Indeed.
The action and the excuse for the action need to be treated entirely separately. Far too often only the latter is argued and the results of the former are irrelevant…
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Wait. There’s oil in Afghanistan?
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yes. in opium poppy seeds.
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I agree. Fuck it if they don’t have a plan. A good plan to make any sort of positive difference will depend almost entirely on conditions within the organization and what sort of constraints are in place and what sort of actions are possible. It’s just not possible to get the necessary insight from the outside.
So why not join up, see what you can do, and if you decide you can’t do anything then just slip out again quietly. If nothing else maybe one day you can write a book, which can be a significant act of protest in itself. Action against more powerful adversaries must necessarily be opportunistic. Demanding some sort of cunning plan from the outset is paralytic, and to be honest the sort of thing I might expect from a fiction writer.
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there will be, once Unocal gets its pipeline built. This is the same thing the Russians wanted to do in the 80s, back when we were openly funding the Taliban
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So you’re saying that’s the basis of the war in 2003?
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Literally came directly to the comments without reading the article just to post this. I leave satisfied knowing God’s work is done.
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Which is a great threat. Unfortunately, the agent that said this would have a tragic accident on the way home that evening. It’s sad, but at least they would be buried with honors, right?
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I think Cory meant that the cadet believed he could produce change from within, which Snowden failed at doing (and had to resort to more drastic measures).
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way back in 1935
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I also hope that kid doesn’t listen. As an academy grad myself, I think I know a bit about where that kid is coming from. And I feel that there is no other place in America that drills the idea of duty, honor, and loyalty into kids than the service academies.
It may be true that the kid comes into a rotten NSA system. And it may be true that he/she sees things that are morally wrong taking place. And it may be true that taking a stand against those things may end the kid’s career. But remember, these are kids that are being indoctrinated with very strong moral compasses and the courage to lead charges up hills defended by machine gun bunkers.
I believe that one of the best ways to force a change in thinking amongst American leadership is to hold a mirror up through the example of young and idealistic Americans willing to take a stand for what they feel is right. Snowden is one of these but we need more. This is a cause worth fighting for and one insider’s idealistic voice is not enough.
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" Sure, bud. Keep sweeping that parking lot."
That was bad advice on several levels.
If you want the security services to behave better ,then you want better people in them. You can pass laws until you turn blue, but if decisions are made by less good people, they won’t get better.
Democracy ain’t just voting. It is institutions. I take a different view to Cory on many things, but I turn up and take part in processes that make things better, in my view, as a Conservative. If you don’t turn up to argue with me, I win.
You could be smarter than me, you can feel morally superior by not engaging with outfits you don’t like, you may even be right about the issue; it doesn’t matter because I am there and you are not.
If the NSA, CIA,FBI, GCHQ, Mossad et al only recruits the sort of person who wouldn’t ask Cory for advice, then the world would be a worse place. I’ve met Cory and despite being a member of the British Conservative party asked for and received his views on stuff. It’s called intellectual integrity.
When kids ask me for advice, I offer things I believe will work, but in this case Cory just shared his own prejudices and because he’s eloquent did some harm.
I’ve done security for the government and won some arguments, lost some others. Anyone who cannot function in an environment where they can’t cope with that isn’t just unsuitable for government service, most decent jobs are out of their reach.
I’ve lost some arguments because I was wrong, others because I was not articulate enough, but most importantly here, sometimes because I was outnumbered.
Smarter more intellectually honest people in important organisations is a good thing, the NSA ain’t going away if it gets boycotted by a few but it can be transformed by a few.
I find this analagous to the left wing anarchist idea “don’t vote, it only encourages them”.
As a Conservative, this benefits me, because it means that people who’d vote against my party don’t vote for anyone. But also as a Conservative who knows how many good men and women suffered and died so that people had the right to vote against me, I am bloody sad.
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You may not be allowed to do that.
Spycatcher by Peter Wright. He only escaped prosecution because he had emigrated to Australia.
Unfortunately a study of history suggests that organisations are rarely transformed by a few good people; they are usually taken over by sociopaths and psychopaths. (Going from big to small, and off the top of my head; Stalin’s takeover of the Russian Communist Party, the ongoing travails of the US Republicans, the Blairite takeover of the British Labour Party, and even UKIP, which began as a centre left party under Prof. Ian Sked, and was then taken over by Nigel Farage and moved quickly to the far right.)
I’d love Trudeau to provide a Canadian counter-example, by the way.
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Exactly what I was going to post.
Of course, nowadays a kid that went on that kind of fugue during an {NSA,CIA,NGSA,[redacted classified acronymic agency]} interview would hever see teh light of day again.
That depends on whether an organisation is salvageable or not. Sometimes its whole raison d’être can be rotted at the core.
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There’s been a lot of talk about NSA’s conflicting mission statement. Being in charge of SIGINT and IA at the same time while having to use the same tools for both seems like a recipe for disaster. I don’t know how someone is supposed to manage the Information Assurance side of the house when they have people trumpeting the misguided slogan “collect it all”.
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Several strategies to bring a system from within, come to my mind.
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Attrition… what Snowden did might not have been enough but sure hurt the system. Do this 100 or 1000 times and system will come crumbling down.
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Subterfuge… the open kind. Once inside actively work to sabotage the tech that system relies on
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Subterfuge… less open. Do a subpar, crummy, sloppy, half-ass job when ever given a task. Kiss ass to ensure promotion to higher level of responsibility. Volunteer, take initiative and take charge whenever possible. These systems are designed to promote persons with such attitude.
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Infiltrate the system and use your influence to recruit likeminded people. Decent human beings. People that would actually make system better.
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Inverse of no. 4. Once inside use you influence to bring in incapable yet eager individuals. The ones that will ensure that crappy work will start to pervade every part of the system.
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he has not failed !
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Yep, and it’s why we’re still there now.
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