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Being a spymaster sounds far more fun and interesting than being a spy.
It seems worse to me. Just sorting through all these memos trying to figure out which people are and aren't important, and which data may be relevant. id the business is mundane, middle management isn't exciting.
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This comment comes across as small minded and pessimistic without real evidence. Scientists and engineers typically help the world, with or without money. See Gates, Stallman, Page & Brin, Clair Cameron Patterson, etc
Page and Brin have repetitively again and again compromised their stated moral positions in pursuit of money. They are billionaires that put thousands of smaller businesses out of business on a regular basis. The company they operate has paid off a large number of government officials to protect them from prosecution, and they have a level of power and influence that rivals oil companies. If you were trying to show a…
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I think "original provocation" is a little hard to claim when we are talking about Jerusalem. Even in recent history, the '48 Arab-Israeli war, pan-Arab forces attempted to crush the nascent Jewish enclave. Also, I find your Holocaust allusion extremely tasteless.
> Even in recent history, the '48 Arab-Israeli war, pan-Arab forces attempted to crush the nascent Jewish enclave. If you're going that far back, why not just a handful of years earlier? Palestine getting flooded with immigrants whose sole purpose was to replace the incumbent population and establish their own state. The American far right is terrified that muslims are going to take over an establish sharia law... al…
The American far right is so disconnected from reality and humanity as to render their arguments null and void. I am not arguing their positions.
I don't think though that any mass migration of a persecuted people is an invasion, no matter how much the current inhabitants don't like them.
When the state of Israel was attacked by an existential threat it defended itself, and it now occupies the terrain required to defend itself. The continual threat from Syria more than justifies holding the Golan Heights. The rocket attacks from Gaza on heavily populated areas (and control by Hamas) certainly justify some blockade. The West Bank territory squeezes so close to Tel Aviv that ceding it to a regime that might rocket them is impossible.
The Israelis use of heavy weapons on Gaza is indefensible, as are the continued growth of West Bank settlements. But they fall short of being comparable in any way with the Holocaust.
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Page and Brin have repetitively again and again compromised their stated moral positions in pursuit of money. They are billionaires that put thousands of smaller businesses out of business on a regular basis. The company they operate has paid off a large number of government officials to protect them from prosecution, and they have a level of power and influence that rivals oil companies. If you were trying to show a…
Please be specific about this payment of govt officials to protect them from prosecution. I have never heard any whisper of such a thing, I think that's BS. They have influence in that people use google.com. You can argue they compromoised to keep their power, but you need to be specific. They don't like NSLs, they just have to obey them.
1. Google had a previous FTC Commissioner in their pocket under Obama (named Joshua Wright). The same former FTC Commissioner is now part of Trump's transition team for the FTC. The FTC is charged with regulating companies like Google. The best source I can give you is The Intercept, which not only describes his quadruple-revolving-door, but links to the various stages of it. And yes, an investigation of Google by the FTC was quietly closed during his tenure.
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/15/google-gets-a-seat-on-th...
> "Joshua Wright has been put in charge of transition efforts at the influential Federal Trade Commission after pulling off the rare revolving-door quadruple-play, moving from Google-supported academic work to government – as an FTC commissioner – back to the Google gravy train and now back to the government."
2. In their original paper, Sergey Brin and Larry Page argued that advertising had a fundamentally corruptive influence on search. If you compare the quote from their paper below, which indicates a strong need for an uncorrupted academic search engine, with their multibillion dollar advertising empire, the only logical conclusion is that Sergey Brin and Larry Page value money and power over any sort of highminded desire to benefit society. You'll also notice that Google displays paid ads for websites that should naturally be the top result, like showing a paid Best Buy link above the official Best Buy website search result when searching for "best buy", just as they originally indicated was a trait of a "worse" search engine.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
> "Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."
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> Even in recent history, the '48 Arab-Israeli war, pan-Arab forces attempted to crush the nascent Jewish enclave. If you're going that far back, why not just a handful of years earlier? Palestine getting flooded with immigrants whose sole purpose was to replace the incumbent population and establish their own state. The American far right is terrified that muslims are going to take over an establish sharia law... al…
The Jewish flight from Europe and concurrent Zionism is significantly different is character to the current Israeli behaviour, which is undoubtedly seeking to illegally expel Palestinians from the West Bank. But to say that the Palestinians and their allies had no role in this process is also absurd. The plight of the Palestinians is dire, but their actions must also be weighted. In many ways they have the Israelis t…
For people who like this sort of thing: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times-they... (on the British Royal family being infiltrated by fascists). The TV series Deutchland 83 is also well worth watching for a snappy spy drama about a young man from East Germany being coerced into being a double agent.
Lovely series, but first thing I thought of when reading the article was The Americans , it's about two spies in the Soviet illegals program living in a DC suburb. Would definitely recommend it if you liked Deutschland 83 .
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/03/24/a_former_kgb_...
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Right. For instance, if you are China.. odds are you have agents in Google and Facebook, right now.
Working in defense and talking to candidates who applied from China (graduated from M.S. programs at some US universities), I sometimes wondered if some who applied would be agents working for Chinese Intelligence services...
So I guess I can recommend that as a trigger... (Someone with a mission would have kept quiet, I think.)
A fair number of sleeper agents like this have been outed over the years. Another example that comes to mind is the KGB agent couple on which the TV show "The Americans" was based: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/07/discovered-our... FBI Operation Ghost Stories arrested 11 people back in 2010. https://vault.fbi.gov/ghost-stories-russian-foreign-intellig... What I'm wondering is: how many other agents are o…
One of the inefficiencies of embedding agents like this seems to be that they're subject to the same vagaries of chance as all of us. What are the chances of an agent being hired and then promoted to have access to an SCI file you're interested in? It seems a pretty poor bet compared to turning individuals already in relevant positions.
Much easier to get your person into an IT position. Edward Snowden gained access to more secret documents than almost any individual person in the NSA. Get your infiltrator into the IT department and then help them with hacker tools and zero day exploits needed to extract data. Who knows how often this technique has already been used already.