The Diplomatic Couriers Who Deliver America's Secret Mail
wired.com
wired.com
https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mom-Odyssey-World-Travel-ebook/d...
“DEAR MOM” is a book told through 591 letters to my parents while living throughout the world. The letters seen here are transcriptions of all letters I wrote to my parents for ten years following college graduation. They record my daily life in surprising detail from Navy Officer Candidate School until resigning from the U.S. Foreign Service in Viet Nam. This was a decade of practically non-stop travel throughout most of the world – some 4 million miles.
I don't think I have seen the word 'unlicensed' followed by the word 'orphanage' before, I might just add '2' on the end and use that for my password.
I don’t know how safe it is to give the google keywords to find the place.
Would be interesting to know just how dangerous it is though, particularly for relatively low pay. The article covers some plane crashes, but doesn't really explore the question in detail.
- Being a dual citizen (and, far worse, holding a passport from the other country) even if they were born citizens of the US and the other country
- Having traveled to several countries, like China or Russia, for reasons other than a short tourism stay
- Being married to a non-US-citizen, even a permanent resident
- Owing a lot of money on student loans
- Parents being born in or citizens of the "wrong" country
- Psychiatric or psychology counseling for certain conditions
- A history of regular gambling
From what I can tell, the investigators want someone who was born in the US to parents whose ancestry can both be traced to the Mayflower and who does nothing except stay at home and read National Geographic while sitting by the fire next to an equally-suitable spouse.
They don’t care if you like to go out drinking
Not going to lie though, it would be really interesting to do a tour just to see how it all works.
These days people do all they can to stay put, eschewing travel or relocation, both internationally and domestically. The dearth of truck drivers also seems to reflect this cultural shift.
By my calculation the number of overseas departures relative to population has steadily increased: 6.3% in 1997, 8.5% in 2007, 9.2% in 2017. (Those numbers exclude Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean.) And only 2008, 2009, and 2010 saw a YTD drop. However, according to this article (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-d-chalmers/the-great-...) the percentage of unique travelers is decreasing (or did decrease) per year. That is, an increasingly selective cohort is traveling more.
There's also the question of what percentage of citizens traveling are immigrants. The number of foreign born citizens has been steadily increasing over the above time period.
The MMGY Global's report, mentioned in the article, is $3k. I'm not that invested in my post (not to the tune of $3k) so I can't actually look at the data myself.[1]
I suspect you may be right and that my impressions are wrong; but it's not at all clear-cut.
[1] Especially more recent data as numbers during the Great Recession may have been anomalous.
I think a lot of people in their 20s want vacation travel, but business travel loses its lustre quite rapidly. The extremely odd subset of the population that legitimately enjoys business travel usually ends up in consulting which is more rewarding and has a better career progression.
My guess would be that once you have the clearances for awhile, you can make a lot more money working for some contractor.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/07/pompeos-pledge-to-lift-...
Do they? The article never backs that up:
> Nobody at the service could remember a single lost pouch or unsuccessful delivery in the service’s modern history, though missions can be aborted for political, weather, or mechanical reasons if necessary. The service did once manage to lose a baby grand piano along the Orient Express in 1919. Evidently, the courier—David K E Bruce, later a renowned diplomat—slept beneath it on a railway platform in Bulgaria and woke to find the piano was gone.
I'd count cancelled missions as unsuccessful, just as I'd count a cancelled delivery by UPS.
Given that the Diplomatic Couriers Service must have orders of magnitude fewer packages than e.g. UPS or FedEx, it's entirely possible that those few failures are a higher failure rate than the commercial carriers.
None of that's to detract from the DCS's really cool achievements — I just dislike journalistic hyperbole.
Why does the State Department need to take such extreme measures and have special exemption from processes meant to detect and stop all manner of nefarious activity?
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Diplomati...
Think "hey, I just recruited Yuri to spy for us" or "the mission to hack NK's nuclear systems will happen next Friday".
Some messages are too important to be anything but hand-carried.
I'm not sure the government is actually authorized to spy, per the US Constitution. It seems that it (spying) would only be authorized as part of a military operation.
Would you like to revive George Washington and tell his ghost that his spy rings were unconstitutional?
However, the Constitution does not grant Congress or the Courts to spy, or to hire spies, or direct spies, or have anything to do with spies.
Using spies (human intelligence) is as basic to warfare and defense as any other weapon.
Spying on citizens is where things get murky.
And as much as many readers here may dislike the intelligence agencies, distinguishing between domestic and foreign targets in the internet age is not an easy problem to solve.
Especially considering they're damned when they go too far (e.g. Prism) and damned when they don't (9/11).
Spying and intelligence are still, in the present day, seen as a matter of national defense. NSA is explicitly under the Department of Defense, for example. CIA is civilian, but is still framed as serving a defense/national security purpose (thus Constitutionally justifiable) and scoped to be foreign-facing (domestic intelligence is primarily the FBI's province, "necessary and proper" for enforcing federal law).
Computers, code books, secure phones, etc. are required for communication.
Sometimes, more interesting things get sent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatic_bag#Noteworthy_ship...
Paragraph 2.1 states "2.1 Need. Accurate and timely information about the capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign powers, organizations, or persons and their agents is essential to informed decisionmaking in the areas of national defense and foreign relations. Collection of such information is a priority objective and will be pursued in a vigorous, innovative and responsible manner that is consistent with the Constitution and applicable law and respectful of the principles upon which the United States was founded."
The CIA and NSA would be surprised to hear that.
Governments are allowed and expected to keep secrets from each other; this is a way to do it out in the open.
I don't actually allow or expect my government to keep secrets. I don't think 'they' are even authorized to. If 'they' could, 'they' would not be a representative government, of, for, and by the people.
I did the courier job briefly when I was working for what was then the Defense Communications Agency, and we were transmitting SECRET documents. I had the hand-carried copy, and they sent a second copy via USPS.
I even had a nifty courier badge, which was created by using a typewriter to fill out a small government form that was printed on orange card stock, and then the whole thing was laminated together. No pictures, no fingerprints, no signatures. The security agents at Washington Regional Airport sure took notice....