CIA to Kids: I Spy, You Spy

[David Honig <honig@alum.mit.edu>]

Wednesday April 22 3:57 PM EDT 

CIA to Kids: I Spy, You Spy

By Jim Wolf 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Central Intelligence Agency has unveiled a World
Wide Web site aimed at introducing the spy game to the
kindergarten set. 

The CIA's "Home Page for Kids" at www.odci.gov/cia/ciakids, features
geography quizzes, interactive disguise games and thumbnail sketches of
cloak-and-dagger figures dating back to the Revolutionary War against
Britain. 

It also showcases "Who We Are and What We Do," a very basic primer on
intelligence-gathering and analysis. 

"What we're really trying to do is encourage kids to use computers, explore
geography and give them an understanding of what the CIA does," said Anya
Guilsher, an agency spokeswoman. 

"We're also putting a human face on the people who work here," she said. 

The section on those behind the scenes opens with a shot of a woman
possibly meant to personify the CIA's vision of the American James Bond for
the
late 1990s. 

Slender, smiling and black, she is conservatively dressed in a white blouse
and smartly tailored outfit. Other pages give a glimpse of an espionage
operation, complete with a man wearing dark glasses and a trench coat. 

"If you worked in the Directorate of Operations, you would like to travel
and have a great curiosity about the world and its different cultures,"
reads the
text in the People section. 

"You would like to work with people from all over the world, be able to
adapt to any situation (especially dangerous ones!), be well educated, know
other languages, be good at working at with other kinds of people, and be
courageous, well disciplined, and able to accept anonymity," it says. 

The text goes on to explain that such undercover operatives -- whose job
typically includes recruiting foreigners to steal secrets for the United
States --
know they will toil chiefly in the twilight. 

"The rewards for the officer are the knowledge that he or she contributed
to the security of our country and is recognized by his or her peers," the
text
adds. 

The site lays out the work of the CIA's other three branches as well --
those analyzing intelligence for policymakers, solving science and technology
challenges ("To work beyond the state of the art every day is normal in
this directorate") and administering the CIA's estimated 16,000 full-time U.S.
employees and its $3 billion budget. 

One fringe benefit of the site, which went online last month, is that it
helps CIA personnel explain their jobs to their kids, said Karen Gilbert,
an agency
public affairs specialist who was part of the four-woman design team. 

"Finally people who work here now have a way to talk to children about what
they do here," she said in an interview at CIA headquarters in the
Washington suburb of Langley, Virginia. 

To appeal to children as young as six, the designers picked the CIA's
bomb-sniffing canine corps of Black Labradors and Belgian Shepherds to conduct
"first-person" tours of the CIA's leafy campus. The site will be updated
regularly. 

The Web site, which the agency said has been receiving as many as 950
visits a day, contains links to the CIA's signature World Factbook and the
agency's main Web page, said to get almost two million "hits" a month. 

The kid page has nothing to do with recruiting future U.S. spies, the
agency said. But job-seekers can read about pay and benefits by clicking on
the
employment tab on the main site. 

It stems from an executive order last April 19 in which President Clinton
told federal agencies to match White House efforts to put more educational
material online for children. 

The CIA effort, hardened against would-be hackers and housed on computers
separate from those used for its sensitive work, was done on "a real
shoestring budget," said Gilbert. 


http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/top_stories/story.html?s=z/reuters/9804
22/news/stories/cia_2.html



------------------------------------------------------------
      David Honig                   Orbit Technology
     honig@otc.net                  Intaanetto Jigyoubu

	"But if we have to use force, 
	it is because we are America;
	we are the indispensable nation." 
		---Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright