
C.I.A. Admits Penetrating Senate Intelligence Computers - aaronbrethorst
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/world/senate-intelligence-commitee-cia-interrogation-report.html
======
dmix
This is the time for damage-control PR that they were handed on a platter by
the intelligence oversight committee. The report was supposed to be released
months ago but instead the CIA was given special early access to the report to
conduct massive redactions and had the released delayed, giving them plenty of
time to come up with good excuses and rebuttals to questions.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/26/world/george-tenet-ex-
chie...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/26/world/george-tenet-ex-chief-of-cia-
is-set-to-defend-actions-on-interrogation-program.html)

The only government response to hacking the oversight committee is to create
an extra accountability board. Adding more layers of bureaucracy instead of
holding anyone responsible doesn't create a better agency.

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ganeumann
If you or I penetrated the Senate's computers I would expect we would spend
quite a long time in jail. Is it naive for me to expect that someone at the
CIA will spend a long time in jail?

~~~
josephlord
Well to be fair it is quite likely that the CIA was doing this legally which
just goes to show the uselessness of the laws and the oversight provided by
this particular committee. I think the CIA used to be prevented from operating
domestically but that this has changed at least for terrorism.

And this was clearly a case of terrorism because that report makes the US look
bad and it could be used within terrorist propaganda.[0]

[0] I wish I was being sarcastic but I think this is actually reality now [1]

[1] See David Miranda detention at Heathrow.

~~~
georgeecollins
I think the whole point is that it isn't legal and more importantly to the
senate, it isn't constitutional.

No one wants to prosecute anyone in the CIA. It's terrible politics. But this
isn't legal.

~~~
Zelphyr
I personally don't care about how good or bad the politics are. The CIA
clearly broke the law and anyone directly involved needs to be held
accountable to the fullest extent possible. At the very least Director Brennan
needs to be brought up on charges of perjury. Between him and Director Clapper
the precedent is being set that its OK to lie to congress especially if you're
a member of the Intelligence community.

We simply can NOT have bodies with the power of the CIA and NSA spying on our
own government or people. There's no way that ends well for us as a nation.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Is there some sort of incompetence charge? That way later when he claims not
to have direct knowledge he must be dismissed immediately on the basis that
anyone who is the executive of the CIA and doesn't know that the CIA spied on
the Senate Intel cmte, isn't fit to run the CIA.

~~~
001sky
This is worth parsing. Is it really incompetence? Or is it actually a very
high level of foresight? As a general rule, the only thing people are evered
fired for is breaking the law. While there are exceptions to this, in an
organization like the CIA, such would be aking to admitting terminal liability
at the next level within the organization.

(This seems to be why companies like GM never admit to an engineering flaw; or
why wall street firms are never prosecuted criminally to the full extent of
the law.)

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I believe that if a CIA director were actually oblivious to such a flagrant
violation of law/ethics/trust/separation of powers, whatever you want to call
it; then that would be incompetence. If after faced with the facts, he refused
to immediately produce the perpetrators, that makes it malevolent, he is now a
co-conspirator.

Of course, I don't really believe it is incompetence, but rather, as you say
the result of careful planning, or very competent crisis handling.

If we can't prevent guys like Brennan from playing the "I didn't know...
honest!" gambit, then at least that could trigger the "incompetence response"
which would be immediate dismissal, and hopefully change the rules of the game
a bit, even if it allowed the criminal a comparably graceful exit.

~~~
001sky
As a point of history, this may be of interest

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability)

 _Plausible deniability is a term coined by the CIA in the early 1960s to
describe the withholding of information from senior officials in order to
protect them from repercussions in the event that illegal or unpopular
activities by the CIA became public knowledge._

You are dealing with purposeful behaviour. One mans 'obliviousness' is another
man's 'innocence'. In other words, it helps to not mis-understand this
situation as the work of the ill-informed or 'incompetent'. It sort of does a
dis-service to the complexity of the problem, here.

(And I'm certainly not arguing about the existence of a _problem_ ).

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
>You are dealing with purposeful behaviour.

I agree.

> One mans 'obliviousness' is another man's 'innocence'. In other words, it
> helps to not mis-understand this situation as the work of the ill-informed
> or 'incompetent'.

What do you propose? Just because some people understand it as a deception or
a possible deception, that understanding is not universal. Plenty of people
accept these "ignorance" claims making it so that executives are able to
effectively use the plausible deniability gambit. How else can we work around
it?

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jstalin
Don't forget that when Feinstein accused the CIA of doing this, the director
replied that it was simply _absurd_ that the CIA would do so.

