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Reading this article made me really frustrated. As an individual I can't do much about government sanctioned surveillance but at least I'd have hoped that peopl

• rhcom2 8y ago
  Honestly, it just sounds like good old fashioned xenophobia.
  • ashwinaj 8y ago
    Well put. I grew up in the UAE where xenophobia/racism is rampant. If you really want to see white privilege in action and more shockingly, out in the open, move to any Arab country.
• awakeasleep 8y ago
  You're asking a fundamentally interesting question that has horrifying implications. What makes someone OK with murder? How do you flip someone from a civilian mindset of more or less 'love thy neighbor' to a soldier mindset of 'kill the bad guy'? In rough terms there are a lot of simple answers, like 'portray the other as a threat to your family/way of life/values' But here we're talking about someone that believes human rights workers are valid targets unless they have her same passport. That makes the origins of the belief much harder to imagine.
  • FakeComments 8y ago
    I find it baffling you can’t imagine a human engaging in tribalism, a behavior which predates civilization and permeates nearly every facet of human life. That’s clearly what it is: Stroud views US citizens as “her tribe”, so people attacking them offends her, while outsiders fighting outsiders doesn’t matter. Further, this also answers the “moral compass” question: they have a strong moral compass, it’s simply aligned to tribal protection, rather than some kind of “universal” ideal, which is precisely what you’d expect from people who volunteered as soldiers in tribal warfare.
    • awakeasleep 8y ago
      You seem to be mistaking an answer to "what" as an answer to "why/how"
      • dnbgfher 8y ago
        The answer to "what" is implied above. Evolution.
        • ivanhoe 8y ago
          or a military selection of psychos... because ability to limit or completely switch off the empathy is one of the characteristics of psychopathic criminals
  • pluma 8y ago
• cs02rm0 8y ago
  How can she justify that citizenship is the differentiator between what's right and wrong? AIUI (not an American) that's a dividing line for a lot of US law relating to intelligence agency activities. More observation than explanation, but to some people what's legal and what's ethical is very tightly coupled.
  • colordrops 8y ago
    It's not only citizenship but distance. People are very upset about what's happening at the Mexican border, but pay almost no heed to actual civilian deaths caused by US policy in Syria and Yemen.
• skh 8y ago
  ...I'd have hoped that people such as Stroud that worked for US intelligence would have a stronger moral compass than what the article describes. It seems like you are saying it is moral to work for a U.S. intelligence agency but not for a foreign government that targets human rights activists. U.S. intelligence agencies have targeted human rights activists for decades. U.S. intelligence agencies have engaged in torture, illegal kidnappings, drug trafficking, and a host of other immoral acts. If a person is comfortable working for an American intelligence agency and you are comfortable with people who do then I don't see how this situation is any worse. I'm surprised she had any moral compunction that an American citizen was involved.
  • secfirstmd 8y ago
    Solid points you make. Though also, it might just my be inner cynicism reading this article having spent a long time working on security/human rights etc, but it sort of feel reading between the lines that the so-called "moral compunction" of many of the former US intel people was actually more of a "legal compunction" ("Oh crap, I've ignored things I've seen because I am getting paid a huge wedge of tax free money but now the the FBI are sniffing around it's time to grow a conscience and get ahead of this.")
    • skh 8y ago
      That is an interesting take. I'd not have thought of "legal compunction". I like the phrase and will borrow it without attribution!
      • secfirstmd 8y ago
        I just want to tell you both good luck. We're all counting on you.
    • BorRagnarok 8y ago
      Exactly. Psychopaths have no morals, they only feign them when necessary.
  • fossuser 8y ago
• opportune 8y ago
  The reason she was probably ok with working for US intelligence was precisely because she saw no immorality in doing terrible things to non-americans, or at the very least, she gradually absorbed that viewpoint over time.
• sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Good points but there is also one missing: she is American, not Arab and/or has not civic ties with the Monarchy or culture there. There is a giant difference between communitarian acts one might carry out for the ostensible good of the community (we may not always agree with our own geopolitics, but at least we can vote) - and for other, arbitrary regimes, working for money. Most people even in the regular civil service have a sense of duty, and it's generally 'not about the money' - and wouldn't be very interested in just 'doing it for the money' anyhow. The first statement about 'as long as it's not Americans' is a little disturbing though.
• sorokod 8y ago
  Perhaps it is not that complicated. Perhaps she is lying and cares not as to who is on the receiving end of her expertise regardless of nationality. Perhaps in the end it's just a business disagreement.
• netcan 8y ago
  mercenaries
• BLKNSLVR 8y ago
  That's exactly the sort of personality they want working for their own military / intelligence. Pets. Guard dogs. Familiar == good, !Familiar == bad. Grey doesn't exist. Makes me worry about how military AI's will be "trained". That revolution can be delayed indefinitely.
