Meh... am I supposed to hate the CIA and the rest of the military-industrial-espionage complex any less because of a cheery article about their Starbucks store? If anything, I now think less of Starbucks as a company, for knowing that they agreed to such a setup.<p>I mean, yeah, maybe I'm being overly sensitive and care too much about torture, detention camps, pervasive surveillance, blatant disregard of the Constitution, illegal experiments on unwitting victims, and the other myriad crimes committed by these assholes, but this article does nothing to give me the warm fuzzies.
Interesting article. The CIA sounds like a terrible place to work. No smartphones, definitely no BYOD, and you can't talk to coworkers about your projects. You don't even know if you have old friends who work at the same place.<p>The benefits and pay are probably decent, but it seems like one could find a better job in the private sector. I guess the restrictions weed out a lot of people who aren't truly dedicated to the CIA's purpose.
> The baristas go through rigorous interviews and background checks and need to be escorted by agency “minders” to leave their work area<p>I would have expected the baristas to be actual CIA agents in training. Barista is a job available all over the world. Starbucks itself has locations in 65 countries, covering most of North and South America, most of Europe, and most of Asia. They also have pretty good coverage in the Mideast and Arab regions. Map here [1]. Being able to be planted in a coffee house as a barista and pull that off without suspicion would be a useful skill for an undercover agent trying to monitor what's going on in an area.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbucks#Locations" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbucks#Locations</a>
>>“But giving any name at all was making people — you know, the undercover agents — feel very uncomfortable. It just didn’t work for this location.”<p>>> There are no frequent-customer award cards, because officials fear the data stored on the cards could be mined by marketers and fall into the wrong hands, outing secret agents.<p>What? CIA agents don't like a real-name policy or their coffee consumption being mined by marketers? Who'da thought.
Not a spook, but it bugs me also when I'm asked to give my name to identify an order.<p>I have an unusual name that people find difficult to pronounce and spell. Meanwhile, there are five Matts behind me who have each ordered different things. All six of us have to keep visual attention on the service area so we can identify our stuff when it comes out, because I won't know whose name they're trying to call and latte-Matt has been assigned the same identifier as sandwich-Matt.<p>It bugs me even more that stores adopt this as a mark of "friendliness". It's not friendly, it's presumptuous, rude and inconvenient. I'll happily chat to the staff and exchange names when it's quiet, but don't make them try and learn mine when they're flat out doing their job. Just give me a number, or call out what I ordered - both practices vendors have been following successfully for thousands of years.
So the moral of the story is secret agents get uncomfortable when a barista asks to put their name on a cup? These people sound super easy to spot in a crowd.
I wonder if it is cash only. Credit card transactions would also be revealing to interested parties. If there ever was a time for the "Company" to pick up the tab, this would be one just to prevent the data leak to the outside world.
I imagine that a similar process happens for pretty much all mundane jobs in sensitive locations. Sure, people think about the process to recruit high-level personnel for CIA and NSA positions... but what about the janitors, truck drivers, plumbers, and warehouse personnel?<p>I imagine that these people are paid pretty well for their positions, as they're not being paid for their skills; they're being paid for trustworthiness.
"...[CIA employees]can’t fiddle with their smartphones during downtime. For security, they have to leave them in their cars."<p>Pay no attention to the guy just outside the fence remotely rooting them all. Heh.
Isn't Starbucks Store #1 at Pike Place in Seattle? That seems like it would be suspicious; wouldn't it be better to borrow the store number of the one inside the Safeway or something?
Surprised Starbucks got more points than the CIA museum
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8370849" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8370849</a>
an intelligence agency. that specializes in proxies. failing sutton's law. who would've guessed..<p>wait for it..'thanks, your ORDER NUMBER is #'<p>ta-da!