miguel Fabregas, Valerie Plame, John Spahn, and Rebecca Wolfson can be added to the spook list!
What about her cover company Brewster Jennings & Associates? There's a reason you don't out intelligence agents. There is a HUGE amount of collateral damage.
;-)
I'm not arguing about that. Depending on the work done by people sharing her cover company, there may have been a lot of collateral damage as you suggest (or maybe they were a useless bunch who didn't get anything useful done. Who knows but the CIA, right?
All I'm saying is that Mr. Wilson isn't being entirely clear about her status immediately before the news broke, at least not to my satisfaction. Let's see what the investigators conclude.
I tried to read this article and to me it seems like a diversion from the issue.
The author seems goes to great lengths to find out who Wilson' s wife is, a task he could have accomplished with 2 credit checks. Maybe the author is not very smart or experienced at how to do this sort of research.
The most important detail, the one he glosses over, is that Karl Rove revealed that a particular person was working for CIA and as a result blew her cover, the cover of the front company, and has endangered the sources connected to them. And those sources were placed in important places in Iraq. True Rove did not name HER name, but he did identify her.
Now, the part about the article that is scary to me is that the author uses the chance to call for more restrictions on information, tries to tie the PLame case to the credit card information leaks in the past few weeks. To my liberal eye it reads like a subversive call to advance the march of facist tendencies in th post 9/11 world.
Dont let it succeed. Pay attention to it and brace yourselves. Remember to vote in every election and remember to talk to anyone and everyone about thse issues.
If we dont fight it now with words and votes and legislation we'll have to fight it later...with whatever comes to hand.
Ima gunna clean my pump shotty.
Small wonder, given the number of boobies on the Internet.
Bert
A digression...
The interrogator's question is not
"How Long Have You Been Beating Your Wife?", as a loving husband could answer "0 months",
but rather
"Have you stopped beating your wife? Yes or No?"
as a "Yes" could be an admission of abuse in the past, and a "No" is a admission of continuing abuse. Attempting a more complex answer could be taken as evidence of dissemblance...
Orwell pointed out that many writers, too lazy to invent novel metaphors capable of evoking a powerful visual image, use worn out ones instead, and sometimes mix incompatible phrases together: "a sure sign that the author is not interested in what he is saying."
Karl Rove might have leaked a name, but this woman will be lucky if by the time this is all over, the media hasn't published every single last detail of her life. Seriously, you make it into the news and all the sudden it's open season on every detail about you. There isn't a little info out about her, it's all kinds of crap I've seen in news articles...like her name, her husband, where she lives, where she works, what's she's been doing, her neighbors names....etc etc etc.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
I'm at least as good at finding CIA secrets as this guy. Look what I just found on the web - the CIA's super secret fact book! . It most be secret, since the graphics and style look so hokey.
My motto: "A cat is no trade for integrity."
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...
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
If you are relying on security-through-obscurity to keep people from tracking you down and harming you, perhaps you should be investing in some other form of security... one that doesn't assume that you are hard to find.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Sept. 29, 2003 [White House Briefing]
... I've said that it's not true. ... And I have spoken with Karl Rove.
Q: You said this morning, quote, "The president knows that Karl Rove wasn't involved." How does he know that?
A [Scott McClellan]: Well, I've made it very clear that it was a ridiculous suggestion in the first place.
Well, I don't know exactly what McClellan said that morning prior to the briefing, so when he said "The president knows that Karl Rove wasn't involved", I don't know in what the president knew Rove wasn't involved. Was he not involved in knowingly divulging classified information? Or was he not involved in this whole mess at all? What was the whole quote?
Oops. Correcting my mistake--he wrote a second article in Oct 2003--the first article was written in July 2003. Even if she was still undercover, if she had not been posted outside the US in the last 5 years, no violation of law occurred.
Now please locate Osama for us.
Rove didn't do anything illegal he received the information from a media source.
Does passing classified information that he received (however he got it) on to Matt Cooper somehow not count as illegal?
There are lives at stake here!
Who is David Lazarus?
Where does David live?
But is he a CIA agent? Stay tuned!
-anon cause this will be modded a troll for pointing out the facts.
:p
You'd have to actually have facts to point out first
It was not, and was never clear that she was working for the CIA. Her in-laws went so far as to ask whether her husband knew. And it's absurd to think that all spies are some shadowy non-person who hide from any sort of identification. Spies are people who hide what they do, not necessarily all facets of who they are.
Finally, it doesn't matter whether Rove was intending to do her harm, he did the dumbass thing and running with what he thought was convenient, rather than checking whether he should be spreading around information about CIA agents or not.
If you'd like to try supporting your claims with say... actual information, perhaps you wouldn't have to post anonymously.
There are lives at stake here!
I'd like to know what happens to Novak and Rove if the CIA walks into court and tells them that some undercovers and/or innocent civilians got bullets in the head from foreign governments because they were associated with Plume and/or her cover company.
Doesn't it seem odd that Wilson got his wife to approve of the trip to Africa? Like any bureaucracy, there are certainly rules against this sort of thing at the CIA. What other taxpayer funded trips did wifey sign for and did she ever go along? Sounds like a nice vacation scam to me.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
What was the writer's point? FUD? Just becuase you know where someone lives means nothing about how defensible that location is.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
The reason why there is a special prosecutor is because the CIA asked the justice department to investigate the alleged violation. Atty General John Ashcroft took a look at the allegations and decided that is was worth investigating. It was Ashcroft that assigned Fitzgerald as the special prosecutor.
Pundits and Politicos can argue over whether she was a NOC or not, but the CIA apparently thought a violation occurred, and I trust they would know her status.
My father is a blogger.
