According to report from Politico.com, the CIA is allowing agents to do work on the side for the private sector. The new CIA policy will give large companies unprecedented access to the US government’s top intelligence experts.

Some of these active CIA agents did work for a hedge-fund consulting firm in the specialized area of “deception detection”.
Deception detection is a technique used to determine when people are lying based on clues from their conversations.

According to sources at the CIA, the policy is needed to stop the “brain-drain” of intelligence professionals in the agency, who leave for more lucrative jobs in the private sector. Former intelligence agents reportedly can double or triple their government salaries by working for corporations. The policy is intended to let CIA agents earn more money while staying in their government jobs.

So far, the CIA has not provided details as to how many agents have used it; how long the policy has been in place and what types of private sector jobs have been approved by the agency.

Federal employees are typically allowed to take side jobs in the private sector, under tight guidelines, that differ from department to department.

However, close connections between current and former CIA agents and one consulting firm reveal the level to which CIA intelligence techniques are being used by hedge funds and financial corporations.

A Boston consulting firm called Business Intelligence Advisors that specializes in deception detection was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA agents.

Some of Business Intelligence Advisors’ clients include Goldman Sachs and SAC Capital Advisors, according to sources at both companies.

Connections between BIA and the CIA are strong. The BIA name was specifically picked as a play on the CIA.

In fact, there are so many former CIA agents on the BIA payroll at BIA that some people wonder whether BIA is a private-sector extension of the CIA itself.

BIA even uses a disclaimer in some of its corporate materials to clarify that it is not run by the CIA.

Companies can retain BIA for $400,000 to $800,000 per year. BIA’s corporate clients get a variety of business intelligence services like “deception detection”.

BIA employees can teach business managers how to use the CIA’s investigative tools through a program called “Tactical Behavior Assessment.”

Tactical Behavior Assessment lets investigators to detect a person’s lies without hooking them to a polygraph machine. The target never knows that they are being tested for their honesty.

Tactical Behavior Assessment looks for verbal and nonverbal markers that people show when they are lying.

When people lie it causes a mental split in them called “cognitive dissonance,” which causes physical discomfort in them. As a result, when people lie, they tend to show signs of discomfort like squirming, fidgeting and body shifting.

BIA doesn’t just offer TBA training to companies. For a price, BIA employees will do the TBA analysis themselves.

BIA will often use their CIA-trained employees to dissect corporate-earnings conference calls.

Companies rely on these calls to put a good spin on quarterly business activities and future guidance.

BIA uses these question and answer calls to determine if a CEO or CFO is being evasive or lying to investors about the health of their business.

The business intelligence that BIA can gather from these calls is potentially worth millions of dollars to large investment firms that pay for the analysis and reports that BIA produces from these calls.

[ Source: Politico.com ]

PI Magazine will be presenting the 2010 World Investigators Conference from March 11 – 13 in Dallas, TX.

Featured speakers at the conference will be -

John Walsh – Host of America’s Most Wanted TV show.

Jules Kroll – Founder of Kroll & Associates, an investigations, background screening, business intelligence and fraud detection company.

Hank Asher – data mining maverick and creator of the Accurint people search and public records database as well as a new public records database company TLO.

Jimmie Mesis – President of Professional Investigator Magazine.

The 2010 World Investigators Conference will give investigators, security professionals, law enforcement officials and legal professionals a chance to network and learn about the latest investigative technologies and techniques.

The World Investigator Conference is the top event for the people in the investigative profession.

To learn more about the WIC and the registration process, you can visit their site at 2010wic.com.

Wired.com has published an interesting article on the secret lives of some professional secret shoppers, who work for Consumer Reports. It just so happens that the job of a secret shopper is a lot like the jobs of undercover police officers and private investigators.

There are nine full-time and 85 freelance secret shoppers that are part of an undercover shopping network employed by Consumer Reports. Their jobs often require them to make some peculiar purchases under suspicious circumstances that require good acting and explanations with little white lies as well as some tall tales.

There is the time when a secret shopper named “Jon” had to buy 9 pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream with the requirements that all the pints needed to be from the same production line, on the same date.

Jon walks into a supermarket with a Styrofoam cooler filled with dry ice (to keep the ice cream cool), a pair of gloves (to keep his hands warm), and a flashlight (to help him see the indentations on the bottom of the containers that show where and when the ice cream was made). This whole incident required some creative excuse making, when an unhappy stocker approached him as to why he was stacking pints of ice cream all over the store floor.

Consumer Reports tests thousands of products a year and spends millions of dollars purchasing these products. According to the magazine’s strict ethics code, all of these purchases need to be made by secret shoppers. Making large and sometimes strange purchases like these without giving explanations can be a difficult business.

According to the article, Jon once told a salesman that he needed an older model because his mother had Alzheimer’s disease and he couldn’t teach her how to use a newer model. Another time he recalls all the strange looks he received from people when he filled up a shopping cart with condoms. He once excused the purchase of five different washing machines by saying that his landlord dad had given his renters their choice of brands.

And how did he get out of the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream debacle with the angry supermarket stocker? According to Jon — “I go into my Rain Man routine,” he says. “Count the vanilla, count the vanilla, gotta count the vanilla.’ Eventually, the stocker just gives up and walks away. And I get my ice cream.”

Source: Consumer Reports’ Secret Shoppers Have Lots of Explaining to Do.

Portfolio.com has published a lengthy and interesting article on the world of ex CIA agents who are using their “Company” skills to do private-sector spy work for corporations and businesses.

The article discusses numerous current hot topics like pretexting and privacy issues.

From the article –

They’re leaving “the Company” to snoop on your company. How C.I.A. agents are pushing corporate espionage to ominous new extremes.

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The best estimate is that several hundred former intelligence agents now work in corporate espionage, including some who left the C.I.A. during the agency turmoil that followed 9/11. They quickly joined private-investigation firms whose U.S. corporate clients were planning to expand into Russia, China, and other countries with opaque business practices and few public records, and who needed the skinny on international partners or rivals.

These ex-spies apply a higher level of expertise, honed by government service, to the cruder tactics already practiced by private investigators. One such ploy is pretexting—obtaining information by pretending to be somebody else. While private detectives have long posed as freelance reporters or job recruiters to get people to talk, former agents have elevated pretexting to an art.

You can read the Portfolio.com article @ Spy vs. Spy

Since 2003 the pedophile-hunting organization “Perverted Justice” has been responsible for the conviction of 104 child predators. The organization has numerous supporters and critics. Some say the organization cleans up the internet and makes it safer for minors, while others claim it entraps people for entertainment and money.

The New York Times has published an interesting look into the organization (it’s pros as well as cons); how it got started and it’s elusive founder, Xavier Von Erck, in a recent article.

Web Site Hunts Pedophiles, and TV Goes Along