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No idea if eternal spy and counterspy cat and mouse game counts as part of culture wars, but here are some recent news from this area.
1/Teixeira leaks were discussed here when they happened, here is the resolution of the case.
We would all agree that 16 years of maximum security prison is price worth paying to impress your gamer buddies in Thug Shaker Central Discord.
2/In related news, important US Foreign Service officer, former ambassador to Bolivia was uncovered to be lifelong spy for ... Cuba.
Another source.
Do not laugh, Cuban DI counts among the better ones in the spook world, infiltrating Washington DC previously while running circles aroud US agents in Cuba. US is rather lucky that Cuba is shithole in every other measure.
3/Another, more pedestrian case of desperate American greed and disgraceful Chicom penny pinching. Surely US top secrets are worth more that $42,000? What insult.
Conclusion: US security is as big shitshow as it had always been. No loyalty (if you keep back stabbing everyone who trusts you, what could you expect), no grand idea inspiring self sacrificing volunteers and no rewards for service either.
Good that any superpower or wannabe superpower competitors are even worse. Notoriously insular Chinese who understand nothing about outside world and have to rely on cash and Chinese ethnic ties, and the less said about Russian Petrov & Boshirov clown show, the better.
Unlike the great and tragic struggle of the First Cold War, the second one is going to be slapstick comedy. Freedom and Democracy (TM) vs. Bright Communist Future(TM) are over.
LGBTQ+BLM vs Xi Jinping Thought is the game now. Enjoy the show.
edit: links now work
I was actually thinking about this subject recently while reading Wikipedia biographies of Soviet spies (this guy died in 2020, after spending 50 years in Moscow post-defection!) from decades ago.
It is telling that the volume of high-profile defection seems much, much lower today than it was at the height of the Cold War. The influence operations we have today are either low level things, like your $42,000 case, or stuff like Bob Menendez being comically and publicly bribed with literal gold bars by the Egyptians, which the intelligence community has obviously known about since it first happened. I think the motivation for high-volume elite defection just isn't there anymore.
When you read the biographies of famous Cold War defectors, almost all of them were motivated by a genuine belief in the Communist system. For every greedy Aldrich Ames there were a half dozen Rosenbergs, Philbys, Blakes and so on who truly believed in the Marxist message and revolution. And it's telling that the few major spies the West has seen since the 1991 have also been motivated either by extreme narcissism (Manning) or by genuine political conviction (Snowden's libertarianism).
Most of the people that were recruited as double agents in the 50s and 60s, certainly in higher-IQ positions, really believed. They believed they were serving global revolution, serving a superior system, and that the sooner the USSR outcompeted the West and the West had its revolution, the better. Many genuinely believed the above would happen in their lifetime, very soon even, such that even if they were discovered and as such either imprisoned or forced to officially defect and flee, they would return home before long.
China and Russia don't really have much to offer American double agents. They can flip the occasional low-level operative with the promise of money, but the scale of US surveillance over global banking is such that multi-million-dollar payoffs to poorly-paid intelligence agents are pretty much impossible to get away with permanently for now, even with crypto (it's not like trying to convert your Chinese monero into dollars to buy anything isn't going to tip anyone off, especially if every bank already has you flagged as intelligence, which they do). Your only options in the case of defection are living a shitty life in Moscow or Beijing as an eternal foreigner in a system that doesn't care about you and which is essentially just a poorer, more authoritarian and more corrupt version of what exists in the West. (And they know it too, which is why Snowden and others will be under permanent surveillance in case they attempt to defect back.)
And I think this is increasingly visible in the way that China and especially Russia conduct international espionage. China outright kidnaps random prominent Americans / Canadians / Brits etc and holds them hostage until its people are released (eg. the Huawei heiress). Russia does the same, but maintains order by assassinating double agents who defect to the West on foreign soil at an increasingly aggressive pace, presumably to keep its people in line and convince them that they'll never be safe if they leave. Foreign influence operations by both nations are increasingly short-termist, amateurish, or just chancers, like the largely abortive attempts via Manafort etc to influence Trump, which were mostly just an embarrassment for everyone involved.
