The New York Times reports that the Central Intelligence Agency faced one of its worst intelligence gathering setbacks in decades when many of its informants in China were killed or imprisoned between 2010 and 2012. To this day, it is unknown how the identities of the informants were compromised:
From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former American officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.'s sources. According to three of the officials, one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building — a message to others who might have been working for the C.I.A.
Still others were put in jail. All told, the Chinese killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 of the C.I.A.'s sources in China, according to two former senior American officials, effectively unraveling a network that had taken years to build.
Assessing the fallout from an exposed spy operation can be difficult, but the episode was considered particularly damaging. The number of American assets lost in China, officials said, rivaled those lost in the Soviet Union and Russia during the betrayals of both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, formerly of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., who divulged intelligence operations to Moscow for years.
The previously unreported episode shows how successful the Chinese were in disrupting American spying efforts and stealing secrets years before a well-publicized breach in 2015 gave Beijing access to thousands of government personnel records, including intelligence contractors. The C.I.A. considers spying in China one of its top priorities, but the country's extensive security apparatus makes it exceptionally hard for Western spy services to develop sources there.
Also at BBC, which notes:
Last year, China warned government officials to watch out for spies - and not fall in love with them
This CIA story really helps put that "Don't date a foreigner!" campaign in perspective. You don't want to see your significant other bleeding out in the street, do you? DO YOU?!
Update: Chinese paper applauds anti-spy efforts after report CIA sources killed
Related Stories
Ex-CIA officer arrested for retaining classified information
A former Central Intelligence Agency officer was arrested at a U.S. airport on Monday night in connection with charges that he illegally retained highly classified information, the U.S. Justice Department said Tuesday.
Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a U.S. citizen who now lives in Hong Kong, used to maintain a top secret clearance and began working for the CIA in 1994.
The Justice Department said that in 2012, FBI agents searched his hotel rooms during trips to Virginia and Hawaii. They discovered he had two small books containing handwritten information on details such as the true names and numbers of spy recruits and covert CIA employees.
Ex-C.I.A. Officer Suspected of Compromising Chinese Informants Is Arrested
A former C.I.A. officer suspected by investigators of helping China dismantle United States spying operations and identify informants has been arrested, the Justice Department said on Tuesday. The collapse of the spy network was one of the American government's worst intelligence failures in recent years.
You may remember this story: CIA Informants Imprisoned and Killed in China From 2010 to 2012
Also at BBC, SCMP, and Washington Post (archive).
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used a quick and dirty web-based system to communicate with its agents around the world. Easy-to-use but not sophisticated. Iran and China used this system to find U.S. spies and convert or kill many agents, including entire national spy networks, starting around 2008.
Once you recognized the system, counter-spies could simply use Google to find the CIA's communication sites. They could then use standard traffic analysis to find out who visited the sites, identifying the spy networks.
Iran found spies using the system, converted some to double agents, while killing dozens of others. Iran may have passed the info to China, who wiped out the CIA network there, turning and killing 30+ agents. Iran then went spy hunting across the Middle East, too.
The absolute kicker: a CIA tech contractor identified the problem, that the network was compromised and spies were disappearing due to it, and reported it up the chain in 2008. He was ignored, punished and fired. Part of the reason we know this all happened is because he filed a federal whistleblower protection lawsuit.
So many/most of these U.S. agents would not be dead if CIA management AND the CIA inspector general had listened and acted on the report of a technical/security problem. Instead they denied they had a problem, burying their heads and their agents in the sand. Not only is the CIA riddled with terrible torture monkeys, but also deadly, incompetent, and inept management.
Article: The CIA's communications suffered a catastrophic compromise. It started in Iran.
Previously: CIA Informants Imprisoned and Killed in China From 2010 to 2012
Ex-CIA Officer Arrested, Suspected of Compromising Chinese Informants
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday May 22 2017, @05:41AM (13 children)
Pay-to-play. The Clintons did always enjoy their Chinese soft-money.
