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

And here I thought this was saying something:

http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-...

Is this article for real? Or does it cherry-pick only the failures?

The real problem with spy agencies is that their compartmentalized nature is ripe for abuse from the top down, which is why I theorize they have been compromized from the top down. Also, so tired of hearing the trite ol hanlons razor (a logical fallacy on it's face) trotted out, or the inevitable follow up of "but how could so many people keep X a secret? No conspiracies are possible..." That shit has been debunked time and time again and it's utter tripe.

The only commentor here that even gets close is the one who said something about freemasonry. I would add secret societies in general, such as Knights of Malta and Jesuits in there as well. But that's stuff the public dismisses as crazy conspiracy theory and the agencies themselves don't like to talk about...

So tired of being dismissed as cookoo and then a few years later saying "I told you so".

Couple of people use the cambridge 5 as an example. First of all, it was the cambridge 6, and they were triples who were always ultimately loyal to the crown.

The middle men of spying are never allowed to be too good because if they were they would realize the top of their own orgs are the problem. Even the one group that used to be allowed to be good, the analysts, who told truth to power, have been slowly being ousted so it's easier to manufacture intel for whatever geopolitical/strategic purposes those at the top want.

The technological revolution has scared them though because they are afraid of being outed, which is why they are quickening the pace to turn the key of the totalitarian dystopian surveillance society. The information revolution is a threat to the powers that be, which is why we will continue to see nothing but an increase in attack tempo on the internet and it's freedoms.

This is for real, although we should acknowledge that some successes would be much harder to see than failures. (Some should be much more obvious, though... The FBI loudly celebrates terrorist attacks it prevents, and yet all the self-described wins turn out to be pretty lame.)

SIGINT sometimes does really well. Enigma is the obvious example, but I'm sure the recently-revealed wiretaps on international conferences produced some politically valuable stuff.

There are even occasional wins on analysis. The German tank problem was a major statistical breakthrough, and Abraham Wald pioneered operations research doing air force design analysis. But... both of those were unconventional, marking breaks from normal intelligence work.

Moreover, almost all the wins I've outlined here came during wartime, a setting where a very clear 'they' is undeniably out to hide secrets and attack you. Things tend to get way less impressive during peacetime.

I can't find it at the moment, but John le Carre tells a brilliant story about this. He was an MI6 man in the cold war, before he was a writer. And the beginning of Tinker, Tailor, a mission to Hungary to meet a defecting general, was inspired by a real experience. But in real life, there was no general - le Carre's superior had made him up. His boss led him on a dangerous covert mission across the Iron Curtain for no reason, simply because real Cold War spy work was so aimless and boring.

I went from a private office to an open office and worked there for two years a while back. One of my fears going in was that the increased visibility would force people to work more, but in the end it seemed like there was a silent agreement that we'd all turn a blind eye to the fact we were all working six hour days, including the boss...

I'm glad I'm not going nuts here. ECHELON was public knowledge all the way back in the 1980s, the European Parliament formally investigated in in 2001, but even in 2010 it was something you only joked about or people would look at you like a conspiracy theorist.

Sure, "the NSA listens to stuff" wasn't a revelation, but before 2013 very little of this was taken seriously outside of a few corners of tech and cybersec.