How Technology and Politics Are Changing Spycraft
Interesting article about how traditional nation-based spycraft is changing. Basically, the Internet makes it increasingly difficult to generate a good cover story; cell phone and other electronic surveillance techniques make tracking people easier; and machine learning will make all of this automatic. Meanwhile, Western countries have new laws and norms that put them at a disadvantage over other countries. And finally, much of this has gone corporate.
Tom • May 21, 2019 7:16 AM
It would have been interesting if the author had explored some the history of how our intelligence services got to where they are. The article makes it sound like it’s just the agencies playing catchup with technology and ignores the changes in the types of threat they work against. Today they face well-equipped nation-state adversaries really for the first time since the end of the cold war. In the meantime, they have seen a fairly radical realignment of their role, from the “symmetric espionage” of the cold war to working against either poorly-equipped nations (conflicts in Africa, the Balkans etc) or, more likely, non-nation-state organisations such as ISIS, Al-Qaeda and so on. In these asymmetric scenarios, often more police actions than international confrontations, agencies often don’t need to worry whether their agents have plausible digital records or a valid birth certificate; it’s more important that they have a plausible conversion to whatever cause they are infiltrating. At the same time, they’re much more likely to be running what would have traditionally been considered a counterintelligence operation on their own territory, to disrupt terrorist plots and the like. These types of operations are much more likely to be interested in domestic records of phone calls, locations, emails and so on and so are much more likely to get caught up in domestic legal problems. Most nations don’t have laws against spying in other countries (though the EU complicates this somewhat).
It’s not surprising that agencies which have spent 25 years re-orienting themselves to this kind of threat and this kind of operation aren’t quite prepared to face adversaries with similar resources to their own.