(Score: 2, Informative) by butthurt on Monday May 22 2017, @06:47AM
That's a possibility: CIA staff often pose as members of the diplomatic corps, and Ms. Clinton was the secretary of state at that time.
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp74-00297r001600010097-1 [cia.gov]
--
http://www.businessinsider.com/benghazi-stevens-cia-attack-libya-2012-11?op=1 [businessinsider.com]
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 22 2017, @08:43AM (11 children)
Partisan moderating. Though, to be fair, the post is partisan. Which part of "pay to play" don't people understand? Hillary advanced the causes of dozens of dirtballs, because they had MONEY!! From African blood diamonds, to Canadian fissionables being sold to Russia, the list goes on and on. Not one deserving individual has ever reaped a dollar from the Clinton Foundation - every dollar ever taken in, every dollar shelled out, has gone to advance the Clinton dynasty. That includes the often touted "humanitarian aid" to Haiti.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 22 2017, @12:09PM (2 children)
Corruption is all they know how to do. They literally don't know how to do anything else. After the earthquake in Haiti all kinds of companies and people donated materiel to the relief effort. Penske, for example, donated hundreds of trucks. They sat in the Port of Miami for 8 months because nobody knew you needed an export license or how to do any of the things required to get them to Haiti. They didn't know what to do with any of the $60 million people donated, because they had no idea how to spend it to help people affected by a natural disaster. So they created a fund to administer it, hired a bunch of their pals to run the fund, salaries paid by the fund, and as far as I know they have spent very little of it. The money will probably pay salaries and be used to curry political favor with whomever until it's gone.
Nobody will be very surprised at that. One addendum that people might find surprising, though, is that nobody in the UN Logistics Cluster, USAID, Red Cross, or any of the other agencies people normally think are tasked with disaster relief, know how to do any of that stuff either. Those agencies are places for the children of the rich and powerful to stamp their passports before being placed in comfy, lucrative jobs.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @09:51PM (1 child)
Hey you guys, take it to a motel room. I think jmorris has one permanantly booked over to the right (or possibly even left) of you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:09AM
白左
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday May 22 2017, @02:57PM (6 children)
> [...] Canadian fissionables being sold to Russia, the list goes on and on.
http://www.factcheck.org/2015/04/no-veto-power-for-clinton-on-uranium-deal/ [factcheck.org]
(Score: 1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 22 2017, @03:25PM (5 children)
Did Hillary, or did Hillary not, accept money from Russia - however it may have been laundered?
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html [nytimes.com]
When you're doing "fact checking", it helps to look at means and motivation. A lot of money changed hands, and the deal was done. Who raked in money, and who did not? Maybe if this were a one-off thing, it could be dismissed as coincidental. Some Russians really wanted to hear what Clinton had to say on some issue or another, and paid her half a million dollars to flap her gums. But, that's not exactly what Hillary, or history, teaches us. Hillary ALWAYS makes big bucks to ease the way for "investors".
I'm glad you didn't link to Snopes. They have a proven liberal agenda. Factcheck.org, I'm less sure of, but they didn't dig deep enough into the facts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @09:53PM (1 child)
I like squirrels. Do you also like squirrels?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:58AM
Sarah Huckabee? That you? Of course I like squirrel! Everyone from Arkansas love them some squirrel! Expecially Runaway and Hillary Clinton, and Gov. Huckabee.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:01AM (1 child)
> I'm glad you didn't link to Snopes. They have a proven liberal agenda.
Interesting! Here's the Snopes link:
http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-uranium-russia-deal/ [snopes.com]
Their page about this issue ought to be enough to demonstrate their "liberal agenda" to anyone. For one thing they link to the same New York Times article that you did, which says:
They also link to a statement supposedly from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission which states, irrelevantly,
-- https://web.archive.org/web/20170129043258/https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2010/10-211.pdf [archive.org]
First off, whether the uranium is exported is beside the point. It's still uranium! Second, the document is hosted by the Internet Archive, which openly states its liberal agenda to "collect published works and make them available in digital formats." Who knows what changes they made to the document?
