[HN Gopher] CIA and Gen Z
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CIA and Gen Z
Author : welpandthen
Score : 45 points
Date : 2021-11-10 20:11 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonian.com)
| matt123456789 wrote:
| Good god. Anybody else on iOS reading this article having the
| text jump around on the page as ads load and unload? Completely
| unreadable.
| ClosedPistachio wrote:
| The full title:
|
| The CIA Is Trying to Recruit Gen Z--and Doesn't Care If They're
| All Over Social Media
| JALTU wrote:
| Hiding in plain sight, anyone?
|
| First rule of tradecraft is you don't talk about tradecraft.
| Sanzig wrote:
| On Gen Z CIA recruits having pre-existing social media presences:
|
| > They're shrewd enough either to be circumspect users of social
| media from the start or to review (and delete) old problematic
| tweets and posts.
|
| Is this particularly effective, though? Most social media sites
| have been scraped to hell and back - surely there's archives of
| the old problematic stuff.
|
| It must be tough working in counterintelligence these days -
| social media has greatly increased the attack surface for
| blackmail.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| If you control the search engines you can just make it hard to
| find.
| cookingrobot wrote:
| And see who's looking for it.
| Sanzig wrote:
| For a private OSINT investigator, sure. But a state-level
| actor (ie: the sort of groups that the CIA is supposed to
| butts heads with) could easily maintain their own mirrors.
|
| Hell, if you have a few dozen terabytes of disk space you can
| download the entire plaintext archive of Reddit comments from
| Pushshift, regardless of if they've been deleted or not. And
| that's something a private citizen can do spending a couple
| grand on hardware. Do we really think that the Chinese
| Ministry of State Security or Russian GRU aren't keeping
| archives of Twitter and public Facebook posts for use as
| blackmail material down the line?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| https://archive.md/XfMUP
| [deleted]
| phkahler wrote:
| Social media could be a perfect cover: An Instagram "model" who
| travels the world hooking up with rich guys who will pay for her
| trips. Am I being sarcastic or serious?
| laurent92 wrote:
| But seen another way: Hookers are, in my mind, the epitome of
| suspects of spying... I suppose a third of the world is driven
| by pillow discussions, whether actual spying, just influence,
| mere affinity, or rape accusations to get rid of a political
| person.
| heyda wrote:
| This entire article reads like a paid advert, it's so hilarious
|
| "Though you'd think a person accustomed to being super-active on
| the group chat would struggle with being separated from their
| phone all day, this analyst assured me, "The mission is so
| dynamic that you'll rarely, if ever, be bored, and the longing
| for your phone and social media sort of dissipates.""
|
| ya... sure... if we ignore all the time waiting for meetings to
| start in a concrete box with no windows and nothing to do, or
| sitting in front of your computer for hours answering
| emails/dealing with paperwork.
| [deleted]
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Does anybody else have an issue where it just loads a blank page?
| aesh2Xa1 wrote:
| Are you using uBlock Origin? Try adjusting your filters.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| if a site requires me to disable adblock, it's broken.
| keewee7 wrote:
| I'm Gen Z.
|
| Most Gen Zs are socialists (we actually know what it means) with
| a small minority of libertarians.
|
| Very few would want to work for the CIA.
| mcguire wrote:
| Wait, I thought all the Gen Z's were living with their parents,
| unemployed, and desperate for an income to pay off their
| student loans.
| handrous wrote:
| > Thirty-one percent of voters ages 18 to 24 supported Trump in
| November, according to exit polls, down from 37 percent in
| 2016.
|
| From NBC.
|
| Sure, 37% isn't "most", but I think it's a fair guess that if
| 37% supported Trump, well under 50% of the total are
| socialists.
| babypuncher wrote:
| You keep saying 37% as if that is the most relevant number
| when it's not. the 31% from last year is both more indicative
| of recent trends and cuts deeper into the Gen Z demographic.
| I think a good chunk of people who were 18-24 in 2016 would
| still be considered Millennials.
| handrous wrote:
| OK, but are you arguing against the substance of it? 2020,
| that age range would have all been Gen Z, I'm pretty sure.
| Still 31%. Do you think the breakdown of Gen Z political
| opinions, ordered by prominence, is "socialist (51+%) ->
| Trump supporter (~31%) -> _everything else_ (less than 18%)
| "? My educated guess would be you could flip those
| "socialist" and "everything else" numbers and that'd be way
| closer to correct--which is still a _huge_ increase over
| other generations, if it 's even as high as 18%!
|
| FWIW if we had a viable, actual socialist party, I'd vote &
| even campaign for them. But I think you're way wrong about
| _how far_ things are shifting, with Gen Z, unfortunately. I
| do _hope_ I 'm the one who's wrong, but I doubt it.
