The output of the intelligence community is surprisingly low. One director of the NSA said, pre-9/11, that the whole organization generated about one important result every two days, one that was acted upon.
The output of the US's domestic anti-terrorism effort is low for the resources invested. Most of the FBI's terrorism arrests are wannabes. They get a report of somebody mouthing off in a bar or mosque, crank up a sting operation, get some dummy to go through the motions of trying something, and claim they've stopped a terrorist.
The DoD/CIA operation to find foreign terrorist leaders and kill them seems to have paid off. Anybody identified as a major leader in Al-Queda has a short life expectancy.
So, after several wars, a couple of occupations, and tons of drone killings, and several trillions spent, all the stronger country in the world has managed was to "reduce the life expectancy" of major leaders in an third world backwater organisation? And help foster another similar enemy (ISIS) in the process?
I find it amusing to consider the NSA/FBI thinks various terrorist groups have masterminded a plan and are closing in, while terrorist groups think similarly about the NSA/FBI's SIGINT infrastructure and capability; when in fact they're both hilariously unorganised and just trying really, really hard, like a real-life parallel to Spy Vs Spy
And so it seems that the currently effective terrorists attacks are the simplest ones, where you don't have to communicate or coordinate too much, or acquire some very unusual hardware (like explosives).
I wonder why a more common tactic isn't to simply ride a lot of busses until one of them is packed full while driving on the highway at full speed, then launching at the steering wheel to turn it basically any direction...Sounds like a pretty good chance of a pile up and lots of casualties, with no evidence the perpetrator is anything other than a normal passenger until it's too late.
because the goal of terrorism is awareness that there are evil assholes out there.
they want to get caught. the casualties are a means to an end. if you just kill a bunch of people without anyone noticing it, nothings been gained in terms of effective terrorizing.
terrorists want to be freddy krueger, not the rollercoaster from final destination.
How is it any different from suicide bombing tho? The terrorist organizations can still take credit for the bus-on-highway-terror just like they take credit posthumously for the suicide bombings.
Yeah. Actually, your idea is even scarier than the usual attacks, because with suicide bombers you can at least expect them to be discovered given enough police and intelligence resources (if by need of controlling the flow of ingredients to explosive substances). But otherwise random people causing unexpected public transport crashes? That would be literally terror.
Nobody taking them seriously is the only way to stop them. Compare with people starting to take them seriously, which brought us at least three country-destroying wars, trillions of dollars of waste, and the erosion of citizen rights in the whole western world - all within last two decades.
> remember what happened last time nobody took them seriously? a generation of conspiracy nutters was born.
I think that it's my fault, but I honestly don't know what you're referring to. 9/11? The Kennedy assassinations? In any case, how does not taking terrorists seriously create conspiracy theorists?
I recently finished reading Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner, a history of the CIA. He basically argues that the entire organization has been marked by incompetence and politics throughout history. It was really eye-opening to me to hear that the mysterious organization behind all conspiracy theories is mostly smoke and mirrors. Cue the old adage regarding malice and stupidity.
I read Tim Weiner's book 10 years ago...it was great. Am currently reading his book on the FBI. To my delight Audible managed to get the same narrator.
At the time I was pretty shocked how bad it was at the COA, but then I realized...the CIA is really just a metaphor for how large organizations everywhere run. A good example is how assignments are given out in the CIA. Your career progression very much depends on which region you get assigned to, or which embassy you get official cover wth. Very similar to say how sales territories are handed out and fought over at regular corporations.
Having just left a 100k+ person company, I can tell you it's a miracle of organization that a company that big can function. It's kind of like seeing a person weighing 1000 pounds trying to walk, or a 125 yr old man try to cross the street. The fact that they can exist / operate is awe-inspiring, expecting them to do anywhere near a good job seems to be out of the question. Obviously there are exceptions to this, and I hope more of them appear later on.
If you work at a big company though please don't be discouraged. It's almost impossible to have good processes for a company that big as mentioned
above, so things are, ironically, even more dependent on people's actions and personal leadership.
