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Comment by STRML | Hacker News Reader

That's pretty sad, especially for an agency that must have a certain amount of technical competence for their day-to-day.

This could be easily solved by releasing all documents and a list of their hashes simultaneously.

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I think the CIA views easily accessible info as the problem, not the creation of the data. I don't think they are looking for a solution to make things more convenient.

Clearly; yet it is encouraging that CREST finally ended up online.

Yeah, but they have to disseminate data and documents both internally, with sibling agencies (FBI, NSA, DoD), and to legislative and executive requests (Congressional panels, inspectors general). So, ideally they would have these best practices for sending secure documents in a reproducible/batch fashion, and reappropriate them to meet their legal obligations under FOIA.

They probably do have such guidelines internally, and totally different and arbitrary ones for FOIA.

People really give these agencies too much misplaced respect.

The defense and intelligence communities hire from Tier 3 schools in the DC, Maryland and Virginia area.

People that - you imagine - would get laughed at for not being from Stanford and Ivy League at every VC pitch meeting. People you would think weren't the "best of the best" hired by all the tech companies that brag about doing so.

Of course, their engineers are just are educated and ambitious, I'm just pointing out how warped people's perception has become.

You're totally right. Your industry definitely contains the worlds smartest people by nature and everyone else is second-rate and would be laughed at if they tried to work in Silicon Valley.

I mean, do you actually hear yourself? Really listen to yourself and describe what you hear.

The comment you're replying to appears to be explcit sarcasm, albeit oddly put.

Just echoing perception. People think intelligence agencies' engineers are geniuses, but are candidates that wouldn't be considered geniuses in the private sector solely because of their pedigree.

Having worked in government, at least half of everybody I've met would be considered too incompetent for the job, if it were a normal company. So yes, it would be easy for me to believe that government workers would be laughed at in silicon valley.

Clearly the CIA's 'public facing' departments do not have the resources, nor the incentives (from a technical standpoint) that are deployed regularly in the 'intelligence' departments of the Agency.

I'd presume that's not a bug, that's a feature.

And PDF format has a built-in digital signature system.

The CIA keeps secrets for a reason. All this armchair talk from prople wanting to get CIA material into the open is pure idiocy.

Stupid and dangerous. You know these are the people who protect you from all manner of sabotage and manipulation from foreign nations right?

Declassified CIA material holds immense historical value. Each document is reviewed prior to release to ensure there's no harm done to national security.

Declassified is fine, and that's what this is about ... I just see too many people with no respect or knowledge thinking that secrets are by nature some sort of problem, and wanting classified things to be in the public domain.

Just classify everything then. Problem solved.

It's good to see satire and parody thriving in the age of Trump

CIA material is extremely time-sensitive. Anything a year or two stale is probably fine to expose. In fact the attempt to hide every CIA activity from public scrutiny is so repressing and dangerous to a free society, that some risk is certainly warranted. Release the documents.

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