Red scare material packaged as a human interest story, now with a Democratic slant to adjust to a new Republican who is reportedly chummy with Russians. It's funny how they always say the KGB/SVR is the counterpart to the the CIA but never describe the CIA as the counterpart to the KGB/SVR.
Red scare material packaged as a human interest story, now with a Democratic slant to adjust to a new Republican who is reportedly chummy with Russians.
No, it's just routine (and useful) reporting on the everday business of spycraft.
It's funny how they always say the KGB/SVR is the counterpart to the the CIA but never describe the CIA as the counterpart to the KGB/SVR.
It's called an "analogy", and it's a pretty useful tool of expression. Particularly for describing "Y, the counterpart of X" where X is a large agency in the (very large) country you live in.
So really, I just don't get the "scare" component you're driving at.
"It's funny how they always say the KGB/SVR is the counterpart to the the CIA but never describe the CIA as the counterpart to the KGB/SVR."
Is this a reference to "the SVR, Moscow’s version of the CIA"? Don't you usually use the construction "X is the counterpart to Y" when Y is the more familiar to the intended audience? I don't see anything sinister here, at least in this grammar construction.
It was in reference to that, in the context of the larger body of text that has been written about intelligence services. Even when the CIA is the subject, I don't think I've ever seen them presented as America's version of [other country's intelligence service] (especially not the bad guys). But the other direction has been so common over the years that it's begun to stand out when I see it.
Like I said, to an English-speaking (arguably American, as Bloomberg is based in Manhattan) audience, it makes little sense to phrase it the other way. You compare the unknown with the known, not the other way around.
Compare:
"Pachinko, the Japanese version of a slot machine."
"A slot machine, the American version of pachinko."
Which version is intended for an American audience? Which for an audience familiar with Japan? There's nothing nefarious here.
If that stands out to you, I think you may be looking too hard for bias to the point where you're seeing things that aren't there. Keeping an eye out for bias is a good thing. It can be sometimes difficult to keep it calibrated.
The phrasing is not a sign of bias specifically. It's just a peculiarity that I've seen in this style of journalism going back to the Cold War era when "KGB" was a household word.
Maybe I've binged too much on 1970s and 1980s news with the benefit of hindsight, and it's coloring what I expect my perception of today's fluff pieces to be if I read them again in 30 years.
I think it's just because the SVR is not a household brand in the same way that the CIA is and the KGB was (you never saw the KGB described that way either).
The CIA, KGB and MI5 are Hollywood staples; the SVR isn't, yet.
(In a similar way GCHQ is often described as "the UK's counterpart to the NSA" or words to that effect).
The tl;drs miss the hilarious assertion that Russia is somehow responsible for the outcome of the election. Nevermind Assange's denials.
"The espionage story of the year, and perhaps one of the greatest foreign operations in decades, has undoubtedly been Russia’s successful effort to influence this fall’s presidential election through hacking—penetrating Democratic National Committee servers and the e-mail account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman."
Why? Not unilaterally deciding the US presidential election isn't mutually exclusive with "one of the greatest foreign operations in decades". I might disagree with their assessment, but Russia did influence the election and someone could at least attempt the argument that it was "one of the greatest foreign operations in decades"
I love how a weak assertion made by the DNC to deflect attention away from the actual email content has now been silently elevated into a "fact" mindlessly parroted like here.
I trust in DKIM signatures. Any statement by an intelligence service ever is caked in multiple layers of conflicting motivations from expanding their budget, pleasing their lax overseers, deflecting incompetence to confusing adversaries.
And these are just the generic reasons. In this particular case, the first obvious question is why NSA et al. would ever state their certainty in a Russian attack publicly. There are no good outcomes. Either they are right and the Russians blow up the bridges as they retreat or they are wrong and the Russians know they are incompetent.
How would DKIM signatures show who stole the e-mails?
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I trust in DKIM signatures. Any statement by an intelligence service ever is caked in multiple layers of conflicting motivations from expanding their budget, pleasing their lax overseers, deflecting incompetence to confusing adversaries.
That is some of the motivations, the negative ones, but you fail to list all the reasons they wouldn't want to lie to make your argument sound stronger.
I understand being skeptical of an intelligence service, but all intelligence services? Well, you'd have to have a pretty strong reason to doubt.
Its a play on the 'The Spy Who ___ Me' title meme. I thought it was very fun and did a good job communicating how mundane the lives of the spies really were, which appeared to be a thesis or at least supporting point of the article.
Tl;dr: Russian spy brought bug into secure facility, revealed other spies. FBI deals with it.
Not sure why LinkedIn is even mentioned... a quick search on the whole page (ignoring the title/post categories) is just this one sentence...
> By day, Buryakov lived the ordinary life of a Wall Street analyst: reading and writing reports; attending meetings, conferences, and parties; building connections on LinkedIn.
But its an interesting read, even with the weird title...
That I was able to work out the intention of a sentence does not mean the sentence should have existed in the first place. It's already used up more of my time than any actual content—why didn't they use a descriptive title?
