Axxman300
Philosopher
As I said from the beginning of the post: "Spying is but a part of the broader context I've said: operating domestically."
The C.I.A. does operate domestically.
When they're recruiting people, how do you think that goes? They walk up to someone cold and say, "Excuse me, sir/ma'am, we're from the C.I.A. and we'd like you to work for us." Or do you think they watch their intended target for a bit before approaching?
Recruiting is not "Operating", recruiting is recruiting, just like Apple, Ford, Bank of America does every day.
The CIA recruits just like every other government agency does: online and at job-fairs. You fill out an application, pass a background check, a polygraph test, and then (depending on you're specialty) you go to work.
Now if you're talking about recruiting assets for intelligence gathering that's different. More importantly that all happens overseas...because that's where the foreigners are. They rarely approach subjects due to risk, so they wait to be approached by people offering valuable information. It's not an exact science, and since 2002 they have run into a lot of trouble finding reliable informants in middle eastern countries, the best example being Iraq where they were fed bad information by Saddam's secret police in hopes of confusing the US. Before 2001 there was only 1 CIA operative covering Iraq and he did it from Jordan because Langley and the White House was unwilling to risk being compromised if he got caught.
Hardly the masters of evil black-ops.
Within the US it is the FBI that does the spying, and they have better results because they often have the leverage of prison and crippling fines to get informants to cooperate.
This is just what our domestic Federal agencies have done in California in the past few months:
http://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr
The CIA couldn't compete with the FBI, DEA, BATF, Customs, and the Marshall Service even if they wanted to, and why would they want to.
And this is the big flaw that you and every other CTer ignores when it comes to the CIA. They have their hands full with keeping an eye on the rest of the world, and that is their job. Since they work at the behest of the President and Congress they are often at the mercy of increasingly stupid and corrupt people. The Clinton White House, for example, had changed the direction of the CIA and NSA's focus to industrial espionage, this helped Boeing win a big contract over Airbus and Airbus screamed bloody murder to anyone who would listen that somebody was reading their internal communications...they were right, we were.
At the same time all of this was going on the former KGB Librarian, Vasili Mitrokhin , walked into the US Embassy in Riga hoping to defect and offered hundreds of important documents in exchange.
The CIA told him to go away. So he defected to the British instead.
http://cryptome.org/kgb-lib.htm
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/07/kgb-defector-cold-war-vasil-mitrokhin-notes-public
See, this actually happened. The "Spy World" isn't what you see in movies or read about on the internet. It's mostly hit and miss, and from there it's mostly miss. This why it is impossible for the CIA to be the monster CTers make it out to be, and believe me when I say that they wish they had the capabilities the nut-jobs think that they do.
The CIA has so many blind-spots that it's not funny. Many are politically initiated blind-spots, and others are created by limited access, and limited resources. Before you can speak about the CIA with any authority you have to accept them as what they ultimately are: a United States Government entity, just like the Post Office, just like Social Security, just like Fish & Game. They have good people working there committed to keeping the US out of trouble, and like any government agency they also employ A-holes. The 10% Rule applies.