CIA and Gen Z
washingtonian.com
washingtonian.com
True story: I went to a job interview on Redstone Arsenal which meant I needed to get a vehicle pass. The recruiter sent me an email asking for my SSN; I replied that I wasn't comfortable sending it via email and then called him with it.
The next day I received a CC: copy of the email request to the Arsenal visitor center, including my SSN. I was unimpressed.
"what I’m told is a very contentious parking situation where lots of spots are so far from the office that a shuttle has to transport employees from their cars to their desks (a spy’s supposedly glamorous life actually laced with drudgery and inconvenience—how very John le Carré)..."
The parking spots nearest the building I used to work in, when we went in to work, were numbered and reserved for particular NASA employees. Many of those employees worked 7:30 to 3:30, so when I typically wandered in half were empty and when I left they were all empty. But if I, contractor peon (which makes up 70-90% of our organization), were to park there I would get a ticket from NASA Protective Services. There were a few general parking spaces closer than those, but they were routinely taken by NASA employees because they were a few feet closer than their assigned spaces. We parked out on the outskirts.
(P.s. The vast majority of CIA employees are not spies.)
"Demographic data from four years after that (2019), collected by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, revealed that intelligence agencies were still behind the federal and civil workforce in minority representation and that the spy agencies’ head counts were 61 percent male, 39 percent female."
Way back in the '90s, I had a friend of Indian descent whose sister worked for the FBI. She said her sister was always getting pestered about moving into investigative field work because no one would suspect she was undercover.
A National ID, that is designed to more strongly prove ID and also designed to be used as a secure form of Authentication for Authorization services... THAT is what I'd really love politicians to approve.
I'm currently in the process of upgrading my enhanced ID drivers license to a Passport (done) and then applying for Global Entry, because it's only 15 more dollars than the TSA Precheck and includes it... so why not do that? That's my response to a lack of a national ID.
I can share that here in Denmark we have a system exactly like that, and have for more than a decade. It's called "NemID" (lit: EasyID), soon to be changed to "MitId" (lit: MyID). While there definitely are some problems with the current implementation, having a 2-factor auth solution in front of every government, banking, insurance, etc. web service is very helpful. [0]
Keep in mind that my only interaction with individuals from the government, on the phone or otherwise, is when picking up books at the library and renewing my passport. Everything from filing my taxes through registering a child for school to reporting a move is done with a NemID login and a simple, guided form. [1]
My taxes are pre-filled with the information they've already gathered from my employer and the bank through which I handle my stock portfolio. The only thing I manually have to put in is my union fees and how many times I drove to the office -- both giving me a sizable deduction.
Doing my taxes at the end of the year is simply a formality too. At the start of the year I do an advance statement with what I expect to earn, and my monthly taxes are automatically pulled based on that. The end-of-year tax calculation is to ensure I didn't pay too much or too little -- the difference being due either way in April.
All of this to say -- a sane, digitized interaction with public institutions is not only a possibility but a fact in certain countries.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NemID -- the entry is critical but not unfair. The MitID changes mitigate many of the big points.
[1]: https://lifeindenmark.borger.dk/ -- It's both a "guide to Denmark" but also has the aforementioned forms. Try going through the "Health insurance card" order flow. You can't accidentally order one without a login.
You can get a temporary "coordination ID" that healthcare,etc can use to register your journals but Bank's doesn't always let you create accounts without personal ID numbers (and specifically no BankID's so you're locked out of all the modern digital niceties and sometimes requirements).
The EU has begun a process of creating intercommunication systems* to allow for digital logins when being in other EU countries, no idea if these systems will ever allow for non-EU identifications (that would help enormously for those countries that has gotten far along).
* eIDAS , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIDAS
Those uses were mostly fairly specific to citizen needs but in the past couple of years municipalies started using them for child care (where temporary expats definitely often need to get in touch) and soon after as the providers started looking for commercial clients the usage exploded everywhere in society and now it's starting to become really annoying/hard to live without one.
(Except possibly for JPL because a) they're not really part of NASA and b) they filed a lawsuit. (https://hspd12jpl.org/)
just another happy accident.
That means both the first issue and subsequent issues need to always be free of cost. If I need to visit some office to get it, such office must be at least as ubiquitous as a United States Postal Service office, and ideally more open hours, not less. I don't think there is either the will or the budget to do this.
This will be a very expensive continuous undertaking, not a one time expensive. My personal opinion is this money should go toward medicare for all. I strongly dislike means testing (medicaid?) or age testing (medicare). I'm sure people can find better use for the money it will take to fund a national ID.
