CIA used illegal snooper cookie

20/03/2002 Written by By Nick Farrell

All a dread­ful mis­take, say spooks
Red­faced CIA spooks have admit­ted using an ille­gal snooper cookie to tail peo­ple who vis­ited its web­site.
The cookie informed the CIA about all the web­sites users vis­ited for years after it was installed on a PC, despite the fact that such per­sis­tent cook­ies are banned by the US government.

The CIA web­site claims that it does not use the cook­ies to gather and store infor­ma­tion about vis­its to its sites.

But the snooper soft­ware was found by Daniel Brandt, pres­i­dent of Pub­lic Infor­ma­tion Research, who explained that he picked up the cookie because he was in a CIA inter­net read­ing room search­ing for pages with par­tic­u­lar ‘secu­rity sen­si­tive’ words.

He believed that the CIA was using the cookie to keep tabs on those whose inter­est in sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion could iden­tify them as secu­rity risks. The cookie would send web browser infor­ma­tion to the CIA every time the user accessed the inter­net.

The CIA admit­ted hav­ing the cookie installed on the site and removed it the instant it was made pub­lic.

A spokesman main­tained that the cookie’s pres­ence was “a mis­take, not inten­tional”. An out­side com­pany had redesigned the read­ing room web­site and installed the soft­ware for web analysis.