Congratulations for the conviction of a major cybercriminal — but unfortunately cybercrime will keep escalating

 FIN7 'technical guru' sentenced to 10 years in prison - CyberScoop

From the article:

"A U.S. federal judge on Friday sentenced Fedir Hladyr to 10 years in prison for his alleged role as an administrator of the multibillion-dollar cybercrime group known as FIN7, which has breached hundreds of U.S. firms.

"The 10-year sentence includes three years Hladyr has already spent in detention since his arrest, and $2.5 million in restitution to be distributed to victims.

"FIN7 is one of the most formidable cybercriminal groups of the last decade, allegedly siphoning off millions of credit card numbers from restaurant and hospitality chains in 47 U.S. states. And Hladyr, a Ukrainian in his mid-30s, is allegedly a big reason that FIN7 operated like a well-oiled multinational corporation."

This is a rare major victory in the war against international cybercriminal organizations, who are responsible for billions (that's "billions" with a B) and probably tens of billions (that's "billions" with a B) of illegal losses to individuals, companies, organizations, and governments around the world every year – and the amounts are growing every year.

These organizations (often multi-national) are usually assisted by foreign governments (or at least receive tacit cooperation from government officials who, at minimum, look the other way – often with the help of bribes), including Russia, China, Belarus, Moldova, Romania, Nigeria, and Indonesia.

Some of these cybercriminal organizations make James Bond's adversary SMERSH look like a two-bit operation – only they don't want to rule the world, just own it (or at least your bank accounts).

Aside from the governments that aid, abet, and give comfort to these organizations, the biggest problems with fighting them and getting victories in court like the one described in this article above include:

The cyber criminals are usually 2-3 steps ahead on the technology curve versus government agencies that have long, complicated procurement lifecycles.

Government agencies have lots of problems recruiting and retaining top talent to battle cyber criminals because they can't compete with private industry on salaries. The FBI, in particular, has been hemorrhaging its top cyber people over the past several years and you don’t easily replace such people with the necessary skills and experience – especially when you’re being constantly attacked for being part of the “deep state.”

Government agencies often can't recruit the best people to battle cyber criminals, even if they're willing to accept lower salaries, because some of the best people can't get security clearances because they acquired certain highly-desirable and special skills and experience when they were "young and foolish."

The laws against cyber crimes have not kept up with the fast pace of development of the Internet, e-commerce, and cybercrime itself.

The reasons for this last point are clear but are not going to be fixed anytime soon:

Too few politicians have made this a priority. Too few politicians have educated themselves on this subject. Too many politicians are more concerned with politicizing the problems of cyber crime rather than with fixing them. (Sound familiar?) And too many politicians are more concerned with fighting culture wars than with fighting cyber crime that robs people, companies, organizations, and governments of billions (and eventually hundreds of billions) of dollars, destroys lives, and undermines our economy.

It's great that Fedir Hladyr was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. (I keep thinking of the character Hugh Jackson played in the movie "Swordfish" but he's not that person.) Will his conviction and sentencing act as a deterrent? I don’t think so – not when the rewards are so great versus the so-called obstacles I described above.

Banning Chess, Coffee, Tobacco -- and Legitimacy

The New York Times published an article today entitled: “Saudi Arabia’s Top Cleric Forbids Chess, but Players Maneuver”:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/world/middleeast/saudi-arabias-top-cleric-forbids-chess-but-players-maneuver.html?_r=0

To summarize: the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia recently issued a fatwa declaring that the game of chess was forbidden, saying that it was "the work of Satan," like alcohol and gambling, and a waste of time and money that creates hatred between players. The response from Saudi chess players indicates that the fatwa will be as effective and command the same obedience that similar bans on coffee and tobacco did centuries ago.

By way of background, early forms of chess were developed in India and made their way to Persia in the 7th century – just in time for it to be adopted when the Muslim Arabs conquered Persia. Unlike most of the areas conquered by the Muslim Arabs in their initial conquests, the Persians were not assimilated by their Arab rulers but retained their Persian identity and language (although they did adopt many aspects of Arab civilization and culture, notably the Arabic alphabet, which they modified for their own use).

In one of the unintended consequences of the Arab conquest of Persia, the Persians also eventually largely adopted their own form of Islam – Shi’ism – which has been in opposition, more or less over the centuries, to the majority Sunni form of Islam.

