Located to the west of Washington, D.C., nestled among the unremarkable suburbs of northern Virginia, are seemingly ordinary office parks that conceal covert government facilities in plain view. Employees dressed in everyday attire exit their cars, gripping their Starbucks, and vanish into these structures. To the untrained eye, they appear like commonplace corporate employees. However, they possess Top Secret clearances and are engaged in defense and intelligence. One such building, sited at a classified location, accommodates the CIA's cyberintelligence wing. The structure is encompassed by a tall barrier and is overseen by sentinels armed with high-grade weaponry. Upon entry into the building, personnel are required to badge in and negotiate a comprehensive body turnstile. On the ninth floor, beyond another door necessitating badge admission, lies a CIA workspace with a conspicuously mundane name: the Operations Support Branch. Here resides the agency's confidential hacker team, where an array of superior engineers construct cyberweapons.

“O.S.B. was focussed on what we referred to as ‘physical-access operations,’ ” a senior developer from the unit, Jeremy Weber—a pseudonym—explained. This is not dragnet mass surveillance of the kind more often associated with the National Security Agency. These are hacks, or “exploits,” designed for individual targets. Sometimes a foreign terrorist or a finance minister is too sophisticated to be hacked remotely, and so the agency is obliged to seek “physical access” to that person’s devices. Such operations are incredibly dangerous: a C.I.A. officer or an asset recruited to work secretly for the agency—a courier for the terrorist; the finance minister’s personal chef—must surreptitiously implant the malware by hand. “It could be somebody who was willing to type on a keyboard for us,” Weber said. “It often was somebody who was willing to plug a thumb drive into the machine.” In this manner, human spies, armed with the secret digital payloads designed by the Operations Support Branch, have been able to compromise smartphones, laptops, tablets, and even TVs: when Samsung developed a set that responded to voice commands, the wizards at the O.S.B. exploited a software vulnerability that turned it into a listening device.

The members of the O.S.B. “built quick-reaction tools,” Anthony Leonis, the chief of another cyberintelligence unit of the C.I.A., said. “That branch was really good at taking ideas and prototypes and turning them into tools that could be used in the mission, very quickly.” According to the man who supervised the O.S.B., Sean, the unit could be “a high-stress environment,” because it was supporting life-or-death operations. (With a few exceptions, this piece refers to agency employees by pseudonyms or by their first names.)

But, while these jobs were cutting edge and—at least vicariously—dangerous, the O.S.B. was, in other respects, just like any office. There was a bullpen of cubicle workstations. A dozen or so people clocked in every day. “We were kind of known as the social branch,” another O.S.B. employee, Frank Stedman, recalled. The experience of O.S.B. engineers bore some resemblance to the Apple TV+ drama “Severance,” in that each morning they entered a milieu with its own customs and camaraderie—one sealed off from the rest of their lives. Because of national-security concerns, they couldn’t take work home, or talk with anyone on the outside about what they did all day. Their office was a classified sanctum, a locked vault. Like the crew of a submarine, they forged strong bonds—and strong antagonisms.

There was banter, plenty of it, much of it jocular, some of it juvenile. The coders were mostly young men, and they came up with nicknames for one another. One unit member, who got braces as an adult, became known as Train Tracks. When another brought food into the office one day, but didn’t share it with some members of the team, his colleagues bestowed a new handle: Dick Move. The group’s ultimate manager was a more senior C.I.A. official, named Karen, who acknowledged that the members could get “boisterous,” adding, “Folks could get a little loud, a little bit back and forth.” Some O.S.B. guys brought Nerf guns to work—not mere pistols but big, colorful machine guns—and they would occasionally shoot darts at one another from their desks. Sometimes people got carried away, and work was paused for some sustained bombardment. But Silicon Valley was known for tricking out offices with foosball tables and climbing walls, and it’s likely that the C.I.A. wanted to foster a loose culture on the hacking team, to help engineers remain innovative and, when necessary, blow off steam.


PLEASE find a VERY INTERESTING account by The Washington Post on how the CIA is COMPREHENSIVELY RESTRUCTURING its organization in order to achieve a much higher potential in CYBER INTELLIGENCE and CYBER/MILITARY OPERATIONS.

"The CIA embarked on a sweeping restructuring Friday that will bring an end to divisions that have been in place for decades, create 10 new centers that team analysts with operators, and significantly expand the agency’s focus on digital espionage. The plans were unveiled by CIA Director John Brennan to a workforce in which thousands of employees are likely to see changes in which departments they work for, the lines of authority they report to and even where they sit. The overhaul is designed to foster deeper collaboration and an intensified focus on a range of security issues and threats, replacing long-standing divisions  that cover the Middle East, Africa and other regions with hybrid “mission centers” modeled on the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center."

[…]

"A central aim, he said, is to eliminate “seams” in coverage that lead to confusion over which part of the agency is responsible for tracking a specific issue or threat. After the reorganization, Brennan [ the CIA Director ] said, the CIA should be in position to “cover the entire universe, regionally and functionally, and so something that’s going on in the world falls into one of those buckets.” ” 

[…]

"The Directorate of Digital Innovation will perform a similar role, and absorb existing entities including the Open Source Center, which monitors Twitter and other social media sites for intelligence on such adversaries as the Islamic State, as well as the Information Operations Center, a secret organization that handles missions including cyber-penetrations and sabotage and is now the second-largest center at the CIA."

