Central to Our Intelligence

For all the talk about Valerie Plame, the real scandal is that the CIA has never properly addressed the threat posed by the Internet. You know, the Internet, developed by DARPA and academics to distribute information among nodes around the world.

The CIA apparently can't keep secret the names and identities of thousands of its employees and agents. This isn't just a national security problem, but a scandal of epic proportions that has been an ongoing mess since the 1990s.

The Tribune is not disclosing the identities of any of the CIA employees uncovered in its database searches, the searching techniques used or other details that might put agency employees or operatives at risk. The CIA apparently was unaware of the extent to which its employees were in the public domain until being provided with a partial list of names by the Tribune.

At a minimum, the CIA's seeming inability to keep its own secrets invites questions about whether the Bush administration is doing enough to shield its covert CIA operations from public scrutiny, even as the Justice Department focuses resources on a two-year investigation into whether someone in the administration broke the law by disclosing to reporters the identity of clandestine CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Not all of the 2,653 employees whose names were produced by the Tribune search are supposed to be working under cover. More than 160 are intelligence analysts, an occupation that is not considered a covert position, and senior CIA executives such as Tenet are included on the list.

Covert employees discovered

But an undisclosed number of those on the list--the CIA would not say how many--are covert employees, and some are known to hold jobs that could make them terrorist targets.

Other potential targets include at least some of the two dozen CIA facilities uncovered by the Tribune search. Most are in northern Virginia, within a few miles of the agency's headquarters. Several are in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah and Washington state. There is one in Chicago.

Some are heavily guarded. Others appear to be unguarded private residences that bear no outward indication of any affiliation with the CIA.

A senior U.S. official, reacting to the computer searches that produced the names and addresses, said, "I don't know whether Al Qaeda could do this, but the Chinese could."

And you can be damned sure that if the Chinese weren't trying before, they're going to be doing it in earnest now. This isn't meant as an indictment of the Tribune, because their reporting has exposed a major hole in our national security.

The real question is what anyone is going to do about it. Will Porter Goss, who was brought in to fix the situation actually address the matter? Will Congress take necessary steps to fix it. Or will it be business as usual until the next terrorist attack within the country?

Paul at Wizbang has some additional thoughts. So does AJ Strata, In search of Utopia, and Jeff Goldstein. No Quarter thinks you have to have a name first to find the linkages to the CIA. If you're a foreign government, don't you think that part is already part of the spycraft - to identify those affiliated or associated with the intel agencies?