In a different life of mine, a long time ago, my surveillance team and I were doing a multi-day follow of a non-us person of interest in a major city.
I recall one day in particular, this person, who didn't know we had significant camera coverage of their route, changed clothing twice, right in front of our cameras. Like the short article described, it was pretty easy to don stuff, like a hat with built-in wig, reversible backpack/carrying case and obvious accessories.
So you'd be surprised how little it takes to fool a team of trained people following one person in a crowded area. We were lucky that our coverage caught everything, because had we not caught the person in the act of changing, we would have probably lost them.
Anyone who has a kid will recognize this phenomena from what happens at a crowded playground.
I had some connection to the flip side of the urban spy game. Cops trying to tail a man on a motorcycle in British Columbia (drugs). On a mountain highway. He meets another biker at a lookout where they trade bikes/helmets jackets ... or maybe they didn't. Then he gets onto a drive-on-drive-off ferry (bikes are filtered to the front) and they've lost him.
When two spies want to get together without tails, it isn't at a downtown coffee shop. It is deep in the woods on a quiet road. It is somewhere surrounded by people in helmets and driving generic vehicles. They drive the vehicles that cops don't. Motorcycles. Bicycles. A vespa scooter can out-maneuver any car attempting to follow it.
Want to get really hollywood. I've heard a legend about two russian spooks having a meeting while surfing. Alone out in the waves, nobody can see the exchange.
Reminder: Any CIA or MI6 agent who lasted more than a week in the Soviet Union had diplomatic cover. The NKVD and KGB caught all of our deep cover agents within days; in some cases within hours.
The United States excels at sigint and aerial/orbital recon, but the Russians have been top-notch at humint for a long time.
> The United States excels at sigint and aerial/orbital recon, but the Russians have been top-notch at humint for a long time.
Maybe, but there's also an inherent counterintelligence asymetry between a liberal democracy and a totalitarian police state (which is why in a liberal democracy, the counterintelligence services are often trying to simulate a totalitarian police state.)
I think the U.S. is just an especially easy place to send a deep cover agent.
It has a high standard of living so it's easier to recruit someone to be willing to live here for long periods of time.
It's not uncommon for someone to have a social circle made up entirely of people they've only known a few years. This seems to be much less the case in other places in the world, especially Russia.
It's much more culturally heterogenous so it's easier for someone to blend in.
That probably contributes, but that can’t be the entire story. A previous post on HN discussed the means by which the soviets excelled at identifying CIA agents working under diplomatic cover - it turns out that American tradecraft was hardly as great as we believed - their sloppiness meant that CIA agents under diplomatic cover had unique payscales, tour lengths, working hours, socialization habits, and many other attributes that allowed their covers to be blown. If you can uncover the handlers by their sloppy tradecraft, surveilling and rolling up their assets isn’t going to be that hard - the lack of constitutionally guaranteed protections just meant that those networks could be rooted out quickly once uncovered, but it didn’t necessarily have to contribute towards their discovery.
>Maybe, but there's also an inherent counterintelligence asymetry between a liberal democracy and a totalitarian police state
You could just as easily argue it in the opposite direction, it is much easier to co-opt the corrupt Russian government than it is to co-opt the less corrupt American government. An individual corrupt unaccountable person of interest in a totalitarian police state is far more valuable than an individual corrupt person of interest that is being watched like a hawk by the public in a liberal democracy.
I think a much more reasonable explanation for why government organizations are always trying to become more totalitarian is simply that the officials would rather have more power than less power. The only difference between here and there are the checks placed on them to limit what they can do.
> You could just as easily argue it in the opposite direction, it is much easier to co-opt the corrupt Russian government than it is to co-opt the less corrupt American government
Note that I was referring to the explanation of the relative success of US vs. Soviet placement/detection of agents (from context, intelligence officers, not assets, though “agent” can mean either); Russia’s current government and the Soviet government aren't the same thing.
> I think a much more reasonable explanation for why government organizations are always trying to become more totalitarian
That's not the effect I was explaining or, even, at that level of generality, one I'd agree exists.
There's no evidence that Russia had any significant effect on who runs the US, even if you accept all of the claimed attempts as true, whereas it's universally accepted and documented that the US got Yeltsin elected: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/03/spinning-hilla...
Hey, thanks for the link, I wasn't aware of the US involvement with the election of Yeltsin. That's especially interesting, as Yeltsin essentially dissolved the USSR.
There is a long history of foreign interventions in elections being catastrophic; I recently read Herman's "1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder" - and he claims that there is pretty solid evidence that Lenin was bankrolled by Germany in very impactful ways.
