from Hacker News

How private intelligence companies became the new spymasters

by dsr12 on 10/7/24, 8:06 PM with 33 comments

  • by jongjong on 10/7/24, 9:26 PM

    Looking at the past 10 years of the software industry, I still can't wrap my head around the approach that most large companies have taken to hiring software engineers; treating them as literal cogs in the machine, designing processes which place trust in the hands of middle managers and bureaucrats instead of engineers. There was literally no vetting process for engineers. Now every corner of the internet is full of viruses, spyware and backdoors and of course middle managers had no idea. Nobody is responsible for the software so it belongs to intelligence agencies and hackers.

    The software industry turned out so different from how I thought it would. When I decided to pursue it as a career, I thought that software engineers would be treated and given responsibilities like managers.

    It's crazy when you think about it; managers are responsible for their people, whom they have limited control over... Yet software engineers have zero responsibility for the software they produce, which they have almost full control over.

  • by rurban on 10/8/24, 5:59 AM

    Theoretically a very good development regarding lawfulness and accountability.

    State spies are basically illegals without accountability, like the various mafia networks. (CIA did have close connections to the Italian mafia, btw in their various illegal activities, such as drugs and torture. The NSA is regularly above the constitution.) Private spies are not yet connected like the mafia, but still can get caught operating out of the legal or constitutional boundaries.

  • by poopiokaka on 10/8/24, 2:29 AM

    This blog post is so scattered

  • by cyberax on 10/7/24, 8:35 PM

    A couple of years ago, a dipshit moron in the US Army leaked a bunch of top secret documents on Discord, mostly related to the Ukrainian war.

    The thing is, these documents were kinda bad. The information in them was not any better than the work of open source intelligence, and analyses were as good (bad) as that of many armchair analysts.

    So it's no wonder that spy agencies are getting left behind.

  • by jklinger410 on 10/7/24, 9:05 PM

    Sounding like a broken record here. Your bank and state government will sell your data to these brokers. Just in case any of you think your TOR browser saves you.