Old-Style Espionage | Hacker News Reader

Old-Style Espionage

theguardian.com

17 pointsNotSwift10 comments

Luke Harding is exactly the kind of overton window journalist the deep state loves. He touts all the same poorly evidenced claims relating to the last 4 years of Russia-gate narrative in a sloppy fashion in a not so subtle attempt to push his newest book, Shadow State, which does the same I assume.

Between his false wikileaks claims, his questionable Snowden book, his unquestioning buy-in on the Litvenko propaganda, and his unskeptical attachment to the Steele dossier, he has lost credibility in spades among those looking for a journalist that tells hard truths.

  “This is old-style espionage,” said David Clark, a former special adviser to the late foreign secretary Robin Cook. “You find a human source who is willing to be persuaded to do this for money from an intelligence service.

  “We have become very used to the idea that everything is done in the virtual world of hack and leak. This feels like a bit of a throwback.”

I don't know how any purporting to be a serious journalist on the topic can even think to put this kind of an exerpt in an article. This is just normal espionage, the same way we all do it. I think the take away is just that... Harding isn't a serious journalist, and you'd be better off looking elsewhere for your analysis. (if it's even his analysis in the first place!)

The Guardian sure has gone downhill since Snowden... it's such a shame.

One point I find interesting is that he mentions that Boris Johnson is doing nothing with the recommendations of the report. Why could that be? There was a lot of outrage when the poisoning happened.

I think it’s common knowledge that the Conservative party in the UK accepts large donations from Russian citizens[1] and that a section of the London property market is swimming in Russian money.[0]

It would be a stretch to say Johnson is kompramat, but there is certainly little appetite in that party to get actively hostile with Russia.

Somehow this lightweight was defence minister during Salisbury[2]

[0] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/russia-report-real-estate

[1] https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/21/tory-donors...

[2] https://news.sky.com/story/amp/gavin-williamson-the-man-who-...

Edit: Formatting

Interesting reads!

I do think you have a point that the excerpt is pretty weak and boring, and overall the article isn’t particularly compelling.

I won’t comment on the deep-state stuff as that appears to be a dog whistle for some other political argument.

What I do find interesting: a lot has changed since the 80s. The idea proposed in this article that low level employees still have access to documents is far-fetched in the modern age of email, virtual ACLs, etc. I suspect that the agent was not instructed to steal documents but rather to execute binaries on computers in the secure network.

We know from other reporting that Russian tradecraft has the agent use shortwave communication to transmit and communicate with their handler. For example, the agent would sit in a cafe and await the arrival of the handler, who would never enter the cafe but be nearby in a car. That is modern tradecraft.

We also know from the Vault 7 leaks that the CIA focused most of their implant development on binaries that would be executed by someone knowingly infecting their computer. That is another example of modern tradecraft.

The bulk of spycraft remains extortion: get us this or else. Else varies.

I'd say incentives are used more, with the or else as a failsafe if the incentives fall through, but yes.

With the current fall of Afghanistan I do have to ask why do we still have spies. We were in Afghanistan with the government, had satellites, drones, ownership of telecommunications, paid informants. We had all the data we wanted.

Are the spy agencies just bullshit jobs? They just make stuff up like the enemy don't have phones, so that makes them more advanced.

They do seem good at stealing oil contracts. Not sure if much else.

Security guard.

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23DavidSmith%20spy&src=typed_q...

"The alleged agent was found out because, according to "Spiegel", among other things, he did not withdraw any money from his account for a long period of time & did not pay with a card. BKA investigators began to observe him"

A common refrain in the intelligence world is that the public sees what goes wrong and doesn’t see what goes right. It looks like a long list of failures because we never see the terrorist attacks that didn’t happen or the double agents who were stopped before they did any damage. Of course, that’s an easy answer that helps intelligence services to minimise their failures, but there’s probably some truth in it.

The millennium bug defence.

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