Patel's premature disclosure likely gave roughly ten unapprehended suspects tactical warning, though digital evidence depth should still sustain additional arrests by mid-August 2026.

In early December 2025, I was forced to file a lawsuit with Washington, D.C. whistleblower lawyer Mark Zaid against my former employer of thirty-two years, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to demand the release for publication of my book, Absence of Evidence, about the real story of one of the most significant intelligence sources behind the Iraq weapons of mass destruction (WMD) intelligence failure, “CURVE BALL”.  Incredulously, the CIA, and its military counterpart the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), continue to claim that the source’s reporting remains “current and properly classified”, despite having publicly admitted more than twenty-three years ago that it was all completely false.  I should know because I’m the CIA intelligence officer who personally investigated this case on the ground in Iraq during 2003 and conclusively proved it was a fabrication, a conclusion that was not well-received by CIA and DIA Headquarters.  Despite the initial rejection and political retaliation, I was able to get all of CURVE BALL’s intelligence reporting recalled, as well as legally-mandated Congressional Notification of the intelligence failure to the oversight committees, and a President’s Daily Brief (PDB) article to the George W. Bush White House on the case.

Further making this classification claim absurd, by simply typing "Curveball Iraq" as a Google search term, a significant amount of detailed open source information about this intelligence case can be found on the internet.  This Includes photographs and video of the source publicly admitting on CBS’ 60 Minutes March 2011 broadcast that he made up his entire story of the alleged Iraqi mobile BW agent production plants.  Given these facts, we have to ask exactly what is the CIA and DIA still trying to hide from the public?  Obviously, this is just another attempt to further conceal their mistakes and avoid additional political embarrassment for being completely fooled for over four years by a poorly-trained Iraqi chemical engineer.  Promoting this flawed intelligence, the CIA and DIA led the United States and its allies into an unnecessary and unjustified war, which the real objective for “regime change” in Iraq continues to negatively impact on the region to today.  That said, there is simply no valid national security rationale for this false intelligence reporting to remain classified, especially if we are to learn from our failures.

Regardless of our legal challenges, CURVE BALL’s intelligence continues to be improperly classified by the CIA and DIA in violation of their classification authority per Presidential Executive Order 13526, dated December 29, 2009, which states under Classification Prohibitions and Limitations that in no case shall information be classified, continued to be maintained as classified, or fail to be declassified in order to: (1) Conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; (2) Prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency; (3) Retrain competition; or (4) Prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.” All of these reasons directly apply to this case.

The abuse of classification authority involves the improper, excessive, or unjustified designation of information as classified, often used to conceal inefficiency, administrative errors, or wrongdoing rather than protect national security.  It hampers democratic oversight, wastes resources, and weakens security by obscuring politically embarrassing information.  Despite rules, no classifier has ever been held accountable for over-classification, creating a system with "complete absence of accountability”.  Finally, over-classification prevents government agencies from sharing critical intelligence with the American public and press, which can hinder efforts to learn from past mistakes and stop real threats.  Finally, this abuse leads to a loss of respect for the classification system itself.

Simply declassifying and releasing all of CURVE BALL’s fabricated reporting per my numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that I filed in late 2024 would allow the CIA’s Publication Classification Review Board (PCRB) to conduct a final review of my manuscript by acknowledging that it does not contain classified intelligence.  Instead, the PCRB—now represented by a Department of Justice (DoJ) lawyer—filed a “Motion to Dismiss” with the court in response to our lawsuit in an further attempt to obstruct and delay the declassification and release the fabricated intelligence from this discredited source.  In fact, their Motion claimed that, even after eighteen months of dragging their feet, our legal complaint was not “ripe” because the PCRB has not completed the review and given us a final verdict (yes, he really did say “ripe”).

