
Bugger - Ygg2
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER
======
swombat
The danger with this very good article is that it underplays the danger
inherent in this system of surveillance. The spooks who put the thing together
are the hard-working idiots described here:

> _I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid,
> and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever
> and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid
> and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine
> duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest
> leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the
> composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who
> is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility
> because he will always cause only mischief._

(often misattributed to Rommel, but actually by
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-
Equord](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord) )

What we have here is a band of diligent idiots who, with their persistent,
hard-working little hands, are building an apparatus of oppression that will
be the wet dream of whatever future tyrant emerges (as inevitably one must, if
history is any guide). They form a powerful, hidden, well-funded department of
our government, and they are, from the looks of it, largely incompetent,
diligent idiots.

This article/documentary is very good, but don't think these guys are harmless
fools. They are very, very dangerous fools - a danger well above their
competence.

~~~
mcantelon
The movement to undermine US freedom and privacy has been focussed and well-
funded since 9/11, under both Bush and Obama and involving more than just the
NSA. If it's the work of idiots, they are very hard-working, successful idiots
as they've managed to wrest considerable power from a nation of hundreds of
millions, assuming control of the world's foremost superpower.

~~~
sillysaurus
_The movement to undermine US freedom and privacy has been focussed and well-
funded since 9 /11, under both Bush and Obama and involving more than just the
NSA._

If that's true, then why don't they just, you know, end privacy? Tptacek was
right when he said:

 _Obama could give a speech in the Rose Garden this week carefully explaining
that NSA requires access to American communications, all of them, in order to
defend the country against terrorist attacks, and that while privacy is
"important", the expectation of perfect privacy in your cell phone and
Internet communications isn't reasonable because it helps terrorist cells
without providing much benefit.

I would recoil from such a speech, but the public probably would not.

The American public currently has a weak expectation of privacy in their
electronic communications. But they make virtually no meaningful demand for
that privacy. Thwarting terror attacks are a much higher priority to them.
Want evidence of that? Well, the body-conscious, vain, generally out-of-shape
American public routinely submits to electronic strip searches to get onto
airplanes. You think they care if someone's screening their calls to catch Abu
Shahid? They would accept that argument. And with that acceptance, the
expectations of privacy and the notion of what "reasonable" searches are would
be, in short order, redefined --- those rights being explicitly predicated on
contemporary mores by the Constitution.

When I look at it from this angle, it becomes apparent that while privacy is
inconvenient to the USG, and something they feel they have to work around,
it's not something they're intent on eliminating. Despite the rhetoric from
the tech punditry, the USG has not stated that it's reasonable for them to
surveil US citizens; their defense has instead been that they are not
surveilling them. I too think that's a falsehood, but it's truth or falsity is
not the only thing that matters about it._

~~~
mcantelon
>If that's true, then why don't they just, you know, end privacy?

By covertly erecting systems that end privacy (and attacking privacy tools
like Tor), they are, in effect, ending privacy (without hurting the "US is a
champion of freedom" brand to the same degree that explicitly ending privacy
would do).

~~~
DanBC
I wonder if Americans know how long it's been since the US started taking
photographs and fingerprints of every non-citizen entering the US?

That feels a bit privacy invading, but there wasn't much fuss over it when it
was introduced.

~~~
gregsq
This is a surprise. I've never been fingerprinted at a US port. Perhaps it's
because I have a biometric passport. Still, such a practice can't be
universal.

~~~
DanBC
> Still, such a practice can't be universal.

What do you mean by "not universal"?

([http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/03/25/us-security-
finger...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/03/25/us-security-fingerprints-
idUSN2538685320080325))

> _The U.S. government has been collecting digital fingerprints and
> photographs of nearly all non-citizens aged 14 and up entering the country
> since 2004, officials said, in a Homeland Security program called US-VISIT,
> at a cost of $1.7 billion._

------
Joeboy
For those that don't make it that far through, one of the things that's
mentioned that I hadn't heard about before is that in 1982 a GCHQ employee
called Geoffrey Prime was caught selling British secrets to the Soviets, not
because of the work of the security services but because he confessed after
being caught sexually assaulting children whose movements he'd been monitoring
via his job.

