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This is busywork. Countries that value efficiency shut down similar operations decades ago. Oil rich country pouring money to military doesn't ask "is this stil

This is busywork. Countries that value efficiency shut down similar operations decades ago. Oil rich country pouring money to military doesn't ask "is this still useful", and the people working on it have no motivation explain their superiors that their own job is useless. Either you end up without job or you are reassigned to attack some village in Ukraine...

bratwurst3000 3y ago
I have many Russian friends and they told me similar things. This seems to be a good explanation.
tivert 3y ago
> This is busywork. Countries that value efficiency shut down similar operations decades ago. IMHO, those countries are stupid. IIRC, the CIA "valued efficiency" and switched to internet based communications, which are so easy to monitor that most of their agents in China and Iran got killed/captured. Radio has the unique benefit that it's pretty much impossible to monitor reception.
- mdhb 3y ago
  I’d love to one day read the full story on how that one went so sideways. There’s an outline of it here worth checking out https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/15/botched-cia-communications-system-helped-blow-cover-chinese-agents-intelligence/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/15/botched-cia-communicati... As best as I can tell they had people designing their tradecraft who really did not properly understand how the internet works not because they are incompetent but because the agency mentality is so heavily focused on compartmentalisation (which is ironic because a lack of compartmentalisation across systems is what ultimately screwed them here) that it was considered to be good enough by people who weren’t in a position to make that call and bringing in further experts to validate it violated the “need to know” aspect. I think that was a huge wake up call for those folks, when things go that badly they will end up rebuilding a lot of the people process and technology from the ground up. But for what it’s worth some of the websites in question are still available on archive.org if I recall correctly. But I don’t agree with the conclusion that the answer is use radio instead. I think a lot of things have changed in that world in the past 10-20 years and lots of things that were previously considered “best practice” suddenly became unambiguous signals that you were up to something that warrants a closer look. For example: biometrics mostly killed the idea of operating undercover means traveling on a passport issued in a fake name. There’s a LOT of these changes but that’s an easy one that everyone intuitively understands.
bell-cot 3y ago
> This is busywork. No, this is national-security-grade redundancy. Via a system which has extremely few ways to fail, and those are all well-understood. Countries that value efficiency probably migrated their operations to Office 365...OOPS!

bratwurst3000 3y ago

I have many Russian friends and they told me similar things. This seems to be a good explanation.

tivert 3y ago

> This is busywork. Countries that value efficiency shut down similar operations decades ago. IMHO, those countries are stupid. IIRC, the CIA "valued efficiency" and switched to internet based communications, which are so easy to monitor that most of their agents in China and Iran got killed/captured. Radio has the unique benefit that it's pretty much impossible to monitor reception.

mdhb 3y ago
I’d love to one day read the full story on how that one went so sideways. There’s an outline of it here worth checking out https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/15/botched-cia-communications-system-helped-blow-cover-chinese-agents-intelligence/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/15/botched-cia-communicati... As best as I can tell they had people designing their tradecraft who really did not properly understand how the internet works not because they are incompetent but because the agency mentality is so heavily focused on compartmentalisation (which is ironic because a lack of compartmentalisation across systems is what ultimately screwed them here) that it was considered to be good enough by people who weren’t in a position to make that call and bringing in further experts to validate it violated the “need to know” aspect. I think that was a huge wake up call for those folks, when things go that badly they will end up rebuilding a lot of the people process and technology from the ground up. But for what it’s worth some of the websites in question are still available on archive.org if I recall correctly. But I don’t agree with the conclusion that the answer is use radio instead. I think a lot of things have changed in that world in the past 10-20 years and lots of things that were previously considered “best practice” suddenly became unambiguous signals that you were up to something that warrants a closer look. For example: biometrics mostly killed the idea of operating undercover means traveling on a passport issued in a fake name. There’s a LOT of these changes but that’s an easy one that everyone intuitively understands.

bell-cot 3y ago

> This is busywork. No, this is national-security-grade redundancy. Via a system which has extremely few ways to fail, and those are all well-understood. Countries that value efficiency probably migrated their operations to Office 365...OOPS!