I’m going to skip over a lot of history now. That includes the fact that the Abbasid Empire, centered in Baghdad during the Middle Ages (and primarily known in the West for the legendary glories of the reign of Caliph Harun Al-Rashid and the 1001 Nights), was founded by Persian Shi’ites who overthrew the first Arab Muslim empire – the Umayyad Empire, whose capital was in Damascus – although the Abbasid Empire eventually became very orthodox Sunni. My point here – and I’m greatly simplifying – is that there is a long-standing rivalry and competition between the Arab Muslims (and later the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which conquered and absorbed the Arab lands) and the Persian Muslims that dates back to the first centuries of Islam. This rivalry and animosity contributed to periodic wars between the Arabs and Turks, on the one hand, and the Persians (or Iranians) on the other hand. The animosity is reflected in the Arabic and Persian languages by their respective synonyms for Arabs and Persians which mean barbarian, uncivilized, uncultured, uncouth, ill-spoken, illiterate, etc.

For example, some of you may remember the late Professor Fouad Ajami, who taught at Johns Hopkins University, and who was frequently on TV and published numerous articles and books. A Shi’ite Arab originally from Lebanon, his family name in Arabic means “Persian” and, in fact, his family originally migrated to the part of Syria now known as Lebanon around six centuries ago. Despite their centuries-long residence in Syria and the complete Arabization of his family, Professor Ajami was the target of many insults over the years by Arab intellectuals who didn’t like (or loathed) his political views and theories (he frequently criticized and skewered Arab intellectuals and Arab politics and he later supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq). Some of those “intellectuals” took particular aim at the “fact” that he wasn’t even a “real Arab,” as "evidenced" by his name – and therefore he had no right or justification (or worse, he had “hidden” motives) for his criticisms. Long before Professor Ajami became identified with the George W. Bush administration, these Arab intellectuals and semi-intellectuals justified their animosity, in part, on the fact that `ajami, in Arabic, means Persian, barbarian, uncivilized, uncultured, etc.

Love or loath him – so much for cool and reasoned academic objectivity and contemplation.

In any case, the current dispute between Saudi Arabia and Iran has very deep roots. And one has to look at the Saudi Grand Mufti’s ban on the “Persian” game of chess as part of that dispute. (The term “checkmate” comes from the Persian “shah mat,” which means the “king is dead.” Note, on the other hand, that “mat” is an Arabic word.)

HOWEVER – and this is my point, however much I meandered in getting to it – the Saudi Grand Mufti’s ban on chess will most certainly end up in the garbage heap with similar bans on coffee and tobacco that Muslim theologians tried to impose back in the Middle Ages after coffee was introduced from Africa, and later tobacco was introduced from America. Because of their stimulative and addictive properties, the theologians concluded that coffee and tobacco were analogous to alcohol and therefore were forbidden (although not even mentioned in the Quran).

Anyone who has been in Muslim countries, particularly in Arab countries, can see that these bans were completely ignored. Moreover, since alcohol is forbidden under Islam (and public consumption is generally banned or illegal), the huge numbers of coffee houses in Arab countries fulfill the same social and cultural functions that pubs, taverns, and bars do in Western countries – with caffeine and nicotine replacing alcohol. The ISIS rulers have also banned cigarettes as anti-Islamic (and are reportedly having as much success at enforcing the ban as their medieval predecessors since smuggled cigarettes are much in demand in the territories controlled by ISIS).

This raises another point – that despite the inflexibility and conservatism of religious leaders, sometimes they are just ignored on issues small, and sometimes large. Moreover, we too often have the tendency to think – even demand – that the members of a religion MUST belong to the most extreme form of that religion,  e.g., all Christians must be fundamentalist evangelicals, all Jews must be ultra-Orthodox Hasids or Satmars, and all Muslims must be followers of ISIS and the Taliban – and those who aren’t or don’t are either not true Christians, or true Jews, or true Muslims – or they’re lying.

When we accept the definitions of extremists as being the only legitimate or true definitions – then are we not actually giving them aid and comfort and legitimacy?

My Interview on CCTV-America on the Islamic State's Use of Child Soldiers

I was interviewed on CCTV-America on Wednesday, Jan. 14, about the recruitment and training of child soldiers by the Islamic State (ISIS). Hopefully this link will stay for a while, since the CCTV-America producer sent it to me. (Hear that, Google?)


