A Tradecraft Primer (2009) | Hacker News Reader

A Tradecraft Primer (2009)

cia.gov

64 pointsgreenyouse45 comments

If you want the real story on current CIA tradecraft (at least on the digital side):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7

For the rest of it, see books like "Legacy of Ashes" by Tim Weiner, or "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA and the Sixties". A lot of that is about CIA recruitment and influence operations, which is perhaps not the kind of 'tradecraft' the CIA likes to popularize, e.g.:

https://coffeeordie.com/charles-manson-cia

I understand this document is from 2009, not secret, and probably contains information known elsewhere.

Still, what is the intent of the CIA in publishing this on the open web? I assume they would be able to distribute this to US nationals even in other orgs through internal networks.

>Still, what is the intent of the CIA in publishing this on the open web?

I think this is great for branding. All you ever hear is negative stuff. They should publish more in their own name and on their own site.

I for one am quite happy that they're unable to make their "brand" look better.

The other day I wondered to myself what would happen if all of the secrets held by agencies like the CIA or MI6 were to be exposed, all at once. I doubt it would be bad for the likes of you or me.

Maybe it’s bad advice that ne’er-do-wells will try to employ, leaving them susceptible to the CIA.

Wouldn't that be too obvious, wouldn't it be better to plan bogus info elsewhere, especially for and org capable of doing so?

Wouldn't it be dangerous to publish bogus info that can be picked up by nationals and allies, especially since it is branded?

People think this, but it is still highly effective.

Say you want your adversaries to use pencils instead of pens to write their secret notes. You publish information on the risks of pens and how they leak information on an obscure corner of the internet and seed it to a small forum or two. That gets picked up by a government worker in Germany and they put it into their recommendations. That document then gets stolen by the Chinese. Both of these get shared with Iran. The materials are then leaked and you have the Snowden's of the world shouting from the rooftops the importance of using pencils.

While I see what you mean, I can't think of any example right away that are touted by people like Snowden - I see there were many honeypots on crypto, TOR and "encrypted" phones, but other than maybe VPNs I wouldn't know what was shared this way.

> I can't think of any example right away that are touted by people like Snowden

Then it worked perfectly.

In the sense of - are you talking about something or is it all just vague impressions?

On the contrary: my guess is that it is a method for people to familiarize themselves with the whole topic of tradecraft, knowing that ALL countries have put great effort into exactly this in recent years.

There's just so many spooks and bad actors about. Having some familiarity makes for a more educated populace who are going to be more wary of being manipulated, so there is really no reason to try and reserve this information for an elite. Because the bad actors are very grateful when you do: they will prosper in a field of targets all of whom are super naive.

Regardless, they have an interesting but relatively sordid history.

Its probably just to drive interest for recruitment since tensions are escalating geopolitically and they are probably finding their projections show they are understaffed. Skilled labor isn't as easy to come by as corporations make it out to be (with everything being replaceable).

Anything published like this would be considered a poison the well attack by any ne'er do wells.

Recruitment, they need to be cool to attract the people they want as employees

Its always struck me as a little odd that their recruitment (at least, their public recruitment) is focused on young people, new grads, etc. I wonder why they dont publicly try to recruit people who have been in industries or domains for years, eg pick up people working at Qualcomm who already have good reason to be traveling across the world and meeting people.

One consideration is that hiring people at the start of their working lives minimizes the number of people they need to trust with sensitive information. Another: the younger the person, the less averse they tend to be to risk their lives.

Isn't most public recruitment aimed at young, new grads? Is there a "mid-career come work at Goldman Sachs" recruitment pitch they put out to the general public?

Public recruitment typically happens at university, which is dominated by young people.

Older people who show up at the university job fair or get “encouraged” by faculty with connections get recruited just the same.

In fact, they’re not recruiting 20 year olds, they’re more likely to recruit people in their late 20s or even 30s who have some real life experience and travel under their belts.

Caveat: apparently service in the Peace Corps and certain other NGOs will disqualify you for Officer duty. At least that’s the claim, backed up by several ex-officers.

They might do for specific jobs, but you want them nice and fresh for a career path. Too much time out in the world fosters the sort of independent thinking that's a liability in that line of work.

My reasoning is that this, to people not as well versed on the subject, indicates that the CIA shares anything that it doesn't absolutely need to keep hidden from the public. It indicates that they are trustworthy.

