To the contrary, he specifically contrasts humint with sigint: "
Spying may be worthwhile in cases where it is very hard or very costly to produce misleading information. Two potential cases are those of code-breaking in wartime, where the number of messages an enemy needs to send is so large that their validity can be checked fairly easily, and that of a secret weapon, where the information produced by spies can be checked by actually making the weapon."
> Both GCHQ and NSA can point to successes as can all the major players in the spy game would Stalin have got the bomb so quickly without spies.
To the contrary, he specifically addressed Stalin's bomb: "On the face of it, the reaction to the atom spies seemed justified. The atom bomb was a weapon that could destroy the world (and perhaps still will) and the science on which it was based was popularly associated with the genius of Albert Einstein. Surely, the only way the Russians could create such a weapon was to steal the secrets of the West....But once the existence of the bomb was known, any competent team of physicists, with access to the right resources, could duplicate it...The secrets passed by Western spies probably saved them a year or so in their research program but did not fundamentally change anything. The Chinese, French, Israelis and others made their bombs without significant assistance from spies."
> Or the success of the XX committee.
To the contrary, a victory for the British necessarily meant a defeat for the Nazis, a Nazi defeat only possible because they tried to use humint: "Yet the actual achievements of these shadowy regiments were unimpressive. In most cases, espionage agencies can cloak their failures in secrecy, but the defeat of the Nazis paved the way for a look at the record of one of the most-feared espionage networks in history. The Hitler regime made numerous attempts to infiltrate spies into Britain and to recruit British agents. As far as can be determined from the German records, all were captured and many were ‘turned’, being induced or forced to transmit disinformation to Berlin."
> And do you think binladen would not have been found and killed if it wasn't for spies run by CIA officers?
Sigint, again. Not that bin Laden's death really mattered aside from the documents captured and the symbolic victory.
Yes, as anyone that has ever had a security clearance knows, the biggest target of humint is sigint. The level of clearance that is needed to handle cryptographic material is higher than the clearance to know about the information sent by the cryptographic system. That's because one piece of information, no matter how sensitive, is nowhere near as damaging as being able to read all encrypted material of your enemy.
Clearances aren't just a title that you get - an increase in your security clearance goes hand in hand with your history coming under heavier scrutiny. At first you might just get a cursory check to verify that you are who you say you are - teachers from your school may be contacted, neighbours etc. As you start gaining access to cryptographic networks, the checks start going into who you associate with, what your hobbies are, what's happening in your bank account. And the checks get more discreet - you might learn about your primary school teacher getting asked questions about you, but you won't learn that your telephone conversations were listened to for 6 months to make sure you're not hanging out with $THREAT_DU_JOUR.
So if sigint is valuable, one of the best ways to get your hands on it is to compromise someone that has access - in other words humint. The two are not disassociable.
Interestingly, this is what I always say to people who proclaim that torture can't produce reliable information. The "hit him with this $5 wrench until he tells us his password" school of torture produces highly reliable information, because it's trivial to check whether what the guy said was correct.
No one ever seems to be happy to hear it. :/
e.g.: Bob hates you, and leaves a thumb drive labeled "CP" behind your computer, filled with random astronomy data. He then leaves bits and pieces that make it appear to be an encrypted drive of illegal porn. (Or, any other nefarious Jack-Bauer-worthy terrorist movie plot.)
When you get interrogated by wrench-wielding thugs, it will never be possible for them to tell whether you are lying about whether it's yours, whether you know what's on it, or whether you can decrypt it.
Torture can only possibly get useful information if the person you're torturing HAS that information. Of course that can work -- no one doubts that. Think from the perspective of the wrongly-accused person, though, and you'll see that it very quickly becomes a game of "what can I say to make them stop hurting me". This is why so many people in medieval times confessed to being witches, or part of treasonous plots: their choice was death by a relatively quick means versus death by torture.
edit: My point is, "reliable" means more than "we can verify that it's true", but also means that you can avoid false positives.
Sounds like the difference between P and NP problems in Computer Science, i.e. P (polynomial-time) problems can be solved in polynomial time, whereas NP (non-deterministic polynomial-time) problems can't be solved in polynomial time but their solutions can be checked in polynomial time.
> How do you differentiate someone who is LYING from someone who is the wrong person, or who doesn't know?
Sounds like the Halting Problem in Computer Science, i.e. checking whether an algorithm halts for all inputs in uncomputable.
It seems Computational Complexity and Computation Theory have something to say about whether torture is an effective means of extracting information.
You are wrong. For many people it is an item of faith that torture cannot produce useful information. In my opinion, these people are generally overattached to the principle that good results come from (morally) good acts, and evil acts necessarily produce bad results.
Yes, if you torture the right people you will get useful information. People who are tortured will give up the information they have at some point.
The problem is that we often torture people who have no information, and so they tell us what we think we want to hear.
Speaking of Syria: spies and so forth were who determined whether or not Syria even _used_ chemical weapons.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/26/idf-intercept-shows-sy...
It was a SIGINT Intercept. Spies are extrodinarily useful for figuring out the truth when international incidents occur. And knowing who is lying, why they're lying, what their motivations are, etc. etc. These are all important foreign-intelligence missions that Spies do their best to figure out for their country.
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Now of course, spies get it wrong sometimes. The famous Iraq situation was brought about because the CIA focused on one bit of evidence that turned out to be falsified. But nonetheless, the general "intelligence successes" strongly outweigh the "intelligence failures" in the past decades.
Both GCHQ and NSA can point to successes as can all the major players in the spy game would Stalin have got the bomb so quickly without spies. Or the success of the XX committee. Or from the other side the Cambridge 5 where certainly effective.
And do you think binladen would not have been found and killed if it wasn't for spies run by CIA officers?