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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   32510 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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The lowest circle of the Inferno, the ice is full of traitors. What has the US done, time and again? Turned spies against their country of origin. If the US government can find a reason to trust someone who commits the gravest sin below treachery to God, no doubt with as little slack as they're given, they can find a reason to trust a guy who lied at parties and fumbled around early in his career.

This is not how HUMINT agencies evaluate potential assets, no.

Most spies don't "need" to be "turned" against their country; they just need to be found.

Being a "traitor" is also very much an eye-of-the-beholder situation. Nathan Hale, patriot or traitor?

Personally, I'm very grateful to e.g. the "traitors" to communism in the USSR.

None of what you describe of his background is specifically disqualifying for his use as an asset.

Reliability and discretion matter quite a lot, in fact, for the value of an operational asset conducting sensitive missions.

They have reason to run a perpetual blackmail machine, including targeted those who appear to be on their side.

They also have reason to avoid ops that, if exposed, would cause major problems. Risk, reward.

I would ask, given what we know about his life and how often men like him skirt justice, is it probable that rather than torching literally any VIP he could draw from the list of flights, he instead just killed himself? It's not.

Well, he wasn't able to skirt justice, right?

There is also maxwellhill. Ghislaine Maxwell had a prominent hand in the general psy-opping of the giant psy-op that is Reddit. She was, maybe still is, an intelligence asset. What was Epstein, then?

You're just asserting that as proven fact? Somebody with her profile, especially if she was ever an actual intel asset, puts their fucking real name as their handle?

Come on. Be serious now.

Most spies don't "need" to be "turned" against their country; they just need to be found.

This is only two sorts, and there are conventionally four. Those who do it for the money, those who do it for the ideology, those who are coerced into it, and those who do it for ego. You can find those who do it for ideology or ego; those who do it for money or (especially) because they are coerced have to be made.

Oh there are a lot more than four kinds.

MICE is super old, plus there's typically more than one motivation in the mix.

And I assure you that those who do it for the money pretty often just need to be found, or want to be found. Money is nice. People like it.

But, usually, people willing to put their life on the line as a covert operative are doing it for more than just money. Money as a primary motivator is typically not the best kind of asset.

Somebody with her profile, especially if she was ever an actual intel asset, puts their fucking real name as their handle?

Ross Ulbricht was arrested for a similar OPSEC failure, so I don't think it's completely implausible. Per Wikipedia, "[t]he connection was made by linking the username 'altoid', used during Silk Road's early days to announce the website, and a forum post in which Ulbricht, posting under the nickname 'altoid', asked for programming help and gave his email address, which contained his full name." I won't discount parallel construction here, but I think there is a certain point in an effort like this when you realize "this is for real", but you can't easily scrub the account history: a new account would itself look pretty suspicious and probably point right back to the original -- "DM'd all the other mods and asked for a new account to be blessed" is itself suspicious if you don't trust all those mods, and it's visible to users that a brand new account was given mod access. Satoshi seems like an exception here, but I think it's hard to leave no trace in these sorts of situations generally.

Early Reddit also strikes me as a place where a power-user could steer the conversation more broadly in ways that would be useful to more than just intelligence agencies, or could just be a personal power fantasy. Bots weren't believable conversation partners a decade ago. Observably, various political activists have gotten a lot of mileage out of moderating default Reddit subs, so even if maybe the impact of that is fading today, I think "digital conversation influencer" might have been a playable role that would get one into real conversations in the halls of (non-digital) power.

Ross Ulbricht was not a Mossad asset, was he? Typically, one gives one's operatives some OPSEC training.

But also you just literally described where he didn't use his name as a handle. He disclosed his name while using the handle.

That's a very different kind of error.

It's fucking funny to even consider that a super sex coercion operative would also be used as a Reddit influencer using her real name. Was that really her competitive advantage for an intelligence agency in terms of effort or exposure risk?

Come the fuck on. Mossad is not retarded. Risk mitigation is a thing.

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