Also, everything in there is somewhat "common knowledge" as in if you sat down for 4 hours thinking on the subject you'd probably get most of whats written here. So this has little impact on risk - anyone that would be a serious risk doesn't need this, so it's a neat read for the public instead.

Have you seen the CIA World Facebook?[1] That goes much further.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/

> CIA World Facebook

That sent shivers down my spine, but then I realized that's just Facebook.

NB: Fact book, not Facebook.

Among other possiblities: working with independent assets for whom some modicum of tradecraft is advisable, but who would not able to attain standard clearances, and for whom the fact that the content is openly available online might itself serve as plausible cover should it be determined they've viewed or accessed it.

There's also the open source (software, not intelligence) model of many eyes and being able to achieve open review of techniques.

Personally I prefer the bureaucratic sabotage manual the OSS (the predecessor of the CIA) published during WWII, to advise Nazi-occupied workers on how to slow business to a crawl. Which, funny enough, sometimes reads like a description of bad management practices in general!

https://www.hsdl.org/c/abstract/?docid=750070

An HN favourite, with 35 submissions.

Amongst the top discussions:

- 7 years ago 64 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448090>

- 3 years ago 89 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22322041>

- 11 years ago 68 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4831363>

- 6 years ago 32 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109771>

- 1 year ago 55 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31676964>

- 8 years ago 68 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10493881>

- 14 years ago 29 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833443>

> 2003 Iraq’s WMD Programs

> Saddam failed to cooperate with UN inspectors because he was continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Apparently this "analysis" was written in 2009, a good 6 years after the start of the Second Iraq War, and still the CIA followed the political manoeuvre of not challenging their leaders' lies about Iraq's WMD.

This is one of the most vulnerable points of any "intelligence" agency, i.e. they're at the whims of those holding actual power in any given State.

I love the explanation as to what 'really' happened.

>If Iraqi authorities had destroyed their WMD stocks and abandoned their programs, they might refuse to fully acknowledge this to the UN to maintain Iraq’s regional status, deterrence, and internal regime stability.

How about

> If the current US Administration needs to invade Iraq for their domestic political agenda and requires a narrative of existing WMD stockpiles. They will ignore any evidence that counters this, and even create a completely fictional narrative to justify the invasion.

Sadam tried to be ambiguous about having WMDs so he could used them as a deterrent without the problems with actually deploying them (kind of like Israel does, but less credible). Sadam was violating UN orders in regards to WMDs, but there was no automaticity so the US was not actually supposed to go in. I think it's plausible the UN would have gone in anyway if the US had waited.

Probably for the best.

Don’t really want your various 3 letter agencies operating apart from elected leaders.

I think fundamentally, if you have incomplete information and have to make some actions or judgements, either you are:

1. doing things to reason about or uncover more useful datapoints to increase certainty

2. you are accepting the probability that you are right/wrong at face value

The direction in which you decide to uncover datapoints is the "bias" that they are talking about. This process if further influenced by institutionalized assumptions or priors you are working with.

I really don't like lists like "Strategic Assumptions That Were Not Challenged" because they are factually true but also reek of survivorship bias.

If you told me I'd be parsing PDFs from cia.gov on my main mobile device 24 hours ago, I wouldn't have believed you.

virustotal says it's good: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/48fe6cd5ef2cb9779db5bf16...

Hey, a couple of decades ago you could be buying The CIA World Factbook as a paper almanac at a gas station.

Pretty good, now online, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook

Used to buy this on CDs at computer shows along with latest Linux distros and whatever other wonders InfoMagic and their ilk published.

I would think that when people in the CIA manage to understand international developments well enough, they typically become highly critical of US policies and then leave...

I would like to see a CIA counterpart to "War is a Racket" by Smedley Butler of the USMC.

Well, "International espionage, sabotage and regime destabilization is a racket" is not much of a revelation really...

Shows some helpful ways to reason about open problems with incomplete information.

Ah, this missed the mark since the domain is all political/state related. I saw the mental liquidity story from today and it reminded me of an old book they published about how to think. That one has better theory based talk. This article has too many references to conflicts so it's kind of distracting from the interesting stuff.

psychology of intelligence analysis book link: https://www.cia.gov/static/9a5f1162fd0932c29bfed1c030edf4ae/...

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14852250

Dare ya to download that PDF!!

Not today, CIA.

Anyone know the year?

It says in the PDF: 2009

Thank you! Added.

Next question: should we link directly to the pdf?

I think it's fine like this as it facilitates people finding other docs in their collections.

Without understanding OPs reason to share this link it's hard to make a call on that.

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