------
sradu
I've watched / read just about everything created by Adam Curtis. He is a
brilliant documentarist.

If you have a couple of hours start by watching "Century of the Self" where he
tells the history of PR and Edward Bernays. (it's public domain)

If you like it then watch "The Trap" and "Pandora's box". "The Power of
Nightmares" is also great. Subscribe to Adam's blog.

He is able to create brilliant connections which give a whole new perspective
on history. Some people I've talked about him told they believe he is a
conspiracy theorist however maybe I'm naive but most of the things he says
make perfect sense to me.

I remember watching "Century of the Self" at 21 and having a tiny 'aha' moment
about how things work.

~~~
mbrock
Interestingly, one of his major themes is that powerful people and
institutions are themselves driven by various "conspiracy theories," neuroses,
and fiction.

In this post, he describes how the MI5 and other spy organizations need
ideological support from authors like Le Carre.

In "The Power of Nightmares," this is also the primary theme, but focused on
the mythical and paranoid ideology that drives the "War on Terror."

So, Curtis is maybe not a conspiracy theorist, but a conspiracy theory
theorist... I see him as something like a humanist: he wants to the reveal the
"humanity" (pettiness, confusion, imagination) of powerful actors which
present themselves as serious.

~~~
spenuke
Agreed. I was introduced to his work by watching The Trap in a seminar on
Michel Foucault, interestingly enough. I was surprised how much depth there
was in Foucault's work, despite his reputation as a fudging post-
structuralist. Much of it complementary to Adam Curtis's work.

One of the important things we find in both (as well as in the last in my
trifecta of organizational theory -- The Wire) is that conspiracy theories are
almost impossible, because people are mostly either too stupid or too petty
and shortsighted to pull off a true Illuminati-style conspiracy.

It might be tempting to call Adam Curtis a conspiracy theorist because his
notion of how power is distributed and wielded is somewhat arcane -- for
instance, it's at first odd to say that the populace is controlled by propping
up freedom as the guiding ethos and removing arbitrary forms of control by
implementing statistical guidelines, since these things are nominally in place
to remove top-down control -- but such analyses, arcane though they may be,
are not conspiracy theories, because a conspiracy requires a coordinated
effort.

Adam Curtis describes situations in which there is no coordinated effort, and
no secret cabal. Just struggles of power and agreed upon fields of
debate/combat which are then exploited after the fact by those who are able to
do so.

~~~
steveklabnik
> I was surprised how much depth there was in Foucault's work, despite his
> reputation as a fudging post-structuralist.

While I want to make some snarky comment about how maybe this tells you what
you've heard about those 'fudging post-structuralists' is incorrect, what I'll
say instead is that out of that group, which, incidentally, he did not
consider himself a part of, Foucault is widely considered the least-fudgy.

Consider Chomsky, for example: his (silly and vapid, in my humble opinion)
beef with many continental philosophers basically excluded Foucault: "I find
Foucault really interesting but I remain skeptical of his mode of expression."
I highly recommend watching the debate between the two of them:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myy3vL-
QKI4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myy3vL-QKI4) (and the five-second
summary:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0dM6j7pzQA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0dM6j7pzQA)
)

~~~
spenuke
Oh, you don't need to convince me one way or the other. I spent my
undergraduate career in a philosophy department that was extremely
continental-heavy, as well as dedicated to reading only primary texts. After
having read many volumes of Frenchies, my opinion on the two most famous is
that Derrida fudged beautifully, even if he was ultimately a one-trick pony,
while Foucault cherry picked some history but built a system of questions that
were and are worth exploring.

~~~
steveklabnik
:)

I'm currently making my way through Derrida now, though I've put him down to
take up some Kafka...

------
confluence
You'd be surprised at how many things throughout the world can be easily
explained through the lense of utter incompetence. Think of any type of
failure out there, and more often than not plain human incompetence is at the
centre of it.

When you start to understand how utterly incompetent most people are at their
jobs, you quickly adopt an almost anti-conspiracy mindset that only changes
it's mind based on positive evidence of actual competence.

Human error is the number one most common failure mode in complex systems. So
before you think conspiracy, think idiocy.

> _Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity._

\- Robert J. Hanlon of Hanlon's razor fame
([http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor))

------
hedgew
To summarize:

"The terrible truth that began to dawn in the 1980s was that MI5 - whose job
it was to catch spies that threatened Britain - had never by its own devices
caught a spy in its entire history."