Then they link to a statement supposedly made by a donor mentioned in the New York Times article, who claims:
-- http://blog.ceo.ca/2015/04/23/statement-of-frank-giustra/ [blog.ceo.ca]
It quotes the ultra-liberal The Guardian which said
It goes, as you say, on and on. Totally one-sided. Disgusting!
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:06AM
At the time, they would have been speculating that she would become the President of the US.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:23AM
I "forgot" to link to The Guardian's article:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/05/clinton-cash-bill-hillary-scandal-book [theguardian.com]
By the way, the creators of Clinton Cash also have a liberal agenda:
-- https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/mercer-bannon/ [washingtonpost.com]
We had a story about Robert Mercer before.
/politics/article.pl?sid=17/04/10/0322225 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:56AM
Runaway's Chinese education has been temporarily set back by a Clinton-derangement syndrome flare-up. Apply cold compresses until the emotional over-reaction subsides. Seek professional mental health services, if condition persists.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @06:07AM (13 children)
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Just as with the reports of record number of kilos of coke being seized in various places around the world, the conservative way to interpret this bodes ill 4 China. If the reports are true in spirit... That is, if CIA lost more agents than ever before in the last few years, the simplest explanation is, the agency HAS more agents than ever before! That would make perfect sense, since Chinese these days have an amazing level of access to ideas such as democracy, and a record number of Chinese are scratching their heads right now trying to figure out whether the state should serve the people or the people should serve the state. This was not really a question many Chinese have entertained for the last 10000 years, unless you also count the death row philosophers.
China hopes against all hope to go on with the political philosophy outlined by Confuzius and Li Erh: punish thought crime with death, and all shall be well. This works great until the state starts providing anything resembling the Internet. People in China found out about "democracy", for example, the moment the state started censoring Web pages containing the word. The Chinese brand of Censorship does not work on the Internet because people can plainly see WHAT is being censored, defeating the purpose.
So the simplest, Occamiest explanation of the trend is that more Chinese than ever before are being so dissatisfied with their government, they are willing 2 aid a foreign intel service, even though the fallout is as grim as always.
Reader, watch China carefully. They are the world's powder keg. No one will be ready for that explosion, because no one believes it will happen. But if and when a revolutionary spark appears there, it will be entirely too late to make any plans.
~Anonymous 0x9932FE2729B1D963
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday May 22 2017, @06:29AM (2 children)
China may be a powder keg, but the powder might be too damp to ignite. There has to be some build up and Tienanmen Square or Arab Spring style events. Things need to get... dry.
No:
Another simple explanation is that the unnamed sources are not lying, U.S. government cybersecurity is total crap and led to a significant loss of agents/assets in China, and that recovery will be difficult given events like the Office of Personnel Management hack.
Even when it doesn't work, it has the intended effect:
https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/how-china-made-the-tiananmen-square-massacre-irrelevant/276500/ [theatlantic.com]
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/03/chinas-youth-think-tiananmen-was-so-1989-protester-crackdown-historical-memory/ [foreignpolicy.com]
https://newrepublic.com/article/117983/tiananmen-square-massacre-how-chinas-millennials-discuss-it-now [newrepublic.com]
The people most likely to be useful to the CIA are in the Communist Party. They are people with connections and likely money, so they are not dissatisfied with the status quo. For ordinary Chinese, they've seen one of the greatest reductions in poverty in the history of the planet, and even the relatively poor have a much higher status of living and access to good ol' electronic entertainment (the "circuses" part of bread and circuses).
You can give Occam his razor back.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @07:41AM (1 child)
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I disagree with an assertion that the Chinese brand of censorship "has the intended effect", if the intended effect is: less free speech than before. The effect is, at best, the slowing-down of the public discourse that can only happen in a free society. Free to discuss, free to think, but obviously not to act at the moment. As we speak, words such as "democracy" are known to every Chinese person, and not only they know what these "forbidden" words mean, they also know WHY these words are forbidden. This is an UNACCEPTABLE level of understanding of the political process, according to 5000-plus year old dogmas, but it's happening now, and there's absolutely no way to stop it.
