Secrets and spies

So the Pentagon leaker, turns out to have been (apparently) an immature nerd trying just to impress a bunch of teenage boys with his edgelord antics,* rather than a guy who sold secrets for money, or a Philby/Maclean-style sleeper agent recruited by ideological fellow travellers from abroad.

The aspect I find more interesting than the confused motivations of a messed-up 21 year old was raised in this piece by Daniel Drezner. Drezner lists the material that we know has been leaked and concludes that it seems pretty "meh":

You know what? I’m not seeing much in these reports that I find particularly surprising or shocking. All of these assessments mirror the takes one would get on each of these questions from analysts with zero access to classified intelligence.

In other words, the Kremlin could have deduced most of what Teixeira leaked from open source intelligence (OSINT), so having a mole in the other side's camp doesn't necessarily give an opponent that big an edge.

Coincidentally, John Quiggin has reacted to the leaks by reposting a piece he wrote in 2003, in which argues that the effectiveness of spies and spying in general is very much over-rated.

 

The basic lesson of game theory for a game of bluff like that of espionage is that, as long as it is possible for counterspies to generate misleading information most of the time, spies are useless even when their information happens to be correct. If the defence plays optimally, the spymaster can never have any reason to believe one piece of information produced by spies and disbelieve another.

The biggest problem isn't, though, that spying is mostly ineffective, but that it provides the justification for having an intrusive intelligence apparatus which ends up being deployed against the state's own citizens rather than against hostile foreign powers:

The spy myth clearly served the interests of intelligence agencies, which prospered during the 20th century more than any set of spies before them. The real beneficiaries, however, were the counterintelligence agencies or, to dispense with euphemisms, the secret police, of both Western and Communist countries. The powers granted to them for their struggle against armies of spies were used primarily against domestic dissidents.

Quiggin's critique of intelligence services over reach seems as relevant to me now as it was when he wrote it in 2003, in the wake of 9/11. Perhaps it's even more relevant now when the organs of the state are partnering up with hugely well-resourced surveillance capitalists to keep an ever closer watch on their own citizens.

*If Teixeira had been a 51 year old billionaire, rather than a 21 year old national guard, he could have just bought Twitter to impress his teenage fanboys.