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Comment by coretx | Hacker News Reader

Dutch Pirateparty founder and sometimes information broker here. During my 10+ years of both national and international activism, politics and intelligence trade I came to realize that approximately 2 out of 3 people, NGO's, etc. is compromised. Furthermore, the report is matching what I encountered in reality.

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It is dishonest and dangerous to claim that NGOs are compromised without providing any proof. I've worked in that space, and it is critically important that aid workers are seen as politically neutral and with pure intentions.

As an example the Taliban was targeting NGOs in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region because they believed efforts to vaccinate against polio were in fact an attempt to poison Muslims. Dozens of doctors, nurses, and volunteers were killed because someone like you decided to start a baseless rumor.

Most first world intelligence agencies have policies against embedding spies in aid operations. When it became common knowledge we used a vaccination campaign to collect on UBL, many people resigned from the Agency.

Yep, couldn't agree more.

I wrote about one aspect of that specific case here:

https://medium.com/@roryireland/latest-wikileaks-documents-i...

> because they believed efforts to vaccinate against polio were in fact an attempt to poison Muslims

Or more likely a terrorist organization in those countries started such rumors to turn public sentiment against the west. Oh, and then the USG used a vaccination program to attempt to track down terrorists, which played a role in the take-down of Osama Bin Laden.

It's fair to say that there are compromised NGOs, based on the OBL incident alone.

My current understanding is the vaccine doctor story was a cover for the fact that Bin Laden was brought in trough a walk-in. But that's Seymour Hersh' story so who knows.

Been working on security for NGOs and activist groups all over the world and in every part of the space for a long time. I think your figure is on the high side and overly alarmist. Perhaps with Pirateparty-style groups it is higher than most but not across the whole sector. It's certainly not the case that two-thirds of all groups and activists have been compromised. People forgot that human intelligence operations are actually pretty cost intensive and fairly difficult to pull off well. Some parts of the community make the problem worse once a genuine compromise is found by then creating biases and accusations where none can be confirmed.

It really depends on many factors - location, group activities, training, personal, the threats they pose to the actors with the will/desire etc to target them, also how you define compromised (a cleaner keeping tabs? a phishing email opened? a disgruntled volunteer? a paid staff member who walks out the door with data? a leader who has been turned?)

>I think your figure is on the high side and overly alarmist.

This is actually my gripe with the Dutch pirate party. They are often very alarmist and exaggerate problems in the same way the parties they oppose do. I wish there was a party that's focuses on major issues in stead of exaggerating a small number of issues in order to get popular with a specific market.

You are right when it comes to the alarmism and exaggeration, it's a populist policy choice, detrimental to the roots of the party and something I totally disagree with.

Very much agreed. If the Dutch PP was anything like the German, Swedish, Icelandic (to name a few) ones, I'd vote for them in a heartbeat, no second thoughts. But they just keep on making blunder after (sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes plain stupid) blunder, and it's just sad and disorganised.

I admit I might still vote for them anyway if I can't find a party that better represents me. Fortunately we get quite a few to choose from! Dutch might want to take a moment and be thankful we have that :)

Compromised does not have to be destructive intent. It can be nothing but passive intelligence gathering for example. Furthermore, compromised entities are rarely compromised by just one entity. For example national intelligence agencies are obligated to monitor new and rising political or activistic activities in order to asses if they are threat or not.This raises the % of compromised entities a lot. And then there is private intelligence & interest groups; same story. Yet in general, I do agree with your conclusions. Often the fear of being compromised is more dangerous than actually being compromised.

This is true and many NGOs pursue security strategies of "acceptance" or openness in order to deal with this issue. Essentially going along to the policy-maker and telling them what they are doing, which sometimes works to reduce the information gathering operations against them by cutting out the middle layer (intel organisations).

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