> To my delight Audible managed to get the same narrator.
Stefan Rudnicki (the narrator) is an absurdly good narrator. He regularly narrates the Lightspeed Magazine podcast, a sci-fi short story podcast, if that perchance interests you.
Laurence J. Peter: "In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties" [the corollary:] "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence."
He makes a case but two things: (1) Weiner obviously has an axe to grind in his polemic, and (2) we hear much more about the CIA's failures than its successes. But definitely during the cold war the russians smoked us in espionage.
Pick the team that finishes last in any sporting tournament and you hear more about their failures than their successes. The usual response is "Well what successes?" So it would seem to be with the CIA. The USA is hugely and massively successful and the CIA hides its disaster laden, failure after failure after horrendous outcome in secrecy.
What success did the CIA have, ever? List their failures is so easy, I'll start with the ajax revolution and Pinochet, both occasions where if the CIA had done nothing the world would be better and the USA stronger.
Yes, of their actual job they probably do very little. This is already part of being secret and fighting secrets. Being secret means there is no way you need to follow any standards or reviews. So your work ethic must not be very high. And fighting secrets is hard. You can even see that when working in a team of considerable size (e.g. 10+ people). It's hard even to track all the open, important and even marketed information. Think about how many actual secrets there are that are kept by people who really try.
But there are other things these agencies do wonderfully.
A) When you have a real hint, and even if it is just a competitor, you can employ lots of fighting power, technology etc to track them. This in itself is already worth much. Think about bugging another country's chancelor's phone. Awesome!
B) Scaring your own population into behaving. If you think you are observed all day by CIA, FBI and NSA you are more likely to do stupid things that harm the common piece.
C) Doing things that would be illegal for the government, like funding dictatorships delivering weapons to drug lords, etc.
So I think even if everybody knows that spies don't really succeed as much as people thought we will still continue to have spy agencies.
> Being secret means there is no way you need to follow any standards or reviews. So your work ethic must not be very high.
I don't know if you are right or wrong, but your statement sounds to me almost exactly like the one that I hear from religious zealots about atheists: "No one to answer to, therefore, no morals or ethics".
There is a point of view from which this makes sense: Since there is no standard code, everyone is free to choose their own; It's a question of what likelihood you assign a-priori for ethics and morals to be chosen, and a question of empirical data as well, which likely no one has, so no statement can be disproved and everything is "equally right". (Was this paragraph about spies or about atheists?)
Except you are mixing individuals with groups. The NSA is not an individual. It's an entity that has no moral, composed of thousand of people with their own agenda, and nothing to check what's going on.
No, I was talking about the individuals working for the NSA, for which my statement is not confused at all.
And I took "they" in the GP post to mean "the people who work for the NSA" although it possibly refers to the NSA itself - in which case, it is also true of any large corporation -- composed of thousands of people with their own agenda, no morals and very little to check what's going on in many respects -- see, e.g. pharma pricing.
In any case the major point I was trying to make is that spy agencies have side gigs that are so attractive to the governments that the spy agencies will keep their position, even if they don't do their main job well.
Even if you don't believe god is watching you you're still living in a society - if you want to be a part of it you have to follow the rules. With secrecy social repercussions go away.
Everyone has some moral instincts (social animals and all that) but those can be overridden with right incentives.
>I don't know if you are right or wrong, but your statement sounds to me almost exactly like the one that I hear from religious zealots about atheists: "No one to answer to, therefore, no morals or ethics".
Which is not far from true.
Morals one makes for themselves ("personal moral code") are not morals proper. They could just as well include that's its ok to kill kittens for fun (to give a silly example) -- that they don't is mostly thanks to their idiosyncrasy.
>There is a point of view from which this makes sense: Since there is no standard code, everyone is free to choose their own;
Ha, haven't read your second paragraph while replying to the first, but basically, yes, this.
That's a new definition then, because for millennia morals were derived from exactly those "externally enforced behaviours": from religion, society, culture, etc.
