A point most authors studiously ignore is that the real world is *complex*.
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RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/117110021420097079
A point most authors studiously ignore is that the real world is *complex*.
Take spy thrillers. An American one might feature the CIA or, in extremis, the NSA. Up against one rival agency.
But in reality, there's a civil service clearinghouse called the United States Intelligence Community that has nineteen stakeholder members, each of which is an intel agency. Its job is to keep them from stomping on each other's toes.
Now ask yourself if any other nation's bureaucracy is plausibly simpler.
@cstross just yesterday I calculated that since the first intelligence agency was set up, the US creates a new one every 8,2 years.
(I do, however, think that the US is a bit of an outlier here. Still good advise in general!)
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RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/117110021420097079
A point most authors studiously ignore is that the real world is *complex*.
Take spy thrillers. An American one might feature the CIA or, in extremis, the NSA. Up against one rival agency.
But in reality, there's a civil service clearinghouse called the United States Intelligence Community that has nineteen stakeholder members, each of which is an intel agency. Its job is to keep them from stomping on each other's toes.
Now ask yourself if any other nation's bureaucracy is plausibly simpler.
Once upon a time I was in the middle east responsible for all of a specific type of activity conducted by the combined joint special operations task force. In the 9th month of our deployment, preparing to head home, I was still learning of the EXISTENCE of teams below me doing that activity; I'd no notion of WHAT they were doing, except that I knew beyond doubt that it wasn't being done right because it would've had to come through me.
Whole system is broke.
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RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/117110021420097079
A point most authors studiously ignore is that the real world is *complex*.
Take spy thrillers. An American one might feature the CIA or, in extremis, the NSA. Up against one rival agency.
But in reality, there's a civil service clearinghouse called the United States Intelligence Community that has nineteen stakeholder members, each of which is an intel agency. Its job is to keep them from stomping on each other's toes.
Now ask yourself if any other nation's bureaucracy is plausibly simpler.
From Frank Herbert's novels:
"The protagonist of "The Tactful Saboteur" is saboteur extraordinary Jorj X. McKie, an employee of the Bureau of Sabotage (BuSab). BuSab is a government agency responsible for conducting dirty tricks "in lieu of red tape" to help slow down and regulate the vast galaxy-spanning bureaucracy of the ConSentiency"
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@cstross maybe there is a reason a lot of scifi lazily has one government per planet
This has actually bothered me in the past - like how come everyone on the planet all suddenly agree with each other? haven't you ever been in a room full of people?
The REALLY lazy planets have one climate (*cough* Tattooine, Endor, etc.)
I always wanted to parody this by writing settings where you would go to the circus planet, the concert planet, the grocery shopping planet, etc.
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RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/117110021420097079
A point most authors studiously ignore is that the real world is *complex*.
Take spy thrillers. An American one might feature the CIA or, in extremis, the NSA. Up against one rival agency.
But in reality, there's a civil service clearinghouse called the United States Intelligence Community that has nineteen stakeholder members, each of which is an intel agency. Its job is to keep them from stomping on each other's toes.
Now ask yourself if any other nation's bureaucracy is plausibly simpler.
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@cstross That's a good one. Pretty much describes my impression.
@dereisenhofer @cstross
Or the classic "desert planet". As if anything planet-sized and and not frozen solid will have a uniform climate. -
I remember an episode of Get Smart where he went undercover. At the end of the episode, he discovered that every one of the bad guys was an undercover agent, all from different agencies, and nobody knew they were all gathering intel on each other.
@davidtheeviloverlord @cstross Now I need to watch Cypher again.
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PS: I'm not making this up. More about the US Intelligence Community here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Community
"The Washington Post reported in 2010 that there were 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies in 10,000 locations in the United States that were working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence, and that the intelligence community as a whole would include 854,000 people holding top-secret clearances."
@cstross ...and I thought Trevanian was exaggerating for effect in The Eiger Sanction, about CII being named for the 102 agencies that had been merged to create it.
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@cstross
Never mind all non-governmental organizations big enough to need/want their own security or intelligence apparatuses. Apparatii?Huge multinationals; drug cartels; resistance movements ...
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@cstross ...and I thought Trevanian was exaggerating for effect in The Eiger Sanction, about CII being named for the 102 agencies that had been merged to create it.
@KatS It's a very long time since I read Trevanian but their fic had a certain feel of truthiness about the angle it approached intelligence from that makes me think they were once an insider, or insider-adjacent.
