It goes to very recent times, almost all Arabic&Islamic departments in the US universities (the ones that matter, anyway) have a link to either the CIA, the State Department or even the Department of Defense. Needless to say, the same used to apply to Slavic Studies departments (and I bet it still does), see the infamous Victoria Nuland [1]:
> She earned a bachelor of arts degree from Brown University in 1983, where she studied Russian literature, political science, and history
I'm not sure why anyone would expect otherwise. This also extends to a lot of computer science and engineering departments. Not just through funding research and recruiting graduates, but a formal pipeline for students to get their education paid for in exchange for years of service in a Federal position requiring a security clearance and working on cybersecurity (kind of like ROTC or attending a service academy). It's not at all secret, and should probably be more well-known as an option for current or future college students. Here are the participating universities: https://sfs.opm.gov/Academia/Institutions
I'm also a career Army officer (product of ROTC myself) that has been sent to graduate school, as have many of my peers, with an obligation to bring that education back for additional years of service in positions that require it. At any given time, we have hundreds (thousands?) of active duty officers on college campuses all over the country.
Another bonus to World War II intelligence efforts was the relatively high number of German-speaking American Jews, some refugees from Nazi Germany, who had both the linguistic ability and motive to help. Second and third generation Japanese Americans, eager to prove their patriotism, also helped, as did the famous Navajo (and at least one other less famous tribe, I believe it was the Comanche) Code Talkers.
The bureaucratic nature of the military did lead to misclassifications, though. For instance, my great-grandfather, a German-Jewish refugee whose first language was German, was originally assigned to fight in Japan; he wound up interrogating German captives, presumably more helpfully.
I wouldn't be aware of any secretive recruiting, like in the article or the movies, but the first time I bumped into them was actually at an Ivy job fair, where they were publicly recruiting CS nerds.
I went by their table out of curiosity, or to see if they were giving away any schwag. Because who wouldn't want a "CIA" pen, even if it didn't shoot tranquilizer darts.
Since I was a very nerdy kid, I gave the people at the table my resume, while probably forgetting to make eye contact. There was zero indication of them having any interest in talking with me, so I left.
But, maybe because I'd started working very young, my resume looked a lot better than I did, and they must've later glanced at it.
As I was later leaving the job fair, about to enter the elevator, this CIA representative comes bounding across the room at me, shouting to get my attention. Then she asked if I could come in the next day for an interview.
If I did the interview, they must've mind-control drugged me to forget it. But I did retain a nerdy kid story about being chased by a CIA agent. Still no schwag.
Turns out having firsthand experience living abroad, plus airtight foreign language skills, is quite valuable to intelligence agencies. (The fact that they don’t really drink or do drugs makes them a nice cultural fit, too.)
Paraphrasing a sarcastic comment from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Charlie Wilson’s War: “What a wild fucking idea: our spies should probably speak the same language as the people they’re spying on.”
Lest anyone hammer on the LDS for this: missionaries as spies is not a novel concept nor exclusive to Mormons.
The creator of civit.AI, the largest AI porn website/huggingface for diffusion models, is a Mormon and he felt the need to tell me this quickly when I spoke to him.
Butina's vector into anything resembling actual spying was American political advocacy groups and their surroundings, which includes some of academia. What's the parallel to what's being described in the article (American academics who did intelligence work during WW2)?
Mao said that the first step in a succesfull revolution, was to kill all of the librarians
and then famously (silent im) killed or re-educated all of the acedemics, with instructions to rebuild all modern technology and knowledge useing the chinese language and invent a whole new vocabulary for science and engineering but useing
accepted international measuring systems, and latin for biology, called that one "the cultural revolution"
The resulting edifice, now proving to be quite secure from outside observation.
Early "travel writers" functioned as reliable spies, with many of them bieng, young, out of work,recent science graduates.
Even Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle has hints.
One of the bigest secret's the British maintained
was determining a countrys hydrocloric acid production capacity, and as still the worlds most
used industrial chemical is a reliable proxy measurement of a countrys total industrial capacity.
The final piece to the British empire was the invention of the escapement, which gave them the abilty to out navigate anyone else, and thereby co-odinate military actions and concentrate forces where and when there targets were vulnerable.
The current information wars are floundering due to a greater and greater difficulty in getting anyone to believe anything and are instead amusing themselves with cat memes, which the chinese residents of "red book" are demanding as proof of
bieng a tictok refugee, which if provided ,they then offer to act as there personal spy.
> Mao said that the first step in a succesfull revolution, was to kill all of the librarians and then famously (silent im) killed or re-educated all of the acedemics
Mao also said “We should kill all the sparrows” and then tens of millions of Chinese people died during the resulting famine.
yup, and if we read the same account, then China is still suffering from a the loss of song birds.
From observing song birds, especialy in winter, they are very busy eating, dormant insects and there egg clusters, and most of the over wintering birds are doing this, up too crows.Colder weather pushes the birds to seak out the higher energy food from insects, rather than seeds and plants, and the cold weather will kill certain types of pests in the ground.So warmer weather and no birds
did kill more Chinese, than the Japanese in ww2.
