*He feels the same jaded way about spying that I do about computer security.
*If there's a difference now, that is.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/09/spy-swap-john-le-carre
(...)
Once upon a time spies had motives. There was capitalism and there was communism. You could choose. And all right, there was the money and the sex and the blackmail, and needing to get your own back on your superiors by betraying them when you'd been passed over for promotion, and there was the God-feeling, and playing the world's game, and the whole familiar repertoire of noble and grubby motives, but in the end you either spied for a cause or against it.
But what in heaven's name was their cause? Who did they think they were protecting in their distorted, programmed little minds as they tried and tried again, unsuccessfully, to slither up the slippery pole of western society? What was there to choose between Mother Russia and Mother America, two huge continents out of control drowning together in the oily waters of capitalism? Was it really only the name on the lifebelt that made the difference? Mother Russia right or wrong?
I just hope the beleaguered shrinks of Moscow will be able to take the strain as their new patients come pouring through the door: first the frozen children screaming for help, and after them the wise idiots of Putin's vast, chaotic espiocracy who, immersed in their own archaic fantasies, took it upon themselves to recruit, train, and twist young minds in the image of their own....