For someone who grew up in US, it is hard to comprehend how a society can function when people who criticize the government are summarily executed, but that's how Chinese got to where they are now. And the rules are about to change. They have already in the heads of the people, but not in the heads of their rulers, and not in the letter of the law. But think about something like Tienanmen Square happening today: would the Emperor be able to stop the sharing of cell-phone photos of tanks running over peaceful, unarmed protesters? And what would the public opinon be? And what would it do in the regions which don't speak Mandarin? Or even the regions which do speak Mandarin?
Chinese may just do OK, but more probably and more tragically, the Empire will start coming apart, and it will be a series of very jerky moves, and no one will see them coming.
~Anonymous 0x9932FE2729B1D963
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @03:03PM
You certainly swallowed the anti-China propaganda hook line and sinker.
You will recall the most memorable part of the "massacre of unarmed civilians" was the fact that the tank didn't run him over...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @06:32AM (1 child)
What else besides "democracy" do the regime tries to censor?
Makes one wonder how close a possible powder keg event is. And what relationships will then be after such event. They have nukes, large army, international industries have their production facilities there etc. So it will impact the whole globe.
By working for this foreign organization they also buy their ticket out of constant fear. Not now, but in the future.
(Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Monday May 22 2017, @07:05AM
> What else besides "democracy" do the regime tries to censor?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_China [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday May 22 2017, @06:38AM (2 children)
The New York Times article says "by the end of the year [2010], the flow of information began to dry up." It also uses the expression "unraveling a network that had taken years to build." Those are odd things to say, if the situation is as you suppose.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @07:06AM (1 child)
Hash: SHA256
NYTimes says a lot of odd things. Or, to phrase it in a more sensible way, they are full of shit. Here's a taste: https://chomsky.info/20150406/
"unraveling a network that had taken years to build"... Evidence? No, I didn't think so. I personally do not even trust their report of CIA agent exposure incidence, but like I said, I find that plausible, given the actual, factual conditions I described. I understand how and why the recruiting is up, and if the recruiting is up, then of course the counter-intel impact is up, and it's a simple proportion. Are you intercepting 10 times more heroin at the border? Congratulations! Now you know the shipment rate is up 1000%. This is the simplest inference available to us: people with no inside knowledge of CIA or its Chinese counterparts.
~Anonymous 0x9932FE2729B1D963
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(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday May 22 2017, @07:54AM
> [...] they are full of shit.
They may be; we needn't believe that the events described in the article happened. I suppose someone who wished to check could request records regarding the Honey Badger investigation.
> [...] the actual, factual conditions I described.
Conditions that would lead an increasing number of Chinese to collaborate with the CIA, right? I reread your earlier post and "an amazing level of access to ideas such as democracy" was the closest I saw to that. Why that would apply especially between 2010 and 2012 is unclear.
(Score: 2) by Soylentbob on Monday May 22 2017, @08:30AM
I had some problems verifying the signature due to some weird behaviour of Epiphany web-browser. When copying the post to clipboard, half of the new-lines are removed [pastebin.com] leading to error messages about "invalid clearsig header" and "invalid armor header". Trying the same with Firefox works fine.
(Can we agree a post is on-topic if it refers in any meaningful way to parent post? I know I'm off-topic in relation to TFA.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @08:45AM
P.S. I like big bones.
~Anonymous 0x9932FE2729B1D963
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 22 2017, @09:25AM
Particularly the author of that piece. You can sense his complete bewilderment that China would do such an inconceivable thing. Who knew?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 22 2017, @12:49PM (1 child)
Chinese society is very fragile. It has "feet of clay," to borrow a Chinese phrase. It is more complex than 'oppressed people want to be free,' though. It's also not a matter of the Chinese people getting better access to better information. This is not the Cold War, when it was thought Voice of America could get the truth to oppressed people living behind the Iron Curtain. Even without the Great Firewall, there's not much of a beacon of justice or democracy out here to entice them to change.
