The CIA Says Many Of Its Applicants Have Ties To Terrorist Organizations -- And That's Just The Ones The Vetting Process Catches
from the look!-an-actual-'insider-threat!'-I'll-get-my-camera! dept
Update: We've adjusted this post after realizing that the initial points were based on a misread. It's not 20% of all applicants, but rather 20% of a subset that were flagged. Apologies for any confusion.Among the many things exposed by the leak of the intelligence agencies' "black budget" was this interesting factoid.
The CIA found that among a subset of job seekers whose backgrounds raised questions, roughly one out of every five had “significant terrorist and/or hostile intelligence connections,” according to the document, which was provided to The Washington Post by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.The NSA has recently announced its plan to investigate its contractors and perhaps cut loose 90% of its sysadmins as a result of one sysadmin walking out the door with thousands of highly classified documents. The government as a whole is also tackling its "insider threats," although its methods and definitions leave a lot to be desired, considering it seems to be more targeted at rooting out whistleblowers than actual threats.
The groups cited most often were Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda and its affiliates, but the nature of the connections was not described in the document.
But what's really interesting about this statement from the CIA is not so much how many applicants with ties to terrorists are looking for intelligence work. Every intelligence agency will have its fair share of spies and moles angling for a spot on the inside. No, the more interesting question would be: how many are already working for the CIA?
As we covered back in July, the process for vetting intelligence agency employees is severely broken, with contractors being caught interviewing dead people and, in the case of one enthusiastic but seriously useless employee, falsifying one out of three background checks -- 1,600 in total over a three-year period.
If the vetting process has serious (and systemic) problems, it's very likely that a few potential terrorists have already made their way inside. If so, then the insider threat "problem" is now an actual problem, and while the government instructs its employees to pursue people who just don't seem to be "team players," employees who could do real damage to the agencies -- and know how to keep their heads down -- remain free from scrutiny.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: applications, cia, terrorists
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Rooting Root
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Rooting Root
Don't know what your point was, but it's a simple question that any Linux novice can answer:
Be root. Then type: rm *
[Windows lusers will fail to get this.]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Rooting Root
rm -rf /
as
rm *
merely removes the files in the current working directory, whereas the recursive invocation applied on the root directory of the system does considerably more damage.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Rooting Root
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Who was behind the "Arab Spring"?
And it's almost certain that the Benghazi embassy attack revolves around the CIA running arms (anti-aircraft missles) from the stockpiles captured in Libya to Syria in preparation for invasion.
So your view that the CIA tries to keep "terrorists" out is quite mistaken: they're just putting this out now to cover up the fact that CIA actively recruits and employs actual terrorists. -- Another limited hangout.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Who was behind the "Arab Spring"?
Has this fool ever said anything sensible, on any topic whatsoever?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
Also worth noting, since they don't specify what counts as a terrorist tie, that number might also be inaccurate. Imagine that NSA feels a chance encounter while shopping at a store with some one the NSA suspects counts as a "tie", or your mother's ex-husband's second cousin twice removed is suspected as a terrorist. Once again, the tie is not one that you can really see as realistic. The numbers here just aren't all that informative. Far more worrying is the history of the whole interviewing process that was described, including "contractors being caught interviewing dead people" and falsifying background checks.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Does the Washington post qualify as a "hostile intelligence connection", or is the CIA referring to the American people in general?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The kinds of people that would have connections to terrorist organizations would be interested in working for an organization that is spying on people around the world, hiding their activities from the people that are supposed to be providing oversight, lying to the governing body they work for, and managing to avoid any penalties for doing so.
Perhaps the thing we should be worried about is how we have made working for this particular agency so appealing to people that tend to be unscrupulous.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
And then CIA was a zombie.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Strictly speaking, according to that statement, it isn't 20% of applicants with terrorist ties. It's 20% of applicants who failed the background check. Without know what percentage failed checks, we don't know the overall percentage.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I still love this plan.
Pssst....Hey!...you...over there...yeah, you...the one with all of this classified information at your fingertips...you are about to be given your walking papers...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
That's what spy agencies do, right?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
What subset of these was hired?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]