New Snowden Revelation: Terrorists Attempting To Infiltrate CIA 250
cold fjord writes "The Washington Post reports, 'The CIA found that among a subset of job seekers whose backgrounds raised questions, roughly one out of every five had "significant terrorist and/or hostile intelligence connections," according to the document, which was provided to The Washington Post by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The groups cited most often were Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda and its affiliates, but the nature of the connections was not described in the document. So sharp is the fear of threats from within that last year the NSA planned to launch at least 4,000 probes of potentially suspicious or abnormal staff activity .... The anomalous behavior that sent up red flags could include staffers downloading multiple documents or accessing classified databases they do not normally use for their work, said two people familiar with the software used to monitor employee activity.'"
Paranoia... (Score:5, Interesting)
or actual infiltration?
The original Bin Laden al-Qaeda is practically non-existent, its Islamist affiliates are too busy trying to win over regimes in the mideast, Hamas is trying not to piss off the US considering that Obama has been much more pro-Palestinian. Hezbollah....maybe. We're talking about a few tens of thousands of eligible individuals here, most of them with Hezbollah and Hamas.
I have serious doubts that this is anything other than the Three Letter agencies trying to project a Cold War interpretation ("big centralized nation-state entity out to get us") onto a set of data that only shows small, disparate groups who are all actually too busy trying to avoid being smashed by the US, Israel, or the Arab League.
Re:No need for that anymore... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they still need it. Just look at the nature of the story: "The official, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material."
Yet these people aren't being hunted across the globe for their classified leaks.
Re:Paranoia... (Score:3, Interesting)
On one hand, your typical AQ member is probably dumb enough to try to get hired at the CIA...on the other, the CIA is probably dumb enough to think that anyone from a certain region of the middle east is a terrorist even if they are just as closely connected to Kevin Bacon...hey, they blow people up with drones for the same.
Re:TERRORISTS ALREADY HAVE INVADED NSA/CIA/MILITAR (Score:4, Interesting)
"Terrorist" is the new "Red/Commie". Every generation needs a convenient vague Boogyman Bucket to shove people into they don't like.
Re:Paranoia... (Score:4, Interesting)
From TFA:
I would guess that the definition of "signficant...connections" is in this case.
Maybe it means you work for Hamas. Or maybe it means one of your cousins knew a guy in college whose little brother is now a member of hamas....
Re:Paranoia... (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not how the middle-east guys work. The CIA needs Arab spies to spy on the middle east baddies (and their is a very long list including Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, etc.) After a while, the baddies work out who is working for the CIA, and then determine who the spies family is. Then the spy either becomes a double, or the family killed. This is a huge problem for the CIA.
This problem is also why America has made such poor progress in Afghanistan. The Taliban will wipe out your family. On the other hand, American soldiers don't go after peoples families, and mostly follow a reasonable moral code. Thus, middle-eastern students in North America look over their shoulders, because they don't know who will go after their family back home. Can you imagine convincing people to fight when they don't know who will threaten their families?
BULSHIT BULLSHIT BULLSHIT (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't ANY of us know how to read a news story and think for ourselves, anymore?
There's a methodology used to substantiate this kind of BULLSHIT claim. It can be described as shooting an arrow towards a wall, then drawing a bulls-eye around it, after the fact.
For another metaphor? Here's the word you get to drive your Mack truck through:
"Affiliated"
When you have the NYPD secretly assign all Mosques [sfgate.com] the "Terrorist Organization" label, and you have the CIA recruiting for record numbers of native Arabic speakers, [telegraph.co.uk] for translation?
Call it "Psyop Ju-Jitsu". This is an all-star set up, to make a positive scare-tactic out of the negative public relations resulting from Snowden's revelations.
By-the-fucking-way, what else do you expect, when you let this kind of shit [defenseone.com] go down? Objective and agenda-less reporting of fact?
USA. It's like a police-state with Tesla Model S and overnight shipping, instead of Bread and Circuses.
Re: Snowden beware (Score:4, Interesting)
That's actually why he identified himself -- to help avoid assassination.
And he has some security in the form of encrypted documents scattered around the world with instructions to release the key should anything 'happen' to him. And these documents contain stuff that would be VERY damaging to the US government.
So, naturally, the US doesn't want to assassinate him. But the US has many enemies who would like to see these documents released. Do the math.
Re:No need for that anymore... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm British, and I'm old enough to have had arguments in my youth when foreigners - including Americans - castigated my country for its imperialism.
Now, that was obviously a long time ago. (Although not as long as you're probably thinking.) But there's a part of me that's never stopped thinking - this is what it's like, guys, hope you're enjoying it as much as we did.
The current - stagnation, I think is the best word - over Syria is a potent illustration of how empires fail. You do everything, and I mean everything, you can, in crisis after crisis. You send in diplomats, engineers, doctors, lawyers, soldiers, whatever you think will help - time after time after time. There's always another crisis. And no matter what happens, it seems you get no gratitude, nothing but blame. And sooner or later, you're just plain exhausted. Then your congress starts saying "No more, we're not paying for this adventure, we'll sit this one out". And pretty soon after that, their electors start saying "we don't have to intervene every time, who knew? Let's stop spending so much on the military."
And before you know it, you're just another country, sitting around watching the news and bitching about how the Chinese won't stand up against atrocities.
It's a label not an insult (Score:3, Interesting)
"From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli"
Yes the label does make sense, especially in taking over a French colonial war in South East Asia. Also for some reason you seem to have missed that the Korean border was drawn by two guys in the pentagon. A very long list of things went wrong since then, mostly due to every competent potential leader of the north being in the south trying to get Korea united and getting caught off guard by a power hungry idiot, but that war would not have happened without an empire reaching out a hand over the water and drawing an arbitrary line.
There's some interesting stuff Mark Twain wrote about the Austrian-Hungarian empire when he was a journalist in Europe if you want to get some insight into why the definition fits and why the word empire is not an insult but just a label.