"Very expensive"? Sure, if you allow private subcontractors to charge $2500 for printing and laminating a 60x92 mm piece of plastic, it will be very expensive, no doubt about that. But it does not have to be that way, as the experience of many other countries with mandatory government-issued IDs shows.
But either way it doesn't really address the core of what I said, in that the system currently mandated by the government has strongly benefited the surveillance industry. For example SSNs were never supposed to be used for anything besides Social Security, but a law prohibiting such abuse was never passed.
With that said, most of us gave up worrying about our SSN a long time ago. It definitely was printed everywhere and used for everything for a long time. And then the Office of Personnel Management breach happened in 2014-2015...
SSN's weren't designed to be secure, and after decades of leaks they certainly aren't now. Lenders have attempted to brand losses based on this as "identity theft" (putting onus on the person) rather than just "we failed to properly authenticate before handing this person our money". Time to stop subsidizing usurers by letting them get away with this. SSNs are effectively public, and are not secure identifiers.
Just in case someone missed it? Lol this is pretty funny
I used to work in D.C. in/around DoD and Middle Eastern affairs. Not the Lords work, but in a geographic area and domain that people just associate with spooks. Even now, as a software engineer in a non-related field and metro area, upon hearing about my background everyone, and I mean everyone, will at some point joke about me being a spy or working for the CIA. I find it funny that no one has ever thought that this also means I'd be the LEAST likely to be anything clandestine. I think half of it stems from the fact that I'm just an average white dude from the Midwest; My brown or black co-workers were never seemed to be suspect.
I like to pretend they are KGB sleeper agents. I know they aren't, but I like to pretend it is true.
This like saying he is "really good at driving Vespas"
Sending an email is like sending a post card.
Anyone that moves that email can read (and store, amd share) the contents. Each ISP, router, telephone operator, whatever.
Emails are NOT secure.
"Though you’d think a person accustomed to being super-active on the group chat would struggle with being separated from their phone all day, this analyst assured me, “The mission is so dynamic that you’ll rarely, if ever, be bored, and the longing for your phone and social media sort of dissipates.”"
ya... sure... if we ignore all the time waiting for meetings to start in a concrete box with no windows and nothing to do, or sitting in front of your computer for hours answering emails/dealing with paperwork.
> They’re shrewd enough either to be circumspect users of social media from the start or to review (and delete) old problematic tweets and posts.
Is this particularly effective, though? Most social media sites have been scraped to hell and back - surely there's archives of the old problematic stuff.
It must be tough working in counterintelligence these days - social media has greatly increased the attack surface for blackmail.
Between that and face recognition I just can’t see how you can create a fake identity these days.
Hell, if you have a few dozen terabytes of disk space you can download the entire plaintext archive of Reddit comments from Pushshift, regardless of if they've been deleted or not. And that's something a private citizen can do spending a couple grand on hardware. Do we really think that the Chinese Ministry of State Security or Russian GRU aren't keeping archives of Twitter and public Facebook posts for use as blackmail material down the line?
Eleven years ago, someone could be discharged from the US military if they were found to be homosexual. Due to things like this, it was popular to target homosexuals in the military. They were already made to conceal part of their life to keep their job, now they just add one more thing to that.
A debriefing of a double agent revealed that the British turned a high level male target by putting him together with an underage boy during the target's visit to Lebanon in the 1980's. The British had the Lebanese police barge in during the tryst and arrest the target. The offer was then made - work for us or go to a Lebanese prison and have it revealed at home you are a homosexual pedophile. The target was turned.
The Stasi had an unusual spin on this - usually males are targeted, but due to World War II, West Germany had a lack of men who had been born in the 1920s, and a lot of unmarried women of that age. So "Romeo" agents targeted secretaries working at high level offices, and this operation was a successful one.
Most spying is not James Bond level exciting - 45% of it is keeping up with technological innovation, 45% of it is getting positive press for your country worldwide, and negative press for rivals. Or maybe those percentages are juggled one way or another. The other 10% is honey traps, dead drops, wet work, ensuring Patrice Lumumba is shot and things like that.
When everyone has an online presence, the absence of such a presence raises huge red flags. I would expect every spy on earth nowadays has tons of pictures on social media showing them having fun with their friends, cool vacations they've been on, selfies with famous people they've met. So long as they don't tweet something dumb like "CIA's sending me to Belarus #Coup2022", anyone looking at their profile will most likely see a normal person who is probably here for normal reasons. Sure maybe if they went over the profile with a fine tooth comb they'ed notice some things that don't add up, but there isn't a reason to look closer. On the other hand the person without a social media gets scrutinized, and regardless of when you were born there is information on you out there that a sufficiently motivated individual can find.