The personal codes someones makes on their own can be anything and everything ("shit on everybody to get rich" is a perfectly valid code that millions use). Nobody would call that "moral" though -- because precisely morals are those beyond the individual whims (though whether an individual follows them its their choice).
Personal principles someone follows are only fit to be called morals if they follow an extended, external, moral code. Which might change over time, and be culture-specific, but it's not "whatever I say".
As far as one can tell, social animals show something equivalent to morals in every experiment we can devise -- and in the vast majority of cases, it is not a learned trait (elephants being the best known counterexample in that their cultural norms and morals are indeed learned).
We can't really experiment with humans, but the few experiments that have cleared ethical committees, it appears that babies as young as 6 months have a sense of equality and justice, see e.g. [0]
> Being secret means there is no way you need to follow any standards or reviews. So your work ethic must not be very high.
I'm not following the link between "you don't need standards/reviews" and "your work ethic must not be very high" -- could you elaborate, please? Or was this a typo?
Standards are a set of procedures to cooperate and provide a certain level of minimum quality. For many single person hackers not having standards may result in much better quality, but for teams of people who do this because they need to pay rent the quality is always pointed towards the possible minimum, not maximum. Therefore standards usually improve the work of paid teams.
But standards aren't followed per se. Only when your activities are logged and public do you even try (you=normal human being working a day job). But only when ass-kicking or termination of regular payment is feared do people really care about the details. And these usually come from reviews.
So if you have neither standards, nor public exposure (forgot that one), nor reviews your team's quality is probably low.
The same argumentation is usually used to argue that people have to be in the office or they won't do work - it's wrong in that case, it is wrong in this case. People often do good work without being forced to.
Based on my life experience it is absolutely true that average people work much less if not in an office or other organized workplace. Many times even by their own accounts.
This does not mean that there is a minority that can work wherever, or that work even better at home. It all depends on their interest, on the job etc.
But yes, offices provide a lot of productivity boosts.
I went from a private office to an open office and worked there for two years a while back. One of my fears going in was that the increased visibility would force people to work more, but in the end it seemed like there was a silent agreement that we'd all turn a blind eye to the fact we were all working six hour days, including the boss...
If morale is high, people are motivated (like a nonprofit working for a praiseworthy cause) and there are other feedback mechanisms (like market forces in a startup) then you don't need your employers to be in an office, constantly monitored.
Well, I can only say I'm happy you made this experience. In no company I worked until now I could see this. The quality was always horrible, and only carrot&stick could at least improve it to bearable.
It seems you've worked in some horrible companies - good luck in finding better ones in the future. (no sarcasm intended, I really think it's horrible if the only option to get colleagues to work is carrot&stick)
This comment is more amusing than educational, but for anyone who hasn't already, I recommend watching the Coen Brothers movie Burn After Reading.
When you watch it, you get the strong sense that this, rather than Jason Bourne or James Bond, is the movie that comes the closest to depicting what the intelligence community is actually like: nobody knows anything and everyone's bumbling about helplessly while they pretend to be omniscient, except they have a lot of leeway to (figuratively and literally) bury the bodies when things go sideways.
I had no idea! That's reason enough for me to watch the first part of Veep then. The commercials had implied it was all cartoonish, but I should have known that's always the way of commercials.
The older I get, the more I realize: pretty much every organization everywhere is highly flawed in some (usually many) ways. This has been an extremely useful observation in my career and life, and I have found exactly zero exceptions.
This ignores the fact that we live in a time like no other where there is nearly ubiquitous and instantaneous digital communication infrastructure available in many regions which is accessible to all but the poorest of citizens.
It is very possible that epic conspiracies were easier to complete in the past as the ability to leak and disseminate information to a wide audience was far more difficult.
i think to reach the level of a conspiracy theory, you need a lot of people doing something outrageous. for instance, if you have the army, the navy and fbi and the russian kgb (or whatever they're called nowadays) in cahoots without a single leak for twenty-five years, that's improbable.
i tend not to buy conspiracy theories because they usually need a leak which doesn't exist. for instance, my brother is a 911 truther. in his opinion, a civil engineer saying "that's impossible" establishes it as a conspiracy. in mine, the fact that no-one from the pentagon has said "haha, and we cut up that plane and put it in the building, it was amazing, look come here check out my emails" when he was drunk establishes it as the real deal.
