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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> It was one of the largest infiltrations of the United States government in history

Really? There isn't a single group of people more motivated than the Scientologists who've tried to infiltrate the US government?

The US government is the most powerful institution in human history. It controls more money in a year than the totality of almost every other individual country's annual GDP. It can kill billions of people in a couple of hours. The power here is staggering.

And the Scientologists with 5k agents is one of the most serious attempt at getting into the guts of that and corrupting it? Seems unlikely, somehow. I'd suggest that the Scientologists were just crazy enough that the conspiracy was unwound. US federal politicians have a totally reasonable and expected corruption problem; this probably isn't one of the most major attempts. The US army routinely purges countries, purging unfavourable records is just so small-biscuits it is hard to believe.

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>There isn't a single group of people more motivated than the Scientologists

Motivated maybe, but nation state actors have a much harder time. The WSJ just ran an article yesterday about how difficult it is for the US to rebuild espionage networks in China after a relatively large bust a decade ago[1].

The Soviet Illegals program never included that many people, it's fiendishly difficult to get people into influential positions of a hostile government. It's much easier for a cult who has access to tons of already citizens to just get a job somewhere. I mean, with all the religious protections, they could do it half openly almost. Case in point, the fact that Scientology still exists as an entity despite all these bizarre operations probably wouldn't work for many other actors

[1]https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/american-spie...

While anything is possible, hypothetically speaking, if the US had rebuilt their spy network quite quickly (or it wasn't hit that badly) what would you expect to see? I draw your attention to the fact that the WSJ is not, in fact, a reliable guide to the US clandestine programs. We might even expect the US officials to lie and claim that their spy networks are disrupted as a convenient form of misdirection.

The game theory suggests that at almost literally no point should countries want their papers trumpeting that their foreign spy networks are extensive, robust and well established to the point where they survived an attempt at disruption. Especially if that were true.

That's very true. In general, any information coming out more or less directly from a secret agency, from any state, can only be trusted to mean "the agency wants this message to be heard". It is absurd to believe public statements by people who are paid to hide the truth. Their motivation for stating something is never going to be "because that is true" (even when it is!), it is always calculated.

And it's pretty clear that the WP doesn't have its own operatives monitoring US intelligence and Chinese counter-intelligence inside China. So they're getting their information directly from US intelligence (or, very unlikely, from Chinese intelligence).

The thing is, the US government has a large security apparatus that is actively trying to prevent and discover foreign influence, and there are explicit laws requiring them, and other agencies, to do so.

In contrast, preventing individuals to infiltrate the government based on religion is entirely illegal, and there are good chances no one high up in the intelligence community even thought of the danger of Scientology before this was discovered.

Preventing people from participating in government based on their religion is illegal, but Scientology's aim is subversion, which the government correctly guards against. Normally religions brazenly reach for government control in board daylight so it's easy to respond. Scientology's convert infiltration tactics were fairly novel and so caught a lot of people off guard.

Yes yes, I'm not saying the government illegally acted against this infiltration.

Just that, because of the protected status of religion, it was much harder for the government to use the same mechanisms it uses against foreign nationals attempting similar things. So, even though Scientology has nowhere near the levels of motivation and resources as China or the USSR did, it was far easier for them to conduct such an operation (before they were caught once).

For absolutely any nation, it's insanely hard to make 5000 citizens of another country do whatever you want them to without leaking anything.

Besides China, I can't think of any other nation that could get those numbers.

It doesn’t have to be a nation to count as an infiltration. My guess would be that both the drug cartels and the weapon manufacturers are highly motivated to infiltrate the executive and law making functions of the USA.

> this probably isn't one of the most major attempts

Perhaps one of the most major failed attempts. Also do we have to think about what groups might be most able to go undetected while infiltrating the IRS?

Our tax law is already so full of holes it's hard to believe that it would even be worthwhile to go to the trouble to corrupt the IRS...

It’s possible. You have to have a lot of US citizen operatives to be able to pull off an infiltration and though places like China have the resources to pull it off (and probably do), it’s not all that easy.

cough... elephant...cough... room... something ...israel... USA... something

Not realated to any current, past, or future conflict. Still, to any non-American it is mind-numbing, and even moreso that so few Americans apparently even notice it

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