Graphic Source: US Dept. Of Transportation

We all know what the world's first oldest profession is, but do you know what is the second? It is spying. People have been spying on each other, since there was something worth knowing about that another person had. It could have been that some caveman had something he felt was of value and someone else spied on him to try and figure out how he could steal it. We also know that ancient armies deployed spies and the practice has never wavered. Even nations that are so called allies, spy on each other. Sometimes some of the biggest secrets are stolen, by so called friendly nations. If anyone doubts this, just check the headlines for the last 10 years and when you do, try and remember that much of the time this country will try and cover this stuff up, because they want to maintain support for these nations. One has to remember that all spying is not done by people. Spying can sometimes be accomplished by wire tapping, satellites, intercepting email and watching what people do with their computers, among other things. Now that we are advancing in technology, people can be "bugged", and eavesdropped on. There are now chips that can trace people's whereabouts and these chips are only the size of a grain of dust. When it comes to spying there are many ways to go about it. Some ways date back to the beginning of humanity, that is people physically spying on people, and this is not counting all these hi tech methods that are available too.

The DNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence), decided in 2006 that so much was going on in the world that required U.S. spies, that he decided to appoint mission managers. Each on of these mission managers was given a district that he was in charge of. An example of this is that one might be in charge of gathering intelligence on North Korea, one on Iran, one on Iraq and so on. One was appointed for each area that was considered a hot spot. The agencies had a problem, there was not enough human assets. In other words, spies. The agency felt that the absolute limit that they could handle was about 1,200 spies. They worried that they would have to start shifting these assets around as they were needed. This created other problems, in that it took people off of their current assignments, which were also important and put them into a priority system, where they would be assigned as needed. Ultimately the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), was forced to expand their roll in spying. Training programs were put into effect and training of spies was standardized. You can see how much better this makes it for all the agencies concerned. Standard training means that spies could be moved around between agencies if that need ever arose. The CIA is trying to improve the quality of information it receives, by also insuring that the courses that were taught to the student spies in all the different agencies, is efficient and at least similar. The agency remembers it's failures in Iraq and wants to correct this problem. The budget for the spy agencies is at least 27 billion dollars, which allows for all sorts of operations and remember, it probably is a lot more and the funds are surely hidden in other budgets.

It is said that since 2004, this nation's spy agencies have taken a huge leap forward. I am not saying that this is a good thing, so don't get me wrong. It would have been fine, if they had been expanded to make them more efficient in their original role, but one of the reasons that they were expanded, was to allow them to spy on us. This has been proven by all the recent comments on how the different telephone companies were ordered to turn over all their telephone logs to the government. These logs and recordings were of mostly American citizens, just ordinary people like us. This is the sort of thing that you would have expected to have been done by the Soviets, during the cold war, or the NAZIs before and during World War II, not by Americans to Americans. George Tenet, the CIA director during 9/11 told a commission that his agency was about 5 years from being able to effectively infiltrate international terrorist organizations. The truth is that it is almost impossible to infiltrate them. because they usually have grown up with the people that joined them. They don't like strangers. One officer ,who was retiring, stated that the situation is much different than it was during 9/11. It is said that it takes at least 6 years of training, before a spy is useful.

Something new is on the agenda for spies. I wonder if there is anyone here who hasn't heard of Wikipedia? This is an open source encyclopedia that is on the Internet. It is full of useful information and that information can be updated and changed by anyone. You would think that this would be a disaster, but it works out quite well. It is said that there is now something like this online, but it is for spies only. There supposedly is no way that individuals would ever be able to find it and get on it. The idea is that spies will be able to trade information and update information that appears on it. The U.S. intelligence czar announced that Intellipedia is now online. It is supposedly a top secret intellipedia system. Sixteen different agencies are able to get on to it, of course they are all intelligence agencies. Last year it was said to have over 28,000 pages and 3,600 users. I can't help but think that it has been proved that nothing posted on the Internet is safe and that one of these days we will find out that foreign spies have gotten into this.

So far we have talked mostly about U.S. spies, but there are far more spies out there and most of them are spying on us. China is said to have thousands of spies in the U.S. and all of them are looking for technology that they can bring back home. Most of the technology I am talking about is in the field of weapons, but this probably is not all the technology that they are seeking, after all I am sure that they would not turn up their collective noses at some juicy commercial secrets. It is said that of all the countries in the world that are spying on us, China has the most spies in this country. They have figured out that it is much cheaper and faster to steal our military secrets that to try and develop their own. Unfortunately there were a lot of U.S. companies that were so profit driven, that they would sell anything to anyone and several of them have gotten caught doing this. Many students that come over here from different countries and especially China, have spies in their ranks. It turns out that universities contain different secrets too. One of the hot items that the Chinese were looking for at these universities was exotic materials. You would be surprised at how much can be learned without it being classified. The Chinese spy system has been very successful in obtaining some of our most high tech weapons systems. As I have said many times before, what is the sense of us investing billions of dollars into weapons systems if we are not going to protect that data in a competent way? When it come to this stuff, we are at a definite disadvantage since we are a free society.

Several reports have come out recently that state the the Russians have as many spies in the U.S. as they did during the cold war. Is this really surprising? No and who knows how many spies we have in Russia? The problem for us is that since we are ahead in technology we have much more to lose than they do. Space is an area where we are far ahead militarily. Foreign countries would love to get their hands on the plans for the secret space planes that we always deny the existence of, but which everybody knows exists. We were far ahead in stealth, we had a 15 year lead, but guess what? The Russians were able to get a guy into this country who had gotten access to a computer system used by engineers, who design stealth systems. I have no idea of how much damage was done, but going by past experience, I have to expect the worst. This just kills me. Look at how easily the atomic then the hydrogen bomb secrets were stolen. The hydrogen bomb secrets were stolen even faster than the atom bomb secrets. One thing that can not be ignored is that many countries are scared of us, even though they don't show it. They are afraid that we will attack them, somewhere down the road. I think that we bring this on ourselves. It seems that we must always declare an enemy. When the Berlin wall came down, we immediately began talking about war with China. I have to wonder why do we do this, is it to keep the weapons sales going? Look back in our history since World War II. We have always had a declared enemy. Here is the strange part of this, during World War II, we got along very well with Mao and his army. We have a habit of backing corrupt regimes and this has caused us no end of trouble. We did this in South America, Central America and Asia. The U.S. stated that they backed these governments, because they weren't communist. That was true, but they were corrupt, cruel and kept their citizens down. When you back governments like this, the other side would have ultimately had to turn to the communists during the cold war period to help them against us. It was almost like we were forcing them to become communists.

Our closest allies are spying on us and it is time to decide if we want to consider countries like this as allies. We do this for political reasons and sometimes these reasons are at odds with our country's best interest. Are we spying on them, probably and this should also stop. The world will never get any better if everyone is spying on everyone else.