~~~
AlyssaRowan
I note that's not actually a _denial_ , just an admission that what they do is
absurd. :-)

~~~
mapt
"Nothing could be further from the truth" is an explicit denial.

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josho
Accountability in society has been lost. What I don't understand is why we
tolerate this. Are we all really too busy with status updates and mindless
entertainment not to give a damn and demand it again? It's an interesting sign
of our society that we allow events like this.

For the CIA to be accountable someone needs to spend time in prison, senior
directors need to be fired. Anything less sends a message that this is ok.

Nor was this a one off. Look at James Clapper (NSA Director), he perjures
himself to Congress with no consequence.

Banks caused a global economic collapse and many of the CEOs remain, nobody
has faced the possibility of jail.

~~~
contingencies
I share your sentiments entirely. However, it's important to remember that
this is a global issue. I travel a lot, and it is my distinct impression that
a rapidly increasing number of people (many of them young and educated) around
the world are becoming increasingly aware of the problems with the established
systems, in some cases openly protesting and in others merely refusing to
participate. Think Argentina, India, North Africa, the Middle East, China,
Russia, Iran, Thailand, Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal. The global social
climate has never been better to try out new solutions... solutions that
remove centralized control of communications, finance and political power. We
are getting to the point where there are viable offerings and where _state-
level_ actors are throwing their lot in with development: look at Putin's
response to Mastercard/Visa on ATM networks, India's response to US+Israeli
segregation of Iran (their major oil supplier) from SWIFT, or China's quiet
and unrelenting expansion of their own alternative financial networks across
the world (especially Asia) as they push for the RMB as a regional reserve
currency.

The fact of the matter is, the US's present position is an untenable
anachronism.

 _Open source everything is about the five billion poor coming together to
reclaim their collective wealth and mobilise it to transform their lives.
There is zero chance of the revolution being put down. Public agency is
emergent, and the ability of the public to literally put any bank or
corporation out of business overnight is looming. To paraphrase Abe Lincoln,_
you cannot screw all of the people all of the time. _We 're there. All we lack
is a major precipitant – our Tunisian fruit seller. When it happens the
revolution will be deep and lasting._ \- Robert David Steele, ex-Marine, ex-
CIA, Open Source Intelligence expert in _The Guardian_ , 2014-06-19

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mapt
Many Congressional bodies in history would have charged those responsible with
espionage and treason, and moved immediately to impeach the president, if they
found that the Executive branch was illegally wiretapping an internal
Congressional committee charged with investigating the executive branch's
conspiracy to secretly torture and kill enemies of the executive branch.

It is abhorrent to our democracy and a direct, domestic threat to the
legitimacy of our elected government and the survival of the rights guaranteed
to us by our Constitution.

Unfortunately, when you cry 'wolf' / 'impeach' / 'Benghazi' every five minutes
after it becomes clear a black man is going to live in the White House, that
kind of neutralizes the ability to express outrage and be heard on legitimate
issues. If the center-left Constitutional Law professor can get away with this
sort of shit, I cringe at where we're going.

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jobu
_" [CIA] officials suspected the intelligence committee had improperly
obtained an internal C.I.A. report about the detention program"_

How is that even an excuse? The Senate Intelligence committee is supposed to
oversee the CIA. How can they do that without access to any and all CIA
documents?

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seanflyon
This seems pretty clearly criminal. I hope someone presses charges.

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volune
Oops. Sorry.

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alrs
HN title at 1406825693 is "C.I.A. Apologizes for Penetrating Senate
Computers." That is not the title of the NYT story. The NYT title is "C.I.A.
Admits Penetrating Senate Intelligence Computers."

The article does mention an apology from Brennan, but not to anyone beyond the
two ranking members of the Intelligence Oversight Committee.

~~~
uptown
It's worth noting that the NY Times sometimes revises their headlines. I don't
know whether that's happened in this case, but it's a possibility given the
NYTimes tweet contained the HN title:
[https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/494878654934302720](https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/494878654934302720)

~~~
tomek_zemla
Alternative titles I believe are briefly A/B tested for click through rates
when published - it's a standard procedure at NYT and other news sites these
days. Plus title 'correction' could have been made by the editors already
after it was out.

