The director of the CIA announced this week a major overhaul of the agency’s organizational structure ending the traditional separation between spies and analysts, while also creating a new division to handle cyberwarfare.
Director John Brennan officially announced the restructure to agency employees on Friday. Thousands of spies and CIA analysts will be reassigned to new posts, marking one of the most significant changes to the agency’s core structure in its 67-year history.
“Never has the need for the full and unfettered integration of our capabilities been greater,” Brennan said in a declassified statement to his employees.
Under the new model, spies and analysts will be integrated and assigned to 10 new mission centers, which, according to Brennan, “will bring the full range of operational, analytic, support, technical, and digital personnel and capabilities to bear on the nation’s most pressing security issues and interests.” Describing the new mission centers, Brennan said, “Assistant Directors will be accountable for integrating and advancing the mission — in all of its various forms — and for overall mission accomplishment in their respective geographic or functional area.”
The reorganization will allow the CIA to “cover the entire universe, regionally and functionally,” Brennan told reporters in a briefing earlier in the week.
Further details on the mandates of the mission centers were hard to come by — the CIA declined to provide additional briefing materials beyond the director’s prepared statements.
The New York Times reported that the centers will focus on “terrorism, weapons proliferation, the Middle East and other areas with responsibility for espionage operations, intelligence analysis and covert actions.” The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported that, “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 function mainly as talent pools: recruiting and training personnel that can be deployed to the new centers.”
The fusing of analysts and operatives reflects the influence and power of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Formerly a small, somewhat maligned office, the Counterterrorism Center emerged in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks as the CIA’s premiere hunter-killer wing, directing lethal operations around the globe, including the agency’s highly controversial and secretive drone program.
In its effort to hunt down suspected terrorists, the Counterterrorism Center has fused thousands of analysts and spies under one umbrella of operations, a move Brennan has supported.
In his remarks Friday, Brennan also announced the creation of a new division called the Directorate of Digital Innovation, which will handle the CIA’s cyber-operations, taking on the responsibilities of two existing directorates — the Open Source Center and the Information Operations Center. The former monitors social media, while the latter conducts cyber-penetrations and attacks.
The new digital directorate will have significantly more leeway than both its predecessors, according Brennan. “What we need to do as an agency is make sure we’re able to understand all of the aspects of that digital environment,” he told reporters.
Defending his sweeping changes to the agency, Brennan compared the CIA to Kodak, the film company that folded in the face of digital technology. “Things just passed them by,” the spy chief said.


In an article titled, “The Deeper Meaning of Mass Spying in America”, James Petras tells us that mass spying is a counter-revolutionary effort by the dominant class:
read it here: http://petras.lahaine.org/?p=1943
Excellent comment and link Vivek Jain. One of many made by you.
“police state links up with and protects the masters of Wall Street and the propagandists of the mass media”
Perhaps someday those masses of people who are deceived by their respective politicians in international state governments and mass media outlets will finally understand that it is an exercise in futility to go after the puppets. It is the central banking economic puppet masters and underlying religious control mechanisms which must be targeted and removed from government structures on planet Earth if human kind is to gain societal recognition of individual sovereignty.
brennen is a paranoid little prick with a tenuous grasp on reality…he, along with his boss, should be indicted for their culpability in the drone program…
http://federalgrandjury.net/presentment.php
(no ads or snoopy bs at link)
Why is John Brennan still the director of the CIA? How can someone at this post straight-out lie to congress and keep his job? Democracy; honor, truth, justice and the American way. BS. This is where all the nonsense about American exceptionalism starts making me nauseous.
Take a good look at Congress.
The only natural criminal class in America, according to Mark Twain.
Did the separation ever exist? Also, are they going to openly admit they make no distinction between foreign and domestic, that indeed there are no constraints that forbid operations in the “homeland”?
