The concept of a “spy” seems weirdly old-fashioned these days. Kinda like “inventor.”
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Everybody has a camera all the time now and it’s not even suspicious. Back in the day, a dude hanging out in a non-tourist spot with a camera, let alone taking random photos, would be super suspicious.
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We’ve kinda normalized universal sousveillance at a level East Germany would be jealous of. They only had half the population recruited to spy on the other half. We’ve gotten it to 100%.
My secret agent number is 0031415926536
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This may be why I like Burn Notice. The last spy show. There’s an episode where Michael Westen voiceover in a scene goes “a cellphone camera is not high resolution to photograph documents, a hand held scanner on the other hand…” (this was pre-iPhone crap flip phone cameras)
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The show has mostly held up well for stuff like bombs, guns etc, but the elint is silly.
They’re constantly using flip phones for stuff and doing shady stuff with clunky physical devices. The Bourne trilogy is the same.
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Oh yeah the rebooted MacGyver was ok but pretty lame. Revealing that he outsourced all the actually hard digital stuff to girl sidekick and focused on narratively implausible save-the-day physical hacks. Unrealistic on both spy and inventor fronts
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Burn Notice + Scorpion done well could be Macgyver for the blockchain generation.
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In practice spies today are people who lurk on message boards trying to persuade military folks etc to give them state secrets because they’re so sad and pathetic (thread)
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what people expect spies to look like vs what spies actually look like
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