Have a great Sunday, gents.

Also available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-plans-major-reorganization-and-a-focus-on-digital-espionage/2015/03/06/87e94a1e-c2aa-11e4-9ec2-b418f57a4a99_story.html , FYI,David

National Security CIA plans major reorganization and a focus on digital espionage
The seal of the Central Intelligence Agency in the lobby of the headquarters. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
By Greg Miller March 6 at 10:02 PM 

The CIA embarked on a sweeping restructuring Friday that will bring an end to divisions that have been in place for decades, create 10 new centers that team analysts with operators, and significantly expand the agency’s focus on digital espionage.

The plans were unveiled by CIA Director John Brennan to a workforce in which thousands of employees are likely to see changes in which departments they work for, the lines of authority they report to and even where they sit.

The overhaul is designed to foster deeper collaboration and an intensified focus on a range of security issues and threats, replacing long-standing divisions that cover the Middle East, Africa and other regions with hybrid “mission centers” modeled on the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.

The CIA will also create a directorate focused exclusively on exploiting advances in computer technology and communications. The Directorate of Digital Innovation will rank alongside the agency’s operations and analysis branches, and it will be responsible for missions ranging from ­cyber-espionage to the security of the CIA’s internal e-mail.

In a briefing with reporters, Brennan described the far-reaching changes as “part of the natural evolution of an intelligence agency” that has not seen a significant reorganization in decades.

A central aim, he said, is to eliminate “seams” in coverage that lead to confusion over which part of the agency is responsible for tracking a specific issue or threat. After the reorganization, Brennan said, the CIA should be in position to “cover the entire universe, regionally and functionally, and so something that’s going on in the world falls into one of those buckets.”

The changes, however, are also likely to create turmoil at a time that Brennan and others frequently characterize as the most complicated and challenging period for intelligence agencies in a generation. Brennan said the plan has been received enthusiastically by most at the agency, but there have also been signs of friction and disagreement.

The head of the CIA’s clandestine service recently decided to retire abruptly in part because of opposition to a plan that would strip his position of much of its authority over the agency’s covert operations overseas and the teams of spies that it deploys.

CIA veterans and experts described the restructuring as among the most ambitious since the agency was founded in 1947.

“This is a major reorganization, one of the largest and most fundamental they’ve had,” said Mark M. Lowenthal, a former senior CIA officer and an expert on the history of the U.S. intelligence community. Lowenthal also expressed concern that replicating the Counterterrorism Center may also mean replicating an approach criticized at times for being too driven by short-term objectives such as finding the next target for a drone strike.

“Where in this does John have what I would think of as his intellectual strategic reserve, people not worried about day-to-day stuff but who think about what is going to happen two years out?” Lowenthal said. “The centers tend not to do that. They tend to answer today’s mail.”

But Brennan defended the reforms as critical to the agency’s viability in an era of technological and social upheaval. At one point he compared the initiatives to an effort to avoid the fate of Kodak, the company that failed to foresee the impact of digital technology on its film franchise. “Things just passed them by,” Brennan said.

Brennan’s plan was endorsed by others in the Obama administration who noted the advantages of allowing operators and analysts to collaborate.

“I strongly endorse Director Brennan’s vision,” Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said in a statement. “I see many advantages to this, but the one I want to highlight specifically is the impact this change will have in promoting integration.”

As part of Brennan’s plan, long-standing divisions focused on Africa, the Middle East and other regions will give way to centers of corresponding geographic boundaries. The Directorates of Intelligence and Operations — as the analysis and spying branches are known — will continue to exist but will function mainly as talent pools, recruiting and training personnel who can be deployed to the new centers.

“Some who grew up in the old structure will have heartburn with this, but those costs will be short term,” said Michael Morell, former deputy director of the CIA. Morell said that existing centers have “proven to be a very powerful combination” and that the Counterterrorism Center is “the most successful agency component over the last decade.”

The Directorate of Digital Innovation will perform a similar role, and absorb existing entities including the Open Source Center, which monitors Twitter and other social media sites for intelligence on such adversaries as the Islamic State, as well as the Information Operations Center, a secret organization that handles missions including cyber-penetrations and sabotage and is now the second-largest center at the CIA.

But Brennan made clear that the digital directorate will have a much broader mandate, responsible not only for devising new ways to steal secrets from cellphones and other devices, but also for helping CIA officers evade detection overseas in an age when their phones, computers and ATM cards leave digital trails. The head of the new directorate will be responsible for “overseeing the career development of our digital experts as well as the standards of our digital tradecraft,” Brennan said.

Brennan did not present a timetable for the reorganization, or provide names of those who will be picked to lead the new centers. Other aspects of the plan are also unclear, including how much power the new assistant directors will exert over CIA stations overseas.

Brennan began exploring plans for the restructuring last year, when he established a panel to evaluate his proposed changes. The leader of that group, a veteran paramilitary officer whose first name is Greg, was recently put in charge of the Directorate of Operations, one of several departments that will revert to more traditional titles after being rebranded in recent years.

Greg Miller covers the intelligence beat for The Washington Post. 
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