According to Walsh the following story broke on November 2nd. The media, evidently fixated on the pending "Blue Wave" and loath to publicize anything that might tarnish the image of the Obama presidency, has paid it little heed, but if it's true it is a huge bombshell of a story:
In 2013, hundreds of CIA officers — many working nonstop for weeks — scrambled to contain a disaster of global proportions: a compromise of the agency’s internet-based covert communications system used to interact with its informants in dark corners around the world. Teams of CIA experts worked feverishly to take down and reconfigure the websites secretly used for these communications; others managed operations to quickly spirit assets to safety and oversaw other forms of triage.During a two year period starting in 2010 the Chinese and the Iranians, were able to systematically roll up our intelligence assets in these countries and eventually execute more than 30 agents working for the CIA. They were able to do this because the CIA had been using lax, outdated internet communications security.
“When this was going on, it was all that mattered,” said one former intelligence community official. The situation was “catastrophic,” said another former senior intelligence official.
From around 2009 to 2013, the U.S. intelligence community experienced crippling intelligence failures related to the secret internet-based communications system, a key means for remote messaging between CIA officers and their sources on the ground worldwide.
The previously unreported global problem originated in Iran and spiderwebbed to other countries, and was left unrepaired — despite warnings about what was happening — until more than two dozen sources died in China in 2011 and 2012 as a result, according to 11 former intelligence and national security officials.
The disaster ensnared every corner of the national security bureaucracy — from multiple intelligence agencies, congressional intelligence committees and independent contractors to internal government watchdogs — forcing a slow-moving, complex government machine to grapple with the deadly dangers of emerging technologies.
Much more detail on this fiasco is provided by Walsh at the link.
If the media wants a scandal, and, of course, they always do, they might try forgetting about "Russian collusion" and look more deeply into this failure. It might be helpful if they'd call for congressional investigations into how and why this happened, who was primarily responsible, what the extent of the damage has been and what role, if any, this played in the Obama administration's obsession with closing the Iranian nuclear deal.
