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Bugger: Maybe spies aren't very good at their jobs (2013)

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Bugger: Maybe spies aren't very good at their jobs (2013)

#51

Post by erikb »

Yes, of their actual job they probably do very little. This is already part of being secret and fighting secrets. Being secret means there is no way you need to follow any standards or reviews. So your work ethic must not be very high. And fighting secrets is hard. You can even see that when working in a team of considerable size (e.g. 10+ people). It's hard even to track all the open, important and even marketed information. Think about how many actual secrets there are that are kept by people who really try.

But there are other things these agencies do wonderfully.

A) When you have a real hint, and even if it is just a competitor, you can employ lots of fighting power, technology etc to track them. This in itself is already worth much. Think about bugging another country's chancelor's phone. Awesome!

B) Scaring your own population into behaving. If you think you are observed all day by CIA, FBI and NSA you are more likely to do stupid things that harm the common piece.

C) Doing things that would be illegal for the government, like funding dictatorships delivering weapons to drug lords, etc.

So I think even if everybody knows that spies don't really succeed as much as people thought we will still continue to have spy agencies.

Re: Bugger: Maybe spies aren't very good at their jobs (2013)

#52

Post by sdrothrock »

erikb wrote: post #51

Yes, of their actual job they probably do very little. This is already part of being secret and fighting secrets. Being secret means there is no way you need to follow any standards or reviews. So your work ethic must not be very high. And fighting secrets is hard. You can even see that when working in a team of considerable size (e.g. 10+ people). It's hard even to track all the open, important and even marketed inf…

> Being secret means there is no way you need to follow any standards or reviews. So your work ethic must not be very high.

I'm not following the link between "you don't need standards/reviews" and "your work ethic must not be very high" -- could you elaborate, please? Or was this a typo?

Re: Bugger: Maybe spies aren't very good at their jobs (2013)

#53

Post by confounded »

gerdesj wrote: post #16
jimnotgym wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Britain we have state schools, private schools and most expensive of all the old 'public schools', with a name almost designed to confuse. Most of them are ancient, and look a bit like Hogwarts. The real power of the schools is the 'old boys network'. When you need help getting into university, or beginning a career, there will be an old boy of your school you can write to for help. It seems daft in 2017, but ex p…

Anecdote != data, mate. Counter examples: I went to Abingdon School which is in the town called Abingdon (Oxfordshire). Before that I went to a school called Wolborough Hill School which was perched on top of Wolborough Hill, in Newton Abbot, Devon. Both are (were in the case of Wolborough which passed away some time ago) fee-paying schools. My dad was a soldier (as was my mum but she was told to leave on marrying da…

Triggered, much?

I've never met a public school boy that didn't have an "excuse" along these lines, and a mockney accent to "mate" and "cheers" me with. I always find this response baffling.

About 6% go though private schools in the U.K.

You serve a role. All the MDs I worked under in London were also public school boys. No-one who didn't go will find your exceptionalism interesting. We will all listen to your story and "mate" you back while cringing inside. Just accept your privilege, and own it (it's worth quite a lot).

Re: Bugger: Maybe spies aren't very good at their jobs (2013)

#54

Post by [deleted] »

gerdesj wrote: post #16
jimnotgym wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Britain we have state schools, private schools and most expensive of all the old 'public schools', with a name almost designed to confuse. Most of them are ancient, and look a bit like Hogwarts. The real power of the schools is the 'old boys network'. When you need help getting into university, or beginning a career, there will be an old boy of your school you can write to for help. It seems daft in 2017, but ex p…

Anecdote != data, mate. Counter examples: I went to Abingdon School which is in the town called Abingdon (Oxfordshire). Before that I went to a school called Wolborough Hill School which was perched on top of Wolborough Hill, in Newton Abbot, Devon. Both are (were in the case of Wolborough which passed away some time ago) fee-paying schools. My dad was a soldier (as was my mum but she was told to leave on marrying da…

[deleted]

Re: Bugger: Maybe spies aren't very good at their jobs (2013)

#55

Post by erikb »

sdrothrock wrote: post #52
erikb wrote: post #51

Yes, of their actual job they probably do very little. This is already part of being secret and fighting secrets. Being secret means there is no way you need to follow any standards or reviews. So your work ethic must not be very high. And fighting secrets is hard. You can even see that when working in a team of considerable size (e.g. 10+ people). It's hard even to track all the open, important and even marketed inf…

> Being secret means there is no way you need to follow any standards or reviews. So your work ethic must not be very high. I'm not following the link between "you don't need standards/reviews" and "your work ethic must not be very high" -- could you elaborate, please? Or was this a typo?

Yes, I can elaborate.

Standards are a set of procedures to cooperate and provide a certain level of minimum quality. For many single person hackers not having standards may result in much better quality, but for teams of people who do this because they need to pay rent the quality is always pointed towards the possible minimum, not maximum. Therefore standards usually improve the work of paid teams.

