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Comment by throwaway1917 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway1917

It so happens that this story has since moved on slightly since it was last posted. Two years ago, Michael Bettaney died. I knew him briefly - after he got out of jail, he moved into small-group communist politics, where we crossed paths.

The stuff about his incompetence as a spy is rather overstated. By the time I knew him, he certainly had a drink problem, which may for all I know have predated his long prison sentence (much of it in solitary). The truth is of course that MI5 was not the only intelligence agency with double agents and he was shopped by one such British KGB mole, Oleg Gerdievsky. One rather suspects that the fate of the cold war did not hang in the balance.

The underlying point - that counterintelligence has very often proved to be a spectacular waste of human effort - stands, although that is hardly a reason to be insouciant about mass surveillance.

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> The underlying point - that counterintelligence has very often proved to be a spectacular waste of human effort - stands, although that is hardly a reason to be insouciant about mass surveillance.

Mass surveillance causes significant problems regardless of whether intelligence works, and so not only does it make sense for the IETF to write that "Pervasive monitoring is an attack" but I believe that it's morally right for us to say that therefore we should demand our governments desist from such attacks.

But that article takes a pretty typical Adam Curtis angle when it comes to facts that dismantle his core thesis - acknowledge them very briefly and then carry on as if they didn't exist. Double Cross is less than a hundred years ago and took place under the circumstance in which actual spies are more valuable - a war. It can and should continue to be held up as an example of how actually sometimes (in a war for example) there are enemy spies and turning or eliminating them can be significant.

In the modern era we fight a lot of actions short of war. The most significant subsequent military action in the UK was the Falklands in 1982. But something like Double Cross would have been pointless. Britain did not go to war against Argentina. Argentina wasn't at with Britain. Both countries disagreed about the status of the Falklands, which the Argentinians had (for local political reasons) decided to just seize by force. Because this wasn't a war per se, our "intelligence" was mostly just a result of being friendly with the (similarly awful but not hostile to us) regime in neighbouring Chile. No James Bond types, just somebody who will turn a blind eye to human rights abuses and focus on immediate military intelligence resources.

Körner, "The Pleasures of Counting" (1996), has a bit in "The Poles" (on breaking Enigma) that might shed some light on traditional tradecraft vs mass surveillance. (compare what the Stasi could accomplish with their non-automated labour-intensive methods)

> Churchill's romantic soul loved the excitement and secrecy surrounding Bletchley. He relished the way that

>> ... old procedures, like the setting up of agents, the suborning of informants, the sending of messages written in invisible ink, ... all turned out to be largely cover for this other source, as one might keep some old-established business in rare books going in order to be able, under cover of it, to do a thriving trade in pornography and erotica.

2nd level quote from Muggeridge, "Chronicles of Wasted Time" (1973) p139

Mass surveillance will causes even greater problems, if failings like the ones in the article keep happening, which is likely. Look at the MI5 arresting some students based on nothing but a list of different meaning, baseless assumptions and jumping to conclusions. Now imagine such data gathered on a massive scale and the process of bad decision making fully automated. Secret agencies close to the military building a paranoid delusional AI that searches for threats from humans. What could possibly go wrong?

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