I read this a couple of days after watching Doug Limman's movie "Fair Game." (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0977855/) Liman is known for playing the amoral chief of staff in House of Cards.
This CIA training book is all about avoiding self-deception and getting as close as possible to the truth. Those are good aspirations for any trade. Try debugging a complex system without doing those things. You can't.
But there's a whole lot more to making the truth useful. People with power must also avoid self-deception: they must listen. That didn't happen back in 2002-2003.
The movie is about Bush 43 and Cheney's push to convince the world about nuclear weapons in Iraq. That administration infamously disclosed the identity of a CIA undercover person called Valerie Plame. They did so to discredit her spouse Ambassador Joe Wilson.
Mr. Wilson made a fact-finding trip to the nation of Niger (north of Nigeria) to verify the administration's claim that Niger's uranium mines sold vast quantities of yellowcake uranium oxide to Iraq. Mr. Wilson's investigation proved that claim was false. Therefore, he needed to be discredited. Therefore the White House outed his spouse, wrecking her career and losing the lives of her contacts in various places.
CIA people come off as the good guys--earnest purveyors of truth--both in the movie and this training book. But even they can't prevent the kind of collective self-delusion that comes when politicians' minds are made up.
How many of us hackers embark on projects we know are doomed to failure? How many of us know how to validate our hunches with the right amount of information? Many of us, because that's the easy part. How many of us know how to convince people above us in the food chain? Far fewer. That's a place where training might come in handy.
Comments
I read this a couple of days after watching Doug Limman's movie "Fair Game." (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0977855/) Liman is known for playing the amoral chief of staff in House of Cards.
This CIA training book is all about avoiding self-deception and getting as close as possible to the truth. Those are good aspirations for any trade. Try debugging a complex system without doing those things. You can't.
But there's a whole lot more to making the truth useful. People with power must also avoid self-deception: they must listen. That didn't happen back in 2002-2003.
The movie is about Bush 43 and Cheney's push to convince the world about nuclear weapons in Iraq. That administration infamously disclosed the identity of a CIA undercover person called Valerie Plame. They did so to discredit her spouse Ambassador Joe Wilson.
Mr. Wilson made a fact-finding trip to the nation of Niger (north of Nigeria) to verify the administration's claim that Niger's uranium mines sold vast quantities of yellowcake uranium oxide to Iraq. Mr. Wilson's investigation proved that claim was false. Therefore, he needed to be discredited. Therefore the White House outed his spouse, wrecking her career and losing the lives of her contacts in various places.
CIA people come off as the good guys--earnest purveyors of truth--both in the movie and this training book. But even they can't prevent the kind of collective self-delusion that comes when politicians' minds are made up.
How many of us hackers embark on projects we know are doomed to failure? How many of us know how to validate our hunches with the right amount of information? Many of us, because that's the easy part. How many of us know how to convince people above us in the food chain? Far fewer. That's a place where training might come in handy.
Real question: Where were lives lost as a result of Valerie Plame being outed? Wikipedia doesn’t seem to know about it
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair