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Every national government in the civilized world needs an intelligence-gathering agency that can operate with some degree of operational secrecy. What is the b

Every national government in the civilized world needs an intelligence-gathering agency that can operate with some degree of operational secrecy. What is the basis for this assertion? What would happen to a nation that didn't have that?

gcb0 12y ago
It would be ...gasp... Following its own and iteration law.
tormeh 12y ago
It would lose wars, basically. Now, this matters less than it used to in this age of the nuclear bomb, but knowing what other nations are doing and planning is still useful in trade and technology. Knowing more about the market than others means you get better deals and China isn't the only nation doing industrial espionage. Terrorism? It's a pretty pedestrian intelligence agency whose primary aim is to prevent terrorism. The NSA is stuffed full of paranoid people with information addiction. They don't care about terrorism; they just want all the world's secrets. An intelligence guy is just as likely to respect other's privacy as a security researcher is to accept other people reading his files. It's in their nature not to.
- bediger4000 12y ago
  It would lose wars, basically How do we know this? This strikes me as an assertion without evidence. Are there examples? It also strikes me that the secrecy more often gets used to conceal career-ending mistakes and cost overruns, at least in the USA. Has anybody done an honest assessment of secrecy?
  - tormeh 12y ago
    Nazi Germany and Japan partly lost WW2 because the Americans and the British broke their codes. Particularly the Japanese. Had the axis known their codes were broken they would have made new ones. Intelligence gathering would have been worthless without secrecy in this case. To be honest I don't really know too much about this. I've read Cryptonomicon, and that's basically it. But it would be hard to dispute that signals intelligence is useful in war and that secrecy is necessary for SIGINT to work.
    - mikeash 12y ago
      It's tough to dispute that this stuff is useful while in a major war, but I think the relevant question here is whether you need to have it all in place ahead of time, or whether you can spin it up on demand, as it were. In any case, SIGINT certainly helped a great deal, but what really won the war for the allies was the roughly order of magnitude difference between the size of the economy of the United States and those of the countries it was fighting.
      - tormeh 12y ago
        The US didn't have that much of an effect. By D-day, Germany was already running out of people to feed the meat grinder. The Soviet Union, Britain and France basically won the war in Europe. I'm grateful for not being born in the Soviet Union and all, but won the war, the US didn't. Also, the US is about 2.5 times as big as Japan and 4 times as big as Germany today. I don't know what the historical data is, but "order of magnitude" sounds way unrealistic. I think it would be very hard to spin up on demand. There's not a catalogue of talented SIGINTs lying around. These people need to be found and hired. A whole organization as big as Google would have to be built overnight. It would be a nightmare. Not to mention that this organization would be starting from scratch while its counterparts might have taps into American society already.
        mikeash 12y ago
        Don't forget that the US extensively supplied the Soviets and other allies for some time before officially entering the war. They mostly used their own weapons, but a huge amount of Soviet logistical support was American trucks and trains. As for the disparity in GDP, an order of magnitude is a bit of an exaggeration for Germany, only slightly for Japan at the beginning of the war and not at all by the end. Wikipedia has figures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Worl... The US's advantage in the long term became enormous because it was so far removed from the fighting. Germany and Japan's economies were mostly flat, while the US's nearly doubled in that time period. By the end of the war, the economic disparity was almost 5x over Germany and over 10x for Japan. Even in 1941, the disparity between the US and Japan was well over 5x, which makes one wonder WTF they were thinking.
  - dragontamer 12y ago
    Is Russia planning to invade the Ukraine? What are their plans? Are the "protests" in the Ukraine Russian-backed or not? Do they have greater plans to push out west, or are Russia's plans legitimate in the region? These questions can be answered with good-old fashioned spying, and nothing else. Russia is not going to give us their gameplan on a silver platter. And when we do learn Russia's gameplan, it would be best if we kept that fact secret. We can't have Russia knowing that we know their gameplan during the negotiation process.
- resu_nimda 12y ago
  China isn't the only nation doing industrial espionage. Yeah, this is a common argument, the intelligence arms race. It's just...we had the nuclear arms race, which we eventually realized was folly and really could only result in negative impact to humanity, so we started moving towards disarmament...only to start the cycle over again with digital information gathering, which is a lot easier to hide than a nuclear weapons program (and weaves itself into the fabric of citizens' private lives, in that sense it's much more sinister). Who has the fortitude to step up and lead us (by example) towards a healthier geopolitical climate? Collaboration, not paranoid xenophobic competition. It saddens me (but doesn't surprise me) that my country is driving full speed in the opposite direction.
  - mpyne 12y ago
    > It's just...we had the nuclear arms race, which we eventually realized was folly and really could only result in negative impact to humanity, so we started moving towards disarmament We have not started moving toward disarmament. Just ask Iran and North Korea. If anything, what happened to Libya and Ukraine after they gave up existing nuclear weapons will hurt nuclear non-proliferation even further. And that's not even to get into the possibility of a Russia generally hostile to the West, which is the best possible thing that could have happened to U.S. nuclear weapons labs.
    - tormeh 12y ago
      Russia isn't hostile to the west. It's easy to think that everything a foreign country does is about "us". Putin needs an external enemy and a national narrative to support him. It's all domestic policy. We're just annoying background noise. What Putin wants is to stay in charge of his kleptocracy for as long as possible. He doesn't give a shit about the US. It's the Russian equivalent of American currency disputes with China. While there is truth to the claims of an undervalued yuan it's really overblown. It's about identity politics and feelings. China just happened to be a convenient target. To the downvoter: Do you think Putin just now found out he is homophobic? That his claims that NGOs with foreign ties are foreign agents aiming to destabilize the country are real? No, it's all theater, scaremongering and scapegoating.

