If you have ever been introduced to dynamics of counterintel you know that pretty much, in the end, it’s all rabbit-holes and people wasting each other’s lives, but happy to get paid for thinking they are more clever than someone else, but, in thinking that, suspecting that they’ve been had, that they’ve been baited into that self-congratulations. The rabbit-holes get deeper, more side-tracked, useless, humorous. It’s not good to be tasked with counterintel for more than just a few years. It will catch up with you.
This blog occasionally gets hits from a bot running on a named server of relay301.net.cia.gov [Here]. Any such hit is, in my case, just a courtesy letting me know that some activity required to be noted has in fact been seen. Here’s the actual hit on the blog (that’s my edited tag, of course, but you can look up the IP as in the screen shots at the top of this post):
But why was that bot created with the courtesy of letting me know such activity?
- Bot notices digital activity of interest
- Bot automatically sends a flag to a humint officer
- Bot automatically goes, in my case, weirdly, for a nanosecond to my blog on a named server, so that I see that this CIA bot has had a nanosecond of interest in something (not necessarily on the blog, but somewhere in the digital world)
- Humint officer eventually follows up, or not, but in this case, by rearranging some schedules for a perpetual, interdepartmental program. They must have to replace such humint officers frequently in that they must die of boredom one after the other. What could be of interest? ;-)
Anywho, that bot-hit was at 12:43 PM on Monday, 27 December 2021, one week ago as I write this. There was nothing on the blog for quite a long time that would be of any interest whatsoever to anyone in the CIA. So, maybe my phone? My phone had been turned off for Noon Mass, but that doesn’t stop text messages from piling up. Let’s just see if there’s a coincidental timeline with one of those conversations that could have set our friendly bot into action. Note that it takes a full 15 minutes for me to turn the phone back on so as to answer the first volley of this text conversation, my response about being able to be gone in the middle of the week coming in at 12:40 PM:
Checking my watch is just a habit I picked up, you know, whenever I hear a gun shot in the neighborhood or what not. Always.
Just some humor there. Sorry. But to get into and complete this text conversation, with both parties busy with other things, took a couple of minutes. The first mention of air travel comes in at 12:42 PM, and then it was over. The bot visited this blog just one minute later with no referring link, 12:43 PM. Too quick for a human being.
Is it that this bot was set up to notice chatter anywhere involving air travel and myself, and then sends a flag to some nice analyst, and then knocks out a visit to the blog that I will notice?
This isn’t the first time. I remember inquiring about a ticket for ATL-FCO (Atlanta, GA to Rome, Italy) to meet up with Pope Francis and his new Missionaries of Mercy five or six years ago. The nice travel agent said, “Yes, well, let me just type in your passport number to see if you’re on a no-fly list, sir.” Not the usual practice by any travel agent in a back-mountain town that I remember, but, yes, that would be interesting. I noted the time of the inquiry, as is my practice. She was encountering a bit of weirdness while she was online, but then it appeared that I was good to go for air travel. When I checked my stats for the blog for no particular reason when I got back home, I noted this same CIA relay301 had visited my blog at the time of that inquiry about whether or not I was on a no-fly list, all too quick for human intervention, and again about air travel.
There’s nothing mysterious about any of this for me, as Ambassador […] of “Main” State (DoS Foggy Bottom), sent me a two page letter speaking of this weirdness back in July of 1992, already many years into this game.
So, whatever… All the same, I am spending time on writing about this, I suppose to see if anyone can explain the whys and wherefores of this particular bot dynamic. That letter from Main State signaled accompaniment for me in my travels. That takes freakish resources to accomplish. Bots help. The accompaniment has always been there. That’s on them. But, why let me know about it?
ARISE! LET US BE GOING! 