Last week the Chicago Tribune published an article regarding how easy it was to identify covert CIA agents using simple web searches. The byline summed up their views on it “It’s easy to track America’s covert operatives. All you need to know is how to navigate the Internet.”. They then described the outcome of their investigation as this:

When the Tribune searched a commercial online data service, the result was a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States.

Former CIA agent Larry Johnson noticed this article and has taken a more realistic view on it.

Oh really? Okay Mr. Crewdson (the author of this nonsense). Please search the internet and identify 100 CIA officers for me. Go ahead. Give it a shot. Oh, I forgot, first you need a name. You do not just enter a random name and come up with a flashing sign that says, “this guy is CIA”. So really what you are saying is that if I tell you someone works for the CIA you can do a search and find out that someone, who is a private consultant, once worked for the U.S. State Department? In other words, you first have to be tipped off to look at a particular person.

I agree 100% with Larry on this but I also want to take it further. For years we have been reminded of Osama’s existence by video and audio transmissions that are placed on al Qaeda websites. The problem is that someone has to be sitting at a computer to put this information on the web and we can not find them. If someone downloads illegal porn then we know exactly where they are at but we can’t find public enemy number one who is also using a computer?

Sysco systems is considered one of the most secure computer systems in the world. A couple years ago a 16 year old girl hacked into this cyber fortress and gained full control of their system. The FBI was eventually able to track her down. In the process of her hacking she bounced off of hundreds of proxies around the world. What this does is make each proxy look like the hacker was sitting at that computer. Tracing backwards their first stop could be in Africa. Now they have to go through the legal channels their to gain access to logs to find out that the next stop is in Indonesia. The legal process starts all over again. With out going into all the details, you get the general idea – it takes a lot of work to find someone but we still can.

So going back to the Chicago Tribune article, a reporter was able to uncover all this information. If that is the case then how do we have agents working overseas? Al Qaeda is obviously far more tech savvy then we are since we can not find how they publish stuff on the internet. If that’s the case then they certainly can easily find out who our agents are and identify them quickly. That means our intelligence community is at grave risk.

What I feel this article boils down to is more typical right wing propaganda that has been put out in fear of further indictments coming out in the CIA leak case. This is their pre-emptive strike should someone like Karl Rove or Stephen Hadley end up getting an indictment from Patrick Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald already went through the investigative work of finding out Valerie Plame’s identity was not even known to her close friends and family. He did this using the power of the F.B.I. Now some journalist is going to try and discredit that in order to save a partisan attack. That is all the entire CIA leak boils down to is one giant, slimy partisan attack against a war critic.