But standards aren't followed per se. Only when your activities are logged and public do you even try (you=normal human being working a day job). But only when ass-kicking or termination of regular payment is feared do people really care about the details. And these usually come from reviews.

So if you have neither standards, nor public exposure (forgot that one), nor reviews your team's quality is probably low.

Re: Bugger: Maybe spies aren't very good at their jobs (2013)

#56

Post by beagle3 »

erikb wrote: post #51

Yes, of their actual job they probably do very little. This is already part of being secret and fighting secrets. Being secret means there is no way you need to follow any standards or reviews. So your work ethic must not be very high. And fighting secrets is hard. You can even see that when working in a team of considerable size (e.g. 10+ people). It's hard even to track all the open, important and even marketed inf…

> Being secret means there is no way you need to follow any standards or reviews. So your work ethic must not be very high.

I don't know if you are right or wrong, but your statement sounds to me almost exactly like the one that I hear from religious zealots about atheists: "No one to answer to, therefore, no morals or ethics".

There is a point of view from which this makes sense: Since there is no standard code, everyone is free to choose their own; It's a question of what likelihood you assign a-priori for ethics and morals to be chosen, and a question of empirical data as well, which likely no one has, so no statement can be disproved and everything is "equally right". (Was this paragraph about spies or about atheists?)

Re: Bugger: Maybe spies aren't very good at their jobs (2013)

#57

Post by slaymaker1907 »

branchless wrote: post #22
crdb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I immediately thought of Peter Wright's bio [1]: > The Registry employed enormous numbers of girls to maintain efficient delivery of files within the building, as well as the massive task of sorting, checking, and filing the incoming material. In Kell's day the Registry Queens, as they were known, were recruited either from the aristocracy or from the families of MI5 officers. Kell had a simple belief that this was t…

Another example: Cameron. Led us into Brexit due to a massive miscalculation. Not a capable man but the Brits insist on picking leaders from a few thousand upper-class twits. His Chancellor and Eton chum was also a disaster.

Americans don't seem to be doing much better in that regard. In fact, Trump has the worst education of any president in recent memory.

Re: Bugger: Maybe spies aren't very good at their jobs (2013)

#58

Post by beagle3 »

cassowary wrote: post #49
mistermann wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snowden's leaks didn't reveal somewhat of a conspiracy? Was that behavior not both secret and unconstitutional?

conspiracy secret + unconstitutional i think to reach the level of a conspiracy theory, you need a lot of people doing something outrageous. for instance, if you have the army, the navy and fbi and the russian kgb (or whatever they're called nowadays) in cahoots without a single leak for twenty-five years, that's improbable. i tend not to buy conspiracy theories because they usually need a leak which doesn't exist. f…

I have no horse in this race, but you are not more logical than your brother.

First of all, "conspiracy theory" is often taken to mean one of the tinfoil variety ("government and gay aliens experiment with mind control beams" style, or "immortality treatment hidden by pharma for the last 100 years in attempt to increase profits and for eugenic purposes"). But a "conspiracy" simply means an act of collusion done secretly which contrasts with public statements or the law (or is generally harmful). Thousands of these happen every day in various scales. Assuming that you can trust government statements is, based on history, naive. So, do you have a different term for "small conspiracy I accept happens all the time"? Because your rhetoric seems to exclude these from existing.

With respect to the (missing) 9/11 leak, there are countless stories that came out decades after happening. "Establishing it as the real deal" based on the lack of a leak makes to me about as much sense as a statement from a fellow truther (however well informed in his subject matter) establishing it as a lie.

Re: Bugger: Maybe spies aren't very good at their jobs (2013)

#59

Post by bayesian_horse »

Covert intelligence is important, because it is a channel of information which cannot be seen or controlled as easily by adversaries as open source information does.

But the very covertness also means these intelligence services are highly intransparent and poorly supervised. And poor supervision usually leads to poor results, as viewed by those who should be doing the supervision.

Re: Bugger: Maybe spies aren't very good at their jobs (2013)

#60

Post by sametmax »

beagle3 wrote: post #56
erikb wrote: post #51

Yes, of their actual job they probably do very little. This is already part of being secret and fighting secrets. Being secret means there is no way you need to follow any standards or reviews. So your work ethic must not be very high. And fighting secrets is hard. You can even see that when working in a team of considerable size (e.g. 10+ people). It's hard even to track all the open, important and even marketed inf…

> Being secret means there is no way you need to follow any standards or reviews. So your work ethic must not be very high. I don't know if you are right or wrong, but your statement sounds to me almost exactly like the one that I hear from religious zealots about atheists: "No one to answer to, therefore, no morals or ethics". There is a point of view from which this makes sense: Since there is no standard code, eve…

Except you are mixing individuals with groups. The NSA is not an individual. It's an entity that has no moral, composed of thousand of people with their own agenda, and nothing to check what's going on.
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