I'm fairly certain the thousands of dollars Russia spent on Google and Facebook ads, overwhelmed the $1.2 billion that was spent in total on the Clinton election campaign.
The ads are a red herring (and uncomfortably visible for both parties).
The real activity was on Facebook groups, viralizing anti-immigration and far-left news, controling the narritive on 4chan pol and /r/the_donald, and botted up - and downvote brigades.
It was so blatant it was visible to a non-expert on information warfare like me.
The people doing this probably got paid about as much as a paid advertisement.
I suspect we will see more of this sort of thing as the investigation continues, but of course, the investigation isn't over yet. My point is just that it was a lot more than 4chan and facebook.
And it wasn't called "Russia" during the cold war; I interpolated.
The US interfering in the 1996 Russian election to install 'our guy' stands as a preposterous, ridiculous overt interference with Russian politics on a scale which the Russians can never hope to achieve.
What I find super interesting is that some people in the USA seem to think that evidence that the US has attacked the elections of the USSR and Russia in the past means that we somehow shouldn't fight when the reverse happens. I mean, if you accept that we got Yeltsin elected, well, in a real way, we dissolved the USSR, making Russia dramatically less powerful. (And yes, I agree that's dramatically more severe than anything Trump has done so far.)
I am not going to vote for any politician who thinks allowing the same sort of thing to happen to the USA is in any way okay.
(I mean, from a completely neutral sense, I get what they are saying... but I'm not completely neutral; I don't think any of us are. Leaving aside that I think you can make a reasonable argument that the USSR was, even for those who lived there, a bad thing, (though I'm obviously biased on that point.) I do think it's reasonable to expect your political leaders to take steps to prevent your country from being taken over by a foreign power.)
How do you feel about the interference of Israel, Saudi Arabia and China in US elections? Because they've certainly subverted US democracy a lot more than the integral of all Russian/Soviet interference with US elections over all time (China being a very junior partner, but still pretty obviously doing so in ways the Russians don't). Shucks, any one of them interfered more in the last election more than the Russians ever have.
Well, the countries I mention above do seem to have subverted elections in a rather more threatening way; unlike those sinister Russians, they seem to have left rather more evidence, and have subverted democracy so effectively there will never be a federal investigator on the case.
> And it wasn't called "Russia" during the cold war
Russia was called “Russia” during the Cold War (for that matter, in the West, informally, so, frequently, was the Soviet Union.)
> The US interfering in the 1996 Russian election to install 'our guy'
“Our guy” had been installed in the Russian Presidency long before he became our guy, while the Russian Federation was still part of the USSR. Whatever interference happened in ’96 wasn't to install anything.
> overt interference with Russian politics on a scale which the Russians can never hope to achieve.
Well, yeah, overt interference, to even have a hope of not being wildly counterproductive, requires establishing a certain level of goodwill with the target population.
There said, the recent Russian covert (though not so much as to withstand much scrutiny) intervention in Western (not merely US) politics has been on a broader scale, and more successful at driving outcomes, than anything either side did, during or after the Cold War, in the 20th Century.
You're missing out on something: it wasn't considered overt to the Russian people at the time. We subverted Russian democracy. This is all completely documented and non controversial.
Unlike the conspiracy theory that $20k in allegedly Russian purchased FB ads (or whatever the insane idea is this week) is why a reality TV star won the presidency.
There are two very useful books on the subject - Surveillance Tradecraft by Peter Jenkins, and Close Protection by Richard J Aitch. Read those two and you should have no problem surveilling or following someone whilst remaining undetected, and similarly no problem in not being surveilled/followed.
Amazon has 'Close Protection' for $1229 and 'Surveillance Tradecraft' for $54. My library has neither book, which is not terribly surprising. Sadly, that means I'm unlikely to get a chance to read either one.
Amusingly, when I lived in Germany in my twenties, people never seemed to assume I was an American military wife and homemaker. They would greet me in German, assuming I was a local national, or assume I was French or assume I was a teacher. I apparently didn't read as American.
While in the US, people would often tell me that my style of dress and my accent was hard to place, which I always found a bit odd since I was born/raised in the US (to a long line of Americans). And now after 10 yrs abroad, following that period, I can only guess I've got better at hiding it, merely through osmosis.
In my time abroad, I've become good enough at Brazilian Portuguese (my 2nd language, learned as an adult) that people in Portugal, where I've been living, often think I'm from Brazil. I always mention quite early on that I'm from the US but, nonetheless, I'm still intrigued with the idea of disguising oneself.