> how exactly are you supposed to achieve this level of anonymity when you’ve flung untold reams of identifiable content across the digital world?
Assuming that that applies to every single Gen-Z or Millennial is the most "OK Boomer" stereotype ever
Millenials are screwed because they starting using social media before fully understanding the ramifications(because most people did not know how this was going to play out in the early days).
It's a pretty large attack surface that can be subject to a lot of very cheap automation.
Bog-standard confirmation bias, I'd call it.
One would think that's a slightly lesser problem of the US government than for other countries, though, because essentially all platforms are American. So it's potentially easier for the US intelligence services to 'scrub' someone's online presence than it is for other countries' services.
For instance, they also need to be extremely careful of leaks of real identities because of this as these days these can be used for online scrapping in order to collect pictures and more details. This is taking into account that, if I remember correctly, the database of federal employees and their fingerprints was hacked a few years ago so that we may assume that China (since the finger was pointed at them regarding that hack) has a list of virtually all US Federal employees, on which they can let data scrapping farms work.
Young people do not behave like old people, or vice versa.
Young people never seem to get that, though, until their turn comes around.
It seems pretty frequent these days when somebody decides their personal brand of politics warrants betraying information that would have been considered un-betrayable in earlier years.
"What do they understand as necessary?"
"That we find it necessary."
The CIA Is Trying to Recruit Gen Z—and Doesn’t Care If They’re All Over Social Media
First rule of tradecraft is you don't talk about tradecraft.
You only spot the ones that glow. The ones that -don't- are doing their jobs right.
Most Gen Zs are socialists (we actually know what it means) with a small minority of libertarians.
Very few would want to work for the CIA.
From NBC.
Sure, 37% isn't "most", but I think it's a fair guess that if 37% supported Trump, well under 50% of the total are socialists.
FWIW if we had a viable, actual socialist party, I'd vote & even campaign for them. But I think you're way wrong about how far things are shifting, with Gen Z, unfortunately. I do hope I'm the one who's wrong, but I doubt it.
I'm a millennial, but if I look at my social group (mostly gen-z through gen-x) it's nearly all socialists and left- or off-the-spectrum-anarchists[EDIT: probably a couple would identify, specifically, as left-libertarian, now that I think about it, which is very unlike right-libertarian—at least one of those might pointedly insist on just calling the left-libertarian position "liberal"]. That's my bubble, though, and doesn't reflect the proportions for the rest of the country.
[EDIT] Maybe we have different thresholds or definitions of "socialist"? I'd believe that over half of Gen Z wants a "public option" for healthcare, and maybe even M4A, for instance. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if some Gen Z Trumpers want those (Trump did, oddly enough, give some lip-service to reform in that direction in his campaigns, though not to M4A)
Some of them genuinely want to see rock-bottom so we'd start caring about government, as a people, again.
There's a lot of "hobbyists" who think they are socialists
The socialist-socialists—having known a few—usually just say Marxist or communist to describe their position, in my experience. "Socialist" only means "like Venezuela or East Germany" when a Republican is saying it, not when people self-describe as socialist.
[EDIT] and yes, to head it off, even Norway has intelligence services, sure—but they don't have Stasi.
Not everybody will be convinced that this will lead to the promised paradise of maximal creative freedom and abundance for all, so not everybody in a democratic system will vote to continue socialism and there's a risk that a majority will not! Well, that is, until the kulak purges begin.
Republicans have a weird definition of socialism. They seem to conflate it with dictatorships.
Super fucking hot take here, but the former president would be called a socialist by any Republican if he was the leader of any other country. He every hallmark trait of a dictator of a failed state: populist, authoritarian, self-serving, cult of personality, strong man, bribes supporters with state funds, uses police power to crush political opponents, etc, etc.
Now once the socialist regime sets up secret police, it will be utterly benevolent and work solely toward emancipation of the working class.
How can we be sure this hasn't happened already? Could anyone imagine a less effective, more hated organization? Could CIA provide poorer intelligence to the executive if they were actually trying to provide poor intelligence? Could their actions reflect more poorly on USA if they were actually trying to tarnish our reputation?
[EDIT:] Perhaps this just proves your point. Continued existence of something like CIA in a putatively democratic society is a mystery. Perhaps they practice a sort of continuous self-disruption, defending themselves from the attentions of better people by always getting worse?