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My thoughts are that it's a good thing to have agents in the world that can operate in the dark, keeping their actions, and sometimes the consequences, hidden a

My thoughts are that it's a good thing to have agents in the world that can operate in the dark, keeping their actions, and sometimes the consequences, hidden and secret. It's not hard to envision nation state level threats that could be mitigated by illegal assassination of a warlord, or stealing all of a drug cartel's money or so on. That only works in the context of strict oversight and principled direction by an incorruptible chain of command and leadership by elected officials given privileged access. Take the oversight and principled direction away, and you're left with state funded villains whose activity will almost always run counter to societal well-being. Our institutions are failing because we eroded and ultimately lost our social cohesion and embraced the cultural balkanization instead of seeking new shared values. It's bad enough that we don't trust the media, but the CIA being off the leash is horrifying. The war on drugs is a crystallized example of this social failure mode.

maybelsyrup 5y ago
> It's not hard to envision nation state level threats that could be mitigated by illegal assassination of a warlord, or stealing all of a drug cartel's money or so on. This may be true in the abstract, I agree, but out there in the world, you don't have to stray too deeply into kook-dom to realize that, unsettlingly often, we're (the US) the guys responsible for the creation of the conditions in which warlords and drug cartels operate in the first place -- and almost as frequently, of the groups themselves. There are no drug cartels without a War On Drugs, and indeed, the CIA has been shown to be deeply involved in cartel activity itself. (See the Kiki Camarena story, Gary Webb's work, and the story of Sister Dianna Ortiz. All mainstream sources, no whackjobs. The recent-ish Camarena Netflix documentary "The Last Narc" is terrific.) So you could make a compelling case that if we didn't get our hands dirty in these areas at all, we wouldn't need a CIA or NSA to manage the inevitable consequences when the actors involve start behaving in ways we don't like. (I'm told they call this "blowback".) And indeed, this is exactly the point. It's a genius business. It's like the guys in Amsterdam who own both the cannabis coffee-shop and the kebab place next door to it. Revolving door operation. Prints money! > That only works in the context of strict oversight and principled direction by an incorruptible chain of command and leadership by elected officials given privileged access. Respectfully, this is impossible. Human beings cannot do this. No one is incorruptible, and there are too many people with an interest in meaningful oversight never existing, starting with these little mafias themselves. The real-world record bears this out: there is no meaningful oversight, from congress to FISA to your local cops using StingRays. They're just not going to tell you what they're doing. And if you bother them too much about it, well, let's just say don't get on any small aircraft. This is an open secret in DC. Look, even Chuck Schumer knows: "Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you." As I've said in other threads: if you ask a bunch of people to get world-class-good at lying, stealing, betraying, and murdering, and they then start doing those things to you, well, there's no one to blame but yourself.
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  This is all very well expressed.
  - maybelsyrup 5y ago
    Hey thanks so much, that's nice to hear.
    - hungryforcodes 5y ago
      My pleasure:)
- ex3xu 5y ago
  The warnings against the CIA came as early as the Doolittle report [0] during the Eisenhower administration (see Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes), and Peter Kornbluh's Bay of Pigs Declassified documents the intention of Kennedy's state department to rename the CIA and strip it of its covert action capacity in the aftermath of the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. But really, you could go as far back as Nietzsche if you wanted to ignore another perfectly apt warning: Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes back into you. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Report,_1954 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Report,_1954
sandworm101 5y ago
>> by an incorruptible chain of command and leadership by elected officials given privileged access. Nope. All chains are corruptible. Nothing should ever be based on the idea that some core group of people is above reproach. That is the stuff of superhero movies. Realworld trust systems must be built on the basis that everyone and anyone might be a bad actor. All nodes should have oversight. All actors should be accountable to multiple levels of supervision. Everything should be documented. Those who become corrupt need to be detected and removed. When dealing with classified information the process will operate more slowly but must still take place.
- consumer451 5y ago
  > All nodes should have oversight. This is a lovely way of phrasing something that I have been thinking about. Basically that low accountability systems are really bad across the board. If they work for one generation (as in a benevolent dictatorship) then that’s nice, but it’s not a long-term solution. We need a parity chip on everything.
  - Aerroon 5y ago
    I think that systems that require oversight to fight off corruption aren't stable in the long-term. Almost inevitably the executive and the oversight get corrupted in the same way. And then they end up perpetuating themselves. The only real solution seems to be to 'randomly' reset the system once in a while.
- rland 5y ago
  The superhero approach might (arguably) be valid in some cases -- I'm thinking of Lincoln, Washington, and FDR. But an institution must be larger than a single person. Because if you want something to last longer than about 40 years (which is about the maximum amount of time a superhero can be super) you have to have succession. It's also notable that those "greats" had in common a vision larger than themselves. Selflessness and an annihilation of ego, in service of a larger project, seems to be a requirement for getting yourself to that superhero status in the first place.
StanislavPetrov 5y ago
>It's not hard to envision nation state level threats that could be mitigated by illegal assassination of a warlord, or stealing all of a drug cartel's money or so on. Its hard to envision any foreign nation state level threat that is more dangerous than domestic state police that surveil, torture and murder people completely outside the law and the Constitution.