Linguistically, I'm highly doubtful that one can reach C2 status (that is, consistently sounding like a native) in a second language learned as an adult. Of the Brazilians I met in the States, I paid attention to how old they were when they arrived stateside, and judged their cultural/linguistic knowledge with people who were born in Brazil and never left. Anecdotally, I found the age of assimilation (of their home culture/language) was around 16. That is to say, if they arrived in the US at age 14, for example, they'd turn out to be more American than Brazilian by their early 20s. But I wonder how that can be entirely true if I myself don't seem to fit in that box, regarding my American qualities.
My mother is a German immigrant to the US. I speak a little German and I likely dressed a lot more like a German than an American because my mother had a strong influence on my fashion sense. So it's not real shocking that I would sometimes be assumed to be German.
What was bizarre to me was that it seemed like no one ever pegged me as an American. IIRC, I was on an American military base when someone asked me if I was French.
So this didn't just happen out on the streets of Germany. This happened in spaces where you should by default be assuming that most people there were American.
Granted, a lot of soldiers married foreign nationals, so it wasn't quite that simple. I mean, my dad was a soldier who married a German woman while he was stationed in Germany. But it seemed to me like the guess as to my nationality should skew towards American when I was actually on an American base and not, say, fluently droning on in some foreign language.
Fwiw few americans travel abroad, and even fewer outside of major hotspots and tourist locales. When travelling it's somewhat unusual to meet an american around town.
Saw your comment about the military base so there's probably more to it than that, but the base probability of "american" in a lot of places is low.
But the first incident that stuck in my mind was when an American soldier greeted me in German on the sidewalk in front of the McDonald's across the street from the entrance to the American base. I had my very blond baby with me. Yes, I'm half German. Yes, my child is one quarter German.
But he was an American and Americans walked across the street to the McDonald's regularly. It very much weirded me out. Like "Why would you think I'm a German national? You're not. Do I not look American to another American on the sidewalk across the street from the American base??"
the cynical side of me assumes that they'd only show this information off if they had a new system for disguise which was far beyond what they showed here.
i mean, look at the image of the lady in the mask meeting HW bush -- that image is ~30 years old. they've had 30 years to improve on that...
Not interesting by Hacker News' standards. We're not here to have dumb flamewars, but that's what follows comments like this.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
We all start out female in the womb, and then some of us turn make given the right chromosomes. If you look at those who have transitioned their genders, female to male almost always look more “correct” than male to female... it’s hard to remove the effects of testosterone, but easy to add it.
Based on my own transition, and a huge number of conversations I’ve had with trans folks, I don’t think that comparison is relevant.
It’s true that trans men often face a “faster” hormonal transition than women, but this is predominantly due to to the impact of testosterone on facial hair and vocal pitch. But on the assumption that these agents aren’t actually being put on HRT (the whole point is that it’s reversible, right?) going in either “direction” with cosmetics and vocal training is pretty difficult.
Conversely, it’s certainly true that it’s a lot easier to build up someone’s apparent height or facial dimensions than it is to reduce them, again assuming agents aren’t actually receiving cosmetic surgery. But most transitions happen after skeletal differentiation in puberty has already slowed or stopped, so neither men or women get any benefit from that difference during transition.
The effect ‘blfr alludes to probably has much more of an impact, although I don’t agree about the cause. We’re used to cultures where male is the prototype, and female is the marked gender. When those markings are ambiguous, the default assumption is male.
My lived experience is that once you do mix-and-match enough markings to be seen as female, folks will eagerly accept that and ignore whatever “contradictory” signs might be there. Looking at height, for example, it’s not any weirder to see a 95th percentile woman than a 5th percentile man. If you already check the “F” box, no one will look twice.
Lastly, if you’re still with me, maybe take this as a reason to reevaluate how confident you should be WRT who looks like what. If you spend any amount of time interacting with strangers in a US metropolitan area, it’s quite likely you’ve exchanged words with a woman you didn’t realize was trans. We’re really not that rare; we just don’t look like the people you see on TV.
> My lived experience is that once you do mix-and-match enough markings to be seen as female, folks will eagerly accept that and ignore whatever “contradictory” signs might be there. Looking at height, for example, it’s not any weirder to see a 95th percentile woman than a 5th percentile man. If you already check the “F” box, no one will look twice.
Have you considered that other people are just being polite? I know about a dozen trans women, and none of them pass. I've never been surprised to discover someone is trans. The main issue seems to be that medical technology can't yet reliably correct all the giveaways: Large hands, narrow hips, wide shoulders, low voice, strong brow, high hairline, gait, etcetera. And those are just the physical attributes. There are also differences in cultural knowledge, mannerisms, and body language.
Why would I make an issue of someone not passing, especially a stranger? That'd be like pointing out someone's toupee. It'd make them feel worse about themselves while presenting no useful solution to the problem. (Unlike say, "You've got something in your teeth.")
