Happy Birthday James Bond and the future of Intelligence.

Yes, spies need to be bright to provide military information but no, not that James Bond, this one :

Although there is a major link anyway to the sexy spy :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bond_(ornithologist)

James Bond was born on January 4 1900 in Philly and in order to teach my readers to open the links that I provide as mentioned yesterday, go get your surprise by yourselves : click on it!

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Now, I had another reason to mention the movies’ suppaSpy and his above namesake! Intelligence, the mili info one is gathered in many ways. It relates to geo-politics immensely to understand which ways.
First is the civilian data. Since the beginning of History, travelers gathered informations about the lands they visited and brought that knowledge back home. Marco Polo was a spy. Under guise of commerce and trade but still a spy of the civilian category.
Second, we find the bona fide spy that masquerades as a traveler. Sent on the journey with the initial purpose of collecting info, that spy may remain in hiding or play a part called his cover to facilitate movements but is trained to retrieve useful facts about the enemy.
Third comes the military theater operatives from standard Recon units on the battlefield to Special Ops personnel in enemy territory.
Fourth, comes the infiltrated spies that become part of the enemy  for very variable time spans going from hours to lifelong.

This leaves one type of spy, the Ian Fleming type although most of these do not fire in their whole service as many bullets as James Bond does in a single movie! To be even more precise, these are not all sent on guns’n'explosives missions, you’d be very surprised. The guy seated at a desk in the CIA’s Hoover building and translating memos does not shoot bad guys much. Neither does the telephone snitch and recording operator. Actually, the most common order of business for that last type is industrial espionnage!

Everyone does it! Even friends to friends! The US wants all the top tech, no matter how it gets it. France will gladly spy on the big US corps for secrets and Germany on England and so on.
For a long time the USSR sent friendly purely scientific missions to anywhere were they’d be invited saved that their scientists … as in one incident from the time when the Franco-British Concorde was under construction. Concorde was the first and remains the only successful supersonic passenger airliner ever. The commies did have a plan of their own but could not make the metal last long enough.
So during a visit to the Aerospatiale plant were Concorde was being readied, the visiting Ivans one by one left the group in different sectors to walk with their thick, sticky, gummy shoe soles in the scrap metal on the floors. Little did they know that the scrapings and filings had been replaced with unrelated ones by the French secret service. o_O

That example is more in the normal range of modern spying activities, with the phone, translation and accounting people from up there.

That type of activity is also the one with the brightest future. The world is already quite integrated marketwise. The French Navy, US Coast Guard and Chinese People’s Liberation Army all use the same helicopter for instance!

This shows that on standard tech, even of military nature, restrictions in trade even when they exist mean little on occasion. The secret stuff is not even of that nature anymore; it really is about patents and other levels of fabrication expertise all the way to research data. We steal ideas worth billions from each other. Because that is the real pot of gold!

And since the future of intelligence the mili information rests on the intelligence of the spies that procure it, some bright people want to train and possibly manufacture more intelligent spies.
Come on click, don’t be shy : http://stratrisks.com/geostrat/10212

Nothing surprising there in and of itself except maybe in the implications : We will create our doom, won’t we? The above link is about raising bright spies but we have already begun to manufacture them too! As in artificial intelligence?
The world now runs on algorithms for almost everything computerized. The Internet is increasingly dependent on high levels of processing power accomplished by machines and their programming. As Asimov once remarked, Silicon may yet take its revenge on Carbon. But also, from that piece up there, one can understand another future to be brewing. If the powers that be need better spies to the point of walking over the best known of warnings as when the UK Ministry of Defence chooses to call its satellite array SKYNET despite the Terminator series bad omen, they will likely, eventually … genetically engineer the Ultra-mega-über spy of tomorrow. Maybe like the bad guys in The Matrix, but  for real ( … and hopefully cuter and in both sexes variants. )

Move over Dolly, here comes Billy from Monsanto, able to remember every letter from that paper you were just securely hiding in your office safe as your secretary ushered him in … cause he read that through the walls with his X-ray vision before  entering … -”Ah, mister Fromberg, nice to have you; please take a seat! So you want to talk cooperation on product development, is that it?”

And if that “model” of manufactured spying equipment gets produced, you can bet that at the same time, in a basement of a bland building hidden in a mountain range, another model is swimming in an electrolyte pool to support the weight of its twenty kilos brain and deciphering intent from secret data selected for it from all that traffic on the Web as most pertinent and correlated to the task.

And you can bet it is not all that happy …
unless they genetically removed its personality and feelings too.
Then again, neither am I often happy about all that I know of that world myself to tell you the truth, *sigh*!

Sorry for the bad news, Tay.