C.I.A. Admits Penetrating Senate Intelligence Computers | Hacker News Reader

C.I.A. Admits Penetrating Senate Intelligence Computers

nytimes.com

135 pointsaaronbrethorst46 comments

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...

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Sadly, nothing will ever happen to Brennan or Clapper. And if there was even a wiff of charges, Obama will pardon them at the end of his presidency.

But even more sadder is that by stating the above, you're possibly now on a list, used by the people above to keep tabs on you.

I have a MacBook Pro and I visited BoingBoing once. I'm already on the list apparently.

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.

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.)

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.

As a point of history, this may be of interest

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).

>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?

If you or I participated in money laundering for drug smuggling we would spend forever in jail. That's true if the amount of money involved was thousands or millions of dollars. But once you get into billions of money laundered and once a big multi-national bank is involved then suddenly everything becomes less serious and only fines and admonishments are handed out.

Also will this even be news 48 hours from now? This is incredible and I don't see how heads don't fall. This is the scariest news yet and I bet most people are not even bothered by the lack of self-control certain points of our government has.

It won't be news. The media has a lot of ties with the CIA that run decades deep. [0]

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

It's nothing to do with Operation Mockingbird. It's simply pure Kleptocracy. Anyone with an objective eye can see that this is the inevitable path the US has paved for itself.

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.

Senator Feinstein isn't the best person to have speak out against this. She is rabidly hated by nearly half of the country, so any complaints she makes are ignored by them.

These complaints need to come from a McCain/Lieberman-type coalition of Senators in order to gain any traction.

Having the sitting chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee speak out is pretty much the ideal person. I don't know if she has more or less credibility based on having been so pro NSA spying in the past.

Ideally you'd get the ranking members of the same committees in both houses of congress to do it; it's a powerful position so it tends to go to more partisan people, and thus each will be hated by approximately half of the voters, but you'll have 2 and 2 each hated by different halves.

You are completely right about that. She was so very much in favor of US being surveilled that her complaint about it happening to her rings hollow.

I had no idea that my previous comment would spark such a negative reaction from the mods. I don't think I've ever seen a -3 on a comment that wasn't obviously a deliberate attempt at trolling.

FYI, it isn't mods, users with >= 500 karma can downvote a post.

Thank you for the information. I guess I'm too used to how things work at /.

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

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

It's absurd that they would get caught doing this.

Think for a moment about how effective that kind of defensiveness is. Think about the word absurd, as stated by a public official.

By stating that it is absurd (unthinkable, out of bounds, paranoiac, laughable) the director has cleanly shoved people accusing the CIA of political coercion into the same camp as "conspiracy theorists"-- people who are too ridiculous of a parody to be trusted or listened to.

Who was objectively correct on this one? Whose statements were reality, and whose a falsehood? The CIA, or the conspiracy theorists?

I'd put it this way: who's livelihood is predicated more on an ability to lie?

Evading and/or interfering with oversight should be a per-se federal crime.

Yup, here is the denial. from March. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il7jV27l7pU

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.

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

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.

"[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?

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

Oops. Sorry.

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.

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

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.

'Dynamic titling' especially of NYT submissions is becoming more common. For various reasons, some are business and some are editorial/political. The 'paper of record' is no more.

We updated the title.

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