Neither system really has anything to offer. If you become a true enemy of the West you better (a) hope you enjoy your miserable life in Russia or China, (b) hope neither nation tires of you enough to trade you for someone they care about, (c) accept that even many neutral nations (India, the UAE etc) will be 'no go zones' because the US can and will extrajudicially kidnap you and the local government won't care enough to stop you, or they'll just trade you for money/influence/weapons/some other foreign policy goal.
Cuba is arguably the only exception. If you have some cash, or are given some in exchange for defection, you can enjoy a nice, comfortable retirement on the beach. There are plenty of modern-enough international resorts catering to Canadians and Europeans, the weather is good, the food and alcohol are good, it's comfortable and you can live very well for a very small amount of money. And because Cuba isn't Russia or China, you're not a high priority enough threat that receiving visitors or conducting some limited business is impossible. In time, rapprochement of some kind will likely continue (unlike Russia or China where it seems ever less likely), your defection may well be washed under the bridge, and everything will turn out (possibly) fine. And unlike Venezuela or Bolivia, where a successful US-aligned coup led by people who will gladly ship anyone the CIA wants back to Washington is at least possible in the near term, Cuba's system is very unlikely to experience that kind of revolution.
So, interestingly, Cuban intelligence might well have an easier time than their peers in the anti-American axis.
There's a solid point that the U.S. being able to offer a higher standard of living than virtually anywhere else is its single greatest power to tempt defection and dissuade its own defectors. As you say, if you defect somewhere you don't have immediate cultural ties, you'll almost certainly end up living a far crappier lifestyle once the initial rewards for your valorous actions are spent.
Like how in the Hunt for Red October the defectors manage to persuade themselves that American life will be idyllic if they can pull it off.
What does the US have that China doesn't? Certainly not safer streets.
Shanghai: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ff29nDLBzaA
New York: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6y5CqAHxGX0
The Chinese govt is more authoritarian, you aren't allowed to go shoot guns. They are always watching you. But they can and will pay the big bucks if you have something to offer. They pinch Taiwanese semiconductor engineers by 4xing their salary. They bring in ex-SF or former air force pilots to train their people - on substantial pay packages. I bet we don't hear about the guy who handed over the F-35 radar schematics for 8 million because it makes people think. The US military is not exactly the highest paying organization in the world.
Furthermore, they might throw in a cute girlfriend. Hinkle was going out with Miss Russia.
Really, what stops people defecting is that they'd lose all their friends, family and have to live somewhere else they don't know, where most speak a foreign language. That's why most people stay in their home countries, even when wealth differences are quite stark.
In practice, I think there are a number of ways in which living as a moderately rich Westerner in China is still much worse than living as a PMC Westerner in the West. The reason those ex-fighter pilots and so on take the million dollars to train the Chinese etc is precisely that they expect to be able to take their gains and return home to the US or England.
Look at perhaps the most famous Western dissident of modern times, Ed Snowden, now defected to Russia and granted citizenship personally by Putin last year. Snowden is admittedly an edge case because he didn’t actually defect to Russia, he just betrayed his country and fled to Russia. He was a well-paid software guy living in Hawaii by the beach with his acrobat girlfriend. He doesn’t seem to be living large out there, he hasn’t been granted a tony Moscow apartment with servants, premier dacha and an annual five star vacation to the Maldives (the kind of lifestyle the Russian elite enjoy). He seems to live a pretty mediocre existence, living largely off (Zoom) speech income, the kind of income someone of his class in Russia might live, maybe worse even.
My guess is Hawaii was still better. Similarly, there are people who live well in China, but almost all are Chinese save for a (shrinking) few rich expats in finance and a handful of other industries in Beijing and Shanghai who work for Western companies.
So.. do you really ly believe Americans owe allegiance to thoroughly authoritarian, secretive institutions that have usurped power in their republic and acting in the spirit of the US constitution by fighting against unaccountable tyranny is a betrayal ?
Is that a reasonable summary of your position ?
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Snowden did what he did for ideological reasons, there's always a quantum of those people, but I would be willing to bet that most defectors/traitors are so because of money or threats (either from the inside or from the outside).
I think he's the exception, which is why he's both famous and even could do what he did. There's almost no reason to suspect a guy like that. But most people aren't willing to risk a very nice life on the altar of the 4th amendment. And I present as evidence the fact that basically nothing happened after he blew the whistle.
See also: Reality Winner, Private Manning.
The two biggest leaks in the last few decades were both ideologically motivated, as were many if not most during the Cold War.
