Top Secret Isn’t All That Secret After All
There’s often an air of mystery and intrigue whenever the CIA is mentioned. Books dealing with the CIA are regularly published with large lumps of text excised or blacked out. Sometimes there’s so much missing that it would be easy to think that perhaps the text was never there to begin with.
But of course we accept that the US government has removed the text to protect CIA operatives and CIA procedures but it seems that the CIA - just like the FBI - is a little bit behind the times when it comes to the Information Technology Super Highway.
While the rest of us are zooming along searching for information these guys are still trying to find the on-ramp and so a recent investigation by the Chicago Tribune must have come as a rather nasty surprise.
The paper reports that, with the aid of the Internet and by using quite legal search sites and methods they were able to find the names of covert CIA operatives, internal telephone numbers, the location of 24 CIA installations and the registration and markings of a number of CIA planes used in transporting terror suspects.
Next thing someone will find that the CIA uses Hotmail for all of its email needs.
I’ve always said that any department or branch of the government that used the word ‘intelligence’ in its name was really flirting with a contradiction in terms.
