Reflections on a world with too much spying

Wanted to get a few things down before I finish this book because I’m liable to forget them by then. I’m in chapter 8. Wanted to write a few things about chapter six when I was in it, but those were mostly the same kinds of things. Preamble Criticism of FBI, DoJ, the IC Let me get a few things out of the way that don’t have to do with the book directly but rather a layperson’s criticism of the FBI and DoJ. Though I really do appreciate the sort of “What We Think We Do” versus the “What We Really Do” and “What X (and Y) Thinks We Do,” * etc., I have some concerns about the might of the Federal Government (though anyone who’s read what I write also knows I’m often more concerned with billionaires, typically the libertarian type who want to destroy the Federal Government, and multinational corporations who are in many alarming ways replacing government functions and are only as bound by law when they do so as much as government is able and willing to enforce it and maintain it). While I

Update, 17 Sept 2022: Added link at bottom to NSArchive in Moscow Signals. — Takeaways from the book The Spy in Moscow Station by Eric Haseltine. There are only a handful but they go off in different directions. Briefly:   (a) the Soviets/Russians openly talk about *advanced* electronic surveillance in textbooks while the US does not;   (b) Russia was ahead of the US on much of surveillance tech during the Cold War and may still be;   and (c) Havana syndrome is probably related to surveillance of some kind. Working backwards, I thought of an analogy. Understand that I don’t understand the minute details of the science. Don’t really want to either. The time and headspace required to grep the details can and will distract me from fifty other things I want to spend time on. As such, this analogy would make someone who really does understand the details cringe. It’s a necessary evil because the point here is to explain it to people who likewise are not going to learn the details. Here goe