THE SHINY ONES

The NID announced that they pulled their undercover operatives out of China after the OPM hack raided the State Department's files and China found itself in the position of now knowing for certain who was an actual state department employee and who was just pretending to work for Uncle Sam's foreign affairs personnel meat grinder.

This is what NID had to say on the matter as relayed from Ars Technica.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the committee that while "we don't know in terms of specifics" what was taken in the OPM breach, it had "potentially very serious implications, first among them close to home [for me] in terms of the Intelligence Community and identifying people who may be under public status... This is a gift that's going to keep on giving for years." Still, he said, as "egregious" as the OPM breach was, it didn't amount to an attack on national infrastructure. "Rather, it would be a form of theft or espionage. We, too, practice cyber espionage. We're not bad at it."

I think we are going to have to take Clapper's word that we are not bad at cyber espionage but the only case I can think of was what we learned about the NID from Snowden so I'm not sure that's a credibility gap filler for me. But they sure do spy on everybody, don't they?

You remember valerie plame who launched the vandal that sank Scooter Libby because she claimed that 'he' outed her as an undercover CIA agent? Yeah, me neither but isn't it odd that that was a crime deserving the appointment of a special prosecutor who only ended up tripping up Scooter because he misremembered under oath and didn't know enough to just claim he could not recall. Funny too how it was actually a State Department loser who actually outed plame to the press and he got off scot free. Where is the special prosecutor in this case? Who has been fired or jailed at OPM?