There is no indication that Trump has a firm grasp on security, either its means or purpose, and consequently doesn’t take it seriously. Even so, a demand that the CIA send over a list of its new hires over the past two years by unsecured email would seem too stupid for even the most fanatic DOGEBoy. Not so, apparently.

The C.I.A. sent an unclassified email listing all employees hired by the spy agency over the last two years to comply with an executive order from President Trump to shrink the federal work force, in a move that former officials say risked the list leaking to adversaries.

The list included first names and the first initial of the last name of the new hires, who are still on probation — and thus easy to dismiss. It included a large crop of young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China, and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are constantly seeking to identify them.

The putative purpose of the list was to identify new employees hired pursuant to the CIA’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiative. On the surface, it seems reasonable to question whether the CIA hired new personnel because of merit and need or because they checked woke boxes. The problem is that given the CIA’s job, it may be impossible to distinguish between someone hired because of some marginalized status from someone hired because they fill a need, such as spies of Chinese ancestry to spy in China. You know, it works a lot better when spies blend.

It’s also necessary for the CIA to hire analysts with cultural knowledge of various places around the world. Much as I hate to admit it, I’m really not qualified to serve as an analyst on the Ghana desk, even though the CIA tried to recruit me many years ago to fight Ivan and Igor. There are damn good reasons to have personnel of African ancestry to provide a depth of understanding of cultural mores. And this is true pretty much everywhere, even if they happen to have skin color or religion that DEI advocates might prefer.

And then there’s women, and even gay and lesbian people, because they too fill a niche that’s critical to the CIA function. And they check some boxes, but that doesn’t make their utility to the CIA and the nation any less critical. It can be very hard, if not impossible, to distinguish between DEI hires and new-hires who fill critical needs within the CIA.

But sending their names by unsecured email?

Surprisingly, the Trump admin didn’t deny any of this, but just said they were sure it was no big deal.

Current officials confirmed that the C.I.A. had sent the names of employees to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, complying with an executive order signed by President Trump. But the officials downplayed security concerns. By sending just the first names and initials of the probationary employees, one U.S. official said, they hoped the information would be protected.

That, of course, is fucking nonsense:

One former agency officer called the reporting of the names in an unclassified email a “counterintelligence disaster.”

[…..]

[F]ormer officials scoffed at the explanation, saying that the names and initials could be combined with other information — from driver’s license and car registration systems, social media accounts and publicly available data from universities that the agency uses as recruiting grounds — to piece together a more complete list.

Any competent intelligence operation – like, say, China’s – can easily cross-reference this information with publicly available data and standard OSINT techniques to identify these recruits. It’s literally Intelligence 101. 

A former agency officer called this a “counterintelligence disaster.” According to Jim Hynes, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, the White House “insisted” that the transmission of the names be by unsecured email. Whether there was a reason for this is unknown. Even if there was a reason, it’s almost certainly not a good reason as there can be no good reason to needlessly expose the names of the CIA’s personnel.

And there was no good reason to seek the list in the first place.

Apparently, the reason that the admin wanted this list is because they’re basically trying to get a huge portion of the CIA to quit (they just offered the highly questionable mass resignation offer to the CIA), and they’re so completely terrified of the word “diversity” that they’ve decided the most recent hires are “DEI.”

To say the Trump administration is “terrified” of the word “diversity” might not quite be right. More precise would be that “diversity” presents the perfect target to gain cheap applause from the base. By characterizing any person or thing Trump wants to vilify (think the Black Hawk helicopter crash where Trump immediately blamed “diversity” in the absence of any information upon which to suggest diversity was to blame) as “diversity,” he scores points with the simpletons. But at the expense of national security?

An endemic problem with the shallow approach of Musk/DOGE is that while there may well be waste, fraud and abuse throughout the federal government, there are also critical functions being performed that can’t be “paused” without being compromised or eliminated without causing extreme harm. Distinguishing between what’s good and bad, and what may well have components of both that are nearly impossible to separate, is hard work.

Even so, revealing the identities of CIA hires to exposure is too stupid for words, even if the balance of the process of vetting staff for “diversity” required a depth of understanding that neither Trump nor the Muskies possessed.