Unfortunately, I don't see much hope of a solution to the problem without the total defeat of ISIS. And, of course, ISIS has found all sorts of "Islamic" justifications for their use of child soldiers, despite the explicit prohibitions of such practices in Islamic law and Islamic history. But that has never stopped them from engaging in innovation (bid'a), which they're supposedly fighting against to impose a "pure" Islamic state on a "barbaric" world.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul7yF3SyoZk&feature=youtu.be

German Humor

It's been a very long time but I couldn't resist posting the following from a fascinating March 2, 2014 New York Times book review, written by Barry Gewen, of "Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood," by Joachim Fest, the historian.

Shortly after World War II, one German exile returning to the city of Berlin asked the taxi driver on the ride from the airport how things had been under the Nazis. Gesturing at the bombed-out ruins all around them, the driver replied: "You actually didn't miss much!"

My Interview on Al-Jazeera English TV, Saturday, Oct. 1, 2011

I was interviewed on Al-Jazeera English TV on October 1, 2011 about U.S. foreign policy making and implementation in Pakistan and Afghanistan. (I received the video clip only a few days ago, which is why I'm putting it on the blog now instead of much earlier.)

The lead-in by the interviewer was the killing of a high-ranking Al-Qa'ida-linked commander in Pakistan by a U.S. missile strike — undoubtedly fired from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) — and whether this, as well as the arrest of a senior Haqqani network leader, would “help” the Obama administration or have no impact. I answered that it would give a very short-term boost but their impact would fade very quickly — and it would have no impact on Obama’s re-election chances, which would be determined by the state of the economy in a year.

I emphasized in the interview that the Obama administration’s policies were not so different, in many ways, from the previous Bush administration’s policies, and I hopefully explained the reasons for this. I also tried to give some insights into how U.S. foreign policy decisions are made in the real world, which involve imperfect and conflicting information and where the choices are usually not between good, better, and best but between bad, worse, and worst. In the case of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the choices are usually between worse and worst. Right-wing and left-wing ideologues take note.

My Interview on Al-Jazeera English TV, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2011

I was interviewed by Al-Jazeera English TV this past Sunday, September 4, 2011, about 9/11 and the U.S. intelligence community. The call came late on Sunday afternoon on the Labor Day three-day weekend so I'm sure I wasn't the first person they called. Be that as it may, I discussed the reasons why the 9/11 attack took the intelligence community by surprise, some of the reforms that have been implemented in the past 10 years, and whether the United States is consequently "safer" than it was 10 years ago.

Bearing in mind that the entire interview lasted 3 minutes, I emphasized that even if the intelligence agencies had been sharing information with each other and even if they had been connecting the dots ― they still would not have anticipated the 9/11 attacks. This was due to ― first of all ― a failure of imagination, as pointed out in the 9/11 Commission report. It was also because of preconceptions and perceptions, and because of bureaucratic and cultural inertia.

The interviewer threw me a curveball at the end of the interview when he asked me if the U.S. was less free as a result of the increased surveillance of Americans because of the intelligence “reforms.” He did have a point but I ended the interview by pointing out that part of the problem was bureaucratic ― and anyone who has worked in a large bureaucracy should know that the U.S. intelligence “community” is far from being a monolithic, agile, omnipotent entity (despite the fevered imaginings and conspiracy theories of both the left and the right on the political spectrum). Another part of the problem is that Congress has not done anything about one of the most important reforms called for by the 9/11 Commission ― to reform itself.

Ten years ago there were approximately 85 Congressional committees and subcommittees that had some oversight function for homeland security. The Commission report emphasized that this state of affairs actually undermined the security of the United States and it decreased ― not increased ― oversight. It recommended that this be reduced to something like a dozen committees and subcommittees at the most. Instead, in one of its few bipartisan efforts in the past 10 years, Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has increased the number of committees to around 92 at last count.

I feel so much safer. NOT!

My interview is introduced by a report by an Al-Jazeera reporter on 9/11 and the U.S. intelligence community, with an emphasis on questioning whether the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has really helped to reform the intelligence community. I referred to that report several times during my interview.

 

A modest proposal (and my comments)

I want to emphasize that the following article is supposed to be satirical (the author emphasizes that point several times during the article), though many of the points he makes are not satirical.

This article is also a reminder to conspiracy mongers who believe that the all-knowing, all-seeing, omnipotent CIA is behind everything that goes on in the world — or at least in your part of the world — well, forget about it. Satire and reality are not part of your universe.

I also want to emphasize that almost all his criticism is directed at the CIA, although he takes a swing or two at the intelligence community as a whole. Note also that he is suggesting that the U.S. government should outsource the CIA, not the entire intelligence community.