• Spooky23 8y ago
  Sounds like treason to me. Or it’s some wacky under the radar US action.
• dforrestwilson 8y ago
  I used to work in the SIGINT world. It is rife with contractors who are ex-military, often have no degree, and can get paid triple-digit salaries for doing the same work they were doing in the military. I would estimate 80% of my military buddies are still working as either contractors or government employees in the intelligence field. I have been offered $250K+ (tax free!) to deploy to Afghanistan on several occasions.. because they need bodies over there and it's risky. They weren't pitching esprit de corps or a just war to me, it was solely $$$. This isn't Band of Brothers. This is a war of choice not need. By avoiding a draft via a standing professional military, and then outsourcing much of that military's internal workings to contractors we have created a mercenary culture. Same as the Romans. Fixing this requires a political will that I wish we could muster.
  • AndrewKemendo 8y ago
    I think this is the biggest disgrace in the US. If we actually imposed the costs of wars on the American Public, like we did in WWII, we wouldn't be doing as much war. Instead we "outsource" the costs to private contractors which overcharge because "pensions are more expensive than contract labor." We need to take any and all profit out of war by eliminating as much contract labor as possible. That's easy and perfectly fit to do with software. Which is why I joined Kessel Run as a government civilian, to bring software engineering in-house to the Air Force instead of contracting it.
    • int_19h 8y ago
      It's not just carrying the cost. By removing conscription and relying entirely on volunteers, we have also turned out military into a caste. Literally so - it's more and more common to have entire intergenerational families in service. And once it becomes a caste, it starts drifting apart. Politically, that is fairly obvious if you look at the polls. There's a surprising geographic component to it, too - for one thing, disproportionally many recruits come from specific geographic regions (mostly the South). And there are several municipalities around the country where most people who live there are veterans and their families. The real problem, though, is that such a military caste starts seeing it as separate and distinct from the rest of the country. https://inss.ndu.edu/Media/News/Article/1428887/deconstructing-the-warrior-caste-the-beliefs-and-backgrounds-of-senior-military/ https://inss.ndu.edu/Media/News/Article/1428887/deconstructi... And that, in turn, allows for sentiments like these to develop: "I am irritated by the apathy, lack of patriotic fervor, and generally anti-military and anti-American sentiment. I often wonder if my forefathers were as filled with disgust and anger when they thought of the people they were fighting to protect as I am." If such sentiments become prevalent, how long will the military tolerate civilian control, if it considers the controlling civilian government to be run by people with "anti-American sentiment"?
• house_atr 8y ago
  Your take is a personal opinion and that's what you need to recognize. The world is recognizing that human rights (whatever it actually means) is a shape shifting definition laundered by Western powers to manufacture consent for coups and wars and terrorism. Actual objectively and we'll defined bad things. Human rights activists are the new agitators of this century. You may believe that you are sanctimonious, but given the popular rise of authoritarian governments all over the world, I think the majority of the global South would beg to differ. Sedition is a serious crime and being a buzzword activist doesn't grant you immunity.
• Pristina 8y ago
  You are surprised people who work for the NSA perform mental gymnastics to rationalise their choices?
• yeahitslikethat 8y ago
  It's 2019 and we still discriminate, legally and as a species collectively against people, because of where they were born. We don't choose that anymore than we do our gender or our skin color. But yet, we deny rights. Food. Safety. Life, because of it. And it's fine. Because they were born in that country.
• moneywoes 8y ago
  The double standard is inane.
• khacking 8y ago
  I came here to say the exact same thing. What a despicable human being Lori Stroud is. There is an utter lack of understanding by her that people other than American citizens are humans too. She was ‘a bad spy’ as she put it as soon as she started targeting human rights activists, children, anyone who didn’t have violent agenda (like the governments that she worked for). This part in particular makes me sick: > “Some days it was hard to swallow, like [when you target] a 16-year-old kid on Twitter,” she said. “But it’s an intelligence mission, you are an intelligence operative. I never made it personal.” I hope she has trouble sleeping at night.
• okmokmz 8y ago
  >How can she justify that citizenship is the differentiator between what's right and wrong? Toxic nationalism
• csomar 8y ago
  She didn’t want to target US citizens because that could lead her to legal troubles and possibly lengthy jail. She can get away by targeting an arab activist. Targeting US citizen for another government is spying.
• EliRivers 8y ago
  I'm not convinced that she was "sick to her stomach". Maybe she was either always this way, or maybe the nature of the work has blunted her to this point, but she reminds me of psychopaths blending in. They know that the people around them have morality and that they're expected to have morality too, and they try to fake it, and often they get it fairly close, but sometimes they just get it wrong. Not saying she's a psychopath (there are many reasons to fake morality), but this jarring boundary in morality feels similar; makes me think it's faked.