Comment by EthanHeilman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EthanHeilman | Hacker News Reader

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>So if you were a foreign government and you wanted to place a loyal agent into a privileged position inside the CIA, how would you do it?

A better strategy would be to recruit someone who already has access to the information you want. Consider the difficulty in "placing a loyal agent":

1. Getting them into the country setting up a life for them,

2. Getting them through citizenship (might take five-twenty years, might never happen),

3. Getting them hired at the CIA and hoping they get sufficient clearance,

4. Getting them moved in to a role with access to the information you want.

2,3,4 all require a number of things going right, nothing going wrong and each would take many years. Success would require a large number of attempts and the successful attempts might take over a decade before you get useful intelligence. I'm not sure anything like what you suggest has ever happened, the closest I can think of is the technique of placing agents in a foreign country and having them associate with targets of interest or report back intelligence[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegals_Program

Let's say we take your alternate approach and try to find someone already in the position we want, and turn them.

Who are you most likely to have leverage over: An ex-national with family still living within your reach, that you can use as leverage? Or some anonymous U.S. citizen who's been pre-selected for their loyalty by the CIA, who you'd have to first identify, then track down their family or other leverage, then coordinate a hostage situation in such a way that they wouldn't just immediately blow the whistle?

I don't think either option is easy. The spy game isn't meant to be easy.

China has plenty of manpower and a traditional outlook spanning millennia - they can play the long game. Besides, you don’t need laser focus - throw tons of kids to all your targets (cia, fbi, general government) and some are bound to reach a sensitive position that can produce good intel.

I think you're substantially understating the difficult in recruiting spies. Any mistakes there and the recruiting nation would not only end up with double agents but also expose their handles, methods of contact, etc. Perhaps the biggest issue is that you'd need, as a foreign nation, to know more about the loyalties of intelligence agents than the country they're working for.

And similarly, I think you're greatly exaggerating the difficulties in obtaining US citizenship. It's a process that can take as few as 4 years. And thanks to our laws, people can simply have children in the US and they are automatic citizens.

And there's the third option that sort of meets both these opposite extremes in the middle and that's simply recruiting people already within the nation. Given the reported brain drain of the US intelligence forces, getting a substantial fraction of valuable targets (computer scientists, mathematicians, engineers, etc) into positions of intelligence does not seem like it would be all that improbable. Countries like China are already at a major advantage here given the huge numbers of Chinese involved in STEM.

> And thanks to our laws, people can simply have children in the US and they are automatic citizens.

Under which law? I thought this was debunked time and time again as an urban legend.

The fourteenth amendment[0].

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...

I think the poster is saying the children are automatically citizens. The parents would not be citizens; but, anyone born in the United States is a citizen.

True things are "debunked" on the internet every day.

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