Actually, he's a bit late in suggesting outsourcing of the CIA or any other intelligence agencies. Approximately three-quarters of the 100,000-plus people who work in the intelligence community are contractors. In my humble opinion, we've gone too far in terms of outsourcing intelligence responsibilities, functions, and activities that are and should be considered inherently governmental. But that's another story.

On the other hand, the idea that investigative reporters could do a better job than many CIA analysts and agents does have more than a little merit. On the other other hand, those former reporters will probably find that they haven't escaped dysfunctional management and bureaucratic politics just because they've left the newsroom. They may have just leaped from the frying pan into the fire.

But remember — the following article is a satire...


Outsource the CIA to Downsized Reporters

By Ron Rosenbaum

Slate.com
January 22, 2010

It's rare that one is able to solve two profoundly troubling societal problems with one quick fix, but I feel I've done it! Well, in a metaphorical, Swiftian, satirical "Modest Proposal" way. I suspect that most Slate readers will be aware that Jonathan Swift's 18th-century "Modest Proposal" to solve the Irish famine by encouraging starving parents to eat their children was meant as satire, right? Because when I ran my own modest proposal by a journalist friend, she took it a little too seriously, and heatedly informed me, "That's the worst idea I ever heard!" That's sort of the point! When things are bad, the only way to make the situation crystal-clear is to show how difficult it would be to come up with an idea that is ludicrously worse.

On the other hand, as they say in cheesy movies, "Sounds crazy, but it just might work!"

So: My modest proposal to solve America's "intelligence" failures is to fire the entire CIA and our other many tragically inept intelligence agencies and outsource all intelligence operations to investigative reporters downsized by the collapse of the newspaper business. Thereby improving our "intelligence capability" (it can't possibly get worse!) and giving a paycheck to some worthy and skilled investigative types — yes, some sketchy, crazed, paranoid (but in a colorful, obsessive, yet often highly effective way) reporters who once made the journalism profession proud, exciting, and useful, not boring stenography for the power elites.

How bad are things in U.S. intelligence? I refer you to a Jan. 20 Reuters report on the Congressional investigation into the failure to "connect the dots" on the Christmas bomber: the guy who — as just about everybody in the world except U.S. intelligence knew — was trying to blow up a plane. Why?

A senior counterterrorism official said on Wednesday his agency lacks "Google-like" search capability that could have identified the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing.

The National Counterterrorism Center, the agency charged with reviewing disparate data to protect against attacks, does not have a computer search engine that could have checked for various spellings of the alleged bomber's name and his birthplace in Nigeria, the center's chief told a Senate hearing on security reform. "We do not have that exact capacity," said Michael Leiter, adding that the agency is working on solutions that could be in place within weeks.

Don't you love "that exact capacity"? Sort of trying to say they almost have the capacity but not ... exactly. Remember the Hertz commercial in which a junior exec gets some loser car and has to say that it's "not exactly" what he could have gotten from Hertz? I see Michael Leiter pulling up in a DayGlo-painted clown car, his crack team of Google-like computer experts in full clown makeup emerging with their Commodore 64s at the ready saying, "We almost identified the would-be terror bomber, but ... not exactly."

That's the Michael Leiter, by the way, who is our Supreme Chief of Connecting the Dots in our gazillionith reorganization of U.S. intelligence. Yes, that would be the same Michael Leiter who decided after the Christmas bombing attempt to proceed with his previously booked ski vacation. Hey, the "Google-like" capacity wouldn't be available for weeks, so why not spend some cozy time at a ski resort with all the fixings, maybe even some after-dinner Pong or Donkey Kong.

Why this guy hasn't been summarily fired, not just for the vacation (hope the trails were fluffy!) but for the lack of a "Google-like" search capacity for U.S. intelligence is baffling to anyone with any intelligence. And I think it's sufficient evidence that my modest proposal should be taken more seriously. After thinking about my proposal for a few days during my ski vacation, I've come up with some bells and whistles for it.

I wouldn't stop with firing our entire intelligence team (leave behind the slide rules, though, will you guys, before you turn out the lights — or blow out the candles?) and outsourcing their jobs to downsized print journalists. I'd include the unfairly down-played and down-market wings of media that get no respect, like The Enquirer. (Who knew Hugo Chavez had a love child?) I'd enlist the legion of bloggers and even celebrity-gossip Web sites to join in my new U.S. intelligence team. Do you have any doubt that it would take TMZ less than 48 hours to come up with an (alleged) Mullah Omar sex tape? Or for Gawker Stalker to spot OBL at a Kandahar bazaar. Or for Page Six to get the details on the "gymnastic" skills of Vladimir Putin's 20-somethng hottie and link her somehow to Tila Tequila?