|
| I'm a millennial, but if I look at my social group (mostly
| gen-z through gen-x) it's nearly all socialists and left-
| or off-the-spectrum-anarchists[EDIT: probably a couple
| would identify, specifically, as left-libertarian, now that
| I think about it, which is very unlike right-libertarian--
| at least one of those might pointedly insist on just
| calling the left-libertarian position "liberal"]. That's my
| bubble, though, and doesn't reflect the proportions for the
| rest of the country.
|
| [EDIT] Maybe we have different thresholds or definitions of
| "socialist"? I'd believe that over half of Gen Z wants a
| "public option" for healthcare, and _maybe_ even M4A, for
| instance. Hell, I wouldn 't be surprised if some Gen Z
| Trumpers want those (Trump did, oddly enough, give some
| lip-service to reform in that direction in his campaigns,
| though not to M4A)
| walshemj wrote:
| I somewhat doubt that more like wet Tories (Eisenhower
| republican's)
|
| There's a lot of "hobbyists" who think they are socialists
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Actual socialists had secret police. Every government has
| intelligence services. What do you think being a socialist
| means and what does that have to do with working for the CIA?
| bitwize wrote:
| Working for the CIA means submitting to and supporting the
| existing power structure (unless you're doing a long-march-
| through-the-institutions, subversion-from-within thing,
| which, good luck against the CIA).
|
| Now once the socialist regime sets up secret police, it will
| be utterly benevolent and work solely toward emancipation of
| the working class.
| handrous wrote:
| Most folks throwing around "socialist" in a positive light in
| the US mean it like "social democracy", as in the Nordics or
| various European social-democratic parties.
|
| The socialist-socialists--having known a few--usually just
| say Marxist or communist to describe their position, in my
| experience. "Socialist" only means "like Venezuela or East
| Germany" when a Republican is saying it, not when people
| self-describe as socialist.
|
| [EDIT] and yes, to head it off, even Norway has intelligence
| services, sure--but they don't have Stasi.
| bitwize wrote:
| Then there are the democratic socialists, who are actually
| socialist (unlike the social democrats) but who disavow
| Marxism-Leninism. Problem is, assuming you set up a
| democratic socialist regime, if you want to keep the
| democratic bit, you risk losing the socialist bit (and vice
| versa). A lot of demsocs don't realize this; many believe
| that democracy and socialism are completely coterminous
| with each other.
| havkd wrote:
| First, that depends on your circles. Second, many people turn
| to the right as they mature.
| keewee7 wrote:
| Unfortunately people's political positions today are more
| static because of social media bubbles.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Source? This seems like an estimation based on people
| around you; In my surroundings, people shifted from
| moderate to the extremes both sides, and I moved from
| center-left to stark right.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Ok zoomer
| missinfo wrote:
| What does it mean?
| mcguire wrote:
| " _When you pull up to the CIA headquarters in Langley, you have
| to shout your Social Security number out the window into a
| speaker, like when you're ordering fries at a drive-through. Much
| like the Union that the Agency was formed to protect, the system,
| it seems, could be more perfect._ "
|
| True story: I went to a job interview on Redstone Arsenal which
| meant I needed to get a vehicle pass. The recruiter sent me an
| email asking for my SSN; I replied that I wasn't comfortable
| sending it via email and then called him with it.
|
| The next day I received a CC: copy of the email request to the
| Arsenal visitor center, including my SSN. I was unimpressed.
|
| " _what I'm told is a very contentious parking situation where
| lots of spots are so far from the office that a shuttle has to
| transport employees from their cars to their desks (a spy's
| supposedly glamorous life actually laced with drudgery and
| inconvenience--how very John le Carre)..._ "
|
| The parking spots nearest the building I used to work in, when we
| went in to work, were numbered and reserved for particular NASA
| employees. Many of those employees worked 7:30 to 3:30, so when I
| typically wandered in half were empty and when I left they were
| all empty. But if I, contractor peon (which makes up 70-90% of
| our organization), were to park there I would get a ticket from
| NASA Protective Services. There _were_ a few general parking
| spaces closer than those, but they were routinely taken by NASA
| employees because they were a few feet closer than their assigned
| spaces. We parked out on the outskirts.
|
| (P.s. The vast majority of CIA employees are not spies.)
|
| " _Demographic data from four years after that (2019), collected
| by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, revealed
| that intelligence agencies were still behind the federal and
| civil workforce in minority representation and that the spy
| agencies' head counts were 61 percent male, 39 percent female._ "
|
| Way back in the '90s, I had a friend of Indian descent whose
| sister worked for the FBI. She said her sister was always getting
| pestered about moving into investigative field work because no
| one would suspect she was undercover.
