There are interesting thoughts in this article but talent is something that money can buy, ask the banks.
Spy Kids
21–30 of 67 posts
Re: Spy Kids
#22Charlie's argument is that the vast majority of people growing up today will not have sufficient loyalty to "the state" to fill the ranks of the state's spy apparatus. While I find it persuasive that people's loyalty to institutions may be in decline, that population-wide generalization is not dispositive for the hiring ability of spy agencies. You don't need an entire generation of loyalists to fill out the NSA. You…
From what I've read it seems that both Manning and Snowden were gung-ho patriots when they signed up. When they signed up. It seems in this end game the HR departments are better off picking the cynical, venal and power-hungry. At least they don't have the "disillusioned idealist" failure mode. But you may end up with a kakistocracy.
Are there any articles out there detailing this? I've never heard this part of either story.
Re: Spy Kids
#23Any time I think about loyalty to organisations or countries I am reminded of what E.M. Forster wrote in his essay "What I believe" in 1938: I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Such a choice may scandalize the modern reader, and he may stretch out his patriotic hand to the telephone at once and ring…
That's a great quote. I would hope that such a choice would not "scandalize" today's modern reader, as I don't think that nationalism is as strong today as it was in 1938. At least, not in the US. I hope.
Which is basically Charlie's point, although he went ahead & worked it up into a theory ... a theory I don't think this foundation can quite support, per my post below.
Re: Spy Kids
#24If you get hit with a pay wall to read this article, just Google "spy_kids_nsa_surveillance_next_generation" and you should get the article as the first result. Then you can read it from there.
We have HN whitelisted from the paywall, so if you click through from the link on this page you shouldn't see the paywall as long as you don't have any extensions that hide your referrer.
If that's not the case, would you mind dropping me an email with your browser/version? tim.showers@foreignpolicy.com
Re: Spy Kids
#25I like Charles Stross essays for the interesting points they bring up, but I think this one is missing something. There will continue to be enough loyal-to-country people to staff the major intelligence agencies (and their contractors) in the major Western powers as long as there is some meaningful difference in governance and individual civil liberties between the West and the regions from which the West gathers intelligence. And there is. And there will be for a while. If eventually few people in the civilized, democratic countries of the West feel the need to spy on other countries, that will be mostly because those countries have become more civilized and more democratic--that is, more like the West.
I have no desire for my daughter to live in a country where she can't obtain a full education, so there are at least a few countries in the world that have current policies that are absolutely opposed to my values, and, I think, the values of all civilized, rational persons. Over the years, there have also been national governments that have not flinched from exporting support to terrorist movements that seek to establish dictatorships where democracy is already established. (Yes, over the years, the United States itself has been in that category, but the United States seems largely to have learned from its comeuppance in some countries where it previously deposed elected leaders.) As long as there is fundamental international conflict based on core human values, there will still be people defending the best values by any means necessary.
Charles Stross is based in Britain, and he talks about generational differences, but he doesn't go back even enough generations in Britain to notice that cultures can change in the direction of MORE loyalty to country as well as to less. The famous 1933 debate at Oxford about whether that year's students at Oxford would defend "king and country"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_and_Country_debate
(the answer that year was no) was followed up by a Britain that fought tenaciously for king and for country to defeat the Axis. I'm confident that there are plenty of Americans and will continue to be plenty of Americans who know enough history and understand enough about current world conditions to continue supporting United States governmental intelligence agencies and their contractors.
Re: Spy Kids
#26Charlie's argument is that the vast majority of people growing up today will not have sufficient loyalty to "the state" to fill the ranks of the state's spy apparatus. While I find it persuasive that people's loyalty to institutions may be in decline, that population-wide generalization is not dispositive for the hiring ability of spy agencies. You don't need an entire generation of loyalists to fill out the NSA. You…
> And those people will always exist, helped along by talk-radio fear mongers who continually generate a stream of xenophobic, america-fuck-yeah types who will happily spy on their countrymen in exchange for that ever-elusive "secure job".
The loyalists will be recruited from credit card companies and water treatment plants, who daily watch vandals and foreign powers attack infrastructure. Security agencies can and should be staffed for pedestrian reasons. They can and should be seen as intellectual janitors, not as hotbeds of raving nationalism.
Re: Spy Kids
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
"A" hires "A"; "B" hires "C". And Generation Z's "A" players will not work for the NSA. You don't just need loyalists. You need loyalists who are good enough to operate your systems, who are also conscience-free enough to dissociatively split what they're doing from how they do it, day to day. And you have to have 100% accuracy to avoid the next Snowden. Speaking as an engineer hiring for software, we are desperate f…
>have to have 100% accuracy to avoid the next Snowden That's the classic security problem; you've gotta defend every attack but only need one attack to work. But there have been spies that have sold information before, instead of publishing it. Spy agencies have had this problem for a long time. At least with Snowden, they know he's out. With other long-time double agents, they had to deal with leaks over many years.…
The essence of the argument is "tell me that you want the kind of thing that money just can't buy". The hypothesis is that the next generations will feel similar convictions, only more so.
The counterargument that the NSA has just not found the right dollar amount to clear the market of conscientious objectors assumes a lot about what people want out of life. It might be "rational" to take 500 million dollars not to do your life's work. On the average, you will not be that productive in your lifetime, so the 500 million in the hand is more than worth the 5 million in the bush.
But if you are filled with a sense that you are the one person who can accomplish a unique purpose in the limited time you have alive, then I think no amount of money is going to turn you aside.
Again the cynical counterargument is that just like time is fungible for money, your life is fungible for the next wild eyed visionary. But I think we all have a few heroes about whom we can say: "Never again will such a person walk the earth." They may be successful, but they're not the sellouts.
I have not heard of NSA offering f-you money to engineers so it may be a moot point.
Re: Spy Kids
#28"Dog eat dog liberalism" is something quite different to what we have nowadays. I understand liberalism as something close to a free market.
Now, western countries have everything but free markets. Here in Europe, social insurance and pension plans are state controlled and therefore monopolistic.
Banks all over the world have legal privileges that wouldn't exist in free markets.
Central banks are "calibrating" the interest rates everywhere in the world with India and Argentina already on the brink of hyperinflation.
Yet we call the current system liberal (or capitalist) and we don't like the current system, therefore we call it dog-eat-dog liberalism and want to end capitalism.
I wholeheartedly disagree with the author's point of view on this.
Re: Spy Kids
#29If you get hit with a pay wall to read this article, just Google "spy_kids_nsa_surveillance_next_generation" and you should get the article as the first result. Then you can read it from there.
We have HN whitelisted from the paywall, so if you click through from the link on this page you shouldn't see the paywall as long as you don't have any extensions that hide your referrer. If that's not the case, would you mind dropping me an email with your browser/version? tim.showers@foreignpolicy.com
My mistake, the large subscription popup that appears on page load appeared to be a paywall to me. It does allow you to exit from it, though it had me a bit confused.
Re: Spy Kids
#30Any time I think about loyalty to organisations or countries I am reminded of what E.M. Forster wrote in his essay "What I believe" in 1938: I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Such a choice may scandalize the modern reader, and he may stretch out his patriotic hand to the telephone at once and ring…
It is also worth noting between the world wars Germany and Japan operated such that the rule of law, "country" if you will, counted for a good deal less than other loyalties. No doubt Forster was thinking of someone much more like himself, rather than of the assassins of Erzberger or of assorted Japanese Army putschists. The Weimar Republic, though, is probably a far better representation of a world run by the rules he proposes than the England of the late 1930s was.