Mother Jones:

The CIA probably doesn't want you to know this, but unmasking its covert operatives isn't as hard as you'd think. Just ask John Sifton. During a six-year stint at Human Rights Watch, the attorney and investigator was hot on the trail of the CIA and some of its most sensitive Bush-era counterterrorism programs, including extraordinary rendition, secret Eastern European detention sites, and the legally dubious and brutal methods used to extract information from detainees. "Even deep-cover CIA officers are real people, with mortgages and credit reports," Sifton once told CQ Politics. For researchers with a trained eye for the hallmarks of a CIA alias, there are obvious giveaways: "A brand new Social Security number, a single P.O. box in Reston, Virginia. You disregard those and focus on the real persons who lie behind, and you can find them."

Sifton's talent for uncovering the CIA's secrets may have served him well—but now, it also has set off a firestorm in the human rights community, prompted a backlash from congressional Republicans, and helped trigger a federal investigation headed by none other than Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame affair...

With the CIA pressing the Justice Department to act, Attorney General Eric Holder added Fitzgerald to the investigation. It was a painful blow: Some human rights activists had hoped the administration would appoint Fitzgerald to run a wide-ranging investigation of the Bush-era torture practices. Instead, he'd been chosen to investigate the torture critics.