

CIA Travel Advice to Operatives - us0r
https://wikileaks.org/cia-travel/

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colinbartlett
I skimmed through these and they are really fascinating documents with actual
useful info for normal tourist and business travelers.

If you know what screeners might be looking for, you can avoid making yourself
a target unnecessarily, even when your travel purposes are completely
legitimate.

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tptacek
These documents are boring; if you crowdsourced documentation on how to handle
security checkpoints at airports to Metafilter, you could expect comparable
insight and quality. They're practically brochures.

Presumably, every western intelligence agency in the entire world has
comparable (or, hopefully, better) brochures. Make sure your passports are in
order! Carry the right amount of luggage! Don't fidget! Keep your story
straight!

~~~
dogma1138
This document isn't intended for field operatives. You do realize that the CIA
employees people in 1000's of positions ranging from secretaries to architects
and doctors? This is a simple guide for people who are not trained for wet
work or intended to be deployed as field assets but rather just for office
staff who travel to countries for official or non official CIA business. Many
countries including US allies would like to pinch a CIA employee even if it's
the guy who makes changes the toner.. So yeah if you are some low level
analyst who worked for the US diplomatic mission in Egypt, Yemen and Pakistan
traveling to Thailand for a vacation following some guidelines in the brochure
might prevent you from being halted and be put into a bad situation. So yeah
this isn't the instruction manual for an operative who just assassinated the
vice president of kirgistan traveling with stolen Romanian passport trough a
soviet era checkpoint... ;)

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sauere
I am always amazed of the bad quality of these leaked documents. Not just the
design but also the contents.

Both PDFs have a ton of unsorted, unordered information. It looks like just a
bunch of random facts thrown together. Not sorted by country, not sorted by
threat-level, no table of contents, no references.

CIA, step your game up.

~~~
d0ugie
Sir, did you just insinuate that the US intelligence community has room for
improvement?

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us0r
A lot of this is common sense although this stood out "Hotel and car
reservations are similarly examined for unusual discounts or government
affiliation.". Is this based on providing it to them or the car and hotel
chains providing it?

Side note: Why don't they just mark the entire document (S//OC/NF)?

~~~
dogma1138
That's just a fluff the document is ORCON, so although the company that
probably charged way too much money to generate this classified it as secret
it seems that this is an SBU(Sensitive But Unclassified )/FOUO document at
best. ORCON gives the generator of the content full control over the
dissemination and classification of the material regardless of the actual
content.

As for your question probably both, you might be asked for multiple reasons to
provide a proof that you have a hotel and that you have a return flight
showing that you are indeed entering the country for a "limited" period of
time. This is actually quite a common practice in many European countries
especially when young people traveling alone or in small groups from out side
the EU are involved. If you show them a hotel reservation and they see some
odd discount because you booked a hotel trough the US diplomatic mission they
might look deeper :)

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GabrielF00
The "Surviving Secondary" document is several years out of date, and notes
that it isn't designed to provide tactical advice. However, there are a lot of
tidbits about screening procedures at specific airports, and this gives me
pause. There are several concerns:

1) Does leaking this document give bad people information and tools that they
might otherwise not have, that might allow them to travel undetected.

2) Does leaking this document compromise the people or the tools that provided
this information. Should we be concerned if countries are less willing to
discuss the security of international travel with each other? Should we be
concerned that there are sources within these countries that could be
compromised?

On balance, it's difficult to see the benefit to the public of releasing this
information, and easy to see the risks.

~~~
spacefight
OK I bite.

The benefit is to know, that such organisations are present these days on
european soil. Another benefit is to know, that certain biometric border
checks do not only hassle regular travellers but also them.

~~~
GabrielF00
Those are topics that could be discussed in a newspaper article without
releasing the original documents, which contain all sorts of potentially
problematic material.

Here's a sample from the report:

"In an operation to screen for Hizballah members traveling from Venezuela, the
Mexican Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN) planned to take
into secondary screening Venezuelan passport holders without a mastery of
Spanish."

Casually disclosing what airport security officials know about the travel
patterns of terrorist groups, and how they intend to watch for those groups is
very troubling.

~~~
furyg3
Screening for people who do not have mastery of the primary language of their
nationality seems like something so obvious that leaking it is of little
consequence.

~~~
GabrielF00
It identifies Hezbollah operatives as using a specific country's passport
(Venezuela) to travel to a third country (Mexico). It also says that Mexican
security officials are on the lookout for Hezbollah operatives. Maybe these
are obvious facts. I'm not sure that people on the Internet are in a position
to assess that.

~~~
mikeash
If you don't think we're in a position to assess that, why did you start the
discussion? This sure looks like you presented your amateur assessment, the
when presented with disagreement you threw up your hands, did a 180, and
declared it off limits.

~~~
GabrielF00
Because of the precautionary principle. It's plausible that releasing
information about what airport security knows about the movement of members of
terrorist groups could cause significant problems in detecting members of
these groups. Given that risk, the burden should be on Wikileaks to
demonstrate that releasing this information will not cause harm before they
release it.

~~~
mikeash
It's also plausible that not releasing this information could cause problems,
so the burden should be on the CIA to demonstrate that the info must be kept
secret. How do you choose between your statement and mine?

~~~
GabrielF00
Is it plausible that someone could be harmed by releasing the information (as
opposed to not releasing it)? I don't see anything in this specific document
where I could plausibly say that the public could be harmed if the information
was NOT publicly available. I can see instances where its plausible that the
public could be harmed if the information WAS available.

It's also worth considering that there is a legal process for determining what
should or should not be classified and that there is oversight of this process
by elected officials. It's a flawed process, but there is accountability and
oversight. Who is Julian Assange accountable to? He seems to make decisions on
an ad hoc basis and then disassociates himself with people who question him.

~~~
amirmc
You can only make an amateur assessment because you can actually see the
document. If this had not been released, you only have the word of the
gov/three-letter-agency/etc that it really really does need to be secret.
Since we've seen members of this group repeatedly caught lying (even to their
overseers) how much can we trust the system?

This isn't an argument _for_ leaks but I'm trying to point out that the system
doesn't work as advertised.

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AdamMickiewicz
Are they paid by Putin to do this?

Snowden must have been...

I mean when you look at it from the time passing perspective: Putin had
planned confrontation with the West since at least 2004. From 2004 he was
planning to attack Ukraine. His RussiaTV, all the Alex Joneses and others,
Snowden, far right in EU -- all of that seems to be KGB sponsored (whether
they know about it or not is another matter entirely)

