[HN Gopher] How private intelligence companies became the new sp...
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How private intelligence companies became the new spymasters
Author : dsr12
Score : 78 points
Date : 2024-10-07 20:06 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (engelsbergideas.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (engelsbergideas.com)
| cyberax wrote:
| A couple of years ago, a dipshit moron in the US Army leaked a
| bunch of top secret documents on Discord, mostly related to the
| Ukrainian war.
|
| The thing is, these documents were kinda bad. The information in
| them was not any better than the work of open source
| intelligence, and analyses were as good (bad) as that of many
| armchair analysts.
|
| So it's no wonder that spy agencies are getting left behind.
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| Well don't leave us hanging, what did the documents reveal?
| r721 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_Pentagon_doc.
| ..
| Modified3019 wrote:
| Oh, the thugshaker incident. Now I remember.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| Their post is somehow even worse quality than the stuff
| they're complaining about. To answer your question, a lot of
| the documents were vehicle/weapon data, thickness of armor
| plates of tanks and such. Specifically regarding what is best
| searched as "War Thunder Discord leaks", as it was,
| supposedly, a bunch of War Thunder players trying to one-up
| each other on how knowledgeable they were on military
| hardware. Some of them (there were a good handful over the
| years) are detailed here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfi
| les/filedetails/?l=polish...
| neaden wrote:
| War Thunder are to my knowledge the only game studio who
| have had to publicly tell their fans not to send them
| classified material in order to advocate for a balance
| change.
| martinky24 wrote:
| Any source for the "not any better than the work of open source
| intelligence" part?
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| I think it's GP's own evaluation
| vjulian wrote:
| I'd prefer a neutral account. In conclusion, is it fair to say
| that the leak was a breach of US protocol or law and was
| publicly-available information?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _information in them was not any better than the work of open
| source intelligence_
|
| Now look at the dates on those documents.
|
| Big difference between knowing the Japanese fleet is off Pearl
| Harbor at 7AM versus 8:01.
| tolerance wrote:
| I don't understand why your comment is being retrieved so
| unpopularily thus far.
|
| The decline in quality that you're describing not withstanding,
| I'm not surprised that private intelligence companies are on
| the rise as opposed to state agencies. I reckon that won't be
| for long though and that eventually any distinction between the
| two will be nominal.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> I 'm not surprised that private intelligence companies are
| on the rise as opposed to state agencies_
|
| Me, neither. The private sector almost universally pays more
| for top talent, so much of the top talent will go there. It's
| also probably a better culture.
|
| As more government agencies outsource intelligence (and
| consequently, decision-making) to the private sector,
| companies like Palantir and OpenAI will become even more the
| de-facto government than they already are.
| sudoshred wrote:
| This is a feature of capitalism, nothing to see here.
| tolerance wrote:
| > As more government agencies outsource intelligence (and
| consequently, decision-making) to the private sector,
| companies like Palantir and OpenAI will become even more
| the de-facto government than they already are.
|
| This is basically what I was alluding to. The stage is set
| all too well for this not to occur.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| I predict we'll head to a Holy Roman Empire or Snow Crash
| style of federated fragmented powers that in aggregate we
| can call The United States but in reality it's a bunch of
| jockeying nobles and oligarchs.
|
| Maybe it always was, and the US Revolution was to allow
| this by tearing down unitary monarch power.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Sounding like a broken record here. Your bank and state
| government will sell your data to these brokers. Just in case any
| of you think your TOR browser saves you.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Not what this article is about.
| hammock wrote:
| Sell and buy
| jongjong wrote:
| Looking at the past 10 years of the software industry, I still
| can't wrap my head around the approach that most large companies
| have taken to hiring software engineers; treating them as literal
| cogs in the machine, designing processes which place trust in the
| hands of middle managers and bureaucrats instead of engineers.
| There was literally no vetting process for engineers. Now every
| corner of the internet is full of viruses, spyware and backdoors
| and of course middle managers had no idea. Nobody is responsible
| for the software so it belongs to intelligence agencies and
| hackers.
|
| The software industry turned out so different from how I thought
| it would. When I decided to pursue it as a career, I thought that
| software engineers would be treated and given responsibilities
| like managers.
|
| It's crazy when you think about it; managers are responsible for
| their people, whom they have limited control over... Yet software
| engineers have zero responsibility for the software they produce,
| which they have almost full control over.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| I was a private yacht chef for 7 years. They would hire anyone
| off the street to work on a $35,000,000 private yacht without
| checking references or a background check. I had unprecedented
| access to CEO's of Fortune 100 companies and phone numbers of a
| couple billionaires on my phone. I thought about writing a spy
| novel where a bunch of college students got entry level jobs on
| a yacht and used the access to plant bugs. The plot is they get
| caught and have to escape the Caribbean while being chased.
| gavmor wrote:
| > Nobody is responsible for the software
|
| Sounds like the accountability sink[0].
|
| 0. https://www.ft.com/content/2e1042d5-5e89-4fb6-bbee-
| de605a534...
| aeternum wrote:
| In almost every industry this is the case. Perhaps with the
| exception of some government contractors.
|
| Even with projects that went to extreme cost to maintain
| secrecy ultimately failed to do so, IE the Manhattan project.
|
| Most tech companies (and non-tech companies) take a fairly
| pragmatic approach. Generally trust your employees but
| configure systems with an audit trail so you can hold them
| accountable later for malicious actions. If accidental, there's
| not much you can do anyway so just buy insurance.
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