The Spycraft Revolution

I'm pretty open (within legal bounds) about my time in the operational and technical intelligence world, to the consternation of others in the field, and would say that this article is dead on with it's analysis.

One thing that I try to get across to people is that, Intelligence as a discipline is fundamentally about servicing the Instrument of National Power [1] of "Information."

In that context, the manner in which information is tasked, collected, processed, analyzed and used to make decisions on is a forever moving target, which the Intelligence Community is very well aware of.

The really interesting question here is, what happens when commercial and consumer information systems (eg Google, Facebook, Huawei, Tencent) are able to deploy collection sensors and do information processing at a much larger scale than any individual nation state? The balance of Information power starts to shift away from nations and toward Multinational corporations who control those sensor networks.

For example the USG used to run every imagery satellite in existence, now there are a half dozen commercial imagery satellites and growing.

[1]https://www.thelightningpress.com/the-instruments-of-nationa...

Scud the Disposable Intelligence Officer would make for a legit revival of the Scud comic franchise.

The 2010 assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai by Mossad was a shocker to the general public when the kill team and support personnel were plastered on TV by UAE law enforcement immediately following via dozens of stitched together CCTV feeds.

That op burned a few dozen people from most future external operations.

All I know is that there will be thousands of former intelligence officers and shooters sweating biometric datamining for future overseas holiday travel on their own passports in allied countries, forget about semi/non-permissive country personnel travel.

"As the cost of conducting espionage operations—in money, time, and effort—has shrunk, spying has become less esoteric. These days it is an integral part of business, finance, sports, and family litigation over divorce and child custody. Indeed, modern life encourages people and institutions of all kinds to adopt the thinking and practices of the spy world."

My joke, for some years now, has been that the average teenager has better surveillance capabilities than the CIA did in the 1960's. It might be better than what they had in the 70's or 80's by now. It seems likely to me that Google, Facebook, and probably Amazon, have better data than intelligence agencies of the 90's could've ever hoped for.

> Investigators can also combine these two tactics with a third: financial information. What is the student’s credit rating? What plastic cards does she carry? Does her purchasing history and behavior match her cover story? Every one of these questions is revealing if answered and devastating if not. There are, after all, very few people who travel abroad without a bank account or credit rating, with no social media history, and a prepaid burner phone—and those who do tend to have something to hide.

Heh, is it something that rare. I personally knew people never ever had even a landline in Russia, and I can't say about that being rare.

On other hand, Russian own spies are said to be intentionally recruited from small towns in Russian Far East

I do not think that we should operate our world as if it were a James Bond movie.

It shows a fundamental moral deficiency that effectively makes civilization into a myth. And regardless of morals, it's an inherently insecure paradigm.

"Only the very poor, the very young, and the very old don't carry some kind of mobile device these days."

Good on them.

> Indeed, China’s national security law expressly requires every individual and corporation, state-run or not, to aid the intelligence services.

Australia does the same now.