The lessons of COINTELPRO
http://www.isreview.org/issues/49/cointelpro.shtml
How We Found Out About COINTELPRO
http://monthlyreview.org/2014/09/01/how-we-found-out-about-cointelpro/
“The reorganization will allow the CIA to “cover the entire universe, regionally and functionally,”
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA ..HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA… HOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHO….HEEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEH,,,,,HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA ..HOHOHOHOHO ..HAHAHAH…
please..please..stop.. stop..yer killing me….HAHAHAHAHA… HOHOHO.. HAHA…. hohoho.. man, that’s the funniest thing I’ve read in a year. The ENTIRE universe….HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA… HOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHO… god… please..
note to self..file under..
Great Moments in Monumental Asininity.
I have yet to see the job postings for Alpha Centuri. maybe the CIA is being Speciesist? (yes i made that word up) im going after them for biased hiring practices
Now don’t Brennan look like someone, no one you’d want to be associated with, unless he’d be putting the hurt on someone else, for you? So, if it’s all math from here on out, guess y’all had better hope ya got lotsa digits in yer holdings, accounts, and locations’ coordinates, right? Or maybe none’d be WAY better; no digits; an intel ghost… a real person, an unnumbered human, being… Unless I’m mistaken, I’d hazard, as a person that has few friends, that Dear John, and most of his “friends” and associates don’t have many, if any at all, real, warmblooded friends, that ain’t packin’ or working for him – in protection, or sanctified military aggression. And he’s right; a lot did indeed pass Kodak by – just like the merits of nuking the Japanese as a message to Russia, and anyone else who was paying careful attention… all the pre-blooming fruits of Brennan and his ilk – “unfettered”… He brings new meaning to ” So help us, God…”
Dude, what the fuck are you talking about? Are you drunk? I read that asinine comment 3 times and all I got out of it was confusion. Jesus wept. Congratulations for ruining my day you indecipherable fucking idiot.
I take offense at the notion he and his ilk may have reptilian friends.
Reptiles are smarter than that.
I can’t think of anything more troubling than additional CIA involvement in these spheres and the further militarization of the organization.
We might as well call it the Covert Paramilitary Agency instead of the Central Intelligence Agency–since most of what people will be tasked with doing is “paramilitary” and not “intelligence”. Instead of plumbers (i.e. wet-works operators) we’ll start calling them accountants (CPAs).
From digital to Bond style physical;
“FBI Informant: I Was Encouraged to Have Sex with Muslim Women
A former FBI informant who posed as a Muslim convert to infiltrate mosques in California has said the FBI instructed him to have sex with Muslim women if it would help him gather information. Craig Monteilh has admitted collecting phone numbers and other personal information about Muslims in the Los Angeles area, even planting a recording device in the local Muslim Student Union. He told HuffPost Live his FBI handlers encouraged him to date Muslim women.
Craig Monteilh: “There were some times that in the dates it would get intimate, so I would ask my FBI handlers what I should [unintelligible]. And they instructed me, if I was getting good intel, to allow it to go into sexual relations.”
When he was working as an informant, Monteilh’s extreme talk of violence and jihad alarmed his targets in the Muslim community, who ultimately reported him to the FBI and took out a restraining order against him.”——-democracynow.org/2015/3/6/
Nothing is sacred or beyond the pale to these scumbags and their ilk.
Now, in addition to everything else, women have to give “good intel.”
And all this “good intel” is recorded digitally and can be used against muslim women, disgusting pornostudio.
One thing this new structure will guarantee is that it will constantly be justifying its own existence, and will feature groupthink, manufactured intelligence and threat inflation. Not a word about citizen protection of any sort in the entire statement, and imagine having a dissenting opinion working in that environment.
just that will raise you “terroristic potential” and will make them focus more intensively on you … They work based on “Mathematical patterns” you know
and Hey! “It is not personal” as the mobsters say, “it is ‘just’ business”
RCL
Ah, what would we ever do without Mabel and Myrna to tell it like it is! We’ve seen too little of them around these parts.
