Spycraft 2.0 Pdf
Mauricette Atencio
Finally, intelligence agencies in democratic countries no longer enjoy the legitimacy bequeathed on them in the past or the glamor that rubbed off from Hollywood and spy fiction. Public skepticism about the means and aims of a potentially money-grubbing, thuggish, and self-interested caste of spooks has grown. Spymasters increasingly have to justify what they do and accept unprecedented levels of legislative and judicial scrutiny.
Traditionally, spies depended on cover identities. Until a few years ago, a visiting Canadian in Moscow who claimed to be a graduate student in architecture could present a cover that would be difficult for Russian counterintelligence officers to crack. They could check her documents, grill her about her background, search her possessions, or follow her. They could even use a gifted individual with a photographic memory for faces to scour books full of pictures of known or suspected intelligence officers. But if none of those avenues produced any clues, all they could do was watch, wait, and see if the suspect made a mistake.
Today such tactics rarely work. It is easy for Russian counterintelligence to track the movements of every mobile phone in Moscow, so if the Canadian is carrying her device, observers can match her movements with any location that looks like a potential site for a dead drop. They could then look at any other phone signal that pings in the same location in the same time window. If the visitor turns out to be a Russian government official, he or she will have some explaining to do.
Electronic communications have grown equally vulnerable. The more that intelligence agencies know about what normal behavior looks like, the more that anomalies and coincidences stand out: Why is the suspect using an internet cafe or a virtual private network? What websites is she visiting from her home computer and from her phone? Does she use encrypted messaging services? Has she developed a sudden interest in computer games (an easy way of sending messages to a source masquerading as another player)? What about her online shopping habits?
Intelligence officials must also reckon with the fact that sanctioned illegality today may get them into trouble tomorrow. Extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists, for example, has been the subject of intense legislative scrutiny in the United States. In 2012, Abdelhakim Belhaj, a Libyan migr opposition figure, sued the British government for his kidnapping in Thailand in 2004 and forcible return to Libya, where he and his pregnant wife were tortured. In 2018, the British authorities paid the family compensation and apologized.
That has changed. A stint at the CIA or MI6 has become a paragraph on a resume, not a career. Britain and the United States have caught up with Israel, where the private sector has long prized a spell in a senior position in intelligence or defense. In London and Washington, such work is increasingly a launchpad for an interesting career in corporate intelligence or other advisory work.
Meanwhile, public tolerance is waning as knowledge, trade-craft, and contacts gained at taxpayer expense are used for self-enrichment in retirement. The conflicts of interest and other pitfalls are obvious. Many of the techniques used by government spy agencies are intrinsically illegal (including bribery, burglary, bullying, and blackmail). Such lawbreaking raises the question of what happens if a client hires a private company that is also the target of a government investigation. Must the private company sacrifice its profits? Who makes it do so?
The rise of commercially available spying technology has led to some savings for governments in money, risk, and time. Investigative outfits such as Bellingcat, using open-source information, commercial databases, and material hacked or leaked by sympathetic allies, have produced startling scoops and exposes, including identifying the three would-be assassins of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer who had retired to the quiet English town of Salisbury.
Competition raises standards, in spycraft as in other fields. Intelligence agencies need to work with other actors outside the spy world, both in order to find out what is going on and in order to influence it. Spies and intelligence chiefs need to be media-savvy, countering and mounting information operations. In the old days, spymasters told spies that any contact whatsoever with a journalist was a sackable offense.
Yet the biggest impediment to successful spying today is not leaks but excessive classification. The security clearance industry, particularly in the United States, operates with agonizing slowness, hampering the recruitment of useful people (such as the multilingual children of immigrants) and letting through liabilities (such as Edward Snowden).
Information in most countries is also ludicrously overclassified, at too high a level and for too long a period of time. Overclassification and excessive secrecy do not protect countries from their adversaries. Such methods only protect bureaucrats from scrutiny. Intelligence agencies use the supposed need to protect sensitive sources and methods to justify their concealment of blunders or activities that deserve public scrutiny. This excessive secrecy makes spy services timid, introverted, risk-averse, and calcified by procedure. Taxpayers end up paying ever greater bills for ever less impressive results. Meanwhile, the enemies of Western democracies, untroubled by such procedures, steal secrets and meddle in U.S. and European politics with abandon.
Though the series touches on the strategy and efficacy of espionage programs, Spycraft tends to focus on the negative aspects of the stories, like what damage was done, or why people or institutions were vulnerable to corruption.
Takes a historical perspective, focusing on who the spies were, what they did, what motivated them, how they got caught, rather than looking at things from perspective of the subjects or those who caught them. Some appreciation of the spies' ingenuity throughout the series.
Some episodes contain more sexual content than others, but sex is frequently spoken about as a way for spies to extract information from targets through blackmail or coercion. Some extreme sexual acts are described. Women in sexual poses or states of undress (mostly underwear with occasional glimpses of nudity) are shown in stock footage.
Parents need to know that Spycraft is a documentary series about spies and espionage. Each episode focuses on a different aspect of spycraft, from recruitment to technology to sabotage. Violent assassination is a frequent topic, as is sex as a method of blackmail or coercion. The series mostly takes a historical perspective, telling stories about who spies are, what they do, what motivates them, and how they get caught.
SPYCRAFT is a documentary series about the world of espionage. Each episode focuses on a different aspect of being a spy, from the technology they use to how spies are recruited. The series tells stories about spies from recent American history, and features interviews with government officials who interacted with those spies in real time. The show offers a historical perspective on who spies are, what they do, what motivates them, and how they get caught.
People tend to know more about spies from entertainment than from real life. That's what makes Spycraft's premise so intriguing. Unfortunately, the show feels more like clickbait than a true documentary. It hooks you by promising a look into an unseen world. But rather than give true insight into the world of espionage and the lives of spies, the series simply compiles relatively well-known spy stories from the past 50 years or so of headlines. Other than some interviews with high-level government officials, the show is just basic research, dramatic reenactments, and stock footage. Not much consideration is given to telling the stories in exciting or suspenseful ways, and Dylan Berry's awkward, lifeless narration only makes things worse. Ultimately, despite its thrilling premise, Spycraft doesn't deviate much from the same well-trod territory that most espionage documentaries have taken in the past.
4a15465005