Read today's Sidney Blumenthal article at Salon.com. Cheney tasked the CIA, people who knew Wilson's background asked his wife if he would be interested. She probably broached the subject with him, but she didn't 'authorize' him.
Again, you can believe the spin, or you can determine the facts. Fortunately, Patrick Fitzgerald is concentrating on the facts.
My father is a blogger.
President Cheney will just pardon the whole bunch.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
In the CIA directorate of operations they refer to people like plame as a Case Officers not an agent. Agents, in the parlance of foreign intelligence gathering, are networks of informants who have been exploited to do the dirty work for case officers. The nonmenclature of domestic gathering is a bit different. Just pointing it out, cause a lot of you guys chuck hissy fits over hacker/cracker all the time and refering to a case officer as an agent is pretty demeaning to their trade cause agents are usually traitors.
So if you know a CIA agent's real name you can find out more things about them by searching public records, just like you can for any other american.
Wow.
Here is something else I found out -- if you know the address of a buried treasure you can get a nice map from google with directions to that address. So the internet can be used to search for buried treasure. Amazing!
Seriously, Slashdot editors should be smarter than this.
It also points to the need for privacy laws -- and, in this case, national-security laws -- recognizing the harm that can be done with only a few computer keystrokes.
Yeah, because the one thing the U.S is dangerously short of is national-security laws.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
- George Orwell
Mod that up. That's the funniest comment I've read in a long time.
Thank you MST3K for that humor.
Ah, you found me!
BTW, she was "non-offical cover", and she ran an operation tracking those in the world who would seek to aquire nuclear (and biological, i think) weapons. That's right! She was protecting blessed America from 'weapons of mass destruction.' Way to go Republicans.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
"has a clear field of fire in all directions"
I'm not suprised slashdot got this wrong. The New York Times reported on this issue over a year ago. Plames cover was believed to have been blown when Aldrich Ames sold NOC lists to the Russians in 1994. Three years later, the CIA recalled her. She hasn't been undercover for years.
* What's with him always "clearing brush" when he's down there? What baloney. And why the hell is that shithead always on vacation? Do you get that much vacation?
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
And besides, why would Rove have this information about Plame? If you're an American, you should be feeling *very* uneasy about the people running things right now. They have shown themselves to be utter shitbags and they cannot be trusted.
For more background to this story, see auraslip's timeline at kuro5hin, Karl Rove is fucked.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
So often, when looking up info on some, er, unsavory person, google has the namebase link on the first page. Namebase is great but i don't have a registration so for me it's only good for cross-referencing.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
ho, adn yuo mispeld badly.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
Here's the story. It was actually a quote from a former supervisor, Fred Rustmann. If you can't trust someone with a good solid name like "fred" then who can you trust? :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Times, not the Post. All those washington newspapers, who can keep 'em straight?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
just in the past week or two i've seen that one popping up in the press. I like the Vanity Fair one better, though. Very Hepburn.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
I think he was making a point about Rove's defense: he is currently claiming that he didn't identify Valerie Plame by name, but only mentioned "Wilson's wife" worked as an undercover agent. So he didn't leak the name, which would be an act of treason.
The reporter shows that it is ludicrously easy to make the jump from that remark to identifying the person.
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
Last year around the Democratic convention, the Bush administration ran a terror alert associated with some buildings in New York.
To back up the alert, they claimed information about the buildings was found on a computer of an Al Qaida agent that was arrested in Pakistan.
This was true, but the furor died when it was reported that he'd been under arrest for sometime and the information was old.
Less widely reported was the reason why Pakistan did not announce the arrest earlier. The Al Qaida agent had flipped. He'd maintained after his arrest contact with a team of terrorists planning a series of attacks.
When the Bush administration disclosed the arrest, police who were monitering that team had to round them up quickly, in some cases resorting to high speed chases.
The police arrested a dozen or so plotters, but said their investigation was cut short and they thought it possible that they hadn't yet detected everyone.
That terrorist team was in the UK, and one of their targets was the London Underground.
Rove seems to have a pattern of blowing intelligence operations for political gain.
Play Command HQ online
How is this at all relevant?
"My god, given a person's name, I can find her address! And given her address, I can get a satellite image of her neighborhood! That must imply that that person is an undercover CIA agent!"
Morons.
Another article on the subject from Jerry Pournelle, who is hardly in the administration camp. End of story I'd say.
Note that she was in the CIA even with the twins, no way she was undercover after she got married basically.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Your post is filled with at least two lies(that Plame authorized on her own, and that Her husband lied that Cheney sent him), and yet you have the nerve to accuse me of being mindless?
Should caution, though, that there are occupational health concerns, and field operatives receive more than their share of (9mm) brain hemorrhages.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Probably because what he is stating aren't "facts" but more like right wing talking points that have a whiff of truth but are mainly spin?
Very insightful. We are being shoved into a world where we are obligated to be transparent, but where criminals and savvy businesses can be a bit less so. Thus, if obscurity can be thought of as a "munition," we are being denied the ability to bear that arm anymore, leaving us vulnerable, and with no way back to our simple past.
Having said that, and assuming most of your neighbors are still honest, what other "arms" are we still left with? Trying to embrace openness as both the problem and the solution, I've been thinking of streaming my own camera output to neighbors, for example. Just as you implied, there are diminishing returns with this. While it may not prevent a burglary (unless the thief suspects you have cameras), it may help track down who did it after the fact. Of course, it isn't guaranteed that the authorities would use your "not invented here" data to track down the criminal, and in fact, the way they operate may oblige them to do nothing at all in order to preserve their own "means and methods" ...in obscurity. In the worst case, this may grow to a
"trust gridlock" that helps no one (see: prisoner's dilemma).
As you said, great power does imply great responsibility, and the more power people grab for themselves, the more things people will blame them for, justified or unjustified.