>At a recent meeting of U.S. ambassadors from Russia and Europe in Washington, U.S. ambassadors to several European countries complained that Russian intelligence officials were constantly perpetrating acts of harassment against their diplomatic staff that ranged from the weird to the downright scary. Some of the intimidation has been routine: following diplomats or their family members, showing up at their social events uninvited or paying reporters to write negative stories about them.
But many of the recent acts of intimidation by Russian security services have crossed the line into apparent criminality. In a series of secret memos sent back to Washington, described to me by several current and former U.S. officials who have written or read them, diplomats reported that Russian intruders had broken into their homes late at night, only to rearrange the furniture or turn on all the lights and televisions, and then leave. One diplomat reported that an intruder had defecated on his living room carpet.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/russ...
The agents and officers they actually care about, they (and we) rarely touch. It's better if they think their cover is intact.
Yes Mr inspector the poor lads though they where being burglarised and as "drink had been taken" they got a bit boisterous
I can imagine Russia actually doing something heinous and it making zero waves, all because of the media who cried wolf.
[1] http://www.mediaite.com/online/new-poll-shows-that-41-of-rep...
1. Select an arbitrary NFL game being played in the first week of season.
2. Email a sufficiently large ( > 131,072) group of people, telling half of them that Team A will win. Tell the other half people that team B will win.
3. The game will necessarily yield a loser. (To account for ties, tell your audience team N will not lose, instead of will win)
4. The emailed people who received the correct prediction become the remaining pool, and those that received the incorrect prediction are no longer involved in this exercise.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 for the first 16 of the 17 weeks of the NFL season, always retaining the half of the pool who received the correct prediction.
6. After the 16th game, since you started with a sufficiently large pool, you will have sent the correct predictions for all 16 games to a nonzero number of people.
7. This nonzero number of people, if they have paid attention, will be forced to believe that you can predict the winner of the 17th game, and will be willing to give you ridiculous amounts of money to obtain that 17th prediction.
In their eyes, you can predict the future, but all you did was apply successive approximation, which is how many analog to digital converters work.
The same tactic works in reverse, you simply need to keep the people paying attention to the incorrect predictions long enough. I'll leave the most recent example of this phenomenon as an exercise to the reader.
Their opinion pieces can have a bit more "free thinking", definitely, but they are always marked as opinion.
> Corrections & Amplifications:
> Departing presidents in recent years have given farewell addresses in the final weeks of their terms.
The anti-Russia hysteria is getting ridiculous, and the more the media drum it up, the less people believe it.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C0ArMMGXcAIo8oL.jpg