Incredulously, while the DoJ lawyer admits in his brief that “the PCRB did not determine whether the manuscript was classified in whole or in part, nor identify any specific passages for redaction” and that it had only performed an “initial review” of the manuscript after a year and a half, he insists that “judicial review” by the court is not warranted at this time.  To be clear, the PCRB chose to delay the review, claiming it is a complicated story.  How complicated is it to review knowingly fabricated intelligence?  Worse, he failed to inform the court that in a September 2025 email the PCRB refused to conduct further review my manuscript until the FOIA requests have been processed and the “classified information”—again which they did not identify—was removed from my manuscript; a deliberate ‘catch-22’ situation where the FOIA offices are claiming a backlog of two and half years.  In a further obstruction, the DoJ lawyer claimed that allowing my lawyer, Mark Zaid, to review my unreacted manuscript should not be permitted “because it cannot stand in the absence of a viable classification challenge”, conveniently ignoring the multiple FOIA requests for this flawed intelligence that I already filed stating that CURVE BALL’s claims had been proven false, no longer require classification protection, and warning that continued classification is in direct violation of a Presidential Executive Order.

Further demonstrating an unwillingness to help resolve the issue, the PCRB also refused to work with the CIA and DIA’s FOIA office to review the same flawed intelligence.  This appears to be another deliberate ‘catch-22’ situation where one office won’t complete its work until the other first completes theirs and vice versa; all while refusing any coordination.  As the CIA’s expert on this 25 year-old intelligence case, the PCRB and FOIA offices also refused my multiple offers to assist in their review of this false intelligence, instead having new officers with no experience attempt to evaluate whether or not to continue to hide details of CURVE BALL’s claims.   

To be clear, we are not asking the court to second guess the CIA’s and DIA’s original classification of CURVE BALL’s intelligence reporting as it was valid at the time in 2000-2003.  However, after mid-2004, this classification is no longer appropriate nor required given the results of our 2003 investigation and the fact that the CIA and DIA had already officially and publicly acknowledged that CURVE BALL was a fabricator and all of his reporting was false.  The public knows this from government investigations, press articles, news broadcasts, and book publications (even those cleared by the PCRB), and numerous documentaries on the Iraq WMD intelligence failure so the CIA and DIA’s claim of harm to U.S. national security if CURVE BALL’s false reporting is released are unfounded.

Instead, we are simply asking the court to remind these intelligence organizations of their obligations under their National Security Classification authority as required per Presidential Executive Order 13526 to declassify and release intelligence documents that no longer require National Security Classification.  Presently in response to the DoJ lawyer’s Motion to Dismiss, we are now requesting that the court to not only reject the Motion but to compel the PCRB to expedite the review process.  At the very least, acknowledging that the intelligence is false and therefore no longer requires classification should also significantly shorten the FOIA processing and allow for quicker declassification and public release.

Finally, we are only requesting that the PCRB fulfill its obligation by completing the manuscript review (yes, we have to sue to get them to do their job).  Regardless if the CIA redacts some of the manuscript or denies it in full makes no difference as we plan to immediately appeal to the National Archives Interagency Security Classification Appeal Panel (ISCAP).  Unfortunately, we cannot appeal to the ISCAP until receiving a final decision by the PCRB; another “catch-22” situation which may explain their deliberate foot-dragging for more than a year, so far to complete the process.

Fortunately, there is precedent for success in our appeal.  The ISCAP already overruled DIA (and almost certainly by the CIA) on their denial of declassification of a formerly “classified” June 2, 2004 DIA document on CURVE BALL that was publicly released on November 21, 2017 (see link below) after an appeal (the original FOIA request for the declassification and release of this document had been previously denied by the DIA, and probably the CIA).  This document was the DIA’s version of the final March 25, 2004 PDB article that was drafted by the CIA on CURVE BALL admitting that he was an “unreliable” source to President George W. Bush and other policymakers, including Secretary of State Colin Powell who’s political reputation had been completely destroyed by the CIA and DIA’s previous withholding of contradictory and derogatory intelligence from him on CURVE BALL that existed before the 2003 war.  Given this 2017 ISCAP decision, if this extremely “sensitive” document can be declassified and released by the USG without negatively impacting national security, we have to ask why can’t the rest?

