CIA Board Determines Staffers Shouldn't Be Punished for Accessing Senate Data - East Idaho News
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CIA Board Determines Staffers Shouldn’t Be Punished for Accessing Senate Data

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Thinkstock 011415 CIASeal?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1421292886672Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — Former Senator Evan Bayh announced the findings of a CIA Accountability Board on Wednesday in regards to the CIA staffers accused of improperly accessing Senate data confined on a classified CIA computer network.

The board determined that the five staffers shouldn’t be punished for their action. The staffers, Bayh explained, “acted reasonably under the complex and unprecedented circumstances involved in investigating a potential security breach in the highly classified shared computer network, while also striving to maintain the sanctity of [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] work product.” Bayh noted that there was no formal agreement or common understanding regarding the procedures to be followed in investigating a security incident in those circumstances.

“Although five non-deliberative SSCI emails were accessed in the course of the investigation into a possible security breach,” Bayh said, the board found those actions “clearly inappropriate,” but “a mistake that did not reflect malfeasance, bad faith, or the intention to gain improper access to SSCI confidential, deliberative material.”

The incident in which the CIA staffers accessed the stand-alone computer network set up for staffers to review documents occurred about a year ago.

The CIA released a statement on Wednesday saying that the agency’s leadership “in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, has accepted the recommendations on accountability.” The board also made a series of recommendations regarding systemic issues.


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