Spies are far less effective than most of us think. And ELINT organizations like the NSA aren't much better, even though ELINT supplanted HUMINT from the 1960s onwards because it was clearly The Way Forward.
]]>Weiner's Legacy of Ashes does the same thing at book length for the CIA, and while I haven't read Puzzle Palace, I wouldn't be surprised if it gave the NSA similar treatment.
To me, spying and magic ("real" magic as opposed to stage magic) have a lot in common, which is why the Laundry books are so fun. In the real world, neither works nearly as well as its practitioners claim, and secrecy and misdirection are endemic to both worlds.
The one thing I'd disagree with about ELINT being "the way forward." I'd rather suspect that the US' intelligence problem is, quite simply, that we're the weirdest of the WEIRD. Because we're so different, it's hard for us to find loyal citizens who blend in well elsewhere. As with neurodiverse people everywhere, we've turned to technology to make up for the social ineptitude that makes us hard to be proper spies.
]]>In one of Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise stories O'Donnell has his characters talk about how easy it was to break into one of the departments of the British security service because said departments spent so much time spying on each other they had no time left to pay attention to their own security. It stuck me way back then, as it does now, that there are probably a good many authors of fiction who are actually better researchers into intelligence than the higher echelon people of the Security Service who didn't seem to be all that good at their jobs and the journalists that they use to regurgitate their fables for public consumption.
Ah, well, I gather that MI 5 has been decentralised from its over concentration in London so maybe Lessons Have been learned, but I'm afraid that it is all too easy for members of the Intelligence Community, of whatever nation, to tap the sides of their collective nose in a Significant Manner whilst Murmuring, " WE know things that YOU don't .. "
I rather liked Anthony Prices quotation of Alexandre Dumas from 'The Three Musketeers ' in Prices 1986 novel, "For the Good of the State" thus ...
" It is by my order and for the good of the state that the bearer of this note has done what he has done.
3rd December, 1627 Richelieu "
Quite a few members of the Intelligence Communities seem to me to have been carrying a copy of that fictional Richelieu document inside their heads during the cold war. You can justify an awful of lot of really nasty stuff in the line of ‘high crimes and misdemeanours ‘if it is done “For The Good Of The State “
]]>I wouldn't say it was social ineptitude that makes the USA bad spies, rather your own cultural slef-centredness, and that you are to a large extent still the dominant culture that ensures you think you know the best about everythying.
]]>Re BUGGER Wasn't the guy in Aus who was atempted to be gagged (I forget his name right now - "Spycatcher", anyway - ah - Peter Wright ) completely wierded-out over some totally unscientific shit, which was utter cods, from beginning to end? Ah, I see Wright [ & ANGLETON! ] show up ... oh dearie dearie me .... These people make even the "ministry of transport" (DafT) look competent & sane!
ARNOLD @ 214 Richlieu/Dumas Even scarier is the other quote: If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. Fancy a trip to Guantanamo, anyone?
]]>The grimly ironic part of me wonders whether the next major wars will resemble those of the late Roman Empire or perhaps the Japanese Sengoku period. In the former, we have a weakening empire being pummeled by barbarians, many of which were basically people being pushed off the Eurasian steppe by worsening climate conditions and by other people taking their land. For example, what will India, Myanmar, and Nepal do when Bangladeshis in the hundreds of millions have to move or drown?
The Sengoku was the warring states period in Japanese history that preceded the rise of the Tokugawa. Factors that fed into it were a weak and divided government in Washington DC, erm, Kyoto, usury forcing people off their land in the farm belts, and the rise of fundamentalist, erm, Buddhism in a way that helped people reach across class lines to organize themselves, take their land back and attempt to govern themselves, based on ideas of a largely mythical past, with crime enforcement going medieval (Japanese, in this case. Medieval Texan is a bit harder to imagine).
On the more impersonal scale, it's yet another case where the peasants killed the moneylenders, burned their mortgages, and took their land back. Then I look at what happened in America when banks started falsifying mortgage documents wholesale and daring people to sue them, and I see a very ancient pattern playing itself out again. Smart politicians would be screaming for a jubilee at this point, but it appears that smart people are getting out of politics instead.