I know: J-school ethicists wouldn't approve of this, and I agree with Glenn Greenwald's argument that journalists shouldn't get mixed up in government business, and I've practiced what I preached. (I once turned down a CIA offer to deliver a lecture about Hitler and the nature of evil at their Langley headquarters.) But, hey, do I need to reiterate that this is a "modest proposal" satire remember.

And I wouldn't limit my recruitment to the new CIA (renamed the Creative Intelligence Agency) to just the downsized. Why not unleash some of the still-employed fearsome legends of investigative reporting, like Sy Hersh or Jane Mayer, on our nation's foes? They invariably have ways of outsmarting the CIA's rudimentary secrecy protections, publishing leaks from inside sources. The warrantless wiretaps, the "black flight" illegal renditions of suspects to torture-friendly countries, the "enhanced interrogation" torture program itself, you name it — if the CIA's got a secret, the New York Times and the Washington Post have it a day later.

These reporters have managed to infiltrate the CIA far better than the CIA has infiltrated any terrorist organization. The CIA has compiled a history of failure so replete with lethal blunders that even when a self-proclaimed mole within al-Qaida told them he could get al-Qaida's No. 2 man, al-Zawahiri, they credulously and, alas, tragically got the go-ahead to trust him and ended up losing seven lives because they were so eager to end their relentless run of defeats.

Newsmen have taken such a beating lately from the likes of corporate consultant-racket profiteers such as Jeff Jarvis, who get paid handsomely to tell the executive drones who hire them as consultants that the collapse of the newspaper industry wasn't their fault. No, it was somehow the fault of the reporters they had to fire to maintain their perks, so that these execs don't have to carry anything on their conscience about it. Just keep paying Jeff to tell them fairy tales about the future, and someday they'll find an online business model that really, really works (for Jeff, anyway).

Indeed, my modest proposal might be a morale booster to show the world just how resourceful and skillful and "creative" U.S. reporters can be. I'm not suggesting a Pulitzer Prize for spying. Maybe a Congressional Medal of Honor though. (Kidding!)

Let's face it: The only good secrets our intelligence agencies have are quickly scooped up and published by ace investigative reporters. In fact, any group of people randomly selected from the phone book (or Facebook) could have compiled a better record than our intelligence agencies over the past half-century. They've made us a laughingstock.

Do I need to recount the dismal, abysmal, horrible, very bad record of U.S. intelligence agencies over the past half-century? They may as well have been run by our worst enemies. (Indeed, some paranoia-inclined analysts believe they were run by double agents and moles, but my inclination is to follow the maxim: "Never believe in conspiracies when sheer incompetence provides an explanation.")

You want to see incompetence? Look at the record (or read Tim Weiner's encyclopedic compilation of CIA failures, Legacy of Ashes, for a start). After their hall-of-fame-worthy bungling of the Bay of Pigs, CIA incompetents almost got us into a global nuclear holocaust over the Cuban Missile Crisis, when they assured the Pentagon in October 1962 that the Russians had not yet armed their nukes in Cuba. This turned out to be totally false: The nukes were assembled, armed, and aimed, and Khrushchev had given operational control to Castro already, so that the invasion the Joint Chiefs almost talked JFK into would have almost certainly been an instant Armageddon. Heckuva job, Langley!

Then there's the endemic problem with "connecting the dots" — which dates back to the veritable dot matrix that Lee Harvey Oswald presented, one that the CIA ignored (or siloed as the fashionable new management jargon has it). After all, consider Oswald: a guy who defects to the Soviet Union proclaiming his belief in communism and hatred of America, then redefects to the United States, where he gets deeply involved in violent post-Bay of Pigs CIA-financed intrigue, proceeds to threatens an FBI man who tries to question him, buys a rifle, and happens to work within gun scope range of the presidential motorcade. Nothing much here for the CIA to be concerned about or communicate to the Secret Service watch list, right?

Did all of this have something to do with the CIA being run by elite, WASP, Skull and Bones types who were pitifully easy marks for the darker-skinned people they were trying to control? Yes. But there was also a kind of Higher Stupidity at the CIA that masked itself as "complexity."

