Shlok Vaidya

CIA Troubles

Funny how these three articles are intersecting –

Goss is, reasonably enough, attempting to prevent leaks such as the torture flights fiasco –

According to National Public Radio, a directive internal memo from Director Goss regarding heightening the protection of national security information from possible information leaks gives the new National Clandestine Services branch of the CIA a potentially super-charged bureaucratic and political culture.

But the side effect of that is –

The National Security Archive at George Washington University named the spy agency as the 2006 recipient of its annual Rosemary Award, which recognizes the poorest performance within the federal government for responses to Freedom of Information Act requests from the public.

And he’s not paying much attention to what’s publicly available –

The names of thousands of CIA personnel – including covert operatives – as well as internal phone numbers and the locations of two dozen secret installations can easily be found through Internet searches, it has emerged.

Simply put, the CIA and the government as a whole are having a hard time dealing with broadband international connectivity and the sheer amount of associated information. People whose lives have revolved around controlling and manipulating information are now being forced to adapt to an environment where they simply can not. During this transition time (assuming there is a possibility for the CIA to retain functionality in an era where I can google someone to see if they are in fact a spy) people are going to pay for it with their lives.

With the intersection of these three, and the knowledge that the state will increasingly fail to protect us from foreign and domestic enemies, we see a pretty dreary picture. Instead of attempting to utilize a risk averse arcane bureaucracy, the government should be emulating new organizational structures (read open source networks etc).

To just that end, Robert Steele, a retired Clandestine Case Officer (Read CIA Spook) has a venture – Open Source Solutions, Inc – which serves as a privatized model for an open source (OSINT if you will) intelligence network which focuses on utilizing all major languages public information to deal with future threats.

The problem with that, however, is that the state would have to move beyond its current limitations. As demonstrated here – when the potential of the nation state is achieved (that threshold being a dynamic level) – we will move on.

-Shlok
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14. March 2006 by Shlok Vaidya
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