Breakout Six: Espionage and Warfare in the World Before the Apocalypse Guard
The Federal Bureau of Investigations began when the grandnephew of Napoleon Bonaparte suggested to President Theodore Roosevelt that perhaps there should be a dedicated group just for looking into cases on behalf of the Department of Justice. After all, someone needed to do something about organized crime and all that free flowing liquor. Theodore Roosevelt readily agreed and so with the stroke of a pen began an entirely new government entity.
The Central Intelligence Agency began when General Wild Bill Donovan suggested to President Franklin Roosevelt that the Russians might be up to something as hostilities were ending in Europe at the end of the second World War. After all, there were already communists in the United States. Franklin Roosevelt agreed and yet another spy network was born.
Two being a psychologically unsatisfying number of spy networks to begin in a relatively short period of time, the National Security Agency found its start when cryptographers at the Second World War made the case that it might be for the best if they kept on trying to find out things other governments were attempting to keep secret, as other nations were likely to continue to try to keep secrets and it was already hard enough to find employment as a mathematician. From such unlikely beginnings, numerous intelligence services began.
From there, Intelligence Agencies replicated something like bacteria.
For the most part, despite our popular present notions, patriotic professionals came to these jobs, ready to serve their nations and did so in a lot of particularly boring but occasionally cinematically heroic ways that helped ensure global security. For the most part, upstanding, law-abiding, officers put aside political bias to preserve the public peace and uphold the dignity of their beloved nation. For the most part, that is the fairest summation of the work they performed. And if that had been the totality of all these agencies did, the story would end there.
The problems seemed to always start with someone working at one of these agencies rising to a position of power, finding themselves cordoned off into a smaller group over which they had almost total power, feeling intense pressure coupled with a total lack of oversight, getting particularly frustrated, and wondering out loud: “Wouldn’t it be more interesting if everything we did was more like the movies all of the time?” And as the power of individuals grew in parallel with technology, the scope of these disasters likewise grew.
As mentioned previously, Pre-Forum people did not appropriately weigh the power of incentives or systems to produce particular outcomes. Their habit was to set up systems and groups and then immediately wash their hands of any negative outcomes by saying, “Well, whatever happens, I meant it all for the best.” By their very natures, Intelligence Agencies operated with limited transparency. They had the ability to create secret budgets. They also had a sense of urgency and personal accountability that compelled agents to action. When actions that needed to be taken were not possible by conventional means, unconventional means became more attractive. Once those means were pursued, and the honor of a particular agent already stained, unconventional means could even become common.
So when an agent said something like, “Let’s spy on these lawful protesters because… well, you never know if they’re actually agents of a hostile foreign power or not,” everyone in the room tended to nod along. What was spying other than paying attention? Nothing unethical about that. However, under corporate structures this could often quickly escalate to, “This group doesn’t seem to be committing any crimes, and we need to justify our existence on our performance report. Why don’t we join one of these groups, secretly, and then incite them to commit a bunch of crimes so we can arrest everyone involved?”
In the worst cases, in very small rooms, with the very worst actors, sometimes it was suggested, “Listen, we’ve tried to infiltrate these groups and they keep kicking us out. How about we trick one of these people into having sex with a child and then film it so we can use it as blackmail to get them to act out our agenda?”
It is startling to discover there were documented instances of these types of activities being orchestrated by almost all intelligence services at one point or another. Forced consumption of hallucinogens, attempted mind control, smuggling weapons to enemies, and torture occurred with a clockwork regularity. By comparison, secret assassinations were almost tame.
Secrecy combined with corporate structures and growing power, created hundreds of perverse incentives. When trying to tackle the common problem of a budget shortfall, agencies could even say things like: “Why don’t we sell drugs to the African American community so that we can pay for all of these secret wars in other countries?” And then actually put them into action with almost no negative personal repercussions.
Intelligence agencies at their maturity were also not helpful in giving accurate interpretations of what was happening in the world whenever the matter was political. By the time an agent had become seasoned enough to have a high rank, they had often already been compromised and needed to maintain numerous secondary relationships at odds with their primary duties. They were incentivized to be connected, and as their careers matured these relationships created tangled webs of compromise that prevented them from being effective. In other words, whenever accurate answers were most needed, they were the least trustworthy.
If corporate structures in the Intelligence Agencies produced perverse incentives the same pattern produced true horrors in the Military Industrial Complex. While it was fair to say that the nation had to maintain these structures because of competition from other nations, and for practical reasons because in the same way a grade school student can forget how to do long division over a summer break a rocket scientist can also forget how to build a missile between wars, their expense became enormous. Before Minerva spread globally, making it practically and logistically impossible for any country to invade another, military strength was maintained by stock-piling various pieces of expensive equipment. Complex weapons were produced with tax revenues that could have paid for dozens of schools, hospitals, and infrastructure upgrades. Jets were designed at a significant portion of the Gross Domestic Product to fight non-existent enemies. All of this because the only other category of weapons available would end human civilization.
We shall pass over the more grotesque excesses of the Military Industrial Complex, except to briefly mention that in order to keep research and development budgets high, arms manufacturers made sure to lobby Congress to sell their current products to potential future enemies, in this way ensuring there would always be a need to build better and better weapons. Lobbying efforts could even be employed to encourage wars.
It was a terrifying, trustless world where leaving one’s personal association group left one with no surety of safety. If an uncharismatic person with no political pull were to be a victim of a random homicide, often their greatest chance of justice from beyond the grave was to have their case discussed on a popular true crime podcast.
The idea that the entirety of non-nuclear national security could be solved by spending a few thousand dollars within each community and simply teaching citizens to shout a single magical word when they were in need of help was simply unthinkable prior to the implementation of Minerva. As well as the idea that communities could, in a very real sense, directly own and control their own non-lethal systems of enforcement.
Much more than this, there was no structure prior to the Forum to care for existential risk. As the number of apocalyptic futures multiplied, as gene editing equipment became cheaper and easier to purchase, as virology libraries became downloadable from the internet, and the power of artificial intelligence exploded, there was no body to fight structural risk itself. There was no one empowered to step in and stop boulders before they had a chance to fly off cliffs.