Brickbat: Spying Eyes

The CIA reportedly had evidence that 10 employees or contract employees committed sex crimes against children. The agency fired those employees or canceled their contracts, but only one of them faced criminal charges. Buzzfeed, which broke the story, says the CIA is reluctant to prosecute employees, claiming it could reveal national secrets.

Comments

[Fist of Etiquette]

...the CIA is reluctant to prosecute employees, claiming it could reveal national secrets.

The agency should think about doing background checks when hiring to prevent potentially compromised assets.

[Chumby]

It was the children’s assets being compromised.

[perlhaqr]

Buttplug is CIA?

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[MatthewSlyfield]

But they are trying to hire the other guy's compromised assets.

[Unicorn Abattoir]

Haven't you seen their recent advertisements?

"I used to think being a communist sympathizer would keep me from becoming a CIA officer. Then I met James Clapper..."

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[perlhaqr]

She knows James Clapper too!

[Davy C]

Though most of these cases were referred to US attorneys for prosecution, only one of the individuals was ever charged with a crime. Prosecutors sent the rest of the cases back to the CIA to handle internally

Some important context about who to get angry at.

[Cyto]

That was my first thought. The CIA does not prosecute people for sex crimes. I'm not sure what the point on that was.

Although, I'm not sure why we're reporting people to US attorneys instead of to local prosecutors. Is there such thing as a federal sex crime?

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Is there such a thing as federal sex?

[Unicorn Abattoir]

yes. Every time they pass a spending bill, you're getting fucked.

[Stuck in California]

Federal Sex. Good title for a punk song. I'm totally stealing it.

[kcuch]

18 U.S. Code § 2423 - Transportation of minors

[markm23]

Yes, there is such a thing as a federal sex crime. For example, they can prosecute you if you travel to Thailand for sex with a 16 year old prostitute, never mind that the age of consent is 16 in your home state. It's a ridiculous law, but it is the law, men have been sent to prison under it, and I don't think there's an exemption for CIA agents.

[JohnSteed]

Well at least they didn’t just transfer the guys, or give them sanctuary against extradition — so the CIA does come out as more moral than the Catholic Church. (Kinda low bar, though.)

[mad.casual]

By the same token, it would make The Catholic Church a far more effective, efficient, and moral intelligence agency than the CIA. (Kinda low bar, though.)

[CE]

what do you think all those confession booths are for?

[Kristian H.]

Those people knew which pols were being spied on and thus they had some protection.

[Kivlor]

Doesn't this seem like a topic worthy of more than a single paragraph?

[Chumby]

Child
Intercourse
Agency

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

Crimes
Ignored
Again

[Longtobefree]

At least they didn't put their feet on government desks.

[Agammamon]

The CIA can - and does - straight up murder people. But they didn't feel that was appropriate here? Of only to protect themselves?

[Roberta]

The linked story is brief but perplexing. This excerpt is representative:

At a symposium in 2016, Daniel Payne, a top Pentagon security official, said that when workers’ computers were examined, “the amount of child porn I see is just unbelievable.”

Is there something about being a spook that predisposes people to such things? Or, as I suspect more and more, is sexual attraction to children and their images perfectly normal?

I mean, how close are these investigations to showing us a random sampling of humanity? They could not be investigating large numbers of people, since that's very labor-intensive.

[Roberta]

By "perfectly normal", I mean something whose commonness is about the same magnitude as homosexuality.

[mad.casual]

You mean like 5-10% of the population is relatively indiscriminately sexually perverse?

This has been known for quite some time. The Catholic Church and Scouts were only exceptional inasmuch as they were made examples of, arguably as cover. Chicago Public Schools had a scandal in 2018. They discovered something like 5,000 unreported or unresolved cases going back 10 yrs. Internal investigations, failure to report, quiet dismissals, position shuffling... everything we'd seen alleged against Scouting and The Church except CPS only serves one city. The DOE did an investigation, new policies were passed. In 2019... 450 incidents. 36 people lost their jobs.

[Cyto]

That is an odd thing to say. I used to run IT for a mid-size company. As a sales oriented company, we had over a hundred salesmen. For those who have never worked with sales organizations, sales guys are kind of sleazy.

I had a standard speech for all the new hires. I passed it on to my team as we grew and I quit meeting all the new hires. "Don't make me have to look in your browser history or your email. I don't want to know. So make sure nothing is in there that is going to get you in trouble with HR and make me have to look."

I figured that was enough of a warning .

It wasn't. Pictures of jugs with milk flowing over them were fairly common items to be passed around on the sales floor. And every once in awhile, someone would see it and complain.

I found married, straight guys whose browser history was filled with websites for hung black guys. I found plenty of married women on dating sites for hours during work. All at the behest of HR.

I never found anything remotely CP adjacent, let alone CP.

You have to have specifically recruited a bunch of deviants for that to be commonplace. I would assume that this particular kink or obsession is extraordinarily rare. Like, on the order of magnitude of dudes who want to be women. Probably less.

I would say they have a big problem. Much bigger than just a casual observation that they have More than a few weirdos running around. Something about their hiring practices or the nature of their work is attracting extreme sexual deviants.

[Trollificus]

I wonder if there's something in the CP deviance that's power-based? That would explain "people like that" also being attracted to the kind of work the CIA gets up to, or at least, that people assume the CIA gets up to. I can see the same kind of dynamic in both.

And I don't get it...either the CP or the CIA-wannabe obsession with power over others. How freaking weak is it to worry so much about other people that you need to have power over them?

