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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

Weird how there is a culture of seeing spies and their craft as special. They are at best Peeping-Toms and stalkers.

Also, keeping secrets is no big deal. Every family has them. Every school has 'secrets' that they don't tell the children. Every company board has 'secrets' they don't share with the staff or the outside world.

As for personalities and the need to keep different persona, who really is the same person at work as they are in their private life? It is not hard to compartmentalise your life and be a different person for work.

However, ultimately, what these agencies are up to is quite sick and twisted. They are not out for the common good. Some of the psychology behind that could be a better basis for an article.

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"Keeping secrets" is in many places part of the cultural cachet. It's a high-status move to, when asked about something, say "I can't talk about that" (the "it's above your paygrade" is implicit). In a lot of corporate cultures, and a lot of government ones too, that status-affirmation-through-secrecy is really pure status-seeking; the actual security measures aren't that difficult to defeat, the secrets aren't that important, and the people you care about not telling are unlikely to be asking.

That's different from someone who is trying to conceal that they even have a secret, like someone trying to infiltrate another organization while remaining inconspicuous, or someone who's secretly embezzling or cheating on their spouse. That second form is far more isolating.

I LOL'ed.

Once you realize that the USA is probably behind in terms of "spying" when compared to the Soviets, you'd be a fool to accept that without a response.

It is the height of narrowmindedness to think that Nation-States operate within the same plane as ordinary individuals.

<i>USA is probably behind in terms of "spying" when compared to the Soviets</i>

From hypothesis to demonstration in less than 10 words.

I say probably because I have little direct knowledge of what the Soviets are capable of.

But I do know that the Soviets have been caught doing some impressively sneaky stuff. One thing that sticks in my mind is the placement of a (completely passive) eavesdropping device in the Oval Office. Said device was unpowered, and missed during a comprehensive check for bugging devices.

So I'm making an assumption here: namely, that they have only refined their techniques in the areas of statecraft and espionage.

My point is that they're not "Soviets" anymore...

I suspect a lot of industries build up a corporate mythology around how it is 'special' to motivate intelligent people to get to do their best work for them. I don't see the CIA as very different from every startup entrepreneur with a pitch on how they're changing the world.

Countries make themselves special too.

"...keeping secrets is no big deal. Every family has them."

Uh, I would note she immediately goes on to mention her father's classified work - so, maybe everyone has secrets but not everyone works in a classified capacity for the US Government (though the group is now fairly large).

This is significant because Victor Marchetti and John D. Mark in The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence described how already in the 70s the CIA was growing more and more to be a hereditary sect, something that one might imagine would make this separate group even more insular.

Indeed, this is the only interesting comment in an article which I would agree otherwise just simpers and grovels to the cachet of the spy.

Aside from Marchetti, I'd also recommend Phillip Agee's Inside the Company: CIA Diary - a book which shows this "Company" as neither harmless or romantic.

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