First of all, it's difficult to look for a job when you're in Djibouti (I don't think he was... but he did serve in some seriously nasty places). It's also not easy to leave if you are, like most CIA staffers, overseas most of the time... you don't have a lot of US contacts (because you don't live in the USA) and you don't have a base of operations. Thirdly, you might not find it surprising to discover that there is not much of a one-to-one mapping of job requirements for a former CIA officer moving into the job market in the USA.

But I think the biggest reason is that, like many people, hope springs eternal and most assignments are just 2 or 3 years long. And while they weren't always "happy" they were not always unhappy; if that makes any sense. Also, the longer you stay with the Agency the easier it is to adapt to a new area and it's a small cadre of staff officers (most of the Afghanistan and Iraq "CIA" people are contractors not staffers); every station you go to you find old friends. And everyone hopes for that dream job in Paris or Rio or Buenos Aires. The Agency knows all this so they dish out a plum assignment now and then so you get to live in a house and not an apartment for a couple of years. And even get rotated back to the USA where the HQ types are all getting promoted to division chief spots.

And the life wears on you, for sure. Kids come home from school and say, "Daddy.... Bobby says you'rr a CIA agent... are you?" And your college pals (and in-laws, often) think you're a flake who can't keep a job. Plus the possible dangers your family face. The Soviet KGB and the CIA maintained a clear "family is off-limits" policy but modern terrorists have no such scruples.

It's not like the movies.

A friend of mine who retired from CIA after 26 years once told me that his family was only happy for six of those years... and not six consecutive years. Cut off from family and friends back home and in contact only by letters and the occasional "home leave" of a month or two, he was trying to fit back in to the country he spent his life trying to serve (back in the days when the Agency was less of an operational force and more of an intelligence gathering organization). I can see how Facebook would have made their lives more enjoyable with all the family and friends news (and even minutia). I'm sure it's a security risk par excellance but I can certainly understand why they'd do it. And I can especially understand why a wife, stuck inside an apartment in Djibouti trying to order six months of canned food from Denmark, might.

I don't expect Slashdot readers to grok it, though.

I didn't read beyond the first page but I can't see that you made any egregious mistakes. You are, in short, correct that the "private" IP addresses are not to be routable. Apparently this is commonplace. I wonder how many VPNs have broken down because of this. Just goes to show you that you should pick a private IP subnet way out of the way of the first 100 or so.

Thanks for your post. :)

I had a VPN customer on CenturyLink and a previous network engineer had put their home office LAN on 192.168.1.xxx (which is pretty common). The outlying offices were on 10.x.x.x subnets. One day, suddenly, no one could reach the home office file server. I discovered that there was a whole collection of computers with 192.168.1.xxx addresses on the WAN side of the routers. This, of course, broke the VPN links. He didn't just have them on that subnet but he had addressed one as 192.168.1.1 and up through a numerical sequence. When I finally got through to the chief admin guy (in Portland, OR) and told him he had internal IP addresses on a routable network he responded that the WAN side of our network was his INTERNAL network and he saw nothing wrong with putting a bunch of servers on those IP addresses. Nothing could convince him otherwise, either... because he was studying to take his Cisco Certified Network Administrator test.

We readdressed the home office (that was fun!) and then moved to a better provider; one who at least would listen.

LOL... ok... you get the vote! :)

Why would Bill Gates invest in Apple if Jobs admitted that Apple wouldn't survive long enough to win a patent lawsuit against MS anyway? Something's fishy. Gates could just wait 'em out and let Apple go away and gobble up the patents. Must be something more to the story.

But I have no trouble believing that MS was infringing... I don't think they (or, probably, anyone else back then) paid much attention to "patents". They were paying more attention to copyright but even then, not very much.

I bought one for our motor home... $58 at Costco!!!

Good link. Not many seem to find this issue significant. I'm amazed at the irony of selling booze and gasoline at the same outlet and then being surprised that so many people drink and drive.

So who was the rocket scientist who decided to sell alcohol products where people buy fuel for their cars?