I have no horse in this race, but you are not more logical than your brother.
First of all, "conspiracy theory" is often taken to mean one of the tinfoil variety ("government and gay aliens experiment with mind control beams" style, or "immortality treatment hidden by pharma for the last 100 years in attempt to increase profits and for eugenic purposes"). But a "conspiracy" simply means an act of collusion done secretly which contrasts with public statements or the law (or is generally harmful). Thousands of these happen every day in various scales. Assuming that you can trust government statements is, based on history, naive. So, do you have a different term for "small conspiracy I accept happens all the time"? Because your rhetoric seems to exclude these from existing.
With respect to the (missing) 9/11 leak, there are countless stories that came out decades after happening. "Establishing it as the real deal" based on the lack of a leak makes to me about as much sense as a statement from a fellow truther (however well informed in his subject matter) establishing it as a lie.
A conspiracy theory typically involves a pretty large group of people doing something big to deceive a massive group of people.
Like a faked moon landing, a large false flag operation like 9/11, or a hillary clinton/democratic party death squad murdering leakers.
Has anything like this ever happened in all of history? The whole snowden thing is the best example I can think of but I don't remember actually being surprised when that came out. Maybe if hitler burned down the reichstag? I don't think that was ever proved though and I'm not sure how many people would really need to be involved in something like that.
> A conspiracy theory typically involves a pretty large group of people doing something big to deceive a massive group of people.
> ... death squad murdering leakers.
Two people are enough to conspire. And to claim (as you did, if I understand correctly) that you need a "large group of people" to hire an assassin to take out one person is irrational, and I believe contradicts a lot of well documented court cases involving organized crime.
> Has anything like this ever happened in all of history? The whole snowden thing is the best example I can think of but I don't remember actually being surprised when that came out.
I wasn't surprised either; but I do remember tens of people I interact with changing, practically overnight, from telling me "you are paranoid, they only listen to bad guys" to "of course, we've always known that". Most people remember always being on the right side of history, even when they demonstrably weren't.
It has happened countless times. The Enigma code breaking story involved tens, perhaps hundreds, deceiving hundreds of millions, for over 30 years; When the secret did get out (officially; no leaks involved), it was a huge surprise.
There are tens of others if you care (I don't have time to list), but ... do you really believe that whatever Snowden informed the world of ONLY started with the things documented in his leaks, and that it ONLY concerned the NSA? That would be the irrational position. (Stated another way: the snowden leak might be unprecedented in depth and breath. But the operations it exposes aren't)
> Two people are enough to conspire. And to claim (as you did, if I understand correctly) that you need a "large group of people" to hire an assassin to take out one person is irrational, and I believe contradicts a lot of well documented court cases involving organized crime.
No this coverup would have to include the DC police with his laptop and many others to bury all the other connections that would exist with wikileaks.
So he wouldn't have tor installed? His computer wouldn't be encrypted? This is ridiculous, the laptop would be full of all the software required for being a leaker.
The enigma code wasn't really much of a conspiracy theory so much as it was normal espionage during ww2. Everyone knew each side was spying and trying to code crack each other. So like, yeah, one of them was successful...
I worked as a technician for GCHQ twenty years ago and heard some good stories in the London Office at Palmer Street (loose lips guys!) it was so obvious that wearing the right tie or being a Freemason would get you further than any degree in this circle.
But lets face it, it's the same at the top levels of all civil service they are all really just job clubs for people with Latin and History degrees.
>... or being a Freemason would get you further than any degree in this circle.
That's rather disturbing. This is why storing everything on everyone is a terrible idea. Insiders with loyalties that may lie with a particular Old Boys' club, with access to the most intimate details of people's lives.
