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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Great read.

This part left me a bit shocked:

His response, "And you found all of this information just by looking on the internet? Incredible." Let me repeat that, this is the former Deputy Director of the CIA.

I hope to hell that the guy was a just Washington bureaucrat and it's not indicative of the CIA's thinking.

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The article doesn't specify when he held that title. Of the dozen or so living former Deputy Directors of the CIA[1] there are only a few that I would expect to not to still be surprised at how much you can find out over the Internet. Heck, I'm still in my twenties and I'm impressed at how easy it was to narrow it down to one likely candidate.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deputy_Director_of_Central_Inte...

Good catch. I never thought it might have been a deputy director from that long ago. In that case, it makes a lot more sense that he wouldn't know.

However, don't you think that someone who is involved in intelligence gathering would have some inkling of the important of the internet in intelligence?

Based on bsims comments about "extensive military/government background" and the guy being an investor, I would say this person is likely Admiral Inman, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence from 1981-1982, managing director of VC firms since 1990. He left the CIA the same year that the TCP/IP suite was standardized, hardly a point in history when the internet was a major source of intelligence, unless you were spying on DOD researchers.

Being a former Deputy Director means almost nothing about knowledge of current CIA practices and modern methods for intelligence collection.

Can't speak to Washington, but he had a pretty extensive military/government background.

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