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> Spooks aren't actually that good in hiding their works This is pretty similar to the old argument about why mass surveillance is unlikely to be happening - w

> Spooks aren't actually that good in hiding their works This is pretty similar to the old argument about why mass surveillance is unlikely to be happening - we're just not that good at keeping secrets. Seems like a pretty safe bet that there's good spooks who are good at hiding their works. > we know about a lot of cases where people were assassinated (of course, we may also not know about many, but I think we have a good sample). Among those, we have a lot of ways it can be done Let's not forget about survivorship bias. You only know about the assassinations you know about. You don't know about the assassinations that were successfully kept secret.

snowwrestler 2y ago
> This is pretty similar to the old argument about why mass surveillance is unlikely to be happening - we're just not that good at keeping secrets. Not a great example since we know for a fact that mass surveillance is happening. The U.S. Congress just voted to extend and expand it.
- zarzavat 2y ago
  I believe that was indeed their point. People used to dismiss mass surveillance of the US on its people as a crackpot conspiracy theory, until the full extent of it was revealed by Snowden. Some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Just a handful though.
  - rootusrootus 2y ago
    By "people" you mean "some people" and there are always some people. For as long as I've been alive the predominant public opinion has been that mass surveillance does take place. We've had evidence for that decades before Snowden got specific about the NSA's abilities.
  - snowwrestler 2y ago
    Snowden is a great example of how hard it is to keep things secret when they are real.
smsm42 2y ago
> Seems like a pretty safe bet that there's good spooks who are good at hiding their works. But that's not true - actually, we learned about the mass surveillance reasonably soon after it started. They aren't actually good at hiding. True, there was a period that somebody could say "we haven't learned about it yet so it probably doesn't exist" - which would be fallacious - but within a reasonable period of time, that option had disappeared. Now, with assassinations, the biological weapons option has been existing for almost 100 years. If that were so common that even corporate machinators don't hesitate to use it to silence a witness of fairly low importance - we'd have heard at least a couple of cases, at least some rumors or defector reports. Just as we did with all other means of getting rid of witnesses. Since we didn't, I attribute very low probability to the possibility that this is how we learn about this being common. > You don't know about the assassinations that were successfully kept secret. Yes, I mentioned that in my comment. However, as I also mentioned, we have, over the years, pretty generous sample out of the mass of all assassinations. It would be rather weird if assassinations specifically using biological agents were somehow so special that while we have leaks about pretty much every other kind, we don't have any indications specifically about those. One could assume that is because this method is used only by the very best operatives going for very high-value target - but then we'd need to explain why suddenly Boeing corporates have access to it to deal with a pretty low-grade issue (and frankly I don't even see how it helps them by now - they are so deep in doo-doo anyway that one less witness is not going to save them). Such assumptions do not form a coherent picture if you look at the likelihood of the events involved.

snowwrestler 2y ago

> This is pretty similar to the old argument about why mass surveillance is unlikely to be happening - we're just not that good at keeping secrets. Not a great example since we know for a fact that mass surveillance is happening. The U.S. Congress just voted to extend and expand it.

zarzavat 2y ago
I believe that was indeed their point. People used to dismiss mass surveillance of the US on its people as a crackpot conspiracy theory, until the full extent of it was revealed by Snowden. Some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Just a handful though.
- rootusrootus 2y ago
  By "people" you mean "some people" and there are always some people. For as long as I've been alive the predominant public opinion has been that mass surveillance does take place. We've had evidence for that decades before Snowden got specific about the NSA's abilities.
- snowwrestler 2y ago
  Snowden is a great example of how hard it is to keep things secret when they are real.

smsm42 2y ago

> Seems like a pretty safe bet that there's good spooks who are good at hiding their works. But that's not true - actually, we learned about the mass surveillance reasonably soon after it started. They aren't actually good at hiding. True, there was a period that somebody could say "we haven't learned about it yet so it probably doesn't exist" - which would be fallacious - but within a reasonable period of time, that option had disappeared. Now, with assassinations, the biological weapons option has been existing for almost 100 years. If that were so common that even corporate machinators don't hesitate to use it to silence a witness of fairly low importance - we'd have heard at least a couple of cases, at least some rumors or defector reports. Just as we did with all other means of getting rid of witnesses. Since we didn't, I attribute very low probability to the possibility that this is how we learn about this being common. > You don't know about the assassinations that were successfully kept secret. Yes, I mentioned that in my comment. However, as I also mentioned, we have, over the years, pretty generous sample out of the mass of all assassinations. It would be rather weird if assassinations specifically using biological agents were somehow so special that while we have leaks about pretty much every other kind, we don't have any indications specifically about those. One could assume that is because this method is used only by the very best operatives going for very high-value target - but then we'd need to explain why suddenly Boeing corporates have access to it to deal with a pretty low-grade issue (and frankly I don't even see how it helps them by now - they are so deep in doo-doo anyway that one less witness is not going to save them). Such assumptions do not form a coherent picture if you look at the likelihood of the events involved.