Strict rules with regard to access control are meaningless if the people abusing the system are either sufficiently high-level or are able to use side channels.
If we ever come to live in such a dystopian society I'm going to use our new found peeping power to mark political enemies and remove them all in a night of the long knives stile ordeal then overthrow the government and burn everything to the ground.
Your political enemies can also use it to google you up, find what you're up to, and night-of-the-long-knives you first. You've already blown it by writing this post, so it's on Your Permanent Record For All To See.
Once the panopticon's switched on, YOUR first priority, Sunset, is to make sure you don't have any enemies who care enough to check out your posting history, because once they hit this post, you're toast. Concentrate on being super-nice to everyone you meet for the rest of your life.
See how this works? You're already out of the running as Evil Dictator Overlord. This everyone-sees-everything society is starting to look a bit less dystopian than it first appears!
It just means it's impossible to be covert within the system. It makes it straightforward for up-front malicious actors to run the system, Trump passim.
You'd end up with a conservative theocracy in short order. Only the perfectly conformist have nothing to hide; those people who beat their wives or children in the normal, socially approved manner will be safe.
As much crap as people give the civil servants in the US, I feel like our government does a pretty reasonable job at finding competent employees. I'm from Chicago, so I definitely know how false that statement can be, but most other places in the world seem a lot more about who your parents were and who you know.
I mean, the social stratification of the public/private school thing is somewhat baffling to me, as someone who attended school in one of the best community-run school districts in the US.
In Britain we have state schools, private schools and most expensive of all the old 'public schools', with a name almost designed to confuse. Most of them are ancient, and look a bit like Hogwarts. The real power of the schools is the 'old boys network'. When you need help getting into university, or beginning a career, there will be an old boy of your school you can write to for help. It seems daft in 2017, but ex public school boys still seem to dominate public life. What still surprises me is the willingness of brits to 'doff their caps' at them like they are still Lord of the manor. I see it daily where there is still a feeling that they are somehow better, because they had an expensive education.
This is one of the huge things that holds Britain back. So many 'businessmen' in the UK were in fact set up in business by their father, or family. They then run their business with a sense of entitlement, and not a hint of maybe sharing equity with founders. Private Equity is dominated in the same way. If you want to meet a VC in Britain, you would do much better if you had the right old school tie. Access to capital for ordinary people with a good idea seems impossible, unless it is via some kind of research funding. It is the same thing that makes UK business so male dominated.
It will carry on too, until Brits stop believing in the Downton Abbey model of British identity. I thought the article was really good too. Thanks for sharing
How does a nameless resume help if you haven't removed schools, class, year of graduation, grades and all the other signifiers correlated with free-time and networks.
And that's smoothing over the little problems of the jobs not being open for competition in the first place, not being item for competition once they've been appointed, and that no one has yet to come up with an agreed upon definition for what meritocracy even is...
Anecdote != data, mate. Counter examples: I went to Abingdon School which is in the town called Abingdon (Oxfordshire). Before that I went to a school called Wolborough Hill School which was perched on top of Wolborough Hill, in Newton Abbot, Devon. Both are (were in the case of Wolborough which passed away some time ago) fee-paying schools.
My dad was a soldier (as was my mum but she was told to leave on marrying dad - things were different back then). Me and my brother went through five schools/kindergartens by the age of 10 (three in West Germany, one in Manc (MCR)). By that age we were pretty good at looking under cars for devices because dad was an ATO and taught us - a handy skill for a family going to a restaurant or whatever: you never knew when you car was going to explode.
Dad didn't hand over the family business to me and my brother because the RAOC (Rag And Oil Company) is now part of another org these days - RLC (Really Large Corps) and besides I'm a nerd and a sysadmin and my brother is loosely HR. We are both grateful for the start in life that both he and mum and a contribution that the army gave us in life - whether it made us better or worse people is debatable. We had less schools is definite.
OK, my job title is MD these days but you doff your hat and I'll kick you in the nuts (and take you out for a beer until the swelling subsides.)