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@dereisenhofer @cstross
Or the classic "desert planet". As if anything planet-sized and and not frozen solid will have a uniform climate. -
Once upon a time I was in the middle east responsible for all of a specific type of activity conducted by the combined joint special operations task force. In the 9th month of our deployment, preparing to head home, I was still learning of the EXISTENCE of teams below me doing that activity; I'd no notion of WHAT they were doing, except that I knew beyond doubt that it wasn't being done right because it would've had to come through me.
Whole system is broke.
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@Tarbh @venya I'm sorry but half the boxes on the org chart are labelled [CLASSIFIED]. And the org chart itself is [CLASSIFIED] above your level.
Srsly, I've heard anecdotes about folks tasked with writing reports that were then classified so high they weren't allowed to read them—or then to amend them where found to be factually incorrect.
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@Tarbh @venya I'm sorry but half the boxes on the org chart are labelled [CLASSIFIED]. And the org chart itself is [CLASSIFIED] above your level.
Srsly, I've heard anecdotes about folks tasked with writing reports that were then classified so high they weren't allowed to read them—or then to amend them where found to be factually incorrect.
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Now, I'm currently grappling with a space opera set in a mid-sized interstellar empire governed by backbiting aristocrats/planetary despots, with 8000 star systems, multiple settled worlds/habitats per system, and travel times measured in weeks to months. Multiple governments per planet aren't unusual.
How many intel/secret police forces do you think *that* setting requires? Just saying "it's an empire, duh!" elides all the complexity a glance at the history of John Company would reveal.
@cstross some guesstimation puts the number of people employed in "Intelligence" in the USA north of 1.5 mil people, potentially way bigger.
So I would put the ballpark ratio for a somewhat fascist empire at 1:100 people work on INT. If there are fewer external threats, more will be looking inward. Spanish inquisitions hunting the Spanglish Inquisition which was set up as a sting operation by another department of the SI... -
RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/117110021420097079
A point most authors studiously ignore is that the real world is *complex*.
Take spy thrillers. An American one might feature the CIA or, in extremis, the NSA. Up against one rival agency.
But in reality, there's a civil service clearinghouse called the United States Intelligence Community that has nineteen stakeholder members, each of which is an intel agency. Its job is to keep them from stomping on each other's toes.
Now ask yourself if any other nation's bureaucracy is plausibly simpler.
@cstross At least it's only toes in the US. Disagreements between different FSB directorates end much worse for the losing side.
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RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/117110021420097079
A point most authors studiously ignore is that the real world is *complex*.
Take spy thrillers. An American one might feature the CIA or, in extremis, the NSA. Up against one rival agency.
But in reality, there's a civil service clearinghouse called the United States Intelligence Community that has nineteen stakeholder members, each of which is an intel agency. Its job is to keep them from stomping on each other's toes.
Now ask yourself if any other nation's bureaucracy is plausibly simpler.
@cstross "... if any other nation's bureaucracy is plausibly simpler." Simpler, not really. Being less idiotic than American bureaucracy isn't much of an ask.
Jurisdictional pissing matches may not be uniquely American, but they not the norm elsewhere.
Where I live all most of those three letter agencies would just be part of either the state or federal police. The secret squirrel agencies are mostly separated by their actual function. -
RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/117110021420097079
A point most authors studiously ignore is that the real world is *complex*.
Take spy thrillers. An American one might feature the CIA or, in extremis, the NSA. Up against one rival agency.
But in reality, there's a civil service clearinghouse called the United States Intelligence Community that has nineteen stakeholder members, each of which is an intel agency. Its job is to keep them from stomping on each other's toes.
Now ask yourself if any other nation's bureaucracy is plausibly simpler.
@cstross
And pretty much all of them are competing for bigger budgets. -
@Tarbh @venya I'm sorry but half the boxes on the org chart are labelled [CLASSIFIED]. And the org chart itself is [CLASSIFIED] above your level.
Srsly, I've heard anecdotes about folks tasked with writing reports that were then classified so high they weren't allowed to read them—or then to amend them where found to be factually incorrect.
@cstross @Tarbh @venya This happens in smaller bureaucracies too. My former employer had a specific problem, and an exec believed the solution to that problem was the specific subdiscipline of cryptography I was working in at the time (I’m a builder, not a cryptographer, but I was building systems to manage cryptographic assets and processes, which has some specific duties of care), so I was asked to look at the problem
Since the problem touched many areas and teams that would need to contribute or participate, I set out to codify the problem in careful prose, and to write a detailed threat model. The time eventually came to review with a senior principal engineer, and on first read through, he said “I think this needs to be privileged and confidential”
So now, this work that was for a wide audience was no longer accessible by that audience
At least the execs were aware that my area was not the quick and easy solution to the problem they’d assumed it was
