It can set up mirrored sites. It can bounce from server to server. But whatever impact WikiLeaks continues to have on the US government after dumping tens of thousands of military reports and diplomatic cables, the CIA’s WikiLeaks Task Force is watching, studying, learning. It’s literally a WTF operation.
Actually, what makes it a WTF operation isn’t just the task force’s acronym. It’s the WTF’s mandate: not to launch any subterfuge against the radical disclosure entity—that would be a job for NSA, most likely, or maybe Saturday Night Live—but rather to study its disclosure’s impact on the CIA’s ability to recruit snitches and retain the trust of spy agencies worldwide.
According to the Washington Post’s Greg Miller, it takes an entire task force to determine that the CIA came out of the WikiLeaks saga with minimal exposure. While WikiLeaks appeared to show CIA operations in Iraq, its most-hyped disclosure was a boring piece of analysis on homegrown terrorism. The Pentagon and the State Department can only wish they had such limited breaches.
Score one for the CIA’s distaste for sharing information. It didn’t participate in the government-wide SIPRNet secret internet that allowed an Army private like Bradley Manning to allegedly put hundreds of thousands of State Department cables on a Lady Gaga CD. While the Defense Department is rushing to ban thumb drives, an ex-CIA official tells Miller that if he ever put a thumb drive into his work computer, “there would probably be a little trap door under my chair.” For all the carping about CIA’s reluctance to share information from earnest think-tankers and angry congressional panels, here’s an enormous information-security upside.
That’s partially the result of an institutional culture of secrecy. But the CIA has also had a lot of early experience with cyber-insecurity. In 1995, then-Director John Deutch put classified information on his home computer, which his AOL account left vulnerable to cookies, malware or phishing—though a CIA inquiry found no harm was done. More seriously, in what might be the biggest reply-all-FAIL of all time, a CIA agent accidentally emailed the agency’s entire spy network inside Iran in 2004, allowing a double agent to identify and then neutralize all the CIA’s snitches.
And the CIA might not WikiLeak, but it leaks like a sieve. In his first public speech as director of national intelligence, Jim Clapper said that President Obama was pissed at “widely quoted amorphous and anonymous senior intelligence officials who get their jollies from blabbing to the media.” All those are WTF moments—though, as a reporter, I’m not complaining—but chances are they’re not going to merit their own task force.
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