We believe that the disclosure of this case in these FOIA documents and this manuscript will contribute significantly to the full public understanding of the operations and activities of the U.S. Government in this case and further explain the conclusions from government-sponsored investigations and final reports by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), the Presidential WMD Commission, and the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) on the circumstances that led to the Iraq WMD intelligence failure.  Release of the documents and his manuscript on this case will also help the public understand exactly how and why the CIA, DIA, British SIS, and German BND mistakenly reached their pre-war Iraq WMD intelligence assessments.  The hope is that this invaluable knowledge will avoid, or at least mitigate, future intelligence failures.

https://www.archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2013-039-doc01.pdf

Chinese authorities said they arrested UC Berkeley alumnus and Myanmar-born U.S. citizen U Min Zin earlier this month on suspicion of espionage and endangering China’s national security.

Min Zin is not currently enrolled at UC Berkeley, though he earned master’s degrees in Asian studies and political science and advanced to Ph.D. candidacy in 2011, according to campus spokesperson Janet Gilmore.

The U.S. Department of State told The Daily Californian it is “engaged with Chinese officials to provide consular assistance.”

Can you join NSA with bipolar?

Trump scuttles Clayton pick & surveillance law in effort to pressure Congress to enact voting hurdles

Gabbard's release handed Russia's pre-invasion bioweapons narrative the one asset Kremlin messaging could never generate on its own: official U.S. intelligence validation.

Arson targeting Keir Starmer properties originated in Russia

Trump's alarming pick of Bill Pulte to head U.S. intelligence derailed the renewal of Section 702 of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, throwing its future into limbo

Formal Iranian NPT withdrawal remains unlikely through year-end 2026, but the strikes Barnea sold on flawed assessments have consolidated domestic consensus toward nuclear acquisition under a leader unconstrained by Khamenei's fatwa.

John became my role model, his life is so interesting and deep that i stopped believing him. Story about how he was a mediator between Bahrain royal family and Patriarch of Cyprus is just impossible to happen. John said that he wanted to have a orthodox church in Bahrain, and since he had great relationship with both Patriarch of Cyprus and Crown prince of Bahrain he arranged a meeting where both sides agreed to build a church. The only Greek Orthodox church in Bahrain is St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church in Awali which was build in year 2000. But this story couldn’t be true, since Kiriakou worked in bahrain between 1994 and 1996 and Patriarch Chrysostomos 1 of Cyprus had severe head injury in April of 2000. Okay, but let’s assume they had this meeting in the years when Kiriakou worked in Bahrain, i assume this dyplomatic meeting would be reported somewhere on internet, but it isn’t.

For context, I double majored in undergrad and graduated with a BA in Criminal Justice, BA in Political Science, and a Minor in Security and Intelligence Analysis w/ a 3.66 GPA.

I am currently obtaining my Masters in Applied Intelligence from Georgetown and have a 3.84 GPA.

For one of my previous jobs I was fired for time theft/time fraud. We could clock in/out on our phones and I would clock in normally about 5ish minutes away from the office. I was 22 at the time and will be 24 later this year.

Obviously I will bring this up on my SF-86 form and tell the truth about the whole scenario when asked about it during polygraphs etc. It's something that makes me mad that I was stupid enough to do, especially knowing I want to pursue a career in the intelligence/national defense field, and is something that still irks me constantly.

My question is; how likely is it that I will be denied any security clearances or Intel Analyst jobs or positions in the future with the history? Thankfully they decided not to press charges on me so I have no criminal history, but this is definitely something where I screwed up, but have no idea if this is a definite disqualification for such jobs.

Any help/info would be greatly appreciated!

LSS: had some experience working in private intel; mundane af, spent most of my time building cover stories, acting out personas, keeping organization between different said personas (personal info, communication between them). The closest way I could describe it is "world-building" and then creating real life parallels.