Now wouldn’t the whole universe include the good ol’ USofA? Which, if I recall correctly, is technically illegal. But I forget: It’s only illegal if us peons do it.
hi velma201 hunnee!
Myrna bizzy runnin teh bidness butt i yam haev littul bit uv tiem to cumment wuns inna wile.
tihs Breenman persum iz furry fool uv himsef an i hadda littul moer whine too drank las nite tahn yewjual don u no.
I agree, If the Minkoffs don’t hang out on this corner anymore, why should I drive by?
i yam heer BileJonz hunnee.
There goes Osborne Cox…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO8roISHjJo
This is perceptive of Brennan. Kodak tried to restructure and move into digital photography, but its legacy business was too much of a burden. So it will be interesting to see if the CIA also ultimately flounders and fails.
In the case of the CIA, the business of collecting information about people is now done much better by Facebook. This will remain true, regardless of how much the CIA restructures itself. It can try and compete head on against Facebook, but people are unlikely to enthusiastically embrace CIA ‘Likes’ and CIA ‘Friends’. Since Facebook already provides their information to the government, there is no need for the CIA to maintain its own parallel inferior system of files.
But while the ‘Intelligence’ part of the CIA’s mandate is now obsolete, there is still a need to conduct coups to remove obstreperous foreign leaders. So the agency should ensure that the restructuring allows them to focus on their core competency.
But Benito, drones are the core competency, and so this reorganization allows them to be used for everything, including eliminating unwanted national leaders. It also makes the acquisition of Facebook much more likely.
I fear that the CIA sees drones as its core competency, but they are wrong. If the entire world is a battlefield, you don’t need a covert agency to deploy drones. The military is better suited to killing people and will eventually take back that role.
But compare the results in Libya and Egypt. In one case, brute force was used to remove an unfriendly leader and the result is hardly any better than the original situation. In the other, the US worked closely with the local military and the resulting change in government was exceptionally smooth, with a new regime that is extremely friendly and cooperative. So the finesse of the CIA can accomplish a lot. Of course you need brute force too, but one shouldn’t be seduced by the idea that it’s the best solution to every problem.
Say, that would provide the business world some new meaning for “hostile takeover.” Although, nationalizing Facebook then makes the CIA appear even more hypocritical for all those coups in countries that tried to nationalize oil over the last century. Plus there’s that whole Facebook probably already works for the NSA thing…
Good Lord, you mean you don’t know that Facebook is no longer run by private interests …
A couple of years ago, Zuckerberg, and several of his cronies made a secret deal (not secret anymore) with a still secret group within our government, the deal being that he and others would be highly compensated silent partners in the running of Facebook by this deeply hidden government agency.
There are several other public corporations, while still appearing to be independent, are in fact government controlled and operated.
Believe it or not … Little is as it seems.
Free-market mechanics is not your (or the CIAs) strong suit, benitoe. The CIA is a ‘privately held’ company.
*To be a ‘player’, the CIA would have to do what they call an IPO. This is basically where the ‘company’ ask everybody for a wad of money in exchange for a piece of paper w/ the company logo called ‘stock’. Since the CIA already has more money than Dog (w/ the full force and backing of the government), this would ‘fetter’ the marketplace and disrupt the operation of the ‘invisible hand’.
Publicly held or privately held, I know the key thing is to be the market leader. To do so, you have to focus on what you are good at.
Collecting data has become so easy that anyone can do it. Facebook currently does it best, but Google, Apple and Microsoft are all pretty good too. Whether they received feed money from the CIA is irrelevant; the bottom line is that data has become a commodity. So there is no payback investing your precious resources in a drudge activity that can be done by just about anyone.
A manufacturing company buys raw materials and turns them into a finished product – it doesn’t have to mine its own ore. Neither does the CIA need to collect its own data.
Your original assertion stands strong, Duce, they should not seek some NSA redundancy function and more fledgling countries must be found where they’re allowed to practice their core competency – if they’re to avoid Kodak-cide.