Its one of the bleaker demonstrations of the law of unintended consiquences.
Something similar happened in India, when they killed all the snakes,(cobras), which used to keep
the now out of control rat population in check.
The disease and food destruction caused by rats, is orders of magnitude more deadly and costly than the snakes ever were.And now there are spoty efforts to rehabilitate the snakes reputation and the place they occupied for millenia.
Maybe for some but not all. China absolutely threatens Chinese Americans and their families - remember the Chinese police department's in America - but not sure that it is everyone.
It’s telling the the comment you’re responding to, the best comment in the thread, is flagged and dead so fast.
They are clearly co-opting university departments around the nation to prevent left wing revolution or any meaningful anticapitalist stuff from happening. This has happened since at least the 1960s and a significant amount of the dumbest parts of “wokism” was planted by the IC into academia.
I’m so fucking tired of having to listen to yet more academic post modern neo Marxism from folks who are obviously connected to the IC. We know that you only use this rhetoric to knee cap actual “revolutionaries”.
As someone who works in AI right now, I’ve rest assured that Langley and ft Meade have deeply co-opted and infiltrated most AI labs, with the goal of doing targeted surveillance of individuals who they worry are capable of the “lone wolf” AI disasters that the less wrong folks talk about. I unironically thinks it’s some glowies jobs at Langley or ft Meade to make sure no one at openAI, anthropic, etc is doing like gain of function research or bioweapon manufacturing with LLMs.
If the IC isn’t doing what I am describing, they’ve dropped the ball and probably ought to be doing it…
It goes to very recent times, almost all Arabic&Islamic departments in the US universities (the ones that matter, anyway) have a link to either the CIA, the State Department or even the Department of Defense. Needless to say, the same used to apply to Slavic Studies departments (and I bet it still does), see the infamous Victoria Nuland [1]:
> She earned a bachelor of arts degree from Brown University in 1983, where she studied Russian literature, political science, and history
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Nuland#Early_life_and...
> I bet it still does
I'm not sure why anyone would expect otherwise. This also extends to a lot of computer science and engineering departments. Not just through funding research and recruiting graduates, but a formal pipeline for students to get their education paid for in exchange for years of service in a Federal position requiring a security clearance and working on cybersecurity (kind of like ROTC or attending a service academy). It's not at all secret, and should probably be more well-known as an option for current or future college students. Here are the participating universities: https://sfs.opm.gov/Academia/Institutions
I'm also a career Army officer (product of ROTC myself) that has been sent to graduate school, as have many of my peers, with an obligation to bring that education back for additional years of service in positions that require it. At any given time, we have hundreds (thousands?) of active duty officers on college campuses all over the country.
> the same used to apply to Slavic Studies departments
Yes, of course it does, look where the people in the State Department and related positions in foreign policy come from.
Another bonus to World War II intelligence efforts was the relatively high number of German-speaking American Jews, some refugees from Nazi Germany, who had both the linguistic ability and motive to help. Second and third generation Japanese Americans, eager to prove their patriotism, also helped, as did the famous Navajo (and at least one other less famous tribe, I believe it was the Comanche) Code Talkers.
The bureaucratic nature of the military did lead to misclassifications, though. For instance, my great-grandfather, a German-Jewish refugee whose first language was German, was originally assigned to fight in Japan; he wound up interrogating German captives, presumably more helpfully.
The CIA largely recruited only from Ivy League universities well into the 1980s.
I wouldn't be aware of any secretive recruiting, like in the article or the movies, but the first time I bumped into them was actually at an Ivy job fair, where they were publicly recruiting CS nerds.
I went by their table out of curiosity, or to see if they were giving away any schwag. Because who wouldn't want a "CIA" pen, even if it didn't shoot tranquilizer darts.
Since I was a very nerdy kid, I gave the people at the table my resume, while probably forgetting to make eye contact. There was zero indication of them having any interest in talking with me, so I left.
But, maybe because I'd started working very young, my resume looked a lot better than I did, and they must've later glanced at it.
As I was later leaving the job fair, about to enter the elevator, this CIA representative comes bounding across the room at me, shouting to get my attention. Then she asked if I could come in the next day for an interview.
If I did the interview, they must've mind-control drugged me to forget it. But I did retain a nerdy kid story about being chased by a CIA agent. Still no schwag.
Now it's mainly BYU...
Turns out having firsthand experience living abroad, plus airtight foreign language skills, is quite valuable to intelligence agencies. (The fact that they don’t really drink or do drugs makes them a nice cultural fit, too.)
Paraphrasing a sarcastic comment from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Charlie Wilson’s War: “What a wild fucking idea: our spies should probably speak the same language as the people they’re spying on.”
Lest anyone hammer on the LDS for this: missionaries as spies is not a novel concept nor exclusive to Mormons.