Cheers
Jon
PS You failed to initial capitalise "Brit" - I am better than you 8)
I've never met a public school boy that didn't have an "excuse" along these lines, and a mockney accent to "mate" and "cheers" me with. I always find this response baffling.
About 6% go though private schools in the U.K.
You serve a role. All the MDs I worked under in London were also public school boys. No-one who didn't go will find your exceptionalism interesting. We will all listen to your story and "mate" you back while cringing inside. Just accept your privilege, and own it (it's worth quite a lot).
> The Registry employed enormous numbers of girls to maintain efficient delivery of files within the building, as well as the massive task of sorting, checking, and filing the incoming material. In Kell's day the Registry Queens, as they were known, were recruited either from the aristocracy or from the families of MI5 officers. Kell had a simple belief that this was the best vetting of all. [...]
> By the early 1970s the staffing of the Registry had become a major problem for MI5. There were more than three hundred girls employed and with the surge of file collection at that time the pressure for more recruits was never-ending. Openly advertising was considered impossible. Yet it was becoming very difficult to recruit this number of girls, let alone vet them properly. In at least one case, the Communist Party managed to infiltrate a girl into the Registry, but she was soon discovered and quietly sacked. This problem, rather than dissatisfaction with the increasingly antiquated filing system itself, finally pushed MI5, belatedly, into accepting a computerized [sic] Registry.
As the quote hints, large landholdings and a family with long standing ties to the country (i.e. old money) are great ways to ensure loyalty, both emotional and financial, and loyalty is much more precious than ability in intelligence work.
The Cambridge Five were a very public (and rare, if costly) failure of this system, and Yuri Modin (their handler) claims [2] that the tension between the middle class, Scottish-accented John Cairncross and his upper class colleagues was part of what pushed him over.
The British merchant banks' eventual deaths at the hands of meritocratic American ones is strong evidence that this is not a good system in areas where ability is more valuable than trust.
[2] Yuri Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Five-Cambridge-Friends-Cairncross-C... - Modin died a hero in Moscow after a prestigious career including heading the KGB's Active Measures department, so it could be mostly disinformation, but his observations on human character are still great.
Another example: Cameron. Led us into Brexit due to a massive miscalculation. Not a capable man but the Brits insist on picking leaders from a few thousand upper-class twits. His Chancellor and Eton chum was also a disaster.
And doesn't it fit neatly that we're force-fed the narrative of Islamic extremism as public enemy number one... Poor religious radicals are the only foe our intelligence services are likely to outwit
There was a suggestion going around that some of the recent London attackers had at one time been recruited by MI5 to fight in Libya. My google-fu is failing to find me the alleged details, though.
Most of them. The good ones you rarely if ever read about. Only learn about them later on when docs are declassified, books are written, or they're shafted for politics.
Not sure what the author's point is. That all spies are incompetent? KGB infiltrated UK's intelligence establishment successfully, got the plans for the nuclear bomb and the space shuttle etc. etc. So clearly at least one organization is not completely without merit. Maybe he means specifically UK's spies? If so his anecdotes are not very convincing.
I would say rather than KGB infiltrating it was a case of British socialists fearing an imbalance of power reaching out to the Soviets. And yes he is poking fun at old Johnny English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melita_Norwood was the most important of these atomic spies, was never prosecuted and ended her days in a cottage in Bournemouth I think it was, the nice little old lady next door. The BBC itself is heavy with British spooks so this piece may not be the jolly little fna-fna it purports to be. I even suspect OP (no offense old chap).
This is all covered in _great_ detail in "The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5", by Christopher Anderw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defence_of_the_Realm - this article is a nice summary of that book.
The book goes into _lots_ more detail, including the CIA/Angleton side of all this.
Covert intelligence is important, because it is a channel of information which cannot be seen or controlled as easily by adversaries as open source information does.
But the very covertness also means these intelligence services are highly intransparent and poorly supervised. And poor supervision usually leads to poor results, as viewed by those who should be doing the supervision.
