> Agencies like the CIA, NSA and whatever other group that does "clandestine" operations shouldn't even exist in the first place.

Such organizations are simply necessary to run a nation. Global politics is a game, and everyone plays it. It involves gathering intelligence and acting on it. The work isn’t beyond reproach, and the nature of secrecy makes doing dirty things an unavoidable consequence... but ultimately you have to accept that reality is messy, the world isn’t very nice, and sometimes you don’t have a choice as a nation but to do some detestable act for some higher purpose... and rarely will it be possible for the whole story to be told publicly in order to be judged fairly.

Sure it would be nice if everybody stopped being so awful to each other, but you can’t pretend like that is already true if you don’t want to lose everything.

In plenty of circumstances intelligence agencies have done things that never should have been done, but that isn’t an argument to stop all together.

> sometimes you don’t have a choice as a nation but to do some detestable act for some higher purpose

It's always important to force yourself to remember that essentially all detestable acts are done for detestable purposes, no matter how selfless the rhetoric tries to make them sound. There may have been a handful of exceptions in history, but they are so vastly outnumbered by the other kind that they can safely be ignored.

The narrative of doing something for the greater good should be treated as a lie until the burden of evidence is so high that you are forced to accept that it was indeed good. In particular, spy agencies have produced far more terrorism, coups, and disinformation for their own people, with the goal of supporting the monetary interests of their nation, all others be damned, than they have ever defended anything. The exceptions almost always happen when the goals of empire happen to be aligned with those of the people, like during WW2.

> The narrative of doing something for the greater good should be treated as a lie until the burden of evidence is so high that you are forced to accept that it was indeed good.

An obvious impossible standard, more than that you can’t really know if an action was right or wrong without an oracle to tell you what would have happened if different forces had been made.

Yes, that was mostly the point - you should assume that nefarious actions are done for nefarious purposes. Assuming they are done for noble purposes risks normalizing them much more than the opposite. Your president has assassinated a foreign dignitary? Assume they are a criminal now. Perhaps in 50 years you will find out that it was of the outmost importance for world peace and prosperity, but it is far more likely that it was some petty revenge or power struggle.

That is why you should never be doing that kind of things. Nefarious acts almost always produce nefarious results. I agree with the parent comment completely.

The natural next question is whether or not nations are necessary. To me they look like a stepping stone from kingdoms to ???

Nation states are more or less required until a post scarcity economy becomes realistic and then basically they devolve into more and more voting entities that do things everyone agrees are necessary but generally less and less interesting unless a person has a particularly strong interest in a topic. (like say building codes, traffic engineering, licensing, etc.)

Nations can’t just disappear, anarchy always transitions to tribalism to monarchy to ... etc.

It's certainly not an easy system to unwind. I often wonder why we accept living in an emergent system rather than a designed one though. Our systems now can only be described as a patch work with all the baggage of history attached (colonialism etc). Right now feels like a great time for a large refactor though unfortunately given our path dependency, the political in/out-fighting and stagnation, it makes this near impossible to implement.

It's easy to think you could scrap a mature system and design a simpler one from the top down (or do a sweeping refactor). Sometimes this is true, but often you're simply overlooking years of edge cases and bug fixes that allowed the system to become as robust as it is. Emergence in itself is not a bad thing. It means the system grew from the necessities of reality rather than someone's imagination.

I'm also not sure what the real-world realization of scrapping a mature political system looks like if not violent revolution.

Rewriting my entire home operating system to be the ideal may be a fool's quest, because one person will never be able to do as much work as the hundreds or thousands who developed the code he is replacing, but if you want to try it is entirely on you. I can putter away in my basement for years without bothering anyone.

Replacing or reforming a political system is fundamentally different because it requires the buy-in of a large portion - a super-majority ideally, but at least a powerful minority if you're willing to play violent or dirty - of the population to get started. And you can't just show up out of the blue with A Plan and expect people to all be on board - even if your plan is really quite good, human nature means almost no one will want to commit to someone else's plan. So you have to develop your plan in a group, making compromises that you may personally disagree with to get larger and larger groups of people on board, until, unless there really was a large number of dissatisfied people in your camp all along - which we all want to believe but is seldom the case - you end up politicking your way to a revolution that is barely different than the status quo.

There might have been a shot at this 30 years ago. "We have a real chance for a new world order" wasn't just empty talk. The US as the sole remaining superpower could have led the world under an increasingly potent UN. But it was sold poorly. People correctly identified it as dystopian, but failed to recognize that NOT doing it would almost certainly lead to something worse.

"I often wonder why we accept living in an emergent system rather than a designed one though."

Because we ourselves, our bodies, are an emergent system rather than a designed one?

Human biology seems to be even more chaotic than various political systems on Earth, but both have one great advantage under their belt: they survived unexpected crises in the past.

Designed machines tend to be nowhere near as robust.

> We achieve this by making encryption easy, powerful and ubiquitous

Ubiquitous encryption will be pointless if the encryption itself is subverted, like it was for 50 years with the 2 leading Swiss encryption vendors. I imagine the CIA/NSA would target the PRNG hardware as the crown-jewel, and the next-best targets would be "enclaves", then back-dooring the algorithms themselves (or implementations thereof).

Remember - their aim isn't to break encryption (which would be simple to spot) - it's to make it easier for them to break, while remaining hard for everyone else.

> I imagine the CIA/NSA would target the PRNG hardware as the crown-jewel

The cryptography community seems to already be aware of this risk. I've read about random number algorithms that mix the results of many randomness sources so that one compromised source cannot compromise the result.

> and the next-best targets would be "enclaves"

Yeah, we should watch out for this. Secure cryptoprocessors are a great thing but we need to be able to trust them. We already have hardware that runs free software but the chip itself can of course be compromised...

> then back-dooring the algorithms themselves

I trust that the worldwide cryptography community will never let that happen. From what I've read they no longer trust the NSA implicitly.

> I trust that the worldwide cryptography community will never let that happen.

I wonder who puts in more expert man-hours into safeguarding/defeating crypto: the US alphabet soup agencies, or the rest of the of the "worldwide cryptography community". I'm fairly certain the government spends more dollars (doing things like factoring enough primes AOT to be able to decrypt ~20% of all https traffic in realtime[1]). Often things that community concludes to be "unlikely" or "difficult" are well within the governments ability - cue "SSL added and removed here ;-)"

I think the fact that the cryptography community didn't pick up on Crypto AG's subterfuge says a lot, IMO.

1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/how-t...

How much access did the cryptography community have to Crypto AG’s cipher machines? I thought those were mostly sold to foreign military/diplomatic missions.

> I've read about random number algorithms that mix the results of many randomness sources so that one compromised source cannot compromise the result.

You might like djb's article "Entropy Attacks!": https://blog.cr.yp.to/20140205-entropy.html

And any hardware protection that flows through a supply chain including just FedEx/ups/dhl can be compromised at the hardware level.

Agencies are just a representation of the human personality spectrum in the population. Saying they shouldn't exist is like saying people driven by ambition, fear, mistrust, aggressiveness should not exist.

When people's needs aren't aligned all these personality variations in the population come to the fore.

> Agencies like the CIA, NSA and whatever other group that does "clandestine" operations shouldn't even exist in the first place.

Who cares if they should or should not exist? The point is that they are there in most countries already (nothing limited to the US) so worrying about the ideal situation of not having them around is not very helpful. Just like "we should not have nuclear weapons" is a very weak argument as there's no way you can put the genie back in the box.

> Agencies like ... that does "clandestine" operations shouldn't even exist in the first place

If one day they have all disappeared, it just means they hid themselves from you, and fooled you completely.