What they do see, and what does drive the fragility, is the corruption and wealth inequality they can see around them. Party officials and well-connected individuals get wildly rich and strut around in shiny foreign cars and live in opulent palaces. Everyone else grinds to get by. Factories close and people get laid off by the tens of thousands. Protests happen, but they get shut down by troops quickly.
Sound familiar [nytimes.com]?
There are regional tensions, too. City vs. countryside, North vs. South, Coasts vs. Interior.
Sound familiar [npr.org]?
In keeping a lid on all that, China has an advantage over others in that it's happy to have the army shoot everyone, and everyone rather expects that sort of move and aren't particularly shocked by it. One disadvantage they have is they have no civil society to buffer economic dislocations or the effects of corruption, such that when things break loose they break loose all of a sudden without warning.
On the other hand, lots of warning does not seem to produce policy changes in places that have civil society, so maybe in the end China will outlast everyone else.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @02:43PM
I think you're missing one of the most important variables: nationalism. Chinese are, by and large, extremely nationalistic. That doesn't preclude change that 'goes against the [established] grain', to put it one way, but it does help ensure that that change is geared directly towards the greater good as rapidly as possible. Something trendy in just about every election is for popular voices in America to claim they'll leave the country if their preferred politician doesn't get elected. Now they never do, but the fact that their ties to country are advertised as so incredibly whimsical as to be upset by a single election is something that I think speaks to heart of the American electorate. And that heart fundamentally says, "It's my way or you're wrong."
Independence is a strength, but also a weakness. Should America begin to enter into chaos that cannot be completely mitigated and mediated by the powers that be, now that is going to a catalyst for self implosion. Chinese society may be fragile. I don't know. But I do know that ours is extremely volatile. Nationalism helps tie a country together, even in light of overt differences between themselves. In America nationalism has now begun to be used almost as a sort of pejorative.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @06:17AM (1 child)
want Obama back.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @06:24AM
I want Slick Willy back.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday May 22 2017, @06:37AM (6 children)
- Build a great wall between the US and China (and China pays for it).
- Ban foreign individuals of the Chinese faith from entering the country.
Seriously though, while the spies play their spy games and the warmongers their war games on our money, 99% of the rest of the world, composed of ordinary people, tries to lead a decent life and provide for their families on ever decreasing wages.
Spies get caught and die? Cry me a river, it serves them right.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 22 2017, @12:51PM
If the CIA wants more, better information they need to torture more, harder. It's obvious, isn't it?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday May 22 2017, @03:08PM (3 children)
The sad thing is, these people aren't exactly "the spies" (and not American), at least according to my reading of TFS. They're the spies' informants: they're people the spies conned into working with them, perhaps even by exploiting romantic feelings. It takes a particularly horrible kind of person to seduce someone, take advantage of their loneliness, and then use that to convince them to do your dirty work for you. Then, who takes the fall? The victim, not the actual spy working for the foreign country.
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Monday May 22 2017, @03:44PM (1 child)
Maybe there should be some proof before shooting the people, such as hard cash as evidence. Love alone is hard to track on paper. But then again this is China so maybe I'm wrong and they don't bother with such details.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday May 22 2017, @04:45PM
Maybe they shouldn't shoot anyone at all. But this isn't a discussion over how China should treat spies or their informants; China's going to do what they're going to do. I'm just pointing out that the OP's lack of sympathy is probably misplaced, because the *real* spies don't seem to be getting the punishment here, only the "useful idiots" they've seduced into working for them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:32AM
Well, that's good! If they were American nationals guilty of espionage against China, they would only be pretending to commit treason, instead of actually doing it, like these poor bastards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @04:53PM
How did this get to +5 Insightful. At the risk of being the antagonist of "A Few Good Men," this is incredibly naive. How many people do you think watch "the wall" to ensure that you and everybody else can sleep safe at night? I'm not saying we should fetishize the security state or create a fascists regime, but let's not dismiss their work, either.
Is the bluster of North Korea business-as-usual, or are they about to launch a nuclear strike against Seoul? Would sending an aircraft carrier fleet there deter an attack against South Korea or instigate it?