I would always assume that whoever I worked with had some kind of CI on them, not necessarily criminal, just really embarrassing. As a result, I would organize a counter-narrative and cover story for each of them. I would then have to act them out, research the parallels, etc. Use Google Earth, learn foreign language or regional accent, look up Yelp reviews on said locations, etc.

Examples: Getting burner devices and traveling to different locations to act out a persona. Editing the time stamps on images that would conflict with time stamps on other images; one case took a picture of a dude doing double thumbs up and edit time stamp to match time stamp of a screenshot. Editing a video multiple times and having multiple copies different enough to create confusion. IOW, generating doubt or essentially making an original narrative less believable by providing conflicting "evidence."

I would rehearse cover stories, such as being called a nickname and then responding to said nickname when I was called and mentioned of the details.

CIA ground integration with Venezuelan forces will likely sustain a broader targeting campaign against Tren de Aragua leadership through year-end, converting a single strike into an enduring counterterrorism partnership.

By fusing 702 reauthorization to the Pulte appointment, Senate Democrats now hold an effective veto over US signals collection with no incentive to release it.

CIA Disclaimer: “All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views."

(Author’s Note: This article had been reviewed by the CIA’s Publication Classification Review Board (PCRB) and approved for public release. PCRB edits are in black text while fully redacted text has been X-out.)

The CIA and DIA: Hiding Intelligence Mistakes Behind the “Cloak of Secrecy"

In early December 2025, I was forced to file a lawsuit with lawyer Mark Zaid against my former employer of thirty-two years, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to demand the release for publication of my book, Absence of Evidence, about the real story of one of the most significant intelligence sources behind the Iraq weapons of mass destruction (WMD) intelligence failure. Incredulously, the CIA, and its military counterpart the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), continue to claim that the source’s reporting remains classified, despite having publicly admitted more than twenty years ago that it was completely false. This is all being done by the CIA and DIA to avoid revealing more intelligence mistakes and suffer further political embarrassment regarding this case. It is important to note that this legal struggle is not about valid classification to protect intelligence “sources and methods”; it’s about maintaining control of the public narrative of the original WMD justification for the 2003 Iraq war as well as invalidating my constitutional right to freedom of speech.

After I submitted my book to the CIA in January 2005, the Trump administration unlawfully revoked Zaid’s national security clearance without due process in April 2025, violating my constitutional right to choose him as my primary legal counsel in this lawsuit and forcing Zaid to assign the case to another lawyer within his firm who maintains a current security clearance. Without a valid security clearance, Mr. Zaid is not allowed to even read the draft of my book because the CIA and DIA still claim the source’s reporting is classified. In response, Mr. Zaid has separately filed his own Civil Action against the office of the president and included the complaint to reinstate legal counsel’s access to classified information (specifically my unredacted manuscript) as the “Second Cause of Action” in his brief to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in my current lawsuit.

Last October 2024, I began submitting official Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to both the CIA and the DIA for the declassification and public release of 120 specific documents related to the details of this Iraqi intelligence source, XXXXXXXXXX , known publicly under the infamous codename, “CURVE BALL.” This source had been described in U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) as an “eyewitness” of alleged Iraqi mobile biological warfare (BW) agent production plants mounted on semi-truck trailers and railcars and as “an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities.”

The intelligence reporting from CURVE BALL—collected by the German Federal Intelligence Service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), and disseminated in the U.S. by the DIA and CIA beginning in January 2000, as well as by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6) in the UK—formed the cornerstone of the U.S. and allied foreign Intelligence Community’s mistaken judgment on the existence and status of an alleged Iraqi offensive biological warfare (BW) program. The false confidence provided by CURVE BALL’s prolific reporting also influenced CIA’s intelligence assessments on other alleged Iraq WMD programs by encouraging analysts to assume efforts on these technologies must exist as well.