~~~
walshemj
hey right I believe you and price philip is realy a lizard man from plant zog

Karl Hans Lody is but one example

------
3pt14159
The truth is somewhat in the middle. I've worked with a couple ints and a
couple of their bosses. Some are hyper competent, some are effectively the
equivalent of people that "play business" by forwarding technical "advisories"
to non-technical people.

So yeah, it's a range of skills and dispositions, at least from what I've
seen.

------
cup
I would counter that the real state secret is that the threat of global
conflict in this day and age has dimished but the cold war mentality has
persisted.

Furthermore, people don't care about privacy and are willing to trade liberty
for securiy. We like to talk the talk but when the we get to the crossroads
the general public is indifferent.

~~~
Zigurd
> _the threat of global conflict in this day and age has dimished but the cold
> war mentality has persisted_

This is the problem at the bottom of the whole thing, Why do we have a Cold
War sized NSA, or bigger, when we can look out decades or even centuries and
see no totalitarian threat on the scale of the Soviet Union, and today not
within three orders of magnitude of the Soviet Union? Nobody is occupying half
a continent. No columns of thousands tanks are poised to invade. No multi-
megaton hydrogen bombs are aimed at our cities.

The only threat this weapon is aimed at is the people.

~~~
learc83
I agree completely with your sentiment, but I'd like to point out that there
are still "multi-megaton hydrogen bombs" aimed at our cities.

~~~
Zigurd
I would check on that. As far as I know, the US no longer stocks any "high
yield" nukes, and the same for Russia, or at least a very small fraction of
their previous arsenal. Not that a "small" nuke would be any picnic.

~~~
hga
There's good reasons for that, unless you're trying to hit a particularly hard
target, like the Cheyenne Mountain bunker that's now on "warm standby", really
large nukes don't gain you anything, you get diminishing returns as additional
heat liberated just radiates back into space.

Hitting a modern city with 3 low-centi-ton yield airbursts will do a lot more
damage than one megaton class one.

------
known
"If you wish to keep slaves, you must have all kinds of guards. The cheapest
way to have guards is to have the slaves pay taxes to finance their own
guards. To fool the slaves, you tell them that they are not slaves and that
they have Freedom. You tell them they need Law and Order to protect them
against bad slaves. Then you tell them to elect a Government. Give them
Freedom to vote and they will vote for their own guards and pay their salary.
They will then believe they are Free persons. Then give them money to earn,
count and spend and they will be too busy to notice the slavery they are in."
\--Alexander Warbucks

------
coldcode
It doesn't matter whether they are any good at catching bad people. What
matters is how they impact the lives of good people.

------
nazgulnarsil
But this is what I worry about. A competent corrupt government is mostly
concerned with crushing its genuine enemies. An incompetent one thrashes
around crushing arbitrary people.

~~~
analyst74
A government branch, when faced with difficult choice of either harming its
own budget or exaggerating its legitimacy, will always do the latter.

Those who have high enough morale to harm their own interest for public good
can only thrive in an environment of lots opportunities. So after making the
case that they should be fired, they can find other equal or more lucrative
careers.

------
sbirchall
Haven't read this yet - it's a bit of a long one. But I just thought I'd leave
a comment for anyone wondering if this is worth reading. I can categorically
say YES, yes, a thousand times yes. Adam Curtis is a master artist of a
documentary film maker and everything he has produced is worth combing over in
fine detail when alone and feeling introspective or with friends who are
curious and open to new and exciting ideas. He will quite simply intrigue the
ever loving bejesus out of you and I think the HN crowd (if not already)
should be much better acquainted with his work.

If you need further convincing (and a shorter read), just check out this
interview: [http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/looking-beneath-the-
waves-v10...](http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/looking-beneath-the-waves-v10n12)

~~~
Ygg2
I definitely haven't seen a finer writer or more intriguing than Adam Curtis.
Malcom Gladwell comes to mind, but I subjectively like AC bit better. My
favorite is the one on the interaction between pets and their owners on TV and
how it changed over time.

