CIA: ‘We don’t know where Tupac is’

The CIA swears that it does not know whether rapper Tupac is alive and where he might be.

It also hasn’t kept track of passwords that people might have forgotten, but it would be willing to take a picture with Ellen DeGeneres, if she visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

Also, it’s hiring.

{mosads}The humorous messages were part of a stream of Twitter posts on Monday marking the spy agency’s first month on the social media service. They come as a sign that it’s sticking with a tongue-in-cheek public posture rare for official government public relations outlets, especially ones as sober as the CIA.  

Last month, the spy agency took the social network by storm with a joke about its notorious secrecy.

“We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet,” the agency tweeted, a message widely shared on the service.

At the same time, the agency launched its official Facebook page, which has proven to be a more conventional outlet for agency public relations messages and sharing historical anecdotes.  

The twin moves were intended to make the covert agency more accessible to the public, though critics quickly chided it for making light of its lack of transparency.

According to the CIA, its messages on Monday were meant to answer the five “top questions” asked by the public, and quickly made the rounds online.

Within minutes of the Tupac tweet, for instance, the message — “No, we don’t know where Tupac is” — was shared by Twitter users more than 10,000 times.