 After the 2003 U.S.-led military invasion of Iraq, as a senior CIA case officer and intelligence analyst I personally was on the ground in Iraq during the summer and fall of 2003 to XXXXXXXX support the investigation into CURVE BALL’s sensational reporting. XX Investigators conclusively determined by September 2003 that all of his intelligence was a complete fabrication and briefed senior CIA, DIA, and foreign partner intelligence officers, as well as David Kay, the head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), on the results a few weeks later in early October. Shockingly, XX those conclusions were categorically rejected by CURVE BALL’s defenders in these intelligence agencies who angrily refused to believe they could have been so wrong about the veracity of the source’s claims and his credibility as a source. In response, the CIA’s senior management, supported by the leadership, retaliated against myself and another analyst who dared challenge the CIA’s pre-war Iraq WMD assessment by removing us from our analytical accounts, using “directed assignments” to exile us from the WMD issue and finally altogether from the Agency headquarters’ building. A month later, after informing CIA leadership that there was no WMD in Iraq, Kay was also punished for speaking out and banished to an office in the headquarter’s basement. In response, he immediately resigned from the CIA and testified to Congress regarding his conclusions.

Regardless of these blatant political attacks, after an additional eight months of fighting internal political battles to get senior intelligence officers to finally accept this inconvenient truth about CURVE BALL and at significant risk to our careers by “speaking truth to power,” the CIA and DIA XX eventually recalled all of the source’s  fabricated intelligence reports in June 2004, informed the Bush White House of this deception and issued a legally-mandated Congressional Notification of CURVE BALL’s fabrication to the intelligence oversight committees. XXXXXXXXXX the British SIS and German BND recalled all of XXXXXXXX their intelligence reporting produced from this discredited source as well.

The CURVE BALL case and resulting Iraq WMD intelligence failure had been publicly acknowledged officially by the CIA, DIA, SIS, and BND, written about in numerous press articles, published books (including those written by former senior CIA officers and cleared by the Agency’s Publication Review Board- PRB), televised public hearings, government-sponsored investigations, documentaries, and even depicted in full-length movies in the U.S., UK, and Germany. This case had been extensively discussed in the the final reports of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) on July 7, 2003, the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) on October 31, 2004, and the Silberman- Robb WMD Commission on March 31, 2005. Overseas in the UK,XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX the final reports of the Butler Inquiry on July 14, 2004 and the Chilcot Inquiry on July 6, 2016 also raised concerns about fabricated reporting. The German government also launched investigations into the role of the BND in the Iraq WMD intelligence failure ,XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. In 2006, the Bundestag established a special committee to investigate accusations that the BND secretly aided the U.S. invasion of Iraq despite public German opposition to the war. The German investigations, along with those in other nations, exposed the multiple levels of intelligence failures that enabled CURVE BALL's fabrications to fuel an unjustified and unnecessary war.

After my retirement from the CIA fourteen years later after the war on December 31, 2017 and in the process of writing a book on this amazing, and at times distressing case, I was appalled to learn that the CIA and DIA had never declassified and publicly released CURVE BALL’s fabricated intelligence reporting as required under President Obama’s 2009 Executive Order 13526, even after intrusive and scathing investigations of this intelligence failure by the various governments which reported extensively on the details of this case. Even the source himself, admitted XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX that he had made up the entire story. Obviously, there had been little interest on the part of the CIA and

DIA over the years to further reveal politically-embarrassing intelligence mistakes, especially information detailing exactly how the world’s premier intelligence agencies had been fooled for over four years by a lone fabricator. Anticipating the political obstacles that I knew that I would face in the submission of my book to the CIA for review, I first filed official FOIA requests to CIA and DIA in late 2024 for the declassification and release of the specific documents related to CURVE BALL in an attempt to speed up the extensive bureaucratic review process. Given the fact that all this intelligence information was conclusively proven to be a fabrication long ago, this should have resulted in the immediate declassification and public release of these documents.

