[bena]

I don't think you see what he's saying.

If you want top secret documents, you don't start by asking for top secret documents. You start by asking them to violate a relatively innocuous rule. Changing a date by one day on a file so it's no longer late or something like that. Doesn't matter what it is. The point is that it's not worth being exposed over. And the rule you're breaking would technically be worthy of getting fired over. Especially for the thing they're blackmailing you over. "It's changing a date by one day, no one would know, and it's not worth losing my job over."

It starts off "Hey man, I was cool about the weed thing, do me a solid here." Then it's "Hey, remember that thing you did, do you think you could do this slightly bigger thing?" If they refuse, you can bring up that first thing they did.

Then, a year or two down the line, you're fucking cooked. They come to you and say, "Look man, you've done this, that, and the other thing. If they find out, you are fired, in jail, life ruined. What I need now is this top secret document."

The idea is to build a list of escalating transgressions so in the end, the asset feels as if they have no choice but to comply with your requests. You don't need fabricated offenses. You just need a small issue you can use as a starting point.

[notch656c]

If someone can be blackmailed to do ever progressively worse things over something minor, why couldn't you do the same thing and possibly even faster with something major?

[nl]

There's no "one size fits all" answer here.

If someone has done something really bad (maybe murdered someone) then yes, directly blackmailing them to do something major might work.

But in general the things we are talking about are mostly things were someone lied on their clearance form and if they decided to they could get that cleared up and cause the foreign agent significant problems by reporting an approach.

So instead they escalate. They don't directly blackmail you - you just happen to meet a woman at a bar who happens to have pictures of you smoking weed at a party 5 years ago. So you are joking around about what a great party that was, and it just happens to turn out that this woman works at a defense contractor and they are waiting on this stupid proposal to be released so they can bid on it, and you don't happen to know when it will be released do you?

So you go look it up. It's not classified, maybe it's commercial-in-confidence at worst. But then this woman needs to know how long she should rent her apartment in town for, so exactly how big is the project? How many units are they ordering?

That's still not classified, but is need-to-know. But she's hot, so you tell her.

And now they have you. You might not actually realize yet you are being blackmailed, but as soon as they ask for classified info you realize she can ruin you.

[naniwaduni]

Because dealing with experienced blackmailers is not something that most humans have good intuition and fully rational responses for.