Bugger: Maybe spies aren't very good at their jobs (2013)
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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.
Hurray for effectiveness...
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.
Why not try to claim they made the malaysian air flight disappear?
I'm not sure, but it doesnt seem to be on their agenda.
Terrorist code of conduct. "Thou shall not claim casualties you didn't cause."
That's because if you are ever disproved, you lose credibility for future claims.
That's orthogonal to the merit of using such "mundane-looking" tactics and then rightfully claiming involvement.
duh?
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?
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.
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."
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.
* Operation Ivy Bells (joint with USN and NSA, according to Wikipedia)
* Stuxnet, possibly (unclear who was responsible for it, although it's generally thought to be joint US-Israeli effort)
*yes, I'm making a joke. Mostly.
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.
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?)
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.
Everyone has some moral instincts (social animals and all that) but those can be overridden with right incentives.
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.
Externally enforced behavior is not "morals".
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".
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]
[0] http://www.wired.co.uk/article/babies-understand-hero-action...
So what _are_ "morals proper"?
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.
But none of that is true for the NSA.
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.
JK Simmons: What did we learn, Palmer?
Aide: I dont know sir.
JK Simmons: I don't fucking know either.
JK Simmons: I guess we learned, not to do it again.
Aide: Yes sir.
JK Simmons: I'm fucked if I know what we did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlA9hmrC8DU (spoilers in the video)
EDIT: (Also RT has the quotes mostly wrong..)
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
But of course, this will be dismissed, as will any other example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
Want some more?
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=noam+chomsky
Spend a few hours there and then come back and tell me the image the US government portrays is highly consistent with its actual reality.
> ... 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.
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers
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)
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.
If by "<>", you mean "does not equal", then that statement is false.
>Conspiracy: a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful
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.
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.
Perhaps we need to embrace the Panopticon instead of resisting it.
Really store everything on everyone and make it _available_ to _everyone_ instead of the privileged few.
Make only one rule on access control: it is forbidden to refuse access.
Edit: on -> one
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!
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.
Not quite. My opinions aren't a secret IRL. I am surrounded by like minded individuals and am not afraid to voice my ideas freely.
There is a serious difference in the way I approach weapons training/survival and the way my ideological opponents do. So I am not that concerned.
But this is not the point. The point is, people will rebel if you put them into a corner.
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.
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
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...
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.
[1] Peter Wright, Spycatcher - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spycatcher-Candid-Autobiography-Int...
[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.
His father actually worked for a living and he probably had to buy his own furniture...
And hid away significant amounts of cash in offshore tax havens
Required reading on this topic. Tl;dr - Salesmanship, cold calling, closing and relationships are worth a LOT more than acronyms, budgets and bugs.
The book goes into _lots_ more detail, including the CIA/Angleton side of all this.
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.
http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-...
Is this article for real? Or does it cherry-pick only the failures?
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 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.
Which theories are you thinking about here?
sounds pretty hard to me
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.
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.
They had to listen to all of it to listen for the trigger words.
How did you think they were listening for the trigger words?
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.
Weirdly when I posted the comment that you replied to HN said "please try again", which made me think the comment hadn't posted. Thus the re-wording.
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.
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.