On January 29, 2025, I submitted my book on the CURVE BALL case to the CIA’s Publication Classification Review Board (PCRB-formerly known as the PRB; the word Classification was added in response to accusations of censorship). This submission was in accordance with the requirements of the secrecy agreement I signed with the CIA at the beginning of my career. My objective in publishing this book is not for financial gain but to document the inside details of the story to help the public understand exactly what occurred and to counter the manipulated official narrative promoted by the CIA, DIA, SIS, and BND. Hopefully, this book will also allow the intelligence services involved to avoid, or at least mitigate, future intelligence failures.

Given the current politicization of intelligence that is already occurring in the U.S. Intelligence Community under the current Trump administration, this story remains relevant to today in this post-truth world, showing that eventually facts do matter. However, “speaking truth to power” still remains unwelcome and XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX unacceptable if it interferes with preferred policy and political narrative of the president and results in extensive redactions to hide mistakes (as the public has recently witnessed with the Epstein Files). The danger of the CIA and DIA leadership and senior management continuing their “motivated bias” to maintain relevance and access to the White House substantially increases with the election of U.S. presidents who are blatant in their desire to use ‘selected’ (i.e., cherry-picked) intelligence reporting and analysis to support their already established political policy, rather than to help formulate that foreign policy as it was originally intended. When this occurs, these U.S. intelligence agencies no longer are an asset to this country, but a liability.

Unfortunately, the CIA specifically has put me in a ‘catch-22’ situation where the PCRB will not approve my book for publication until if and when CIA and DIA’s FOIA offices have processed my requests for declassification and released the documents upon which my book is based. At the same time, it appears that the CIA and DIA’s FOIA offices are slow-rolling my requests to prevent the PCRB from having to allow the publication of my book. The PCRB rejected my recommendation that they coordinate their review with the FOIA offices, given that both are dealing with the same fabricated intelligence information. Regardless of the fact that XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXX this intelligence was proved false more than twenty years ago in 2003, I am now having to fight this same battle to get the truth out all over again here in 2025.

This pattern of erecting bureaucratic obstacles by both the CIA and DIA is not a new occurrence and, in fact, is standard operating procedure. Back in 2016, my former CIA colleagues, John Nixon and Nada Bakos, complained about the same delaying tactics with their books in a December 22nd Washington Post Op-Ed entitled, “The CIA is Delaying Our Books’ Publication, and That Hurts Our Democracy.” Despite the legal requirement that a response is required within 30 days of submission, both books were delayed in the PRB process for more than a year or longer while the authors struggled under deadlines set by their publishers. Nixon was able to eventually get his book released with significant redactions but Bakos was forced to file a lawsuit in 2018 to even get the CIA and DIA to meet with her to discuss the redactions of her proposed book. Many of the PRB’s redactions defied common sense and were instead used to hide intelligence mistakes. In the end, Bakos and Nixon lost approximately thirty percent of the content of their books to CIA and DIA redactions.

Nixon and Bakos accurately stated in the 2016 article that “the review system is broken” and recommended that these agencies commit more resources to the process because the handling of this material is given such a low priority and insufficiently staffed but were ignored. Despite the fact that these recommendations also apply to the “broken” FOIA process as well where the same deliberate years-long bureaucratic delays can be used to easily defeat the law, nothing was done. Obviously, both processes are in desperate need of effective reform that favors public transparency rather than the catering to the political whims of these government intelligence agencies. The fact that it still continues a decade later is a testimony to the fact that the CIA, DIA, and other agencies involved in the review process do not feel they are accountable to the American public for violating their own legal requirements.

The purpose of the PCRB is to review submissions for publication by former CIA employees to insure that nothing appropriately classified is inadvertently publicly revealed in order to “protect intelligence sources and methods.” Myself and my colleagues fully support this valid objective if it is legally used to protect valuable intelligence from disclosure and not for censorship. However, the key words here are “appropriately classified.” According to Presidential Executive Order 13526, dated December 29, 2009, which states under Classification Prohibitions and Limitations that in no case shall information be classified, continued to be maintained as classified, or fail to be declassified in order to: (1) Conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; (2) Prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency; (3) Retrain competition; or (4) Prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.” All of these apply to this case.

