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It goes to very recent times, almost all Arabic&Islamic departments in the US universities (the ones that matter, anyway) have a link to either the CIA, the State Department or even the Department of Defense. Needless to say, the same used to apply to Slavic Studies departments (and I bet it still does), see the infamous Victoria Nuland [1]:

> She earned a bachelor of arts degree from Brown University in 1983, where she studied Russian literature, political science, and history

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Nuland#Early_life_and...

> I bet it still does

I'm not sure why anyone would expect otherwise. This also extends to a lot of computer science and engineering departments. Not just through funding research and recruiting graduates, but a formal pipeline for students to get their education paid for in exchange for years of service in a Federal position requiring a security clearance and working on cybersecurity (kind of like ROTC or attending a service academy). It's not at all secret, and should probably be more well-known as an option for current or future college students. Here are the participating universities: https://sfs.opm.gov/Academia/Institutions

I'm also a career Army officer (product of ROTC myself) that has been sent to graduate school, as have many of my peers, with an obligation to bring that education back for additional years of service in positions that require it. At any given time, we have hundreds (thousands?) of active duty officers on college campuses all over the country.

> the same used to apply to Slavic Studies departments

Yes, of course it does, look where the people in the State Department and related positions in foreign policy come from.

Another bonus to World War II intelligence efforts was the relatively high number of German-speaking American Jews, some refugees from Nazi Germany, who had both the linguistic ability and motive to help. Second and third generation Japanese Americans, eager to prove their patriotism, also helped, as did the famous Navajo (and at least one other less famous tribe, I believe it was the Comanche) Code Talkers.

The bureaucratic nature of the military did lead to misclassifications, though. For instance, my great-grandfather, a German-Jewish refugee whose first language was German, was originally assigned to fight in Japan; he wound up interrogating German captives, presumably more helpfully.

The CIA largely recruited only from Ivy League universities well into the 1980s.
I wouldn't be aware of any secretive recruiting, like in the article or the movies, but the first time I bumped into them was actually at an Ivy job fair, where they were publicly recruiting CS nerds.

I went by their table out of curiosity, or to see if they were giving away any schwag. Because who wouldn't want a "CIA" pen, even if it didn't shoot tranquilizer darts.

Since I was a very nerdy kid, I gave the people at the table my resume, while probably forgetting to make eye contact. There was zero indication of them having any interest in talking with me, so I left.

But, maybe because I'd started working very young, my resume looked a lot better than I did, and they must've later glanced at it.

As I was later leaving the job fair, about to enter the elevator, this CIA representative comes bounding across the room at me, shouting to get my attention. Then she asked if I could come in the next day for an interview.

If I did the interview, they must've mind-control drugged me to forget it. But I did retain a nerdy kid story about being chased by a CIA agent. Still no schwag.

Now it's mainly BYU...
Turns out having firsthand experience living abroad, plus airtight foreign language skills, is quite valuable to intelligence agencies. (The fact that they don’t really drink or do drugs makes them a nice cultural fit, too.)

Paraphrasing a sarcastic comment from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Charlie Wilson’s War: “What a wild fucking idea: our spies should probably speak the same language as the people they’re spying on.”

Lest anyone hammer on the LDS for this: missionaries as spies is not a novel concept nor exclusive to Mormons.

Yes, I don't have a reference immediately available, but I've read that the DoD has studied this and found that LDS kids join the military at a disproportionately high rate and turn out to be better than average troops. Anecdotally, I've found this to be true too. The Utah Army National Guard also has the 300th Military Intelligence Brigade of linguists which is pretty unique.
Yeah, but back when there was actually an ethos of morality, there were certain lines which weren't crossed:

- no use of religious/academics/medical practitioners as cover identities

- no high-level clearances to people who had ties overseas and might be vulnerable to blackmail/coercion

Somehow that all went out the locks during the "War on Terror" and I would gladly vote for and donate to a candidate who would make an issue of instances where the above moral considerations were ignored and operations which I would view as war crimes were perpetrated.

It's not worth winning any war at the cost of the moral high ground.

> when there was actually an ethos of morality, there were certain lines which weren't crossed

Uh, what? Could you perhaps tell this to the Catholic Church, who DEFINITELY used their capacity as religious leaders to spy on the Japanese on behalf of the Portuguese around, I dunno, the year 1600?

This is simply the easiest answer I could recall because I just watched Shogun.

This limit you’re describing only exists in your head.

The context was the CIA, which used to have such guidelines.
The creator of civit.AI, the largest AI porn website/huggingface for diffusion models, is a Mormon and he felt the need to tell me this quickly when I spoke to him.

I knew what he was really telling me, lol.