True although paradoxically there is one aspect that is reversed - genital surgery is harder and less functional to construct a functioning penis from a vagina than to create a more or less functional vagina from a penis. Put crudely but succinctly as 'it is easier to make a hole than build a pole'.
Reminds me of the one bit of weirdness with birds - they have the opposite convention of sex assignment being based upon ZW where males are ZZ and females are ZW. Females also have two ovaries but only one of them is active and the inactive one produces testosterone - meaning that if the primary one lost functionality they would start spontaneously masculinizing.
Okay, one last comment before I wear out my welcome: this is actually super fascinating. The reason for this difference has to do with genital homology[1].
Basically, apart from the vagina itself, almost every part of male and female genitalia is made of the same essential “stuff”, just smooshed around to suit different roles. Crucially, all the most important nerve endings are there— so if you rearrange stuff to be in more or less the right place, you get something that works more or less the way you’d expect.
The only issue is, if you got the deluxe variety pack at birth, you probably have a bunch of extra “vulva skin” that you don’t really need, and it’s hanging out in just the right place to make a neovagina out of. Neat!
But if you’re stuck with the original flavor, you’ve probably only got a tiny little bit of “penis muscle” to make do with, so you have to get much more creative.
Am I correct in interpreting your comment as saying that human women generally have less variance in (gendered?) traits than human men. That's an interesting observation if it is what you meant.
Well part of it is also that any X-linked traits are more likely to tend dominant with the back-up copy. Look at colorblindness for one. Women would need a 'bad' gene on both Xs. A man would lack a backup copy on the Y and thus only needs one for it to express.
Yeah you see it in a couple of traits like height, etc..
Basically it's if you have a gene on the x chromosome that increases height by an inch in a man, it will only increase a woman's height by half an inch. And vice versa with removing an inch.
Maybe but I think it's mostly because there's more variability among men so it's easier to pass as a man because we're used to men coming in all shapes and sizes.
I see this repeated so often on the internet, but it is scientifically false. We start out as male or female at conception. XY and XX are determined at conception.
As a matter of fact, women who go through the IVF path can actually choose the sex of the embryo they want implanted in their womb. The womb has nothing to do with the sex of the baby and the female is certainly not the default. A woman can literally choose the sex of her embryo outside the womb and implant it.
Well, actually, if you look up Sex on Wikipedia[1], you’ll see that biologists define sex based on the size of the gametes an organism produces. So we technically don’t turn male or female until puberty!
But seriously, if you’re going to be correcting folks on the internet using the word “scientifically”, you ought to be a little more accurate about, you know... science. The third paragraph of that Wiki article is a pretty apolitical summary of the scientific consensus.
Unlike a lot of folks’ opinions, the scientific consensus is mostly informed by the real world, so it turns out it’s pretty nuanced. You don’t have to sign up for a Tumblr account to understand that no, male/female does not “scientifically” mean XY/XX.
Quick tip: you can mark stories as favourite with a link at the top of the page, and comments on their individual pages (accessed by clicking on the "x hours ago" link).
You can see your own upvoted stories and comments, as well as favourited stories and comments at the bottom of your profile page.
There are some subtle cultural differences however such as table manners. The inspiration for Fawty Towers was angry at Terry Gilliam for eating with the fork in the 'wrong' hand for instance. The gait part however seems a bit questionable.
There are actually very big differences in body language between people from different countries and culture. If you want an extreme example just watch Japanese people and compare them to Americans, the differences are striking but less striking differences exist also between certain European countries and Americans.
The same assholes that posed as Doctors Without Borders so they could gather dna evidence to confirm where Osama Bin Laden was hiding, thus hampering any efforts to eradicate polio because nobody trusts DWB anymore? That CIA?
"I have difficulty separating my life from the work at CIA. This is true for a lot of my colleagues. Early on I found that the men in my office, upon retirement, had an average life-span of 18 months. Eighteen! Their work was their life, and most of them didn’t have outside interests. They literally lived their careers inside the CIA. We changed our retirement procedures to deal with this problem and it got better. Tony Mendez used to say that working at CIA was like drinking from a firehose and that retirement was like jumping from a moving train."
I wonder what it is about the work. This must be true in other professions as well. But at least in computer software after retirement you can still build things and practice your craft.
My father grew up in Oshawa, Ontario where there was a big GM factory making cars. Hard work with decent pay but good pensions- if you lived long enough to enjoy them.
As the stories went, a lot of guys, they put in their 25 years at the plant, retire, and drop dead within 2 years. The only thing worse for you than two and a half decades of hard labor is suddenly stopping.
