Keeping Us Safer?

There was a time when I wouldn’t have believed this was possible: Ex-FBI Agent Accused Of Security Breach

(CBS/AP) A former agent for the FBI and CIA pleaded guilty Tuesday to faking a marriage to win U.S. citizenship, clearing the way to being hired and given security clearances by the two intelligence agencies.

Nada Nadim Prouty, 37, emigrated to United States from Lebanon in 1989. She was given U.S. citizenship five years later and began working as a special agent at the FBI’s field office in Washington in 1999, according to a criminal information sheet filed in U.S. District Court in Detroit.

While working as a special agent, Prouty improperly searched an FBI computer database for information about her relatives and links they might have to the Hezbollah terrorist organization, the criminal sheet showed. She joined the CIA in 2003 and resigned as part of her guilty plea Tuesday, officials said.

There’s no evidence that Prouty was working as a spy on Hezbollah’s behalf, two government officials said.

What is the point of all of the wiretapping and other invasions of privacy when the agencies that are supposed to the analyzing this crap can’t even screen their own employees properly? How is anyone supposed to believe that adults are in charge when background checks for jobs at both the FBI and the CIA allowed this woman to be hired?

Telling us that there is no evidence that she was working as a spy is not very comforting when there is plenty of evidence she shouldn’t have been hired in the first place. I don’t imagine there are masses of little children in Lebanon who grow up dreaming of becoming FBI agents in the US, but that seemed to have been this individual’s goal.