Some Good News, Some Bad News

Good:

She is 52, married, grew up in the Kansas City, Mo., suburbs and lives in Virginia, in a new three-bedroom house.

Anyone who can qualify for a subscription to an online service that compiles public information also can learn that she is a CIA employee who, in the past decade, has been assigned to several U.S. embassies in Europe. [...]

When the [Chicago] Tribune searched a commercial online-data service, the result was a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of about 24 secret CIA facilities around the United States.

Only recently has the CIA recognized that in the Internet Age, its traditional system of providing cover for clandestine employees working overseas is fraught with holes, a discovery said to have "horrified" CIA Director Porter Goss.

Bad:

The CIA asked the Chicago Tribune not to publish her name because she is a covert operative, and the newspaper agreed. [...]

The Tribune is not disclosing the identities of any of the CIA employees uncovered in its database searches, the searching techniques used or other details that might put agency employees or operatives at risk.

What You Can Do: Contact the Tribune's Ombudsman, asking it to reconsider its decision. Besides spying on others, the CIA is responsible for killings, torturing, maiming, and overthrowing democratically elected governments. What's more, it's essentially out of public control, a tool of the executive branch; and much of its budget is not made public. Its activities often come to light only after a thirty-year waiting period for declassification of documents -- and even three decades is deemed insufficient wait for some of its more notorious adventures.

The CIA is a blot on our society whose existence soils any delusions of a democratic American polity. An opportunity for the public to cripple its functioning is like finding gold at the end of a rainbow.

Expose all the spies!

If doing so would put individual agents' persons at risk, then give some sort of fair warning -- say one month -- that the exposure will take place.

Posted by Eddie Tews at March 12, 2006 10:37 AM