Rules of Spycraft (2009) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Rules of Spycraft (2009) [pdf]

grugq.github.io

130 pointsTomte28 comments

As useful today as it was when written. I found the conversational tone Allan Dulles writes with here engaging & the subject matter even more so.

For a good example of a relatively-modern day attempt at op-sec, that goes beyond a directional antennae and public wifi:

'When Cybercriminals with Good OpSec Attack' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXmZnU2GdVk

I'd be intrigued to find similar/more recent breakdowns if anyone has any links.

Maybe also read this [1].

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15715

Nice!

This guy (and friends) are basically the reason everyone hates America.

They certainly didn't help, but the US was doing shady foreign policy stuff long before the 50s

Yeah the problem was they had the WW2 machine at their disposal and they used the unprecedented power without thought to the long term consequences we now suffer.

They also had a genocidal dictator in charge of 1/3 of the worlds population held in a totalitarian dystopia whose core tenant was the abolition of the United States and the way of life it represented. I will agree that not considering long term consequences was a problem, but it's not like they were doing it just for funsies.

Were they? I mean before the 50's you have the 40's the 40's are notable because of WW2, prior to that America was pretty isolationist. I mean I am a huge US History buff, and fascinate with the secret stuff, but tbh, I mean the US wasn't all that involved in other people's governments until after the end of WWII.

So 5 years isn't really long before.

> Were they? I mean before the 50's you have the 40's the 40's are notable because of WW2, prior to that America was pretty isolationist.

Were we? Then how did we expand from 13 states to 50? What were the wars with mexico, spain, china, etc about? How does that explain commodore perry and his black ships in japan? Did he get lost? We had colonies from china to japan to africa to the caribbean before ww2.

The isolationist propaganda is what we are taught in school. But like most history/propaganda, if you just dig a little bit deeper, it's all nonsense. We were the greatest expansionist force in the world in the 19th and 20th century.

There were spies used in the Revolutionary War. Other nation states have had spies as well, like the Roman Empire. Spycraft/espionage have existed for hundreds of years.

>everyone hates America

Source?

Which country doesn't or hasn't engaged in espionage?

Related : Japanese Ninjitsu Manuals; some ideas are still applicable with contextual modifications.

1) Shoninki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Dninki

2) Bansenshukai - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bansensh%C5%ABkai

3) Ninpiden - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninpiden

The Arthashastra by Kautilya (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthashastra) has lots of details on Spycraft. A very good translation is Patrick Olivelle's King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kautilya's Arthasastra.

Indic Roots of Espionage - https://saisreview.sais.jhu.edu/the-indic-roots-of-espionage...

Almost timeless, eminently applicable to modern security with a few updates for the digital age, and for day-to-day grey craft of anyone trying to carve out a dignified existence in dystopian surveillance societies.

well said

>day-to-day grey craft of anyone trying to carve out a dignified existence in dystopian surveillance societies

Seems like it's getting darker every day.

I hope more people are aware of the importance of establishing a positive digital footprint in the age of social media.

Practicing self-curation will not only provide a more positive image for future employers, it'll also protect you from becoming a target of ethical deplatforming in the future.

Immediate read, not even driving out of the gas station before it's done.

James Bond violates the majority of these guidelines.

I personally like the headcanon that James Bond's real job is acting as a high profile decoy/assassin to divert the villains' attention and resources by killing people and breaking stuff while the actual spies do technical work behind the scenes.

How else can one explain a secret agent who constantly introduces themselves under their real name?

Working for an espionage agency doesn't make James Bond a spy any more than working for Mercedes-Benz makes Lewis Hamilton a mechanic. He is an assassin, and attracting the enemy's attention is an alternative to attacking them, with the same lethal outcome.

He is a fictional figure though.

But even fictional figures have to have some resemblance to what is perceived to be a good practices.

For example, you would never have a fictional top notch surgeon, who picked his nose during the surgery. Everyone understands that you just don’t do that.

Yet you have a spy who violates most of the spy craft guidelines. I guess that is a commentary about how far off society’s perceptions are of what a spy is.

A spy's main job is intelligence gathering, not blowing stuff up and killing people. Read a memoir of a retired CIA officer and you will quickly understand that Bond doesn't resemble a spy in the slightest. Don't get me wrong, I still find the movies entertaining. I consider them action movies, not spy movies.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy I think is a better depiction.

John le Carré famously disliked Bond and called him an "international gangster" and invented George Smiley to better represent of real-world espionage (bear in mind that both authors worked for British intelligence, though le Carré worked for both MI5 and MI6). The original Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries is a slow burn, but it's very well made and picks up once you figure out what the hell is going on. It also makes the more recent movie a lot more approachable.

> “At the root of Bond there was something neo-fascistic and totally materialist,” Le Carre said.

> “You felt he would have gone through the same antics for any country really, if the girls had been so pretty and the Martinis so dry.”

I'm curious why there are so many c -> e substitutions in the text.

It looks old enough that it probably wasn't OCRed and if it were, you'd think a journal would fix the typos.

It looks to me like it was scanned from print. So at a guess I wonder if this has to do with the scanner compressing the pages with JBIG2’s lossy mode and its “eh, close enough” approach to glyph tables. That is, the approach that swapped 6’s for 8’s on construction documents, among other examples.

Discussion here at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238

Very nice find, thank you for posting it, some of the items have immediate applicability to my work and I had not realized them that concretely.

Was this copied on one of those Xerox copiers that swapped letters and numbers because of the JBIG compression?

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