A spy agency is necessary for the USA to compete on the world stage. Though, it's operations should be significantly limited.
The CIA is a disaster that needs to be dismantled.
The CIA is a disaster that needs to be dismantled.
In fact, with deepening global threats like climate change and nuclear war (), it is becoming clear just how mortally dangerous such perceptions are. So: Stop supporting "competition on the world stage".
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Yes, that is still a thing and making quite the comeback; see:
https://www.newsweek.com/us-military-new-nuclear-weapons-782...
and
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/28/us-nuclear-wea...
for example.
Working for the CIA is like being a sysadmin. The world only knows you exist when you fuck up.
There was a great CCC talk recently that showed how one of the Vault 7 tools wasn't a remote assassination boogieman drone tool like Wikileaks framed it, but actually a control the CIA developed that allowed them to give anti-air weapons to friendlies in Syria and Ukraine with positive access control and strong time/geo scoping to prevent them from being used nefariously.
While there's some truth to that, this way of thinking entirely ignores the opportunity cost that all those agencies have. With those insane budgets, you could do so much good in the world that one wouldn't have to fear the problems those agencies try to solve, because a lot of them wouldn't exist in the first place.