4 ms·

There is no reason an intelligence-gathering operation has to use someone who is totally incompetent at the job and comes across as suspicious.

vintermann 4y ago
Yes, there is. The reason is that they aren't superhuman, and aren't very popular anymore. This is something I've argued before: In the 40s, the US intelligence services could call up famous, brilliant people like Claude Shannon, ask him to fix some problem and never talk about the problem or his solution to it. If they tried that today, most would tell them to go fuck themselves. Now you may think things would be different in North Korea. In some ways they might be, but they obviously have a lot less top talent to commandeer in the first place, with their lack of modern technology and childhood nutrition. And even then, there are less confrontational ways to say no where open defiance is out of the picture. In North Korea, if you're very competent at anything, you might be quite careful in who you reveal that to in the first place.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  Don't think I agree. You really just need 1 smart person per country to pass a meager interview process post learning the questions.
  - vintermann 4y ago
    You need to identify him first, and remember, from the position of NOT being able to answer those questions yourself. It is very hard to identify someone as smarter than you, if they try to avoid being identified as such. Even if we're talking about smartness in a very narrow technical sense.
    - closeparen 4y ago
      The intelligence community is a significant employer of tech talent, you'd think they could ask their own IT guys...
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Why is money not a solution? A life-changing amount of money is peanuts to a government, and should convince the vast majority of people to take the job.
  - vintermann 4y ago
    If money was what Shannon was primarily interested in, he wouldn't be in academia. This is true of almost all types of narrow domain experts. There are more parties than government that can offer them money, too. For most academics (and more, the better they are), not being allowed to talk about what you're working on to the vast majority your peers, would be too high a price for money to make up for. NSA circumvented this for many years by employing an obscene number of math graduates, effectively creating their own parallel academia. We can only imagine how expensive that was. Still, they were surpassed by the "open" world even in the narrow fields they were interested in, such as cryptography, by the late 90s at the latest. It's not just sad being cut off from the free world, it stunts you.
    - zaik 4y ago
      There is no contradiction in being in academia because you want to spend your time doing research and accepting a nice bonus from the government now and then.
      - vintermann 4y ago
        The contradiction is that you can't talk about what you worked on, and you need to be careful that what you write in public research doesn't reveal it. It's ten times worse than the corporate equivalent.
  - carom 4y ago
    It is not for North Korea. Their APT groups switch between intelligence gathering and PayPal / crypto scams. They also have prominent ransomware groups. Crime pays for the hermit kingdom and they do need cash. Now, to OPs point, on getting someone competent. Say, they want to infiltrate a crypto trading firm. Maybe the guy who knows crypto doesn't know English. So you end up with a team of guys playing telephone and hoping for the best.

vintermann 4y ago

Yes, there is. The reason is that they aren't superhuman, and aren't very popular anymore. This is something I've argued before: In the 40s, the US intelligence services could call up famous, brilliant people like Claude Shannon, ask him to fix some problem and never talk about the problem or his solution to it. If they tried that today, most would tell them to go fuck themselves. Now you may think things would be different in North Korea. In some ways they might be, but they obviously have a lot less top talent to commandeer in the first place, with their lack of modern technology and childhood nutrition. And even then, there are less confrontational ways to say no where open defiance is out of the picture. In North Korea, if you're very competent at anything, you might be quite careful in who you reveal that to in the first place.

hackernewds 4y ago
Don't think I agree. You really just need 1 smart person per country to pass a meager interview process post learning the questions.
- vintermann 4y ago
  You need to identify him first, and remember, from the position of NOT being able to answer those questions yourself. It is very hard to identify someone as smarter than you, if they try to avoid being identified as such. Even if we're talking about smartness in a very narrow technical sense.
  - closeparen 4y ago
    The intelligence community is a significant employer of tech talent, you'd think they could ask their own IT guys...
Nextgrid 4y ago
Why is money not a solution? A life-changing amount of money is peanuts to a government, and should convince the vast majority of people to take the job.
- vintermann 4y ago
  If money was what Shannon was primarily interested in, he wouldn't be in academia. This is true of almost all types of narrow domain experts. There are more parties than government that can offer them money, too. For most academics (and more, the better they are), not being allowed to talk about what you're working on to the vast majority your peers, would be too high a price for money to make up for. NSA circumvented this for many years by employing an obscene number of math graduates, effectively creating their own parallel academia. We can only imagine how expensive that was. Still, they were surpassed by the "open" world even in the narrow fields they were interested in, such as cryptography, by the late 90s at the latest. It's not just sad being cut off from the free world, it stunts you.
  - zaik 4y ago
    There is no contradiction in being in academia because you want to spend your time doing research and accepting a nice bonus from the government now and then.
    - vintermann 4y ago
      The contradiction is that you can't talk about what you worked on, and you need to be careful that what you write in public research doesn't reveal it. It's ten times worse than the corporate equivalent.
- carom 4y ago
  It is not for North Korea. Their APT groups switch between intelligence gathering and PayPal / crypto scams. They also have prominent ransomware groups. Crime pays for the hermit kingdom and they do need cash. Now, to OPs point, on getting someone competent. Say, they want to infiltrate a crypto trading firm. Maybe the guy who knows crypto doesn't know English. So you end up with a team of guys playing telephone and hoping for the best.