A Former CIA Agent Talks Spycraft | Hacker News Reader

A Former CIA Agent Talks Spycraft

pursuitmag.com

56 pointslemonberry13 comments

An operative is not an agent, i.e. case officer. The original articles in Pursuit Magazine (listed below) correctly describe her as a former agent. Whoever wrote this summary doesn't understand the distinction.

http://pursuitmag.com/lindsay-moran-former-cia-agent-talks-s...

http://pursuitmag.com/lindsay-moran-former-cia-operative-why...

In any case, you won't find anything published in the US that the CIA would not agree to. Everything written by current or former agents is screened by the CIA's Publications Review Board.

I am slightly bothered by the notion that "blending in" has any chance of working in the modern era.

Certainly, in the past, the entity carrying out the surveillance was likely to have a limited budget of time-and-attention, a limitation that could be gamed to evade analysis and pursuit as described.

However, computerisation and data analytics change the game significantly. The cost of "attention" is reduced to such a significant extent that practically everybody's behaviour can be analysed, albeit superficially.

It is a relatively trivial matter for the entity carrying out the surveillance to build a dossier on large swathes of the population: to identify and categorise their beliefs, their behaviours and their weaknesses. To score them according to how much of a threat they represent, or according to whatever other factors may be useful.

The information-dominance landscape has shifted considerably over the past 10 years. I am greatly interested in seeing how our newfound industrial-scale-information-dominance is translated into real-world power: Presumably also by automated means and on an industrial scale.

I imagine that this can be done subtly, by targeting specific influencers, inhibiting some selected communications and inserting or promoting others, thereby shaping discourse and the formation of political belief in a larger section of the population.

Emerging geopolitical crises (Ukraine/Crimea, anyone?) provide an ideal petri-dish to see if the competing factions are deploying this sort of technology, and for assessing the effectiveness of these techniques.

but then the terrorists would have won, etc, etc.

also in the end it all boils down to someone taking money from the spy, and as far as i know every country already has some IRS keeping tab on the entire population...

Weird how there is a culture of seeing spies and their craft as special. They are at best Peeping-Toms and stalkers.

Also, keeping secrets is no big deal. Every family has them. Every school has 'secrets' that they don't tell the children. Every company board has 'secrets' they don't share with the staff or the outside world.

As for personalities and the need to keep different persona, who really is the same person at work as they are in their private life? It is not hard to compartmentalise your life and be a different person for work.

However, ultimately, what these agencies are up to is quite sick and twisted. They are not out for the common good. Some of the psychology behind that could be a better basis for an article.

I suspect a lot of industries build up a corporate mythology around how it is 'special' to motivate intelligent people to get to do their best work for them. I don't see the CIA as very different from every startup entrepreneur with a pitch on how they're changing the world.

Countries make themselves special too.

"Keeping secrets" is in many places part of the cultural cachet. It's a high-status move to, when asked about something, say "I can't talk about that" (the "it's above your paygrade" is implicit). In a lot of corporate cultures, and a lot of government ones too, that status-affirmation-through-secrecy is really pure status-seeking; the actual security measures aren't that difficult to defeat, the secrets aren't that important, and the people you care about not telling are unlikely to be asking.

That's different from someone who is trying to conceal that they even have a secret, like someone trying to infiltrate another organization while remaining inconspicuous, or someone who's secretly embezzling or cheating on their spouse. That second form is far more isolating.

I LOL'ed.

Once you realize that the USA is probably behind in terms of "spying" when compared to the Soviets, you'd be a fool to accept that without a response.

It is the height of narrowmindedness to think that Nation-States operate within the same plane as ordinary individuals.

<i>USA is probably behind in terms of "spying" when compared to the Soviets</i>

From hypothesis to demonstration in less than 10 words.

I say probably because I have little direct knowledge of what the Soviets are capable of.

But I do know that the Soviets have been caught doing some impressively sneaky stuff. One thing that sticks in my mind is the placement of a (completely passive) eavesdropping device in the Oval Office. Said device was unpowered, and missed during a comprehensive check for bugging devices.

So I'm making an assumption here: namely, that they have only refined their techniques in the areas of statecraft and espionage.

My point is that they're not "Soviets" anymore...

"...keeping secrets is no big deal. Every family has them."

Uh, I would note she immediately goes on to mention her father's classified work - so, maybe everyone has secrets but not everyone works in a classified capacity for the US Government (though the group is now fairly large).

This is significant because Victor Marchetti and John D. Mark in The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence described how already in the 70s the CIA was growing more and more to be a hereditary sect, something that one might imagine would make this separate group even more insular.

Indeed, this is the only interesting comment in an article which I would agree otherwise just simpers and grovels to the cachet of the spy.

Aside from Marchetti, I'd also recommend Phillip Agee's Inside the Company: CIA Diary - a book which shows this "Company" as neither harmless or romantic.

Interesting for some insight to certain facets of life as a CIA agent, but I find the articles the post discusses to be one-sided.

I think "cute" human interest stories like this, while not necessarily bad in themselves, are particularly suspect at a time like this, when the CIA is in the process of being charged with remarkable crimes against their own nation's democratic system (see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7351710), not to mention the continuing distasteful matter of torture and related practices.

I aim no criticism at the post but find that the material that led up to it has a light scent of media damage control.

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