Well that’s because he (and Manning) were emotionally unstable idiots who thought they had found some major malfeasance and then leaked massive amounts of data not actually showing that.
We'll have to disagree that constant universal violation of the 4th amendment and contempt of Congress to hide it doesn't constitute major malfeasance.
Not that it matters of course.
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What is the lifestyle of a non-Chinese expat living in China like?
How does it compare to the lifestyle of the average Chinese immigrant to the U.S.?
https://www.thepackablelife.com/travel/journal/living-in-china
Seems OK for English teachers. I hear that white men are considered attractive there too, though that's diminishing.
I don't understand, why do people think China is this super-poor country? There are parts of China that are poor but the major cities you're most likely to be in are quite rich, as shown in my videos. You don't even get accosted by crazy homeless people either. One of my female friends went to China and was raving about how safe she felt everywhere, even at night. If you sold state secrets to them, they'd presumably be positively inclined towards you and unlikely to turn the police state against you.
I don't want to move to China because it's not my homeland and because I don't want to learn Mandarin. But it's not like you're moving to Moscow in the 1960s, where you'll be condemned to a leaky apartment and cars that don't work. There's loads of gadgets and cool things in China.
I've heard that the major cities have awful smog problems and the rest of the country is, like, Central America level poor.
Yeah, the air quality is way less than what we’re accustomed to in the West. It’s also highly variable, in our city I think about ten percent of the time the air was visibly bad, though also only about ten percent of the time was it good enough to meet WHO standards. I kept air filters running at all times.
Though from historic data and images it seems not that different from what people used to put up with in cities like Los Angeles.
Villages are quite poor, usually without even flush toilets, and with coal stove heating, but they’re kind of a relic. Part of my family still lives in a village, but almost everyone lives in the city in apartments of varying quality. Some are very nice, some would be nice only by broke American college student standards.
Keep in mind that even tier three cities have the amenities a Westerner would be accustomed too. Nice shopping malls with top brands, app based ride share, food delivery, parks, gyms, libraries, etc.
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I actually suspect the opposite. "If he'll spy for you, he'll spy on you."
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Standards of living overseas are not that bad. A low per-capita GDP is negated to some extent by greater purchasing power in dollars, so your ill-gotten gains go very far. Those countries have electricity, internet access, plumbing, cars, public transport, airport, etc. It's not like Somalia or something.
Sure. Just sucks for your kids.
compared to being in jail for rest of your life? that is probably worse for your kids
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You think that will matter in 30 years? Computers and robots will literally have 100% of the jobs.
No they will not.
source: the same as yours
I'll leave this very informative (and accurate) chart here for you.
It was put out about 25 years ago and we are right on track so far.
https://i.imgur.com/48wuJkO.jpeg
By 2050/60 one AI will have more compute than all human brains on earth.
Why you expect this to be unbound exponential curve rather than logistic function?
Also, lol at jpeg without source for dataset.
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Do you have a meaningful counterargument to Wolfram's computational irreducibility thesis, or have you not considered the issue at all?
Kurzweil style number-go-up arguments are fun Whig catnip, but they completely handwave away crucial details. There's a reason Malthus' predictions ended up being wrong despite being mathematically sound.
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The question is whether it is worth giving up ever returning to the country which objectively has the best economic conditions and relocating to a country where you might not even have the skills (i.e. language fluency) to be of any economic value.
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Uh, aren’t well-off people with government connections in Russia and China doing quite well, even by American standards?
Russia and China could treat their defectors like local elites. They don’t.
I think they are doing extremely well in terms of luxury, even being able to ensure the best possible education for their children but there is something that you cannot buy in Russia or China. Political stability, trust and justice cannot be bought in these countries for any price. There is always a chance (and rather high, I would say) that Kremlin or CCP will knock at your door asking you for a favor, or even worse, seeing enemy in you. That's why all the progeny of Russian upper class, including Putin himself lives in the West.
Having to choose: being extremely wealthy Russian oligarch or just average citizen of Switzerland, I take the latter without any doubt, but it depends on a character obviously.
I doubt it. You really think Russian elites would leave their children in the West so the West would be free to arrest them on various bullshit charges like e.g. in the case of the Huawei founder's daughter?
Might be true for the merely very rich, but Putin? Lmao.
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