[Stuck in California]

Could it be less the quantity of the deviance and more the other personality type that you need to be a CIA officer?

There's a certain moral ambiguity that sociopaths feel, and certain narcissism. The sort of thing that lets them feel like they're special. So, maybe one of Cyto's sales floor was a pedo, but he would NEVER do that on a work computer, while the spook would likely be both more intelligent and less lacking in empathy with a high enough opinion of themself -- or low enough of others -- to assume they wouldn't get caught or get in trouble.

Intelligence operations are chock full of people out on the edges of "normal" emotional response. It's part of the trade, just like how corporate CEOs and surgeons are more likely to exhibit psychopathy.

[Ragnarredbeard]

CIA requires people to be somewhat morally flexible. People like that also tend towards deviancy since they have a rather flexible moral compass to begin with.

Back when Ed Snowden did his thing and exposed a lot of illegal and unconstitutional activities in the intel community, most of the intel folks I knew were all "he's a traitor" because in their opinion he should have played along to get along.

[m4019597]

Snowden did us a favor by being a traitor. Let’s not pretend he was morally right.

[swillfredo pareto]

Let’s not pretend he was morally right.

You think it was immoral of him to expose to the citizens the U.S. government serves, that the U.S. government is unambiguously corrupt and staffed with evil individuals?

What should he do, not seek the truth, not share it...

[kcuch]

is sexual attraction to children and their images perfectly normal

I was schooled during the sexual revolution that in any population (of animals) the exhibition of a trait by 10% or more constitutes 'normal' behavior.

Don't know it the percentage is correct but, like you, I suspect that if their society magically OK'd sex with 14 year olds there would be a line of willing participants (on both sides of the counter).

[Roberta]

But what about "One employee had sexual contact with a 2-year-old and a 6-year-old."? How well represented do you think such people would be?

And it can't be just people working in intelligence. "A second employee purchased three sexually explicit videos of young girls, filmed by their mothers." Get that? The mothers of 3 young girls made sexually explicit videos of them for money. That's 3 (or possibly just 2, if 1 of them made 2) different mothers.

So, like, what's going on in the world? Could it be we're just exaggerating anything sex-related, as when somebody's a sexual offender for public urination? Like maybe they were just ordinary home videos that become "sexually explicit" if you think of them that way?

[kcuch]

Or... they could be muslems or africans or indians (the dot kind).

If you hold 'people' to the standards of western civilization you'll make 75% of the population of the world out to be perverts or racist or mysoginists.

Western Civilization is a fragile thing that can be snuffed out in an instant by diversity, equity, and acceptance.

[perlhaqr]

I suspect there are a lot more people who are attracted to post-pubescent but sub-legal-adult members of the appropriate sex than there are ones who are attracted to pre-pubescent individuals. The former at least makes sense from an evolutionary POV.

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[Trollificus]

This will be an intractable question as long as people fail to differentiate between "CHILD-attracted" (i.e.: pre-puberty) freaks and "inappropriately young but sexually mature-attracted" (i.e.: pre-magical 18th birthday, as humans have been for, oh, the last 50,000 years or so).

There are some unrealistic and arbitrary definitions around the whole subject that speak to the fact we haven't really come to terms with our animal heritage.

[mad.casual]

There are some unrealistic and arbitrary definitions around the whole subject that speak to the fact we haven't really come to terms with our animal heritage.

It's a two-fold problem.

It would be nice to focus more on the explicit power dynamic and dysfunction rather than the simple act of sex in order to make the law more sensible. Unfortunately, I don't think that would make the law more clear. I doubt only 10 CIA employees are "addicted" to porn or worse and I don't consider the 10 employees simply staring at pictures online inherently more egregious than the FBI agent doing backflips to impress the ladies and committing an AD in the process.

As long as we have power disparities where the CIA can blanket surveil the US population and we #believeallwomen, we're going to need magic numbers like 18 to convince people that think the CIA needs those powers, that it can go too far.

[Roberta]

Also consider that we're paying some agents to look at kid porn. But meanwhile the ones who aren't paid specifically to do that are in the wrong, huh?

[Roberta]

Do you mean that because we condemn those who take jailbait (i.e. the almost-legal), we're stuck with the "sexual contact with a 2-year-old and a 6-year-old" types?

[Dillinger]

taking license to get away with everything one step too far. idiots.

[Unicorn Abattoir]

If they got caught, they're probably not very good spies.

[mad.casual]

Especially if they got caught by the CIA.

[Dillinger]

lol busted by Valerie Plame

[Roberta]

But what about "One employee had sexual contact with a 2-year-old and a 6-year-old."? How well represented do you think such people would be?

And it can't be just people working in intelligence. "A second employee purchased three sexually explicit videos of young girls, filmed by their mothers." Get that? The mothers of 3 young girls made sexually explicit videos of them for money. That's 3 (or possibly just 2, if 1 of them made 2) different mothers.

So, like, what's going on in the world? Could it be we're just exaggerating anything sex-related, as when somebody's a sexual offender for public urination? Like maybe they were just ordinary home videos that become "sexually explicit" if you think of them that way?

[Roberta]

Wireless cx went down, and when it came back up, I was replying here instead of to kcuch, sorry.

[m4019597]

Apology accepted.

Don’t let it happen again or you’ll be assigned to clean the urinals.

[Chumby]

Rosenbaum’s Buttplug worked for the CIA?!?!