No, it’s very private. The public don’t know squat. *In fact, under Obama’s ITP (Insider Threat Program), I could (should?) report you for even thinking about it!
*FB, google and other ore-mining subsidiaries help fund the operations … kinda like First Look Media’s digital innovations help fund TI.
;-)
RCL
Normally something like that means that less than half of the people have to do double the work. So the young and healthy keep the job… And “universe” is the synonym for twenty-four-seven? At least it is well-paid…
The cyber- part of this is dangerous. I have encountered people who really are disturbed that there are different opinions on the internet. Some even believe that there is only one set of facts (which authorities they trust convey to them) and that opinions disputing those facts or seeking a new perspective on them involve being a traitor. We are a multicultural society, certainly the internet is one, and some societies have less toleration for different outlooks. But even within the US there is a wide range of what is and is not permissible to question. The mob mentality is just seething beneath the surface much of the time. Will it find its voice in secret government like the CIA which can manipulate such a mob? Once upon a time it was believed that CIA only operated abroad to protect our country. Now that will not necessarily be the case. We don’t have to go far to find examples of governments which were finally eaten up by their secret services, and from which they produced dictatorial governments. Are we at last so far beyond history that we have forgotten it? Fusing analysts and operatives says to me “Knowledge=Power” and we are going to pay for it. We will not recognize our country’s values in another generation. There has to have been a reason they were separate, those two levels of CIA. Now it will be a Ministry of Propaganda with the ability to eliminate dissenters. Many people will get quite comfortable with that, but the best people will be destroyed by it.
“In his remarks Friday, Brennan also announced the creation of a new division called the Directorate of Digital Innovation, which will handle the CIA’s cyber-operations, taking on the responsibilities of two existing directorates — the Open Source Center and the Information Operations Center. The former monitors social media, while the latter conducts cyber-penetrations and attacks.
The new digital directorate will have significantly more leeway than both its predecessors, according Brennan. “What we need to do as an agency is make sure we’re able to understand all of the aspects of that digital environment,” he told reporters”
Hot damn!
Not only do we peons need absolute monitoring by the NSA to conduct our activities of daily living, but we also need to finance a new directorate within the CIA to replicate and enforce the mission of the NSA which also falls under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Imagine…Our very own CIA Directorate diligently monitoring digital and voice communications in the homes, offices, etc…etc…of world citizens; and being able to quickly identify suspicious persons who flush the toilet too frequently or who use “key words” that trigger the label of “terrorist.”
In record time…they will be able to launch appropriate “penetration and cyber-attacks” against heinous State offenders. If those fail they can just write an internal memo to their buddies in the Counterterrorism Center who can readily respond with direct physical attacks….like Gestapo raids or dropping drones.
Sort of like…one stop shopping for and automatic disposition of “terrorists” with carte blanche backing by the Executive Branch of the Government.
Remember…this is paid for on the backs of American taxpayers so that the Central Bankers and their elite puppets can reap their filthy rewards.
And just in case some Zionist asshole or Government Troll feels compelled to reply to this comment let me tell you in advance that you can boil in the cesspool of the hell that you have helped to create on Planet Earth.
If Brennan wants to find terrorists all he to do is look down the hall at the monsters his agency holds. It saddens me more than you know to realize we have such people here in this country. Our biggest security need is to learn to leave other folks alone and not continually try to rob them of their resources to make a few rich SOB’s here a bit richer.
I just wish I could write a line onto my tax check “Not to be used to fund terrorist organizations like the CIA, DOD, and NSA.”
Monsters is exactly the correct word. That we have people in “our” employ who are committing the same crimes for which war criminals were executed after WWII, but “our” war criminals pay nothing for their crimes, is a fact all decent people should be screaming at the government to correct. Thanks for your comment Mike.
This looks like their opportunity to flush out all those who might do a Sterling.