4 replies →
The creator of civit.AI, the largest AI porn website/huggingface for diffusion models, is a Mormon and he felt the need to tell me this quickly when I spoke to him.
I knew what he was really telling me, lol.
2 replies →
I saw a photo pop up a few months back from a hiring fair at Yale. I guess Skull and Bones isn't pulling them in like it used to.
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I chuckled at this. Tried to find an article that came out recently about why Mormons make good spies but couldn’t unfortunately.
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They will have to compete with the FBI.
American academia is still full of spies and foreign agents: https://www.propublica.org/article/why-russian-spies-really-...
Butina's vector into anything resembling actual spying was American political advocacy groups and their surroundings, which includes some of academia. What's the parallel to what's being described in the article (American academics who did intelligence work during WW2)?
Mao said that the first step in a succesfull revolution, was to kill all of the librarians and then famously (silent im) killed or re-educated all of the acedemics, with instructions to rebuild all modern technology and knowledge useing the chinese language and invent a whole new vocabulary for science and engineering but useing accepted international measuring systems, and latin for biology, called that one "the cultural revolution" The resulting edifice, now proving to be quite secure from outside observation. Early "travel writers" functioned as reliable spies, with many of them bieng, young, out of work,recent science graduates. Even Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle has hints. One of the bigest secret's the British maintained was determining a countrys hydrocloric acid production capacity, and as still the worlds most used industrial chemical is a reliable proxy measurement of a countrys total industrial capacity. The final piece to the British empire was the invention of the escapement, which gave them the abilty to out navigate anyone else, and thereby co-odinate military actions and concentrate forces where and when there targets were vulnerable. The current information wars are floundering due to a greater and greater difficulty in getting anyone to believe anything and are instead amusing themselves with cat memes, which the chinese residents of "red book" are demanding as proof of bieng a tictok refugee, which if provided ,they then offer to act as there personal spy.
> Mao said that the first step in a succesfull revolution, was to kill all of the librarians and then famously (silent im) killed or re-educated all of the acedemics
Mao also said “We should kill all the sparrows” and then tens of millions of Chinese people died during the resulting famine.
yup, and if we read the same account, then China is still suffering from a the loss of song birds. From observing song birds, especialy in winter, they are very busy eating, dormant insects and there egg clusters, and most of the over wintering birds are doing this, up too crows.Colder weather pushes the birds to seak out the higher energy food from insects, rather than seeds and plants, and the cold weather will kill certain types of pests in the ground.So warmer weather and no birds did kill more Chinese, than the Japanese in ww2. Its one of the bleaker demonstrations of the law of unintended consiquences. Something similar happened in India, when they killed all the snakes,(cobras), which used to keep the now out of control rat population in check. The disease and food destruction caused by rats, is orders of magnitude more deadly and costly than the snakes ever were.And now there are spoty efforts to rehabilitate the snakes reputation and the place they occupied for millenia.
I also remember when magazines didn't crash your tabs.
Anyway 3 Days of the Condor is a pretty good film.
It is pretty wild that now 99% of spying is done through a keyboard.
HUMINT has become very difficult due to ubiquitous automated physical surveillance, social media and DNA.
To credibly run HUMINT, the agent must have a strong backstory.
The people doing the vetting also work for intelligence agencies with unlimited funding.
Is it?
If you lived your entire life exclusively around "spies", would you be able to tell? (don't think too much about it).
> If you lived your entire life exclusively around "spies", would you be able to tell?
Yes: basically every large website is spying on you. :-)
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Yes - there is very little HUMINT happening nowadays. The end of an era.
I am going to pass on addressing your hypothetical question.
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[dead]
[flagged]
Maybe for some but not all. China absolutely threatens Chinese Americans and their families - remember the Chinese police department's in America - but not sure that it is everyone.
[flagged]
And those graduates also subsequently make their way into the IC.
It’s telling the the comment you’re responding to, the best comment in the thread, is flagged and dead so fast.
They are clearly co-opting university departments around the nation to prevent left wing revolution or any meaningful anticapitalist stuff from happening. This has happened since at least the 1960s and a significant amount of the dumbest parts of “wokism” was planted by the IC into academia.
I’m so fucking tired of having to listen to yet more academic post modern neo Marxism from folks who are obviously connected to the IC. We know that you only use this rhetoric to knee cap actual “revolutionaries”.
9 replies →
Now the top spies against us are all Academics!
As someone who works in AI right now, I’ve rest assured that Langley and ft Meade have deeply co-opted and infiltrated most AI labs, with the goal of doing targeted surveillance of individuals who they worry are capable of the “lone wolf” AI disasters that the less wrong folks talk about. I unironically thinks it’s some glowies jobs at Langley or ft Meade to make sure no one at openAI, anthropic, etc is doing like gain of function research or bioweapon manufacturing with LLMs.
If the IC isn’t doing what I am describing, they’ve dropped the ball and probably ought to be doing it…