start the weekend with a sad shake of the head and a chuckle

Being the terminally curious idiot I am, I wondered what kind of stuff I might find in the CIA Electronic Reading Room
http://www.foia.cia.gov/

It is hard to find any of the kind of documents I am interested in (science and technology). The CIA produce wonderful World Factbooks http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html each year, which are a veritable goldmine of knowledge. They also produce maps, though the publicly available ones don't seem too great. But those things aren't in the reading room.

Looking through their Electronic Reading Room it makes me wonder at the kind of mindset of those in the CIA. I'd generally considered them a group with a warped, paranoid outlook, but made up of individuals who honestly did want to do the "right" thing. But the publications released in the reading room make me revise that estimation to consider them rather more obsessive and dangerously paranoid.

Here is one of the more silly items there:
MINISTRY TO STUDY PSYCHIC POWERS, UFO' S FOR FUTURE INDUSTRY Created: 2/19/1993
http://www.foia.cia.gov/docs/DOC_0000112348/0000112348_0001.gif
http://www.foia.cia.gov/docs/DOC_0000112348/0000112348_0002.gif

But most of the stuff is just paranoid, political, us-against-them, threat-evaluation stuff.
I guess we need paranoiac obsessives, but should they have vast budgets at their disposal? Of course they would argue that they perform a service of protecting against other paranoiac obsessives. But I guess the problem really is who do they protect?

At least they are opening up some of their (old) secrets.

I wonder if ASIO and the Signals Directorate in Australia are exposing any of their sicko secrets. Somehow I doubt it.