How desperate is Iran/Saudi Arabia/Afganistan for money and political legitimacy? Do we need to be prepared for an upcoming oil shock (which would impair our ability to supply and operate the military)? Is another invasion imminent, such as Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and how can we prepare for it?
Just look at Crimea. I'll bet that you'd say "if only the US and Europe had know about this a week in advance, how different it would have turned out." How do you think the US and Europe, (and indeed how Russia, China, Israel, Brazil, Australia, and pretty much every country) tries to learn about these kinds of things in advance?
Yes, "pies play their spy games and the warmongers their war games on our money." Yes, they make horrible mistakes at times, too. But don't trivialize what they do, or dismiss their sacrifices.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @07:43AM (8 children)
We had a Secretary of State who thought security rules didn't apply to her. Not liking the special secure phone because you have a Blackberry addiction? Oh, just ignore the rules. Get a personal device, rigged up to a personal server that isn't even fully up to date with patches, and then use it for everything from approving drone strikes to general chat about TOP SECRET things. Upgrading? Instead of proper disposal, just smash the device with a hammer, probably failing to even crack the flash chips. People died? Oh well, at least that time it wasn't intentional. These things happen.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday May 22 2017, @08:08AM (5 children)
That's a possible explanation. The article offers another:
(Score: 1, Troll) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 22 2017, @12:54PM (1 child)
Carelessness? Have you ever lived in China, my friend? There are, like, five restaurants in the entire country where you can eat a meal and not have Mao's Revenge five minutes later. Over the long haul you tend to eat there every meal because everything else destroys your ass.
Nothing compromises operational integrity faster and more completely than monkey butt.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @01:33PM
Must be some other China than the one I spent nearly 2 weeks in. Granted I was in Peking but I ate out twice every single day and the restaurants I chose were not some classy joints. One even didn't have an English menu. The worst thing I ever experienced was I saw a cockroach on wall at one place. (I realize this doesn't exactly scare Americans...) I experienced no "gastrointestinal discomfort" at all. And I didn't even take lactic acid bacteria pills or anything as a precaution beforehand. The food was always good and the prices were ridiculously cheap, the most expensive lavish dinner for 2 people with drinks (beer) and all included came up to 2€ (less than $3 US).
I have little respect for the government of China, or the government of US or the CI fucking A. I find their ways entirely disagreeable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @06:57PM (2 children)
China can't afford to listen in on every restaurant in the country.
They bugged that restaurant because they knew a spy would be likely to go there. They wanted to discover who else was involved and to learn about methods, targets, etc.
How did they know a spy would likely go there? That is where our insecurity comes in. Get the names of a few spies by hacking our Secretary of state, follow them, and discover many more spies.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday May 22 2017, @11:13PM
Or as the second paragraph I quoted suggests, it's possible "the Chinese had hacked the covert communications channel".
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:44AM
> Get the names of a few spies by hacking our Secretary of state, follow them [...]
That could happen: the Secretary of State's communications might mention details of people who work at U.S. embassies, which CIA agents often do. However, there are other ways that such people could be identified. For example, the embassy itself could be put under observation, and people could be observed as they left it or entered it. Another way would be to require foreign visitors to identify themselves with a passport when they enter the country, and perhaps require them to obtain a visa. Just going by what Wikipedia says, the PRC requires holders of U.S. diplomatic passports to obtain a visa (note the grey colouring on the map and the absence of the United States from the list of exempt countries).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_China#Visa-free_for_diplomatic.2C_official.2C_and.2For_service_passports [wikipedia.org]
From the little I know of the workings of the CIA, I assume they minimise the amount of information they provide to the State Department regarding the Chinese people who co-operate with the CIA. "Need to know basis" would be the watch-words, I assume.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @09:18AM (1 child)
She should do what other people who care about security do, carry around and use an unsecured Android phone!
Pretty dumb. It would be much better to have the top secret briefings in a restaurant.