This is for real, although we should acknowledge that some successes would be much harder to see than failures. (Some should be much more obvious, though... The FBI loudly celebrates terrorist attacks it prevents, and yet all the self-described wins turn out to be pretty lame.)
SIGINT sometimes does really well. Enigma is the obvious example, but I'm sure the recently-revealed wiretaps on international conferences produced some politically valuable stuff.
There are even occasional wins on analysis. The German tank problem was a major statistical breakthrough, and Abraham Wald pioneered operations research doing air force design analysis. But... both of those were unconventional, marking breaks from normal intelligence work.
Moreover, almost all the wins I've outlined here came during wartime, a setting where a very clear 'they' is undeniably out to hide secrets and attack you. Things tend to get way less impressive during peacetime.
I can't find it at the moment, but John le Carre tells a brilliant story about this. He was an MI6 man in the cold war, before he was a writer. And the beginning of Tinker, Tailor, a mission to Hungary to meet a defecting general, was inspired by a real experience. But in real life, there was no general - le Carre's superior had made him up. His boss led him on a dangerous covert mission across the Iron Curtain for no reason, simply because real Cold War spy work was so aimless and boring.
The real problem with spy agencies is that their compartmentalized nature is ripe for abuse from the top down, which is why I theorize they have been compromized from the top down. Also, so tired of hearing the trite ol hanlons razor (a logical fallacy on it's face) trotted out, or the inevitable follow up of "but how could so many people keep X a secret? No conspiracies are possible..." That shit has been debunked time and time again and it's utter tripe.
The only commentor here that even gets close is the one who said something about freemasonry. I would add secret societies in general, such as Knights of Malta and Jesuits in there as well. But that's stuff the public dismisses as crazy conspiracy theory and the agencies themselves don't like to talk about...
So tired of being dismissed as cookoo and then a few years later saying "I told you so".
Couple of people use the cambridge 5 as an example. First of all, it was the cambridge 6, and they were triples who were always ultimately loyal to the crown.
The middle men of spying are never allowed to be too good because if they were they would realize the top of their own orgs are the problem. Even the one group that used to be allowed to be good, the analysts, who told truth to power, have been slowly being ousted so it's easier to manufacture intel for whatever geopolitical/strategic purposes those at the top want.
The technological revolution has scared them though because they are afraid of being outed, which is why they are quickening the pace to turn the key of the totalitarian dystopian surveillance society. The information revolution is a threat to the powers that be, which is why we will continue to see nothing but an increase in attack tempo on the internet and it's freedoms.
Silly article, the revelations of Edward Snowden shouldn't really tell anyone much about the capability of spies, nothing we didn't already know. If you're interested in a good book about the technical history of the CIA check out 'The Wizards of Langley'. It gives a pretty accurate history of the technical ability of spies throughout the years, and the bureaucracy which limited them.
https://www.amazon.com/Wizards-Langley-Directorate-Science-T...
>Silly article, the revelations of Edward Snowden shouldn't really tell anyone much about the capability of spies
i absolutely loathe when people say things like this. people would nearly without exception treat you like a lunatic if you talked about the kinds of capabilities revealed by snowden prior to 2013. making references to ECHELON made plenty of people write me off as a paranoid crank.
the ex post facto 'everyone knew this' is a fucking crock.
Everybody had _heard_ of this, maybe. Everybody in the tech community at least. Or let's just say enough people that some people feel like everybody did.
However when I heard of this, everybody also knew this was just a conspiracy theory. The NSA records everything -- Hello, NSA person who inevitably reads this -- sure, but c'mon they wouldn't actually store any of it or even pay attention as long as you didn't use trigger words. And even then you knew they wouldn't actually listen to your conversation because why would they care about some rando on the internet.
So, no, everyone didn't know the NSA was doing what Snowden said they were doing. It just sounded familiar enough that it seemed like it wasn't news. I think the conspiracy theories (or leaks?) may have actually softened the blow of the revelations. "Oh, I guess the conspiracy theories were right. Huh, who'd have thought. Anyway, how's your sex life?". People carried on as if nothing happened.
