The CIA Meets MIT | Hacker News Reader

The CIA Meets MIT

everything2.com

126 pointsbootload23 comments

Funny story, but clearly an adolescent fantasy. "Charles I. Andersen Music Company" -> CIA isn't going around cutely inserting their initials into covert front companies. "careful investigation of the garbage bags from that office revealed that the CIA had suddenly felt it necessary to send all of their documents through the shredder several times" -> CIA used burn bags during this era, the idea that they would have been throwing away single shredded documents of anything sensitive is pretty silly - the weaknesses of shredding were well known to them.

I fully understand that it's popular to portray US intelligence as full of bumbling incompetence due to ones politics, but I think in reality that's rather rare. Wasteful? Often. Machiavellian? Sure. Misguided? Plenty of examples. Chronically stupid? Nah.

Indeed, while CIA ain't that smart or capable like some people believe (aliens? flying saucers? mind controlled drones?), they are also not as moronic and bureaucratic as others believe. They probably are significantly bureaucratic as any organization of their scale is - or they are constantly stepping on their own toes.

What I really wanted to add is - that most of their (and other intelligence agencies round the world) agents are not tall muscular black shaded gorillas like you see in movies.

In US case they're the diplomats, they might be 3rd party governmental officials, or indeed your university professor.

I fully understand that it's popular to portray US intelligence as full of bumbling incompetence due to ones politics

That conflicts with the evidence available. We know that in the last few years, CIA officers went to Italy and conducted an illegal operation that was trivially easy for Italian police to reconstruct. Why was it so easy? Because the CIA officers checked into airlines and hotels using their real names. Why did they do that? Because they wanted to collect the frequent flier points.

This is an organization that clearly employs a lot of people who are...not skilled at spycraft. This is not a question of politics.

I heard that during the Vietnam war, all agents were issued the same Rolex watch, which was designed for the purpose of agents bribing their way out of trouble, should the need arise. The taxi drivers figured this out and started just taking agents to the CIA safehouses without needing to be told where they were.

Hmm. Sounds apocryphal. By Executive Order 12333[1] the CIA is legally prohibited from collecting intelligence inside the United States in the vast majority of situations. The CIA cooperates with the FBI in these cases. Hypothetically this could be some kind of base for foreign intelligence operations, but that seems unlikely considering that I can't find any supporting evidence for the event occurring with some basic Google searches.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/eo12333.html

Edit: Let's be clear here: yes, there are a million hypothetical reasons why this story might actually be true. Unless someone can find a reliable source that confirms any of the details in this article I'm going to remain skeptical.

I doubt the office was for spying. More likely it was for working with emerging technologies coming out of MIT.

Possibly, but that still doesn't explain why I can't find any source confirming any of the details in this article.

They could have been there for recruitment purposes.

Then why would they be hiding their presence?

seems like a good match if you want to recruit people who are into secrecy. if you want to recruit potential spies, you don't want your foreign intelligence agencies noticing who you are recruiting, do you?

If foreign agents are moving with impunity in the US and watching recruitment operations without anyone knowing I think the CIA/FBI has a bigger problem than recruitment.

Anyway, this still doesn't explain why I can't find another source that supports this article.

For the same reason they insist on their surveillance planes being painted black.

Because of the last paragraph of this seriously bogus article. The banner was indeed posted and then a nice guy from the CIA office went across the hall and pointed out that while access from the central section with the elevators was controlled (with a Medco lock in the case of MIT's space, not that it was that difficult to get a copy of it), the bathrooms had no such protection, you only had to get past the guard on the ground floor and sign in (a necessary precaution due to the very bad neighborhood Tech Sq. was next to).

So that given that there are people out there who really hate the CIA, if someone were plant a bomb in one of the bathrooms it might very well be an MIT person who "found" it. The banner (in LOGO lab space?) was immediately taken down.

The CIA did not leave; they told MIT they'd be happy to if MIT would pay for replacing their built into the structure safe, which MIT was never willing to do.

While the CIA is prohibited from intelligence gathering activities within US shores, this doesn't mean they're prohibited from opening an office for any other activity.

The CIA is quite active in the tech world. For example, they underwrite a venture capital firm (http://www.iqt.org/). There are many other quasi government companies active in the tech world throughout the US as well. Most of them don't hang up a billboard with exactly what they're up to, for both obvious reasons as well as the same PR behaviors that govern all companies (for better or worse).

Before you break out the tin foil, consider that it's quite reasonable for an organization like the CIA to be interested in tapping into and recruiting from the sort of uniquely high expertise pool that forms around institutions like MIT.

While I think concerns about oversight and ensuring rights are preserved are entirely reasonable, if the CIA weren't this active domestically, I think it'd warrant a call to your senator to demand more from your government.

As I read it, the story sounds _exactly_ like the kind of thing I'd make up if I were the CIA and wanted to convince anyone that I didn't have an office in the area.

It would nicely convince everyone that I was not present, I was unlikely to return because I had been resoundingly bested, and if I were to return, I would be so ham-fistedly obvious that I would be easily detected and so anything less obvious clearly couldn't be me. It'd be perfect.

I suppose if I wanted to take it one level further I'd actually even make it real and have it play out as a script. I'd set up my real office somewhere opposite and unobtrusive and watch the fun.

That said I agree with the other comments. I'm not really sure what the point of setting up an obvious office would be outside of the already mentioned recruiting or academic interactions which seem to have little need to be covert.

An even better sign would have been:

  <- Central
    *Intelligence*
     Artificial ->

I like reading about social hacks like this.

While the story might not be true, it highlights that people are the weakest link. For instance, why didn't the secretary press the "suit", "contractor" and "construction worker" a bit harder? Then there is process. A process might be asking for visitors to sign, a sign-in book and then supply a business card which can be verified, checking name, address etc against a printed phone book. The weakness of social hacks is a legend or background story. The harder you dig the weaker a deception should appear if it's false.

The key to this social hack is gaining the confidence of the secretary (Suits, clip boards, plans) at the same time making sure the secretary does not link any of the incidents together while organising a false scenario: "Mitigating the social engineering threat" (Kevin Mitnick)~ http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/security/?p=3443

These are some of the keys to executing the "long con" ~ http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/hustle/con_jargon.shtml

If this isn't just an urban legend it makes you wonder how easily influenced security policy might be. For instance, if a student was to walk past and talk about how they use electron microscopes to recover hard disks this might influence hard drive deletion processes without any proof that this was necessary.

Not quite.

Here's the actual story. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2004/techsquare-0317.html

"The most intriguing tenant, still invoked by almost everyone who spent time in the building, was the Central Intelligence Agency, which had an office on the third floor under the name R.K. Starling Associates. The office spawned numerous pranks and jokes; one of the best known was a hallway sign that read "Intelligence," with arrows labeled "Central" and "Artificial" pointing to either side"

"Charles I. Andersen Music Company"

Would CIA really do this?

OT: Almost every other term on the post links back to their own website. This is the Wikipedia approach of SEO, isn't it?

Everything2 is older than wikipedia, and has always been like that.

Hilarious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com