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friendly_iconoclast

(15,333 posts)
Wed Aug 12, 2015, 11:37 PM Aug 2015

The Google Search That Made the CIA Spy on the US Senate

https://news.vice.com/article/the-google-search-that-made-the-cia-spy-on-the-us-senate

The Google Search That Made the CIA Spy on the US Senate
By Jason Leopold
August 12, 2015 | 12:15 pm

John Brennan was about to say he was sorry.

On July 28, 2014, the CIA director wrote a letter to senators Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss — the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI) and the panel's ranking Republican, respectively. In it, he admitted that the CIA's penetration of the computer network used by committee staffers reviewing the agency's torture program — a breach for which Feinstein and Chambliss had long demanded accountability — was improper and violated agreements the Intelligence Committee had made with the CIA.

The letter was notable in part because Brennan initially denied the January 2014 search of the Senate's computer network even took place. And later, when it became clear that it had — and that he had known of it while publicly denying that it happened — he refused to acknowledge that it was wrong. For months, Feinstein and other committee members were clamoring for a written apology to make part of the official record.

Brennan's mea culpa was prompted by a memo he'd received 10 days earlier from CIA Inspector General David Buckley. After the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) was tasked with looking into the intrusion, it found that the CIA employees who broke into the Senate's computer network in hopes of tracking down CIA documents the Senate wasn't allowed to see (according to the agency) may have broken federal laws.

"I recently received a briefing on the [OIG's] findings, and want to inform you that the investigation found support for your concern that CIA staff had improperly accessed the [Intelligence Committee] shared drive on the RDINet [an acronym for rendition, detention, and interrogation] when conducting a limited search for CIA privileged documents," Brennan wrote. "In particular, the [OIG] judged that Agency officers' access to the… shared drive was inconsistent with the common understanding reached in 2009 between the Committee and the Agency regarding access to RDINet. Consequently, I apologize for the actions of CIA officers…. I am committed to correcting the shortcomings that this report has revealed."...


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Very long, but well worth reading. Turns out, the Panetta Report leaking
was due to the CIA's IT contractor fucking up, not the Senate staffers hacking into
the CIA's database. Also, the CIA asked Vice not to release the letter that the CIA
had given them ('by mistake', is the claim) but Vice said no, and so you see it
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The Google Search That Made the CIA Spy on the US Senate (Original Post) friendly_iconoclast Aug 2015 OP
bookmarking for later reading think Aug 2015 #1
K&R. nt OnyxCollie Aug 2015 #2
K&R-there's always been "domestic operations" on politicians way before the CIA n/t bobthedrummer Aug 2015 #3
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