| smoldesu wrote:
| No need to fear, the only people who have unfettered access to
| your email communications is the United States Government.
| humanwhosits wrote:
| Seems like we should stop treating SSN user id like a password
| mjevans wrote:
| SSN is current the _defacto_, unplanned, person ID and
| somehow also password. I agree this is insane.
|
| A National ID, that is designed to more strongly prove ID and
| also designed to be used as a secure form of Authentication
| for Authorization services... THAT is what I'd really love
| politicians to approve.
|
| I'm currently in the process of upgrading my enhanced ID
| drivers license to a Passport (done) and then applying for
| Global Entry, because it's only 15 more dollars than the TSA
| Precheck and includes it... so why not do that? That's my
| response to a lack of a national ID.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Unless this recently change it is also standard practice in the
| military to write your SSN on your checks and show your SSN
| which is on your military ID to anyone at the BX/PX. We had to
| say our SSN every time visiting the chow hall.
| mcguire wrote:
| I hope it's changed; _you 're not supposed to do that._(TM)
| But the military operates in its own little world in some
| respects.
| cwkoss wrote:
| It _should_ be fine to broadcast SSN, the blame really
| falls to credit reporting companies and lenders treating it
| as a private and secure identifier.
|
| SSN's weren't designed to be secure, and after decades of
| leaks they certainly aren't now. Lenders have attempted to
| brand losses based on this as "identity theft" (putting
| onus on the person) rather than just "we failed to properly
| authenticate before handing this person our money". Time to
| stop subsidizing usurers by letting them get away with
| this. SSNs are effectively public, and are not secure
| identifiers.
| dkarl wrote:
| I think it's a bit late to start treating SSNs as anything
| more than an essentially public piece of identifying
| information, like your name and address that you give out to
| anybody you buy anything from. I think every public school
| teacher I ever had handled my SSN. Sometimes my schools
| would, for convenience, post grades or exam results in the
| halls using only SSNs so that nobody could supposedly know
| what anybody else's grades were. Being a competitive sort, I
| always wanted to know who else was getting good grades, and
| it was easy to figure out. The idea that anybody is treating
| SSNs as sensitive information is a little bit alarming,
| because that cat is out of the bag.
| ajcp wrote:
| "Way back in the '90s, I had a friend of Indian descent whose
| sister worked for the FBI. She said her sister was always
| getting pestered about moving into investigative field work
| because no one would suspect she was undercover."
|
| I used to work in D.C. in/around DoD and Middle Eastern
| affairs. Not the Lords work, but in a geographic area and
| domain that people just associate with spooks. Even now, as a
| software engineer in a non-related field and metro area, upon
| hearing about my background everyone, and I mean everyone, will
| at some point joke about me being a spy or working for the CIA.
| I find it funny that no one has ever thought that this also
| means I'd be the LEAST likely to be anything clandestine. I
| think half of it stems from the fact that I'm just an average
| white dude from the Midwest; My brown or black co-workers were
| never seemed to be suspect.
| altantiprocrast wrote:
| > One would think it's basically impossible to get millennials
| and zoomers into covert jobs. The youngest of this bunch of young
| people have spent their entire lives online, some since their
| parents blasted out their first ultrasound picture as a pregnancy
| announcement, before they'd even gained sentience.
|
| > how exactly are you supposed to achieve this level of anonymity
| when you've flung untold reams of identifiable content across the
| digital world?
|
| Assuming that that applies to every single Gen-Z or Millennial is
| the most "OK Boomer" stereotype ever
| Sanzig wrote:
| I don't think the article was trying to state that's the case
| for every millenial or Gen-Z, just that it's true for a wide
| swath of them. I'd say that's generally accurate.
| altantiprocrast wrote:
| If that was the case, wouldn't the CIA just hire those who
| aren't in that wide swath? Case closed according to the
| journalist I would think
| uoaei wrote:
| True for a wide swath of the _visible_ ones, maybe...
|
| Bog-standard confirmation bias, I'd call it.
| josefresco wrote:
| Anecdotally my kids have their social media profiles set to
| "private" and don't have any motivation to make them public. In
| fact, most of their friends with a few exceptions have the same
| setup. They also regularly "wash" their profiles because
| they're kids and are constantly redefining themselves to their
| peers. Good luck finding any of that in a public archive.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| Private, but likely with many friends and acquaintances.
| Everyone they allow has access to all they've shared. This is
| a good step, but this isn't the level of protection some
| believe it is.
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(page generated 2021-11-10 23:01 UTC)