CIA Spooks Apparently ‘Impersonated’ Senate Staffers To Get a Look See at Documents On Shared Drives

24 Oct, 2014 by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

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The CIA under the Obama Administration has gone rogue and has turned into a governmental monster. Spying on a Senate committee’s findings is classic espionage and a direct violation of the Constitution. Using the excuse of testing shared firewalls, CIA techs and attorneys virtually had access to anything they wanted to see… but that’s okay… we have their word they wouldn’t peek and who doesn’t trust a bunch of spies?

From TechDirt:

According to sources familiar with the CIA inspector general report that details the alleged abuses by agency officials, CIA agents impersonated Senate staffers in order to gain access to Senate communications and drafts of the Intelligence Committee investigation. These sources requested anonymity because the details of the agency’s inspector general report remain classified.

“If people knew the details of what they actually did to hack into the Senate computers to go search for the torture document, jaws would drop. It’s straight out of a movie,” said one Senate source familiar with the document.

[…]

A person familiar with the events surrounding the dispute between the CIA and Intelligence Committee said the suggestion that the agency posed as staff to access drafts of the study is untrue.

“CIA simply attempted to determine if its side of the firewall could have been accessed through the Google search tool. CIA did not use administrator access to examine [Intelligence Committee] work product,” the source said.

[…]

Five Agency employees, two attorneys and three information technology (IT) staff members, improperly accessed or caused access to the SSCI Majority staff shared drives on the RDINet

The obvious implications here range from low-level hacking to outright espionage. A proclaimed ‘firewall test’ would give perfect cover for poking around in the committee findings and other no-go zones. It doesn’t matter the excuse or what the CIA claims here… what was done was improper at best and illegal and punishable by prison time at worst. The impropriety here is stunning and reeks of subterfuge. There has to be a better way to perform these checks. Methods that don’t involve Inspector Generals, damning reports and multiple hacking accusations.