Comment by somenameforme

Comment by somenameforme 4 days ago

This is a very first level consideration of things like this. In general it would not be particularly useful because exactly the first thing that's going to happen is that any victim of said efforts is going to go to their domestic law enforcement which would not only curtail these efforts (or even completely backfire in the case of double agent stuff), but could also blow up into a giant international controversy.

And for what? What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an "ordinary citizen"? The risk:reward ratios are simply horribly broken in this sort of case. By contrast when your own government is doing this to you, you have nobody to turn to, and they can completely destroy your life in ways far worse than the threat of somehow revealing your taste in videos.

JumpCrisscross 4 days ago

> exactly the first thing that's going to happen is that any victim of said efforts is going to go to their domestic law enforcement

Why doesn't this happen every time someone is blackmailed?

> could also blow up into a giant international controversy

Like if Russia shot down a passenger jet? Or Beijing hacked the OPM? Or India tried assasinating an American citizen on U.S. soil? What about "opening and operating an illegal overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, New York, for a provincial branch of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)" [1]?

> What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an "ordinary citizen"?

Everything needs grunt work. Taking pictures. Accepting and transferring funds as part of a laundering operation. Driving an operative around.

The ladies who killed Kim Jong-un's uncle thought they were "making prank videos at the airport and she was required to 'dress nicely, pass by another person and pour a cup of liquid on his/her head'" [2]. Being able to arrange that from afar, with limited outreach, is something Cold War-era spooks could only dream of.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-operating-illega...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-nam#...

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lmm 4 days ago

> Why doesn't this happen every time someone is blackmailed?
It does, quite often. Which is why blackmail is done mainly by those who law enforcement would think twice about going after, and/or those who have nothing to lose.
> if Russia shot down a passenger jet? Or Beijing hacked the OPM?
Plausible deniability, and who is there to rally around?
> India tried assasinating an American citizen on U.S. soil?
I don't know what incident you're talking about, but the fact you say specifically "American citizen" suggests to me you're talking about someone who had strong connections to India and would be generally perceived as Indian.
> What about "opening and operating an illegal overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, New York, for a provincial branch of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)"
That sounds like a propaganda framing. In what sense was this a "police station", much less an illegal one? All they apparently did was "help locate a Chinese dissident living in the US". So the ground facts are more like "the MPS had a private eye working in New York". Which, well, sure; so what?

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