Phillip Knightley. The Second Oldest Profession (1986) The subtitle ”The spy as patriot, bureaucrat, fantasist, and whore” describes the thesis pretty accurately. Knightley surveys the history of security and intelligence agencies in Britain and the US, and to a lesser extent in Germany and Russia. The book is pre-glasnost, so it assumes the Cold War setting. There is varying detail about various operations, both regime-disruptive and intelligence-gathering. The net effect is to confirm whatever suspicions one may have about the price/payoff ratio of these services. Bottom line: failures are more common than successes, and the focus of these services has shifted from providing useful information (much of which can be gathered from open sources) to empire-building and "counter-intelligence." Spies spend most of their resources spying on each other.
The most worrisome aspect is that paranoia and fantasy drive the world-views of these organisations. (They also drive the world-views of many people afraid of the enormous reach of computers, much greater than anything Knightley or his sources envisaged in 1986). The result is such a massive amount of data that no humans could sift through it all, let alone make sense of it. Thus the increasing reliance on AI algorithms. AI algorithms are inevitably biased, and will yield false positives as well as false negatives. The danger is that the merely human recipients of algorithm-supplied intelligence will trust it. As Pedro Domingos says, People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.
An essential book IMO, still remarkably relevant after 30 years. Considering the increasing paranoia and fantasy in online discourse, perhaps even more relevant. ***
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