Posted on 11/03/2013 8:56:57 PM PST by Olog-hai
It seems that every day brings new claims and counter-claims about who’s spying on whom. Governments are trying to limit the damage, but that damage is not limited to governments, expert Jeremie Zimmermann told DW.
… It’s something of historical amplitude and we still need to take some distance to be able to understand what is exactly going on. What we see is the unraveling of the very infrastructure for a total surveillance society that we are realizing, day by day, is already deployed all around the world under our feet. The infrastructure for surveilling everything about everybody all the time. What we’ve seen in totalitarian regimes when societies were being surveilled—we can think of the Stasi or of the KGB—were child’s play compared to what we are witnessing today. …
(Excerpt) Read more at dw.de ...
Secretly OCCUPIED country...
Don’t people know: the KGB was the USSR’s far less competent intelligence agency. The GRU was quietly much more effective. Maybe that’s why they are still not well known.
Indeed, the GRU still exists with the same name as well.
They still exist today, too.
It’s called the NSA.
I would still be much more worried about the GRU. The head of the MI5 from 1956 to 1965 was likely a GRU mole and he got away with it. Who knows what other moles they had. They did not open their archives in the 90’s like the KGB did.
Today, intelligence agencies have far better technology, but I don’t know if their analysis and tradecraft are better.
Double-edged sword...
What can and should be used as an intelligence-gathering tool can be turned against the American populous with the mere flick of a switch (or keyboard password).
Might a story like that have been the inspiration for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy?
” They did not open their archives in the 90’s like the KGB did.”
What the KGB did open was interesting enough....
Makes sense. Publicity and fame seem like the last thing a successful intelligence agency would incur.
When the Nazi German regime occupied France, they found that the French were spying on their citizens much more than the Gestapo would ever dream of doing and brought their activities into line with the French, not the other way around.
Bullcrap. SVR aka Foreign Intelligence Service aka KGB’s First Directorate was the most powerful spy structure ever.
At one point they had covert agents in every country around the world (or in every neighborhood in case of United States and other major NATO countries) performing various HUMINT missions on a daily basis or ready to take arms and kill key public figures or sabotage infrastructure in your area in case or a real trouble between US and USSR.
If you are old enough and lived through 1970-1980 you knew at least a couple of Russian SVR agents acting as your fellow neighbors.
Each of them maintained a network of US citizens including military and public officials working for SVR being either fooled or simply paid, blackmailed, threatened or something.
These very people were behind subversion of American values and pushed for liberal indoctrination since 1960s.
GRU is an absolutely different service within military, limited in both means and mission.
I’ll bet more than a few of those agents were (or are) active Republicans. They could do a lot more damage in the GOP than with the Democrats.
Today’s young spy analysts are still products of their education and societal conditioning...mainly they see the world as a perfectable utopian society with no judgments to be made on what is good or evil. They tend to be live or let live with no real firm grasp or historical perspective as to what means to be a real patriot while working at the highly sensitive posts that they do.
They will not acknowledge that humans hide incredible evil in their hearts but they are taught to despise those organizations and people, mainly Christians, who attempt to get people to acknowledge their own evil sin and to seek salvation. Since they have no insight into their own potentials for deep evil or deep good, they cannot develop that “cagey edginess” needed to properly assess data on the motivations and probable behaviours on the very nasty people they ‘study”. Spy agency profiling gudelines are also politically vetted further weakening these analysts’ abilities to track our enemies.
Their inability to understand their own pre-biased world views so that they can put those aside when objectively viewing data is what makes them less effective. “Normalcy Biases” cripple their analyses. Some, out of fear that the “messenger will be shot” or political concerns, may “massage” the data so that it all looks like news the higher ups would want to hear.
Snowden is this type of millennial prig who, when disillusioned that his utopian dreams were not being fostered, smugly took it upon himself to expose his country’s secrets. Perhaps, he justifies it as a way of trying to embarrass his leftist heroes to live up to their utopian promises to be more ethical and transparent than what those evil “wascally” conservatives ever were.
We shouldn’t be surprised when more of these narcissistic Prometheus types start coming out of the wood work. The progressives created these “idealistic lightbringers”...let the progressives be the vultures that chew on their livers!
Sure, if you were listening to defectors they said their primary goal was to recruit “conservatives”.
Well I watched the show “The Americans” on FX about this very topic, 2 KGB agents living as Americans. There was a character, ostensibly a Bernie Goldberg type former liberal turned conservative Reagan lover, he was a KGB asset. It’s just a TV show but it seemed pretty true to life.
I wonder if any of the original neocon leaders were Russian assets.
Please let’s not leave off the PRC secret service.
That is the one which is big and growing, and America still doesn’t pay attention.
“I wonder if any of the original neocon leaders were Russian assets.”
Kevin Costner is. Oh wait, that was from the movie “No Way Out”. Sorry.
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