CIA Travel Advice to Operatives | Hacker News Reader

CIA Travel Advice to Operatives

wikileaks.org

83 pointsus0r22 comments

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.

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!

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... ;)

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.

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

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)?

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

Troubling? Why? The docs are multiple years old.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

And again you seem to be taking the implicit stance that you're in a position to assess these documents, but people arguing against your position aren't.

I just want a little consistency. Are we able to discuss these, or not? If not, why are you doing it?

One interesting takeaway was the final anecdote, indicating that a CIA operative traveling with diplomatic credentials had their bag test positive for explosive residue. It seems implicit that they actually had been carrying explosives (not currently) and it was important for the agent to have a plausible and consistent cover story.

So, US agents in Europe/Asia transporting explosives is of interest to the general public, I think.

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)

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