Come on everyone spies. There’s no point in establishing an embassy if you’re not also getting an understanding of both stated and unstated intentions.
I don’t know about all of them, but a quick Google search shows that both Mongolia and Puru have intelligence agencies, which means very likely they have some sort of collection capability for HUMINT and/or SIGINT.
The ones that don’t have intelligence capabilities are probably the exception rather than the rule, and I doubt they’re doing out of good will vs just not having the resources for it.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, or genuinely giving a list of minuscule island chains, culminating in the country that's literally the universal metonym for 'middle of nowhere'.
That's not the issue. The issue is the US getting mad at counter-espionage by Uganda while they are themselves engaging in espionage. It's very hypocritical.
That is simply false. Few countries hypocritical about counter-intelligence. You absolutely have to draw the difference between intelligence work and counter-intelligence work. Saying that going after someone for catching your spies is normal is totally insane, no one except the US does it.
If Uganda was spying on the US in the US, then you would have a point. That's not what happened.
But USA is the most hypocritical about it. It systematically spies on its allies, with the exception of Israel and these 2 countries take active measures for some cybertools not to spy on each other. (or Israel tries to make it seem that way).
I guarantee you that the US spies on Israel and vise versa. I'd honestly be surprised if there was a single country both didn't spy on. But I'd say the same about Germany, Australia, France, Spain, UK, Russia, China, and many more.
Hell, DLI teaches Hebrew (once euphemized as "special Arabic" in some settings) [0]. That's not just for exchange/liaison officers... Not to dig up that bucket of worms, but there were Hebrew linguists aboard the USS Liberty.
We don't disappear people under diplomatic cover, we PNG them just like everyone else does. And when we do catch foreign agents without diplomatic cover, we imprison them. Why kill a useful asset that could be traded for someone on our team?
Offensive counterintelligence is not the same as catching a spy and hacking them.
Offensive counterintelligence involves manipulation or long-term disruption of adversaries. Hacking someone's phone doesn't qualify, that's just normal defensive counterintelligence.
>We don't disappear people under diplomatic cover, we PNG them just like everyone else does.
Sure.
>nd when we do catch foreign agents without diplomatic cover, we imprison them. Why kill a useful asset that could be traded for someone on our team?
We both know that's not true. When it's more useful to trade them, that's done. When you want to send another signal, the US is not shy at all about killing them.
> When you want to send another signal, the US is not shy at all about killing them.
What information is this based on? I don't have any particularly strong opinions on this subject, but I can't recall ever reading about anything like this.
What exactly do you want evidence of? That U.S. intelligence agencies disappear people? That they do so to send a message? Or are you asking for specific examples of that happening to foreign intelligence operatives? Because you will never be able to read of an example of that happening - when we learn about people kidnapped by U.S. intelligence agencies, it's only because they were eventually released. It's an inference from the fact that US intelligence agencies kill many people for multiple reasons including sending a message, and that U.S. intelligence has clandestine facilities on American soil where they commit crimes on foreign intelligence operative (See the case of Yuri Noseko) without consequence, which have only been expanded since then - the CIA now has extraterritorial black sites, so nowadays Yuri would simply have been sent to Romania and then no record would be available of his torture unless he was released.
Where did I say diplomats? Of course, you wouldn't disappear the diplomats. However, they almost never operate alone - whenever there is a diplomat engaged in intelligence there are almost always other assets without diplomatic status.
Offensive intelligence operations that the US has been conducting in Uganda are, well, offensive in nature, and are thus an attack. Not all attacks are an act of war.
> I think your comment sounds a bit biased that’s all. If you share some light - happy to accept the points raised.
I don't see how it is biased. The US applying sanctions on Uganda after they got caught spying by Ugandan counter-intelligence (under other pretenses, of course) is massively hypocritical. As far as I know using economic pressure to coax a country into accepting espionage is a new low. The US is trying to normalize and establish as basic expectations that weaker countries should just let it spy on them, and that's hypocritical above and beyond the norm.
Agreed, but they are the ones that peddle that way of viewing things to their own population to get what they want, and they should be called out for it.
The U.S. isn't complaining as much as shutting down a threat vector. Shooting back isn't hypocritical.
Also, you get the right to complain when you're allies, just as Germany had the right to complain when the NSA was caught tapping Merkel.