How do you know that this is the only spy that was caught? It seems in the west's best interest from a propaganda perspective to paint the FSB in a poor light (to discourage cooperation), and they are obviously selective about what gets disclosed.
Because our intelligence agencies do fail (the Trump assassination attempt is the most recent). We can choose to construct epicyclic explanations for this or we can update our priors broadly. Only outcomes will determine which is right. I think our intelligence orgs are probably not uniquely immune to the quality failures the rest of our government orgs are experiencing.
A finite number of failures absolutely does not imply that they never caught any spy except this one. What kind of logic is that?
Looking at the regular expulsions of embassy employees all over the world it should be rather obvious that there is a lot going on about which “we” never hear anything.
(By “we”, I mean normal people having other activities than following closely geopolitics. There is a lot of information to find if you are dedicated enough. A lot of misinformation as well.)
I don't disagree that intelligence agencies fail, but I don't think that the attempted assassination of former-President Trump counts. The shooter appears to have acted completely alone, and so far it seems that he did not give obvious signs online before committing this (yes, he looked up some things about JFK's assassination, but that does not seem enough to raise real flags).
So there was no conspiracy, let alone a foreign one, for the intelligence agencies to have triggered on. This very much looks like a failure of the Secret Service agency, and it will be interesting to see what the final failure analysis looks like, and what they determine can be done better in the future.
And I think the "quality failures the rest of our government orgs are experiencing" is you projecting a bias. If you really think that things are going down hill, please find quantifiable metrics to show that.
renewiltord|1 year ago
op00to|1 year ago
kergonath|1 year ago
Looking at the regular expulsions of embassy employees all over the world it should be rather obvious that there is a lot going on about which “we” never hear anything.
(By “we”, I mean normal people having other activities than following closely geopolitics. There is a lot of information to find if you are dedicated enough. A lot of misinformation as well.)
larkost|1 year ago
So there was no conspiracy, let alone a foreign one, for the intelligence agencies to have triggered on. This very much looks like a failure of the Secret Service agency, and it will be interesting to see what the final failure analysis looks like, and what they determine can be done better in the future.
And I think the "quality failures the rest of our government orgs are experiencing" is you projecting a bias. If you really think that things are going down hill, please find quantifiable metrics to show that.