In leaked chat logs, intelligence officials appeared to discuss numerous not safe for work topics, ranging from group sex to explicit sexual fetishes, on an official government message server — and our country’s most notorious spy agency is not pleased.
In a statement to Futurism, the CIA confirmed that it was looking into the newly-revealed chats between spies and seemed to suggest that these exchanges did happen on a government server.
“The messages published today from an NSA messaging platform allegedly involving a CIA official are unacceptable and have no place at the Agency,” Liz Lyons, the CIA’s newly-appointed public affairs director, said in the statement. “The CIA will be taking immediate action on this matter which only further proves the need for serious reform.”
Beyond that confirmation, however, the unfolding story is awfully murky — including that it originated with the conservative muckraker behind the debunked claim that Haitian immigrants were eating cats in Ohio.
In a post on his personal Substack, activist-cum-journalist Christopher Rufo wrote that intelligence officials had provided him with chat logs from Intelink, the National Security Agency’s internal chat server, that showed spies discussing a multitude of topics ranging from gender-affirming surgeries to fetishes, polyamorous relationships, and group sex.
Rufo clearly had an axe to grind, cherry-picking lurid details from the exchanges about pee kinks, anal hair removal and gender-affirming vaginoplasty to wage a vindictive culture war.
Make no mistake: there’s nothing wrong with seeking gender-affirming care, dating polyamorously, or engaging in consensual kinks. But on a professional level, the messages run the gamut from overly personal to egregiously inappropriate for the workplace — and that’s without getting into the fact that these are people working for spy agencies, where they know they could be targets for blackmail.
There’s also a pretty stunning lack of judgment on display from the (mercifully anonymized) agents here as well. If you have to talk about stuff like this with coworkers at an intelligence agency, why not use a medium outside of work?
Unsurprisingly, right-wing media outlets like Fox News and The Daily Wire picked up on Rufo’s story — as did unelected Trump administration official Elon Musk, who suggested the revelations show that “MAJOR housecleaning is needed” at America’s spy agencies.
It’s true that some poor judgment and appalling operational security are on display here — but any failings have nothing to do with the gender identities of any of the spies involved, and everything to do with their failure to keep after-hours conversations out of the workplace.
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