Bugger - Maybe the real secret is that spies aren't very good at their jobs

I think most people who do anything are not very good at it. Period.

This applies to Mc Donalds employees, politicians, spies, strippers, doctors, lumberjacks, Comcast customer service representatives, artists, physicists, engineers, teachers, cops, pimps, and any other profession or hobby group you can envision.

After a decade in the U.S. Military, I always wondered how government got anything done. The mere idea of ‘conspiracies’ assumes a level of competence that far exceeds the capabilities of the largest, most bureaucratic organizations in the world. In the end, regarding the military and intelligence, the important thing is to be less incompetent then your opponent.

Often times the most glamorous thing about the secret squirrel outfits and organizations is the secrecy itself. Yet fewer and fewer Americans are serving in government or the military, so it is easy to assume a level of competence far above what actually exists. Hollywood helps a lot with this misconception. Are the inner workings more like The Bourne Identity or Jackass? Spend an hour at the DMV and take a guess.

We have a security apparatus sized for orders of magnitude more threats than we face, so the bulk of it goes about convincing themselves they are working for out security, rather than against our productivity and rights.

Interesting idea. Maybe we're just assuming that people who work for the NSA are 1) very competent and 2) really engaged in their work.

Thinking about it I can imagine that even though they collect a lot of 'stuff' that not many people who work for the NSA (or some other BS organisation) are really motivated to do anything with that information. They are mostly, just like any other corporate environment, people who need to pay their mortgage and what to go home at 5pm.

Maybe that's only true of the spies you hear about.

This is one of the best readings I had in the last year. thanks for sharing.

(August 2013).