CIA Says No Problem with Its NYPD Partnership
July 27th, 2012Via: AP:
The CIA said Friday its internal watchdog found nothing wrong with the spy agency’s close partnership with the New York Police Department.
The agency’s inspector general concluded that no laws were broken and there was “no evidence that any part of the agency’s support to the NYPD constituted ‘domestic spying’,” CIA spokesman Preston Golson said.
The inspector general decided to do a preliminary investigation after a series of stories by The Associated Press revealed how after the 9/11 attacks the CIA helped the NYPD build domestic intelligence programs that were used to spy on Muslims. A CIA officer also directed intelligence collection and reviewed reports, according to former NYPD officials involved.
I doubt anyone is terribly surprised by this…
I’ve had friendly discussions with federal agents in the past. No, really, friendly discussions. 🙂 They have their rules to work by. There are things they can and cannot do. If they happened to observe something not actually “requested”, they could take note of that information.
I will say, everything I’ve ever done with them was amazingly boring.
I’ll mention one in particular, to give everyone a hint. A 3rd parties server got hacked. We had an investigator show up to our office. Until I knew what exactly what he was asking for, I seemed to have almost as many privileges as the cleaning crew.
I took the information he told me, gathered my own intelligence on it (who did what and why), and then gave him a friendly call.
Basically, the hacked machine had been involved in an attack on a federal network. This was before botnets really took off. The owner of the machine had done the absolutely right thing. They pulled the machine down (about a week before), and restored everything from backups to a fresh machine.
With the owners permission, I put the investigator in contact with the owner, to pick up the compromised box to review any logged information.
It sounded a lot cooler before I explained, didn’t it?
I’ve had a few shoulder surf for information. It was invited, so they could get information that they needed but couldn’t ask for without a stack of paperwork. If it helped them catch bad guys faster, and caused no harm to innocents, what do I care? It’s the electronic equivalent of going into a criminals house, taking a picture of their smoking gun, and then showing the photo over to law enforcement.
So, these CIA agents are in the office to “advise” and provide “technical information”. If someone happens to say “I just got a call, there’s a probable terrorist buying 10 tons of ammonium nitrate, to be delivered to 1 Main St. tomorrow at noon”, they didn’t break any rules. They just overheard something that would be useful intelligence.
I’d be willing to bet that there was little to nothing that they gathered was that interesting.
I know, they were spying on American civilians, with no real ties to any terrorist organization, other than their religion. Even following that trail is mostly a dead end. Except for 9/11, most domestic terror events were not done by Muslims. We have enough domestic lunatics of every flavor, filtering on religious affiliation is useless.
Unibomber – Ted Kaczynski – 16 attacks – Atheist
Jewish Defense League – 15 US attacks – Jewish
Oklahoma City bombing – Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols – Catholic
Centennial Olympic Park bombing – Eric Rudolph – Catholic
2001 anthrax attacks – Bruce Ivins – Catholic
Fort Hood shooting – Nidal Hasan – Muslim(?)
DC Beltway shootings – John Allen Williams – Muslim(?)
Colorado theater shooting – James Holmes – Christian
So the score just these….
Atheist – 1
Jewish – 1
Christian – 4
Muslim – 2 (3 including 9/11)
So focusing on Muslims as terror suspects is looking at the wrong majority group. It’s not politically friendly (or manpower practical) to monitor Christian groups. There are just too many people who fall into that category.