Re:UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus
by ClumsyPilot on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @06:57AM
(#31081555)
'They believe intrinsically that what they do is necessary for security.'
That's thr rub isn't it - if you startva security agency thst does terrible things, it will hire people that can somehow justify and rationalise those terrible things
Very few people in KGB or whatever thought that they did anything wrong
Re:UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus
by raxxorraxor on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @08:24AM
(#31082157)
You have a similar problem with police. If you day to day see instances of crime and you have a lot of contact with criminals, you develop preconceptions towards people. You view gets skewed and you start to see crime everywhere. The same happens to security agencies that deal day to day with the spy game. This is why external observers are necessary. Not primarily to punish people stepping over lines, but to provide support and reasonable boundaries and context. People with a strong sense of duty are especially vulnerable to develop a wrong perspective.
Then there is the other dimension where corporations just help the worst dictators for profit or provide surveillance capability against the population. Almost all major names in tech are guilty here to certain degrees. Some more than others, but there are no morals in business. Especially not with investment mechanisms like ESG or similar constructs to provide wellness to rich investors, but that is another topic.
It doesn't even have to be malicious, there are people working in these agencies that are trained to follow orders. They believe intrinsically that what they do is necessary for security. No appeal will ever work, just a tight corset of regulation or protections by law that have actual teeth with heavy sanctions against misconduct. Today some agencies just blatantly disregard the most fundamental laws. If you scrap those you don't even need terrorists anymore, you did it all to yourself.