I sat in a two day class this week put on by people who claimed to be former intelligence agency types. They told a lot of entertaining stories about how far they'll go to both protect their own secrets and gain everyone else's.

Some of their advice seemed useful but some of their suggestions absurd and conclusions naive. The most interesting thing was that challenging them on their assertions (anti-virus is only n% effective) didn't result in any facts to back up the assertions. Instead they'd just mock the challenger and say things like "no matter what you do we can crack your systems in n minutes, regardless".

In fact one of their suggestions was to simply fire anyone who didn't have like-minded world views. People who didn't just nod along with whatever they had to say were the problem and needed to go. If that's how the intelligence community works I can see why they are in an echo chamber that justifies their any means necessary approach to intelligence gathering.