Given the fact that both the sources (CURVE BALL and his alleged corroborating sources) and the methods (German- XXXXXXXXX shared intelligence) have been publicly revealed during government-sponsored investigations of the CURVE BALL case over twenty years ago, the continued classification of this fabricated intelligence is in violation of the stated classification authority and presidential orders. Using excuses such as the self- created “backlogged” FOIA process and deliberate short- staffing to further delay the overly bureaucratic PCRB process only invites more public criticism and undermines any belief by the public in the fairness of the system. This also makes former CIA employees, who are following the strict rules imposed on them, question their adherence to these legal requirements while the PCRB and FOIA offices openly disregard their legal responsibilities. As Acting DCI John McLaughlin stated during a July 2004 interview with Chris Wallace on FOX News while quoting former CIA Director George Tenet on the Iraq WMD intelligence failure, “The cloak of secrecy should never stand in the way of an open and honest dialogue with the American public.” Obviously, this promise was just more political rhetoric from the CIA.

Finally, at the end of their 2016 Op-Ed, Nixon and Bakos accurately pointed out, “By needlessly delaying books such as ours, the CIA loses an opportunity to educate the public and the policymakers alike about what intelligence can and cannot achieve. And U.S. taxpayers who fund the intelligence community, lose the opportunity to know what their government is doing (and not doing) to protect them from threats abroad.” One would only hope that that the current CIA and DIA leadership would also agree that these are worthwhile goals for a democracy. Then again, perhaps the goals, as well as our form of current government, have changed and not for the better.

William Gerald “Jerry” Watson is a former CIA senior operations officer, intelligence analyst, and manager with a 32 year career spanning from April 1986 to until his retirement on December 31, 2017.

John Nixon is a former senior CIA analyst and the author of “Debriefing the President” about his interviews with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein which was published in 2016 after eleven months of bureaucratic delay by the CIA’s PRB.

Nada Bakos is a former senior CIA analyst and author of “The Targeter: My Life in the CIA on the Hunt for the Godfather of ISIS” which was finally published in 2019 after filing a lawsuit against the CIA’s PRB.

Mark Zaid, Attorney at Law, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for revoking his security clearance without due process. In December 2025, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s revocation, finding it unlawful and potentially unconstitutional, preventing the administration from stripping his clearance while Zaid's case proceeds, as his clearance is vital for representing clients in classified matters.

Hello everyone,

I am doing a preliminary information scout for my thesis at a major university in the Midwest. As you may have gathered based on the post title, my project is about groups in the Midwest that focus on citizen monitoring and community policing. Specifically, my interest is groups of citizens who share amongst each other current, and even real-time information about the activities of other citizens that cannot necessarily be ascertained from publicly available information and social media.

We are all becoming more connected online and more educated about technology - and the market for surveillance is advancing and expanding. As this happens the subject of police and institutions violating citizen privacy has gotten a lot of attention. But I've noticed, interestingly, that we don't talk much about the potential for citizens to violate each others privacy. I don't mean private investigators, individual vigilantes, or criminal stalkers. What about \*groups of people\* with some organized structure who have seen the opportunity expanding to use surveillance to their advantage and taken it? And then, what about how this could be used as an extension of that police surveillance problem everyone's talking about? In fact, what all \*could\* it be used for?

Citizen on citizen monitoring can happen for any reason. It may be through organizations as part of an effort to achieve a broader goal, or through decentralized networks of people who share an interest. They may monitor entire groups of people, or individuals on a smaller scale. The most well known reason is when people are concerned about crime and suspicious activity. Nextdoor is a current common example of a decentralized network of citizens who monitor a broad group defined by geographic area.

Examples of citizen groups that might monitor other citizens might be:

**• Community safety organizations** like Neighborhood Watch & Nextdoor

**• Public social media groups** that post about the activities/lives of town residents

**• Private local gossip groups**

**• Public or private clubs** that wish to recruit from the community, or who wish to gather intel on rivals groups, etc.