That he's a Mormon who watches porn, or that civit.AI is government-controlled?
Yes
I saw a photo pop up a few months back from a hiring fair at Yale. I guess Skull and Bones isn't pulling them in like it used to.
there are definitely actively people going to Yale that are going to the CIA, I actually think Yale is a more common one
Well something must have changed if they're having to show up at a job fair.
i knew people, they were recruited prior to even entering college crazy as it sounds as part of their scholarship
I chuckled at this. Tried to find an article that came out recently about why Mormons make good spies but couldn’t unfortunately.
They will have to compete with the FBI.
American academia is still full of spies and foreign agents: https://www.propublica.org/article/why-russian-spies-really-...
Butina's vector into anything resembling actual spying was American political advocacy groups and their surroundings, which includes some of academia. What's the parallel to what's being described in the article (American academics who did intelligence work during WW2)?
Mao said that the first step in a succesfull revolution, was to kill all of the librarians and then famously (silent im) killed or re-educated all of the acedemics, with instructions to rebuild all modern technology and knowledge useing the chinese language and invent a whole new vocabulary for science and engineering but useing accepted international measuring systems, and latin for biology, called that one "the cultural revolution" The resulting edifice, now proving to be quite secure from outside observation. Early "travel writers" functioned as reliable spies, with many of them bieng, young, out of work,recent science graduates. Even Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle has hints. One of the bigest secret's the British maintained was determining a countrys hydrocloric acid production capacity, and as still the worlds most used industrial chemical is a reliable proxy measurement of a countrys total industrial capacity. The final piece to the British empire was the invention of the escapement, which gave them the abilty to out navigate anyone else, and thereby co-odinate military actions and concentrate forces where and when there targets were vulnerable. The current information wars are floundering due to a greater and greater difficulty in getting anyone to believe anything and are instead amusing themselves with cat memes, which the chinese residents of "red book" are demanding as proof of bieng a tictok refugee, which if provided ,they then offer to act as there personal spy.
> Mao said that the first step in a succesfull revolution, was to kill all of the librarians and then famously (silent im) killed or re-educated all of the acedemics

Mao also said “We should kill all the sparrows” and then tens of millions of Chinese people died during the resulting famine.

yup, and if we read the same account, then China is still suffering from a the loss of song birds. From observing song birds, especialy in winter, they are very busy eating, dormant insects and there egg clusters, and most of the over wintering birds are doing this, up too crows.Colder weather pushes the birds to seak out the higher energy food from insects, rather than seeds and plants, and the cold weather will kill certain types of pests in the ground.So warmer weather and no birds did kill more Chinese, than the Japanese in ww2. Its one of the bleaker demonstrations of the law of unintended consiquences. Something similar happened in India, when they killed all the snakes,(cobras), which used to keep the now out of control rat population in check. The disease and food destruction caused by rats, is orders of magnitude more deadly and costly than the snakes ever were.And now there are spoty efforts to rehabilitate the snakes reputation and the place they occupied for millenia.
I also remember when magazines didn't crash your tabs.

Anyway 3 Days of the Condor is a pretty good film.

It is pretty wild that now 99% of spying is done through a keyboard.

HUMINT has become very difficult due to ubiquitous automated physical surveillance, social media and DNA.

To credibly run HUMINT, the agent must have a strong backstory.

The people doing the vetting also work for intelligence agencies with unlimited funding.

Is it?

If you lived your entire life exclusively around "spies", would you be able to tell? (don't think too much about it).

> If you lived your entire life exclusively around "spies", would you be able to tell?

Yes: basically every large website is spying on you. :-)

Websites do it very closely. I hope they do something good with that information tax (it's very high).

There's a larger you though. A little bit blurrier, completely metaphisical. It is an old tradition (for example, Horoscope, but not only it).

That blurry you thing has the means to spy on you too. Not as close as a website that has your exact identity, but close enough.

One could see your public behavior and gauge what cultural clothes you decide to wear, and from that figure out lots of things about you (in a more blurry, metaphisical way). These ideas are very, very old.

For example, I was supposed to move from being a web developer in the 2000s (very known persona profile) to some kind of crypto-nerd, to some kind of AI-nerd. It's the lane that was assigned to me, the clothes I am supposed to wear given my life circumstances. I decided to make different arrangements for myself (still very much a 2000s web developer), and then noticed how people blindly follow this stuff. I can't help but imagine a lot more people do this (persona mobility), and know what's all about.

Yes - there is very little HUMINT happening nowadays. The end of an era.

I am going to pass on addressing your hypothetical question.

If spies were obvious and visible in a way that we could see their intelligence work, they would not be spies, they would be diplomats.

Do you get my point? If there is non-cybernetics human espionage activity, you are not supposed to see it. To people unaware of it, it looks like it doesn't exist.

In this scenario, all this shit about spies (movies estabilishing their personas, tall tales, especulations) is nothing but misdirection.

The espionage holy grail is not perfect tech, is perfect misdirection. Of course, the concept exists, but nothing is perfect.

Both of our discourses are hypothetical, we can't offer any proof. On what grounds can you dismiss mine? (don't worry about it, I don't want to win an argument).

>In this scenario, all this shit about spies (movies estabilishing their personas, tall tales, especulations) is nothing but misdirection.

Not if you are arrested for espionage.

Of course I cannot disclose my sources and methods - I concede the argument.

I can disclose my sources and methods. I just reverse engineered it from widely available distribution mechanisms. I know I got a lot of things wrong, but I got a lot of things right as well.
Now the top spies against us are all Academics!
As someone who works in AI right now, I’ve rest assured that Langley and ft Meade have deeply co-opted and infiltrated most AI labs, with the goal of doing targeted surveillance of individuals who they worry are capable of the “lone wolf” AI disasters that the less wrong folks talk about. I unironically thinks it’s some glowies jobs at Langley or ft Meade to make sure no one at openAI, anthropic, etc is doing like gain of function research or bioweapon manufacturing with LLMs.

If the IC isn’t doing what I am describing, they’ve dropped the ball and probably ought to be doing it…