Re:Captured, Killed, Compromised: CIA Admits Losing Dozens o...
by vintermann on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @08:40AM
(#28772423)
All organizations need a certain amount of idealism to work. You have to on some level believe that you're creating something valuable, doing something good in the world, or whatever.
Because people in an organization run into problems all the time, where they have a choice between doing what's best for the organization, and doing what's best for themselves. There will always be a gap.
For instance, if you see a policy that's clearly bad for the organisation (like, say, informants recruited used aggressively as a metric in the CIA, without regard to whether they would be useful or dead in a year) - do you do the thankless, risky job of trying to change it, do you just play along half-heartedly or do you aggressively exploit it to juice your own metrics to the organisation's detriment?
The CIA has an obvious problem here, in that it's a fucking evil organization with a fucking evil history. Anyone who goes along with the rhetoric that it is somehow heroic, the US' "first line of defense" etc. is either deeply cynical or horribly ignorant and naive. It's not as if the latter sort is any better employees, at best they'd be useless, at worst they will do what Snowden did when he lost his 9/11-inspired naivety.
Because people in an organization run into problems all the time, where they have a choice between doing what's best for the organization, and doing what's best for themselves. There will always be a gap.
For instance, if you see a policy that's clearly bad for the organisation (like, say, informants recruited used aggressively as a metric in the CIA, without regard to whether they would be useful or dead in a year) - do you do the thankless, risky job of trying to change it, do you just play along half-heartedly or do you aggressively exploit it to juice your own metrics to the organisation's detriment?
The CIA has an obvious problem here, in that it's a fucking evil organization with a fucking evil history. Anyone who goes along with the rhetoric that it is somehow heroic, the US' "first line of defense" etc. is either deeply cynical or horribly ignorant and naive. It's not as if the latter sort is any better employees, at best they'd be useless, at worst they will do what Snowden did when he lost his 9/11-inspired naivety.