But Her Emails Redux: Team Trump Makes CIA Send List Of All Recently Hired Employees Over Unclassified Email

Failures

from the everything-is-just-so-stupid-now dept

Remember when Donald Trump and the MAGA universe wanted to “lock her up!” over Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server for State Department business?

Let’s be clear, we found Clinton’s use of a personal email server, which she claimed to have used “for convenience”, deeply problematic but pretty clearly not criminal. And, as we’ve covered for years now, it’s unfortunately (tragically) common for government officials to use personal emails from Colin Powell to many Trump officials, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. This is the same administration, mind you, that later mishandled classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and various other properties. During the first Trump admin, the NSA kept trying to warn admin officials to stop using their personal email, which you’d think they’d know, given the whole “but her emails” stuff.

So, really, if anyone were briefed on how emails can be insecure, you would hope it was the Trump administration.

About that… Yesterday, the NY Times revealed that the Trump administration demanded that the CIA hand over the names of everyone the CIA hired in the last two years which, for fairly obvious reasons, could contain some pretty sensitive information.

So, of course, the White House demanded this sensitive information be sent via unclassified email.

The C.I.A. sent the White House an unclassified email listing all employees hired by the spy agency over the last two years to comply with an executive order to shrink the federal work force, in a move that former officials say risked the list leaking to adversaries.

The list included first names and the first initial of the last name of the new hires, who are still on probation — and thus easy to dismiss. It included a large crop of young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China, and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are constantly seeking to identify them.

Let that sink in: The same administration that wanted Clinton jailed over email security just demanded the CIA expose its newest China-focused recruits through unsecured channels.

Surprisingly, the Trump admin didn’t deny any of this, but just said they were sure it was no big deal.

Current officials confirmed that the C.I.A. had sent the names of employees to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, complying with an executive order signed by President Trump. But the officials downplayed security concerns. By sending just the first names and initials of the probationary employees, one U.S. official said, they hoped the information would be protected.

That, of course, is fucking nonsense:

One former agency officer called the reporting of the names in an unclassified email a “counterintelligence disaster.”

[…..]

[F]ormer officials scoffed at the explanation, saying that the names and initials could be combined with other information — from driver’s license and car registration systems, social media accounts and publicly available data from universities that the agency uses as recruiting grounds — to piece together a more complete list.

Any competent intelligence operation – like, say, China’s – can easily cross-reference this information with publicly available data and standard OSINT techniques to identify these recruits. It’s literally Intelligence 101. Hell, we even published a card game years ago based on the CIA’s internal training tool that tells analysts to do exactly that!

As for why it was sent as an unclassified mailing, the ranking House Intelligence Committee member, Rep. Jim Himes, says the White House “insisted” on the CIA sending the list in an unclassified email.

It’s worth asking: If a hostile foreign power wanted to compromise US intelligence capabilities, would their wishlist look any different from what the Trump administration is actually doing?

Apparently, the reason that the admin wanted this list is because they’re basically trying to get a huge portion of the CIA to quit (they just offered the highly questionable mass resignation offer to the CIA), and they’re so completely terrified of the word “diversity” that they’ve decided the most recent hires are “DEI.”

Why? Because the CIA realized recently that it needed more diverse agents and analysts in order to better understand what was happening in places like China:

Under William J. Burns, the former C.I.A. director, the agency put a new emphasis on trying to recruit a diverse group of officers, arguing that overseas spying operations required people with an array of language skills and cultural knowledge. He focused particularly on expanding the agency’s coverage of China, creating a China center at the headquarters that included analysts, operatives and others. When Mr. Burns arrived at the agency in 2021, about 9 percent of the agency’s budget was devoted to China-related analysis and espionage; today it is closer to 20 percent.

Let’s spell this out: The CIA recognized that to effectively spy on and analyze China, they needed people who actually understand Chinese language, culture, and society. You know, the kind of basic competence you’d expect from an intelligence agency. The “diversity” they sought wasn’t about checking boxes — it was about having agents and analysts who could actually do the job.

But it sounds like the Trump admin saw the word “diverse,” collapsed upon their fainting couch while clutching their pearls, and demanded all the names of these “diverse” new recruits to prepare to shed all those pesky “DEI” hires. Because apparently, in their world, having Mandarin-speaking analysts focusing on China is just woke virtue signaling.

What could possibly go wrong?

As Daniel Drezner notes, this story almost perfectly encapsulates the absolute idiocy that is the current Trump administration:

So, to sum up: in order to comply with the Trump White House’s myriad edicts, the CIA has:

• Burned its most recent cadre of recruits;
• Weakened its ability to focus intelligence assets on China;
• Undermined its recruitment capacity for the future; and
• Unwittingly demonstrated why a jihad against DEI weakens rather than strengthens U.S. foreign policy competence.

The irony is almost perfect: An administration that campaigned on email security is now deliberately exposing our intelligence apparatus through unsecured emails, all because they’ve turned “diversity” into such a boogeyman that they can’t tell the difference between basic operational competence and their imagined DEI crisis.

Ah, but her emails!

Filed Under: cia, classified information, compromises, dei, emails