You can see this in the whole "molehunt" madness initiated by legendary (for paranoid delusion) James Jesus Angleton, the chief of the CIA's counter intelligence division for two misbegotten decades, who was made a fool of by Kim Philby, the British KGB operative who was perhaps the most obvious mole in history but who appealed to Angleton's Anglophilia, a pathology of most of the upper-class twits who ran the CIA from the beginning. After Philby made a fool of him, Angleton went mad, turned the CIA into a place where the paranoid inmates ran the asylum in their insane hunt for a nonexistent mole, a foolish crusade that utterly paralyzed the agency's chief mission: spying on the Soviets. And so at the height of the Cold War, the CIA had no intelligence it trusted about the Soviets.

Then, when it turned out there were no CIA moles during Angleton's watch, his hypervigilance discredited ordinary, rational vigilance and allowed a blundering creep like Aldrich Ames, a real mole, to steal every secret the CIA had for Soviet cash and cause the death of an untold number of our operatives in Moscow.

And then there was the Team A/Team B fiasco, another profoundly dangerous screw-up. It wasn't a bad idea in theory. George H.W. Bush, head of the CIA under President Ford, was persuaded that there was doubt about CIA estimates of Soviet missile progress, doubt raised by perennial "missile gap" alarmists. He appointed a team of outside "experts" to investigate and offer an alternative analysis, beyond the agency's.

They became known as "Team B" to the CIA's in-house "Team A," and they produced what turned out to be a totally inaccurate overestimate of Soviet capabilities and intentions. (See Cold War historian Pavel Podvig's demolition of Team B's conclusions in the light of history.) Nonetheless, in a kind of forerunner to the WMD fiasco, Team B's paranoid analysis became the basis for the $1 trillion arms buildup during the Reagan administration to match the Soviet's illusory gains. Paradoxically, Team B's overestimation and the insane overspending that resulted may have made them a key factor in causing the collapse of the Soviet Union. The CIA's stunning record of ineptness led to Team B's epoch-making mistake. As Dylan wrote, "There's no success like failure." Though, he added, "Failure's no success at all."

The CIA's post Cold War failures are all too well-known from the WMD fiasco. (CIA head George Tenet famously told the president it was "a slam dunk" they were there. Maybe by "slam dunk" he was thinking of water-boarding and other supereffective "enhanced interrogation" methods that were shamefully adopted by the intelligence community.) And, of course, the entire intelligence community had a hand in producing the now-discredited 2007 National Intelligence estimate on the Iranian nuclear weapons program, which left the credulous media with the impression: nuthin' goin' on.

A record like that, an unprecedented, massive, relentless record of failure deserves only one response: accountability. We've got to fire them all. At the very least, this action would say that failure won't be the new normal forever. But who to replace them with? And who to handle the transition?

My modest proposal may have been engendered by rereading something I wrote a while ago in Harper's ("The Shadow of the Mole," October 1983, subscription only) about the whole Angleton mole madness which mentioned a little noticed Washington conference on "intelligence," sponsored by a shadowy group called "The Consortium for the Study of Intelligence." The conference produced a volume, Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s. In it was a paper by veteran espionage journalist (and Slate contributor) Edward Jay Epstein, who I think should play a key role in managing the transition after we fire the CIA en masse.

Epstein's essay had the forbidding academic-sounding title "Incorporating Analysis of Foreign Governments' Deception Into the U.S. Analytical System." But buried within it was an important distinction between "Type A Deception," which involved manipulation of foreign governments' perception of our overt behavior, and "Type B Deception," which "purports to emanate from the highest levels of decision making" — and might involve journalists staging deception — giving the foe a false impression of our secret, esoteric strategy. I'm not doing its complexity justice.

But there was a key passage in the essay that startled me because it broke out of the gray, bureaucratic prose of most of the volume to raise an imaginative, even cinematic idea: a "Type B Deception" team. "It might conceivably employ functional paranoids, confidence men, magicians, film scenarists or whomever seemed appropriate to simulate whatever deception plots seemed plausible."

"Functional paranoids?" "Confidence men." He might as well be describing the mind and character of our better investigative reporters! I'm not strictly an investigative reporter myself, though I've done a lot of it, and I know a lot of them and I think I know the mind-set. They'd be a perfect fit for replacing our discredited intelligence community.

My first step would be to contact the IRE (the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization) and see whether we can scare up some volunteers. Then I'd ask Ed to be my (wartime) consigliore. We will save America from its external enemies! We will end abusive practices and endless bungles! We will put the dangerous, worse-than-useless CIA out to pasture.

That's my modest proposal.

Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.