how does spying and secret agencies work? how do they figure out what other countries are planning?
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Chatter, sources, analysis.
In super, super simple terms, intelligence gathering is basically like very advanced, very high-stakes gossip.
People hear things from people who said more than they should have said, or said something they thought nobody would hear, or someone left papers or something somewhere or put them somewhere someone else could read them – or someone took them. Messages, documents, rumours, online posts, where people were and when, it all adds up and with different levels of certainty. People run analysis to try to fit it all together and try to figure out what’s real and what’s not.
So back to gossip terms – think about say, you heard Mr Green was cheating on his wife Mrs Green. You’ve heard some people say they saw him dancing with another woman at a bar but just hearsay. Then your brother says he actually saw it too. You trust your brother more. Then you see on social media that Mrs Green posted a photo with her and her sister at her sister’s house with a caption with an angry song lyric. She deletes it after 10 minutes but you saw it before. Meanwhile you see Mr Green was tagged in a photo at a bar in Cancun with another untagged woman. But actually your best friend tells you that she knows the untagged woman, so your best friend texts the untagged woman to ask to hang out but that woman says she’s “in Cancun with a guy she’s seeing”.
Well now you add that all together and sure, you have a pretty clear assessment that Mr Green is cheating on his wife. Is it for sure? No, but you have a decent number of sources indicating something and some direct evidence that isn’t damning but all adds up. Is it possible that untagged woman was talking about someone else or that they have an open relationship or something. Sure. But you’re just building sources to varying levels of confirmation.
Intelligence gathering is, for the most part, a much more sophisticated and high-stakes version of that.
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