I swear if we somehow found out that there really were aliens in Area 51 all along, techies would derail every conversation about it by pointing out how everyone already knew this. And the common man probably wouldn't even freak out because it doesn't sound like news.
First of all, you stated the same thing twice in separate comments.
Secondly, I wasn't making an argument, I was describing how people at the time would think about claims like "the NSA records every conversation".
There are flaws in the argument (well, duh) but that's not even the point. The full extent of NSA surveillance was so absurdly unthinkable that people would go out of their way to rationalize anything as long as it was less preposterous than claiming the NSA literally taps, records and stores all Internet traffic.
* The NSA doesn't spy on people, that's absurd
* The NSA doesn't spy on people outside the US, that's absurd
* The NSA doesn't spy on innocent, law-abiding people, that's absurd
* The NSA doesn't spy on me, that's absurd
* The NSA doesn't spy on me as long as I don't act suspiciously, that's absurd
* The NSA doesn't spy on me all the time, that's absurd
* The NSA doesn't record everything I do, that's absurd
* The NSA doesn't store information it collects about me, that's absurd
* The NSA doesn't store all information it can collect about me, that's absurd
etc etc
Also, the way I recall it, at the time the conspiracy theory was (likely due to the popularity of the X-Files at the time) "the FBI is reading our IRC chatlogs", which is a far cry from "the NSA is rerouting all internet traffic", which is what we now know to be true. Not only does it seem less nefarious (law enforcement vs literally spies) but the scope was far more plausible (the network operators might cooperate with law enforcement).
Heck, even Guantanamo and drone strike assassinations seemed implausible back then.
I'm glad I'm not going nuts here. ECHELON was public knowledge all the way back in the 1980s, the European Parliament formally investigated in in 2001, but even in 2010 it was something you only joked about or people would look at you like a conspiracy theorist.
Sure, "the NSA listens to stuff" wasn't a revelation, but before 2013 very little of this was taken seriously outside of a few corners of tech and cybersec.
If the technology exists to do nefarious-thing-X, one must assume that governments are already using X despite whatever moral or political arguments they give you that they would never do it.
The salient point in the Adam Curtis piece is that regardless of their _technical_ capabilities, the organizations are themselves incapable of making use of what signals they may capture. A similar case can easily be made about the US intelligence establishment, for what it's worth.
The assertion the author makes about the revelations of Snowden is incorrect. The author hasn't done their homework. Further, if you'd like to know about the history of the technical ability of spies, and how the information gathered was processed check out the book referenced, written by an actual historian.
| if you'd like to know about the history of the technical ability of spies ...
again, just not the point. This _essay's_ argument would be completely valid in the main, regardless of what technical ability exists _or is falsely claimed to exist_, because the problem is one of power politics, emergent properties of _homo_sapiens_ in 20th century-style bureaucracies, and the cultural history of western intelligence services.
And come on, maybe reconsider the assumption that your interlocutors haven't got the requisite historical background. If we're comparing bibliography size, you may find you come up short, given the number of FOIA-request documents from FBI and CIA I've been through in the past 15 years, not to mention secondary sources on intelligence outfits from around the world.
Here's a fun example of the organizational madness of the US's chief counterterrorism bureaucracy, the FBI. During the late 40's and 50's there was a fear that the Ruskies would target homosexuals in the State Department for blackmail. This lead to all sorts of purges and ugliness, but crucially, the only case of a homosexual's being suborned in
this manner was one in which the FBI itself blackmailed a State Department employee to prove that it was a threat.
The output of the US's domestic anti-terrorism effort is low for the resources invested. Most of the FBI's terrorism arrests are wannabes. They get a report of somebody mouthing off in a bar or mosque, crank up a sting operation, get some dummy to go through the motions of trying something, and claim they've stopped a terrorist.
The DoD/CIA operation to find foreign terrorist leaders and kill them seems to have paid off. Anybody identified as a major leader in Al-Queda has a short life expectancy.