maybelsyrup 5y ago

> It's not hard to envision nation state level threats that could be mitigated by illegal assassination of a warlord, or stealing all of a drug cartel's money or so on. This may be true in the abstract, I agree, but out there in the world, you don't have to stray too deeply into kook-dom to realize that, unsettlingly often, we're (the US) the guys responsible for the creation of the conditions in which warlords and drug cartels operate in the first place -- and almost as frequently, of the groups themselves. There are no drug cartels without a War On Drugs, and indeed, the CIA has been shown to be deeply involved in cartel activity itself. (See the Kiki Camarena story, Gary Webb's work, and the story of Sister Dianna Ortiz. All mainstream sources, no whackjobs. The recent-ish Camarena Netflix documentary "The Last Narc" is terrific.) So you could make a compelling case that if we didn't get our hands dirty in these areas at all, we wouldn't need a CIA or NSA to manage the inevitable consequences when the actors involve start behaving in ways we don't like. (I'm told they call this "blowback".) And indeed, this is exactly the point. It's a genius business. It's like the guys in Amsterdam who own both the cannabis coffee-shop and the kebab place next door to it. Revolving door operation. Prints money! > That only works in the context of strict oversight and principled direction by an incorruptible chain of command and leadership by elected officials given privileged access. Respectfully, this is impossible. Human beings cannot do this. No one is incorruptible, and there are too many people with an interest in meaningful oversight never existing, starting with these little mafias themselves. The real-world record bears this out: there is no meaningful oversight, from congress to FISA to your local cops using StingRays. They're just not going to tell you what they're doing. And if you bother them too much about it, well, let's just say don't get on any small aircraft. This is an open secret in DC. Look, even Chuck Schumer knows: "Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you." As I've said in other threads: if you ask a bunch of people to get world-class-good at lying, stealing, betraying, and murdering, and they then start doing those things to you, well, there's no one to blame but yourself.

hungryforcodes 5y ago
This is all very well expressed.
- maybelsyrup 5y ago
  Hey thanks so much, that's nice to hear.
  - hungryforcodes 5y ago
    My pleasure:)
ex3xu 5y ago
The warnings against the CIA came as early as the Doolittle report [0] during the Eisenhower administration (see Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes), and Peter Kornbluh's Bay of Pigs Declassified documents the intention of Kennedy's state department to rename the CIA and strip it of its covert action capacity in the aftermath of the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. But really, you could go as far back as Nietzsche if you wanted to ignore another perfectly apt warning: Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes back into you. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Report,_1954 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Report,_1954

sandworm101 5y ago

>> by an incorruptible chain of command and leadership by elected officials given privileged access. Nope. All chains are corruptible. Nothing should ever be based on the idea that some core group of people is above reproach. That is the stuff of superhero movies. Realworld trust systems must be built on the basis that everyone and anyone might be a bad actor. All nodes should have oversight. All actors should be accountable to multiple levels of supervision. Everything should be documented. Those who become corrupt need to be detected and removed. When dealing with classified information the process will operate more slowly but must still take place.

consumer451 5y ago
> All nodes should have oversight. This is a lovely way of phrasing something that I have been thinking about. Basically that low accountability systems are really bad across the board. If they work for one generation (as in a benevolent dictatorship) then that’s nice, but it’s not a long-term solution. We need a parity chip on everything.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  I think that systems that require oversight to fight off corruption aren't stable in the long-term. Almost inevitably the executive and the oversight get corrupted in the same way. And then they end up perpetuating themselves. The only real solution seems to be to 'randomly' reset the system once in a while.
rland 5y ago
The superhero approach might (arguably) be valid in some cases -- I'm thinking of Lincoln, Washington, and FDR. But an institution must be larger than a single person. Because if you want something to last longer than about 40 years (which is about the maximum amount of time a superhero can be super) you have to have succession. It's also notable that those "greats" had in common a vision larger than themselves. Selflessness and an annihilation of ego, in service of a larger project, seems to be a requirement for getting yourself to that superhero status in the first place.

StanislavPetrov 5y ago

>It's not hard to envision nation state level threats that could be mitigated by illegal assassination of a warlord, or stealing all of a drug cartel's money or so on. Its hard to envision any foreign nation state level threat that is more dangerous than domestic state police that surveil, torture and murder people completely outside the law and the Constitution.