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Comment by Seanambers | Hacker News Reader

I find it hard to believe that the NSA/CIA don't have the capability to uncover, insert own players and stop this.

Well when the president hands over all the data they've been collecting it makes their job a lot harder

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-rus...

During Cold War 1.0, a lot of analysts and operatives were 1st and 2nd gen immigrants from Eastern Europe, and had ties and culture experience to help inform policy against the Warsaw Pact.

After the 2000s, the US began increasingly limiting those with ethnic or potential familial ties from working beats related to those countries. A Chinese American wouldn't pass the security clearance muster for the China role, nor a Jewish American for an Israel role.

There were attempts to potentially remediate this during the Biden admin, but it fell to the wayside [0][1]

Some white dude who went to high school in White Plains and college at Tufts just isn't going to have the domain or cultural experience or knowledge needed to really understand China or Iran, and it legitimately has caused a lot of IR Policy to become divorced from reality.

[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/16/state-department-di...

[1] - https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/18/asian-americans-sta...

Interesting. Do US colleges and US TV/movies provide sufficient cultural understanding of US to other countries' governments, without them needing US immigrants as staffers?

Also, other countries send lots of students to the US. Some become immigrants but lots go back home.

Also, US-Europe immigration is largely moribund, so familial and social ties to European states are much weaker now than 50 years ago.

Most immigration to the US now comes from Asian and LatAm states, so a lot of us Americans prioritize those problems and needs above Europe.

> Do US colleges and US TV/movies provide sufficient cultural understanding of US to other countries' governments

Do French/German/Italian/<insert country here>?

They don't, and whatever global media Americans do consume tends to be Asian (overwhelmingly Japanese and Korean) or Latin American.

This isn't the 20th century anymore when a lot of 1st and 2nd gen immigrants had European ties. American in the 21st century is now Asia and Latin America facing.

This squares with Edward Luttwak's take:

https://unherd.com/2025/02/the-breakdown-of-the-cia

I'm shocked at how impotent they seem against Russian cultural warfare.

Because we have the 1st Amendment. It's (correctly) very hard to combat people just saying stupid shit in the US.

It's a cultural problem that we let so much bullshit slide. America has come to love the spectacle, and loud wrong people can make quite a show.

In a just society, there'd be a price to pay for lying. Free speech has consequences. Be loudly and persistently wrong (even when corrected by actual experts with real facts) and you get penalized with turning down the volume. But it's the exact opposite in today's media atmosphere.

Totally agreed, just not an easy thing for intelligence agencies to fiddle with/defend.

Sure, that's not their job. It's the cultural shift we've allowed in the face of an overwhelming onslaught on our attention span.

I agree… I was responding to GP who said it’s surprising that the IC has been “incompetent” at mitigating it. I believe, like you, it is not a job for the IC.

Alex Jones, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Joe Rogan are the four horsemen of the disinformation apocalypse.

Russia, got the Propagandists from Germany in World War II. How much have computers gained in power? The Military grade disinformation has gained a lot of power, and yes, they weaponized it, and now own...

The amount of incompetence, incomprehensible ideology and red-tape slows everything down. NSA and CIA still look powerful because of huge amount of funds that flow in. Other countries happily hack into our infrastructure. You hardly hear NSA doing such accomplishments anymore (last was the Iranian nuclear hack). I doubt if America has any powerful spy network in places in Russia or China. But hey, I am just a dumb citizen.

> You hardly hear NSA doing such accomplishments anymore

To be fair, that could also mean that they've been successful at keeping their covert operations... covert.

Maybe yes. If so, that is great. But then why do we not see any damage to those countries either due to misinformation or any other hacks. On a related note, Snowden incident shows the depth of our ability.

Which is why they put pro-Putin Gabbard in as DNI. She's been purging.

U.S intelligence agencies have never been particularly good at their job. Complaining about the deep state and such is cope from fascist and commies that have continually folded under no pressure.

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