I still would like to see some contra argument, though I doubt I'll find much
on HN.

~~~
justincormack
The only comparable person in terms of documentary is perhaps Jonathan Meades.

~~~
smutticus
What about Simon Reeve? Maybe not in the same deepness level as Curtis but
very much worth watching. Especially if you want to better understand
human/nature interactions and how climate change and globilisation are
effecting the world's poor.

------
fnordfnordfnord
> _the historian EP Thompson said that really Chapman Pincher was: "A kind of
> official urinal in which ministers and intelligence and defence chiefs could
> stand patiently leaking."_

Wow. I wonder what EP Thompson would say about the media today.

~~~
knotty66
That line could be straight out of "The Thick of It".

------
rmc
Another example of MI5 dropping the ball was in the Irish War of Independence
in the early 1920s. The "old" IRA was able to infiltrate it, execute various
secret agents, manage to convince them that the IRA had much more guns and men
then it actually did, etc.

~~~
DanBC
Which is weird when we compare that to the STEAKKNIFE[1] infiltration of the
IRA.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeknife](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeknife))

[1] I like this convention of putting everything secrety in capitals.

~~~
rmc
Difference of about 50→100 years there.

------
lucaspiller
"Thousands of Daily Mail readers couldn't be wrong."

------
speeder
I think it is also very sad, that the things that KGB traitors did tell
western people that KGB do, people don't believe, maybe because it worked as
KGB intended (search around for Yuri Bezmenov interview... amazing)

------
marshray
Is this article returning a Server Error page for anyone else? Whereas the
others by this same author are not.

------
_quasimodo
Since i'm not using Flash anymore i wasn't able to watch the videos, but from
the descriptions in the article i believe they would have added a lot to the
text.

Appearently BBCs 'iPlayer' does support https streaming (for their iOS App),
but only if you have an Apple signed client certificate.

:(

~~~
Kliment
You might find
[http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html](http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html)
helpful then

~~~
_quasimodo
Yes, thank you :)

------
wslh
So, at the end if, now, intelligence agencies are spying retrieve information
from Google et al and analyzing it with algorithms that are already in the
public domain why they need a large budget or a budget at all?

------
walshemj
yeh right in reality there was a concerted effort by N the German navel
intelligence to recruit and run spies in the UK.

A number of them where caught bang to rights both pre and during ww1.

hes right that Quex caused more harm than good but hey its the daily mail see
the recent hysteria about opt in to porn which is David Cameron jumping the
the DM's tune

------
jwcrux
Off topic, but am I the only one who noticed "spies aren'y" in the image?

------
nodata
Nice URL.

~~~
Ygg2
I admit it is a nice wordplay on "bugs" that spooks use and the very British
coarse word - bugger.

------
chiph
So ... they're like any other bureaucrat?

------
Ygg2
Ugh, op here. Why was title changed? It's less informative now :(

~~~
simantel
HN Guidelines[1] state that original article titles should be used as the
title on HN (though I agree that it's sometimes to the detriment of HN
readers).

[1]
[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
gojomo
Indeed, title changes (by either submitter or an admin) which improve the
original title, without adding spin or sizzle, should be welcomed.

The mechanistic insistence on original titles often gets things wrong, leaving
a title in place that "buries the lede" (the actually new nugget in a
particular story) or includes its own misleading spin. People then either miss
or waste time on stories, when a few reasonable extra words in the title would
have helped.

Possible experiments to address this might include:

• Adding a separately-voted 'title tournament' for each story, in which the
original title, submission title, and others audience-submitted compete.
(They're not competing for which gets the story the most upvotes, but which
best describes the item.)

• Allowing a subhead per story, where either the original subhead or some
other pull-up excerpt can appear for context. (This could be from the OP,
admins, a group tournament, or even just wiki-style.)

------
Buzaga
That explains why the guy who made the Facebook Event of 'spook spotting walk'
in Brittain after the news that there was NSA personnel working there got
inquired about his intentions! Idiots.

