This is a direct consequence of Conway’s law. You create an organisation with the mission of deceiving and abusing, don’t be surprised if they produce deception and abuse.
Huh, well this is one of those things I’m going to see everywhere now
Melvin Conway and Hannah Arendt probably could have had a really fascinating with each other comparing ideas in computer and political sciences
Yup, and it makes perfectly intuitive sense once you know about it.
If you’ve ever used a software product with one of those left hand menus with a big list of capabilities from any “big” company, it’s almost assured that each item in that list is it’s own development team that’s only tangentially aware of what the others are doing, and the team in charge of maintaining the menu.
I was on a team for a bit whose goal was to find places where we were shipping our org chart and make our tools play more nicely with each other.
End result: we found some really good areas to make them play better with each other, implemented them, and… They got their own entry in the left hand menu because maintaining a feature fully integrated with four disparate teams with different goals is really hard.
To our credit though, once you turn it on, our thing makes the lines between the products essentially disappear for our end users.
“Let’s put LSD in this small town’s drinking water and see what happens.”
“What scientific purpose would this have?”
“It would be funny.”
“Good point. Operation Midnight Climax approved.”
I can’t find the part about spiking a small town’s drinking water in that article.
I had to do some serious convincing to inform my mom about the CIA’s involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking.
That’s the best thing about the stuff that the CIA has done: they publicly admit to it in writing and people still refuse to believe it’s true
And here I thought the whole Iran Contra thing would be the first one people would know
Not even their worst or most prolific drug running scam. For anyone interested “operation gladio.” The CIA ran the herion game out of Myanmar, with the mob, from about 1944 onwards. Myanmar used to be the worlds largest producer of herion, until Afghanistan overtook them sometime in the late 00s / early 10s…
Now, I’m not saying China are the good guys or anything here. However, if I wanted to stop a rouge security agency from selling herion to fund secret, illegal wars around the world, I’d flood their neighbours with fentanyl.
Thankfully, there’s a wiki page
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been the subject of a number of controversies…
God, what a fitting start/title.
Resignation of officials and agents who would not work for Donald Trump
I didn’t think I would come away with my opinion of the CIA improved.
For the rep they get, they actually do objectively more good than bad. It’s just that you’ll never hear about most the good and the bad sometimes tends to get extraordinarily bad. That’s just how it works, it’s why they were founded.
Let’s be honest here. Which country’s secret paramilitary espionage service hasn’t been the subject of several controversies?
Wikipedia Editing
Seeing this listed next to things like “Human Rights Concerns” made me chuckle.
It’s just like that TvTrope! https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArsonMurderAndJaywalking
Straight up just listening to Behind the Bastards/It Could Happen Here, the Dollop, or Knowledge Fight will make you sound like a crazy person if you talk about them to someone who has no interest in history or current events