Good thing that we got a president who is so security conscious, he would never reveal classified information to the Russians [washingtonpost.com]. Dodged a bullet there!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @07:06PM
Being the Secretary of State, you don't get to have a normal phone. Don't take the job if you don't like it.
There are 2 people with an absolute right to release classified information to anybody, Russians included. That is the President and the Vice President. All presidents do it.
There are perhaps a dozen more people, generally cabinet members, with original classification authority. This means the ability to determine what is classified for information that originates in the portion of government that is under their control. If the state department and the homeland security department trade secrets, they are both prohibited from declassifying those secrets. They have to get permission from each other. So when the state department gets info about CIA agents, the state department doesn't have authority to declassify any of it, but they are free to declassify their own stuff.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gawdonblue on Monday May 22 2017, @08:25AM (1 child)
This is possibly the US wanting the Chinese to think they're doing a great job uncovering "spies", and to keep trusting that intelligence...
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:50AM
If that's the intention, this statement doesn't fit:
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 22 2017, @10:04AM
Can't help wondering how many people were trapped by that Great Firewall of China. Just because you got through the firewall, exchanged information, gathered data, or whatever, doesn't mean that you weren't noticed. Government officials may or may not have broken your encryption, but they know where you are. All they have to do is come visit with that $5 decryption wrench, and you'll give them the keys to your encrypted disk. Phhht. High technology, meet the dumb grunt who wants all your questions, and all your answers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by linkdude64 on Monday May 22 2017, @02:33PM (4 children)
China runs a shitload of compromised ones IIRC and it is nothing short of a death race for the devs to continuously detect their signatures. Good thing TOR has spent lots of time and money updating their CoC!
It seems like throughout history the CIA has been willing to do almost anything to get extra funding, especially in the form of creating a greater need for their own services via generating chaos around the world. "Whoops, we fucked up and ruined a country. Looks like we'll need twice as much money to fix it!!!" The NSA, I do not have that impression of, and have not heard anything about, namely, from Wikileaks. They do not seem like a rogue agency, they seem like a true intelligence agency - concerned with Information and Information only, rather than the direct abuse, misinterpretation, and wayward planning intended to exploit that information. They give their figures and likelihoods to the military, and the military does what bull-headed things it will, which they are equipped to do.
The CIA just seems like it wants to bite off more and more and more. I almost suspect (PURE SPECULATION ALERT) that the timing of these code leaks from both the CIA and the NSA were timed with the election cycle, and are a sign of infighting over funding between agencies, and history tells us the CIA have ALWAYS been the ones with their hands in the cookie jar.
(Score: 1) by linkdude64 on Monday May 22 2017, @02:35PM (3 children)
Funny. I'd placed "Pure speculation + Off-topic" in between a couple of karats before the second paragraph as a kind of joke. Looks like I forgot it would disappear. Joke's on me. Hehe.
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:53AM (2 children)
> Pure speculation + Off-topic
Edward Snowden once worked for the CIA, yet the information he leaked was about the NSA.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Tuesday May 23 2017, @06:44PM (1 child)
1) I could've sworn that these recent NSA tool leaks weren't from Snowden, or, at least, it's been confirmed that there has been another leaker to Wikileaks other than he since his big splash.
2) Wouldn't him leaking info about the NSA for the CIA necessitate him being a CIA employee previously?
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @10:51PM
You had some speculation about "infighting" that you said was off-topic, so I offered some additional speculation. Edward Snowden did work for the CIA:
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Employment_at_CIA [wikipedia.org]
I didn't mean to suggest that he was behind the recent leaks. I was alluding to the documents he released beginning in 2013. They increased public awareness of the NSA and, I would say, brought it into disrepute.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @04:53PM
Bush outs Valerie Plame, the hunt begins, in a few years time agents are being identified and eliminated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @06:26PM
If that's really true (e.g. they really were CIA informants) nothing of great value was lost.
I find it really hard to build a list of significantly good things the CIA has done for the USA (much less the world) compared to the evil it has done.
It's far easier to list good things the NSA has done.