I read this New York Times story and I had almost no idea what I read when I finished the article. For others like me, we’re fortunate to have Jeremy Scahill who made the case that this is putting the researchers too close to the war-mongers:
“Brennan is blurring line between ops and analysis. This will enable widening capacity for ops based on unverified Intel”
“Brennan’s reorganizing of CIA seems eerily reminiscent of Rumsfeld’s Office of Special Plans, which cherry-picked raw Intel to justify ops”
The President’s man is going to “cover the entire universe” now, eh? Quite a task, and I’m sure he’s not up to it. The horror, the horror . . . .
“Somebody get the straight jacket. Brennan thinks he’s God.”
The lunatics are in the hall.
I’m no expert, but does this basically mean that everyone at CIA gets a “00” prefix for their employee ID number?
I have thought a lot about the historical trends in the context of this ‘universal’ technological surveillance. Luckily the ‘geeky’ IQ is with the more liberally inclined and it is becoming clearer that it is not the case of a pyramid with a single eye looking down but rather a countless many little telescopic eyes looking up; who has the most to loose from such a state sponsored technological capacity? This financial collapse and fraud? What does the database show?
When I stand in May for a place in parliament in the UK (Vs. Galloway no less!), I will sign a pledge with the ten to nominate me. Not only will I pledge to give away most of my wage, and to milk the expenses system with a view to using that to keep open youth centers, but I will also demand GCHQ monitor my arse as an MP to keep me honest and inline with democratic principles. The first target of surveillance that is not characteristic of an authoritarian and totalitarian practice, has to be those with power!
But what of the masses? Are they to be surveyed? Well, that historical trend would suggest yes; a carbon free industrial revolution is a decentralized productive revolution that empowers people. This industrial revolution (point of consumption production) has been understandably forestalled but freeing those patents and realizing the fruits of contemporary scientific endeavors, necessitates a need to monitor given the potential harm one could do with these unreleased newer technologies. All we need do is to say that (or this) and to paint, by numbers if necessary, the vistas of such a future. I am not frightened by having the intimacies of my life laid bare to all, particularly if we are going to be allowed to have our revolutionary and evolutionary jump..
Cyber wars without a declaration of war by Congress violates our Constitution. An attack is an attack.
Americans deserve a debate and a vote by our elected representatives BEFORE actions are taken in our name.
The invention of new tools of war doesn’t invalidate the document.
Likewise, letting civilians instead of the military have these powers (cyber war, drones, covert ops) is a disaster, and will continue to be a disaster.
No reorganization will change that fact.
The CIA should be limited to intelligence collection only.
Their history of failure, shortsightedness, and lack of accountability demands it.
useful idiot
Yea, that’s what I think Brennan is, too.
Don’t mess with texas. I don’t believe texas was referring to Brennan, just politely introducing himself. No one has ever described Brennan as useful.
Nice.
As always, happy to have your input big guy.
You a Texas history major no doubt.
“In his remarks Friday, Brennan also announced the creation of a new division called the Directorate of Digital Innovation,”
i shud porbably knot cumment on tihs wun.
“the Counterterrorism Center has fused thousands of analysts and spies under one umbrella of operations”
hunnee tehr bettur wayz too maek u packaj luk biggur an moer formadibble tahn tossink it awl in u manpurs in effart too maek a gnu improov munstur.
“The fusing of analysts and operatives reflects the influence and power of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.”
hunnee teh onny thin awl tihs phewjummin reflek iz teh powur uv gittin two bigg foor yew brishez don u no.
“The reorganization will allow the CIA to “cover the entire universe, regionally and functionally,” Brennan told reporters”
sumwun shud tel Breenman taht Myrna an me wud bee willink to cuver venus ef him neds sum hep.
Kill the CIA. Not the people, of course, but the ongoing criminal Conspiracy In Action. It has absolutely no redeeming social value. Kill the NSA, too.
“Things just passed them [Kodak] by,” the spy chief said.
Yes, can’t let that happen to those funding coups or committing torture and murder war crimes in countries we’re NOT at war with…
Wait, what…?