[ShinyCyril]

I'm glad they included something about mental health. There was an interesting post on /r/privacy the other day of someone with burnout from the paranoia of government surveillance [1]. I browse /r/privacy from time to time and am worried by the threat models that many people on there have. I don't know the reasons for their threat model, but I suspect a large number of people don't have any solid reason for such a rigorous model other than paranoia. The cognitive load of maintaining privacy at that level must just be overwhelming.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/5qfpb6/im_exhauste...

[viraptor]

I can't find the tweet easily now, but the original reason for including that was because people apparently have problems handling disconnected personalities for a long time. the_grugq says this affected undercover people.

Edit: here's the tweet with some interesting comments https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/824949499688726528

[grugq]

yeah, a study of the literature will show that it is a constant problem for people that start to assume a secret identity. There is a class of people that are actually better at this than others[0]. For police that go undercover flow long periods, they run the risk of "going native" [1][2]. There was Tolkachev[3][4] who insisted on personal meetings rather than dead drops (although it was ultimately Alrich Ames' betrayal that doomed him, not KGB surveillance or tradecraft errors.)

Karl Fuchs described his mental trauma of being both a Western atomic scientist and a Soviet Atomic Spy[5].

There are many more references available, but it is seldom discussed. This is one of the reasons that the CIA (and other secret agencies) become so insular. The members are unable to be open with anyone else except each other, and so they tend to stick together.

Theres more on the extensive work that RUC and Special Branch had to do to maintain the sanity of the IRA informants they were running. There is a constant refrain, human beings do not operate well with secret identities under high stress environments for long periods of time.

[0] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/20... [1] Undercover and Alone [2] Lu-CiFER: Memoirs of a Mongol [3] The Billion Dollar Spy [4] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig... [5] https://archive.org/stream/sovietatomicespi1951unit/sovietat...