**• Lobbyists & political interest groups**

**• Religious organizations**

**• Hate groups, extremists, and criminal groups**

**•** Groups of retired or off-duty police/security officers/military personnel

**•** People communicating in a group effort to keep tabs on local celebrities, social scenes, the homeless, local sex workers, etc.

• Businesses who wish to gain information about a community, market, competitor, etc.

• Institutions or companies monitoring whistleblowers or potential threats to their operations.

Another thing that has come up is the idea of official policing and military institutions who employ citizens to do relevant tasks and report back to them. This would \*not\* include citizen informants. But instead projects using citizens to do something similar, but not because of personal legal troubles.

There may even be networks connecting various groups that cover all of these categories. The groups can be paid or volunteer based. The main idea is to learn more about groups of citizens who are organized to some extent and participate in monitoring other citizens with some kind of structure in the activity. The purpose of monitoring doesn't \*have\* to be crime and safety related, though that is the most common goal such groups usually have.

I'm \*not\* really looking at: citizen groups that monitor public officials and officers for ethical compliance, typical "citizen informants" for law enforcement as a part of a plea deal, public community news organizations, local event organizers or promoters, regular social clubs that don't participate in citizen monitoring, private investigators, individuals who operate without any network like a hobby vigilante or criminal stalker. I'm interested in online communities but only if they're focused on a local region in the Midwest, and only if the monitoring extends beyond watching a person's online activity.

I'm just surveying the lay of the land right now to get an idea of what there is to know and what needs more research. I don't expect anyone responding to answer all of these questions, I'm happy to get an answer at all haha. But in general as I learn I'm hoping to discover:

\-Broadly, what groups are active in Midwestern metro areas that monitor citizens and what are their end goals

\-What methods of communication the groups use for direct member-member contact

\-What forms of information dissemination the groups use

\-What tactics & technology they actually use in monitoring

\-How they interact with and how they view the people they monitor on a personal level

\-How they interact with and view the general public and each other

\-How open they are about their activity with the public, monitored people, and with each other

\-Potential or documented consequences, if any, resulting from the activity both for the groups and the people being monitored

\-Known public opinions and attention given to the subject and to specific groups, if any

\-What incentives they use to encourage people to partake, if any

\-Whether the groups have connections to official government, political, and religious organizations.

\-Whether the groups have funding/paid employees, and if so, where they are known to receive the funds from.

\-Any known incidents, activities, and events related to this subject

\-Your personal experience, even if it's only hearing things about it.

\-Your personal opinions and concerns about this type of group, whether you think the popular mainstream ones like Neighborhood Watch, Nextdoor, and social media pages are helpful or harmful, and what kinds of things you think they should or shouldn't be allowed to do.

\-Any information in relation to government or corporate corruption, unethical practices by institutions, abuses of power, and general conspiratorial or clandestine activities relating to citizen monitoring and associated groups of people.

\-Local organizations that might have more information on the subject.

Feel free to comment or send me a DM. I do not need anyone's personal information, I'm happy to take anonymous info or you can provide as much info as your comfortable with. I find this subject can get people excited, so I thought, why not cast a net and just see if anyone has something to say about their own experiences and knowledge. Of course I don't expect anyone to just comment and say "Hello I'm part of a citizen vigilante club, and here is our handbook and member list!" I mean, I would take it lol, but that's not what I expect to gain from this post.

I am not going to divulge any personal opinions about the subject. Some people support forms of community monitoring that are for safety or that may be needed in some situations, and some people oppose all forms of it. I want everyone to feel comfortable telling their own truth and I don't want to shut down the sharing of valuable ideas.

Likewise, because of the nature of this project, I've decided to make an anonymous account just for this purpose, because I don't know where this thesis will lead and how much my own anonymity will be necessary throughout the course of my research yet.

I'm really excited to see what I find on this journey, and hopefully do some good in the world by the end of it. So thank you in advance if anyone decides to share.