While it's probably common knowledge to everyone inside the beltway but me, I stumbled across a news article in the Politico that talks about CIA analysts hiring themselves out to the private sector as contractors who specialize in determining the veracity of what is said by people involved in corporate negotiations.

Or in other words, truthsayers.

While I'm only slightly joking with the Dune reference, the way it's described they're doing much the same thing, only without the aid of external devices or mind-altering compounds. Apparently, the Agency maintains a cadre' of operatives who are trained in reading overt and …

An outfit called In-Q-Tel in Arlington, Virginia, founded in 1999, is known to be a semi-independent but private aspect of the US intelligence community which invests in tech companies that do things deemed strategically useful. Practically all of those things are on the cutting edge of commercial technology for the time. They say as much on their website, in case you're wondering if I've been listening to a little too much Coast to Coast AM lately. Their latest investment project is a most interesting one, a company called Visible Technologies which develop software to monitor social activities on the global …

Does this strike anyone else as being oxymoronic?

At some point in the past year or two, twenty-five undercover CIA operatives traveled to Italy to abduct one Abu Omar, an Islamic cleric suspected of involvement in an act of terrorism in Milan back in 2003. However, they didn't follow secure communications procedures (or those same procedures need to be updated badly), and they were rumbled by Italian law enforcement, who are now trying the agents in absentia for kidnapping. Like many people these days, the operatives used cellular telephones to keep in touch with one another through the course of the op. Unfortunately, the prosecutor was able to …

I haven't been following the Scooter Libby case for a couple of weeks because everything else has been keeping me busy, but I did find out in passing that he was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to two and one-half years in federal prison and a fine of one-quarter of a million US dollars because he lied on the stand about the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Then something interesting happened: George W. Bush commuted the imprisonment portion of Libby's sentence, leaving him only with the fine to deal with. Given his position inside the beltway …