gcb0 12y ago

It would be ...gasp... Following its own and iteration law.

tormeh 12y ago

It would lose wars, basically. Now, this matters less than it used to in this age of the nuclear bomb, but knowing what other nations are doing and planning is still useful in trade and technology. Knowing more about the market than others means you get better deals and China isn't the only nation doing industrial espionage. Terrorism? It's a pretty pedestrian intelligence agency whose primary aim is to prevent terrorism. The NSA is stuffed full of paranoid people with information addiction. They don't care about terrorism; they just want all the world's secrets. An intelligence guy is just as likely to respect other's privacy as a security researcher is to accept other people reading his files. It's in their nature not to.

bediger4000 12y ago
It would lose wars, basically How do we know this? This strikes me as an assertion without evidence. Are there examples? It also strikes me that the secrecy more often gets used to conceal career-ending mistakes and cost overruns, at least in the USA. Has anybody done an honest assessment of secrecy?
- tormeh 12y ago
  Nazi Germany and Japan partly lost WW2 because the Americans and the British broke their codes. Particularly the Japanese. Had the axis known their codes were broken they would have made new ones. Intelligence gathering would have been worthless without secrecy in this case. To be honest I don't really know too much about this. I've read Cryptonomicon, and that's basically it. But it would be hard to dispute that signals intelligence is useful in war and that secrecy is necessary for SIGINT to work.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    It's tough to dispute that this stuff is useful while in a major war, but I think the relevant question here is whether you need to have it all in place ahead of time, or whether you can spin it up on demand, as it were. In any case, SIGINT certainly helped a great deal, but what really won the war for the allies was the roughly order of magnitude difference between the size of the economy of the United States and those of the countries it was fighting.
    - tormeh 12y ago
      The US didn't have that much of an effect. By D-day, Germany was already running out of people to feed the meat grinder. The Soviet Union, Britain and France basically won the war in Europe. I'm grateful for not being born in the Soviet Union and all, but won the war, the US didn't. Also, the US is about 2.5 times as big as Japan and 4 times as big as Germany today. I don't know what the historical data is, but "order of magnitude" sounds way unrealistic. I think it would be very hard to spin up on demand. There's not a catalogue of talented SIGINTs lying around. These people need to be found and hired. A whole organization as big as Google would have to be built overnight. It would be a nightmare. Not to mention that this organization would be starting from scratch while its counterparts might have taps into American society already.
      - mikeash 12y ago
        Don't forget that the US extensively supplied the Soviets and other allies for some time before officially entering the war. They mostly used their own weapons, but a huge amount of Soviet logistical support was American trucks and trains. As for the disparity in GDP, an order of magnitude is a bit of an exaggeration for Germany, only slightly for Japan at the beginning of the war and not at all by the end. Wikipedia has figures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Worl... The US's advantage in the long term became enormous because it was so far removed from the fighting. Germany and Japan's economies were mostly flat, while the US's nearly doubled in that time period. By the end of the war, the economic disparity was almost 5x over Germany and over 10x for Japan. Even in 1941, the disparity between the US and Japan was well over 5x, which makes one wonder WTF they were thinking.
- dragontamer 12y ago
  Is Russia planning to invade the Ukraine? What are their plans? Are the "protests" in the Ukraine Russian-backed or not? Do they have greater plans to push out west, or are Russia's plans legitimate in the region? These questions can be answered with good-old fashioned spying, and nothing else. Russia is not going to give us their gameplan on a silver platter. And when we do learn Russia's gameplan, it would be best if we kept that fact secret. We can't have Russia knowing that we know their gameplan during the negotiation process.
resu_nimda 12y ago
China isn't the only nation doing industrial espionage. Yeah, this is a common argument, the intelligence arms race. It's just...we had the nuclear arms race, which we eventually realized was folly and really could only result in negative impact to humanity, so we started moving towards disarmament...only to start the cycle over again with digital information gathering, which is a lot easier to hide than a nuclear weapons program (and weaves itself into the fabric of citizens' private lives, in that sense it's much more sinister). Who has the fortitude to step up and lead us (by example) towards a healthier geopolitical climate? Collaboration, not paranoid xenophobic competition. It saddens me (but doesn't surprise me) that my country is driving full speed in the opposite direction.
- mpyne 12y ago
  > It's just...we had the nuclear arms race, which we eventually realized was folly and really could only result in negative impact to humanity, so we started moving towards disarmament We have not started moving toward disarmament. Just ask Iran and North Korea. If anything, what happened to Libya and Ukraine after they gave up existing nuclear weapons will hurt nuclear non-proliferation even further. And that's not even to get into the possibility of a Russia generally hostile to the West, which is the best possible thing that could have happened to U.S. nuclear weapons labs.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    Russia isn't hostile to the west. It's easy to think that everything a foreign country does is about "us". Putin needs an external enemy and a national narrative to support him. It's all domestic policy. We're just annoying background noise. What Putin wants is to stay in charge of his kleptocracy for as long as possible. He doesn't give a shit about the US. It's the Russian equivalent of American currency disputes with China. While there is truth to the claims of an undervalued yuan it's really overblown. It's about identity politics and feelings. China just happened to be a convenient target. To the downvoter: Do you think Putin just now found out he is homophobic? That his claims that NGOs with foreign ties are foreign agents aiming to destabilize the country are real? No, it's all theater, scaremongering and scapegoating.