But the interesting thing is that we have: a) a lot of dispossessed people, increasingly on the move, b) new ways of organizing these people into effective forces (everything from social media to AK-47s), and c) a lot of nomadic, wealthy leaders who fancy themselves feudal lords already, a few of whom are charismatic enough to provide rallying points for the masses. Interesting situation, yes?
]]>As for ELINT and the cold war, is the problem not more that in a hot war ELINT is actually very useful, but in a cold war much less so because oddly enough knowing which division they send where isn't quite as useful because of the constrained nature of the 'war'.
]]>I've been reading The World Turned Upside Down: Medieval Japanese Society (BigMuddy Link) by Pierre Francois Souyri. Aside from having a nice translation by Kathe Roth, I found the parallels between pre-Sengoku (Warring States) Japan and other periods in history (like now) fascinating. I don't know whether this was by design, or whether their experience parallels our own right now in a number of rather disturbing ways. The good news is, they got through it eventually.
In any case, someone could pretty easily write a near-future SF for the US based on the Sengoku period in Japan. Just substitute in the US military for the samurai, the assault rifle crowd for the jizamurai, the Evangelical movement for the Amidist movement, and Washington for Kyoto. And no, I'm not interested in writing it. Someone else can have fun comparing long arms and katanas.
]]>Well, up to a point. ELINT [more accurately SIGINT - Y Service, and cryptanalysis - "Station X" /Bletchley Park] helped the British war effort no end - but only combination with aerial reconnaissance and good old HUMINT. Many ULTRA decrypts took so long to process their moment of utility had passed.
The Soviets had no ELINT capability to speak of, not much radar and didn't even have tank-to-tank radio communications - and they got their boots on German soil long before the UK/Commonwealth and US did. The only sniff of ULTRA the Russians got was through the Lucy spy network. Otherwise they relied on HUMINT of the Willi Lehmann, Leopold Trepper variety.
One of the great untold stories is that of Geoffrey Prime, whose information enabled the Soviets to switch to a cryptanalysis-resistant code in the early 1980s
The Russians effectively won the ELINT Cold war against NATO, NSA, whomever.
A lot of good it did them, to. ;-)
]]>A billion humans. Almost as many cults.
I suspect this is already a no-go zone, with its own unique ecology of technomancy and competing factions. My gods can beat up on your gods. A billion humans, written off as unsaveable.
Australia.
Trying really hard to extend and intensify the natural shield techniques/technology of the OLD DREAMERS. Weaponising the uniquely resistant Class II entities that have evolved in this environment, so hostile to them, the Wulgarus and Bunyips.
And while we're at it.. using Krantzberg syndrome plus similarity and contagion to keep Gorgonic tumours at controllable levels (and other neoplasms too). Nothing as flashy or wasteful as a Basilisk gun, a much smaller proportion of C atoms get changed. Anything from a hot flush to fatal hyperthermia, coagulating nerve proteins.
But India's the matter that most concerns me. Here we are, putting in armour plate and concrete reinforcement in some areas, while others have all the protection of soggy tissue paper.
]]>A couple of decades or so ago one of my TECH Support Colleagues at a British University told me that I was DOOMED!!!! Doomed I Tell You!!! And so forth. This despite the fact that I had been kind to him and had helped in his career development and so on.
In casual conversation my colleague told me that, since I had not been born into HIS particularly exclusive branch of Christianity, MY SOUL would be dissolved upon Death!!! Evidentially Burning in The Pits of Hell was a bit outmoded...I did ask...and this ever so Humane alternative was proffered. Oh, well, that was Me Told, and all that sort of thing and I do - really and trully for he was a decent man in most respects and did try to do his best in his job which was all that I requred of him - hope that his faith was of great comfort to him when he died of a brain tumour some years later and left behind him a young family...who no doubt now share his belief that if you aren't born into a particulary wierd Christian sect that was born in the back streets of Sunderland way back in the last Great Christian Revival back in the Age of Victoria you were and are Doomed if Not actually Damned. Actually Queen Vicky, who whilst Militantly Christian was not the Right Sort of Christian, would also , by the Standards of my collegue have had her Soul Disolved after her ever so cerimonially celebrated Death at the turn of the Century ... and serve her right too, for not having been one of the Elect!!!
]]>" HIV patients told by Pentecostal pastors 'to rely on God'"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23729684
Bit of a waste of time really since, according to my late colleague, they are DOOMED!!! Etcetera and so forth....
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