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Honestly. I miss the old days. I worked in intelligence at the tail end of the Cold War. We kept all our shit on paper, in a safe, and planted a couple of nice
by rcurry 5y ago
Honestly. I miss the old days. I worked in intelligence at the tail end of the Cold War. We kept all our shit on paper, in a safe, and planted a couple of nice young Marines with guns in front of it. It worked well as a system - so well in fact that when the OPM got hacked and a bunch or people’s security clearance documents got leaked I was like “Well, thankfully my information couldn’t have gotten leaked, it’s on microfiche in a safe somewhere and I really doubt anyone would be stupid enough to scan all that shit into a computer.” Of course about eight months later I get a letter in the mail, lol. Yep, they put it in a computer after all, ha ha.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hamburgerwah 5y agoAt the fall of the iron curtain we learned that the system you are nostalgically venerating was so thoroughly and systemically compromised by the soviets as to make those marines little more than little girls wielding daisies. The Roderick James Ramsay conviction is a good example where the breadth and depth of the penetration was so bad that we didn't even try to really get to the bottom of any of it to avoid embarrassment and political fallout. By way of example, Rod was able to facilitate hardware level duplication (and could have easily performed neutralization though he did not) of the Permissive Action Link nuclear keys in the active german theatre which were also in locked safes on one of the largest US bases in the world behind many, many layers of armed soldiers.
- mikeodds 5y agoDo you have any recommended reading on this?
- hamburgerwah 5y agoThree minutes to doomsday. There are many fabrications in it (it was written by an FBI agent after all) but most can be corrected by reviewing contemporary documentation connected with the trials.
- mikeodds 5y agoThanks will take a look
- aerostable_slug 5y ago> breadth and depth of the penetration was so bad that we didn't even try to really get to the bottom of any of it Correction: we didn't do that in the unclassified literature. PERSEREC did a deep dive and that deep dive remains behind the Green Door (same with Hanssen's, Boyce's, and Ames's, among others).
- hamburgerwah 5y agoLol, the good old "the real answers are in the classified docs". If there was any meat there it would have been leaked ages ago. Literally no one wanted to know what really happened, the answers would end too many important peoples careers.
- aerostable_slug 5y agoKindly, you know little about intelligence. Imagine if they were given up by a human source. That kind of thing doesn't leak until everyone is dead and buried, and even then it doesn't always get out because it gives foreign counterintelligence services some ability to assess the damage done by the source. Imagine if they were given up by a technical collection program. Same thing.
- RyJones 5y agoI have a collection of love letters from OPM somewhere. Idiots, all.