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I suspect the 1960s was chosen because it was before the Church Committee. Back then, the CIA had fewer restrictions about working within the USA.

Got it, thanks. The CIA's cocaine was still ending up on the streets of America during Iran-Contra, though, so I (in my very uninformed opinion!) don't feel like the CIA cared that much.

The company hires people who match the company’s desired culture.

If the people in the CIA who do hiring want the talent who are excellent at lying and compartmentalizing their ethics, then that’s what the organization becomes over a generation.


> is the only gvt org that self funds itself & can run entirely without gvt money

Citation needed.

The CIA receives lots of opaque funding from the US government (at least opaque to citizens trying to FOIA), but just because it’s not easily accounted for doesn’t mean the org funds itself.


that's the point. you can't prove it. I can't prove it.

however - with a little common sense you can link everything together.

CIA has mandate to operate abroad. they can own mines, journalism houses, drug operations - abroad & in the U.S. technically the CIA is not allowed by law to operate in the US (but bcoz they're too powerful - they now have a free pass in that area)

remember they can also self-classify material. which means what they own will always remain opaque till they choose to declassify it usually after 70 or so years.

>> now back to the gold. remember they're restrictions around gold citizens can hold etc. & suddenly a private citizen has massive gold bars ? how so ? unless they were holding the gold for a powerful entity (but discovered by some gvt agency & now they need a fall guy) ?


Does it?

He is accused of fabricating his educational credentials.

Either this guy is fantastic at lying or the orgs where he worked are falling flat on due diligence.


One thing I was reminded by a friend is that exposing his fabrication would make that information useless. As long as the person who knows it wasn’t involved in the vetting process, they now have leverage over at least two people.

As someone said, all spies are bastards.


Techs trying to solve the tech problem.

Governments need it to be solved by a team (either within the government or a vendor company) because it is the non-tech things that are missing from the open source solution: high availability / redundancy, hosting, backups, business continuity, audits, someone to grill when there is a leak.

The people who work in government and banks aren’t incompetent. They are just like you and I but they work within a highly rigid system because if their system isn’t rigid, societies fall. People don’t think rationally during bank runs or when nobody in a country can access public services for weeks at a time. This is the core hazard of Mr. Robot.


I do in fact work in a bank and know a person who works on DigID. I wouldn't say incompetency is the word, but there is something ... special about the people and their skills here.

>high availability

oh yeah, oh noes.


I get what you mean. I worked for a private bank in NL for a bit. Everyone has something special, but we all had a common factor of being in bureaucracy hell. Not that its unexpected when you work at a bank, of course.

I surprisingly don't see any bureaucratic hell and I'm always a bit confused what people even mean when they say that. If anything, I feel the least bureaucratic pressure compared to previous 15+ years. But maybe that's me being a bit special.

> high availability / redundancy, hosting, backups, business continuity, audits, someone to grill when there is a leak.

All but one of these is a tech problem though.


> identity is a BIP-39 seed phrase

So we are back to a single “something you know” factor as identity?

There’s a reason your idea doesn’t exist.


You seem to be assuming citizen data was being transferred. Do you have evidence of that?

By law the US govt is able to compel access to any data controlled by an American company, regardless of where those companies operate. There doesn’t need to be specific evidence of this case, it’s true of all cases.

Some American companies have tried to establish convoluted workarounds in Europe to get around this, but as far as I’m aware it hasn’t been tested in court yet.


That was the info of individuals = citizen's data. Am I wrong? What would be considered "citizen data" just to be clear?

Many people have already mentioned that officials have stated the valve isn’t working.

But also, the chemical is actively undergoing an exothermic reaction (which is why the tank is at risk for failure). How do you transport such a toxic fluid without putting much more of the public at risk?


If you can get it out of the tank, you can prevent further runaway polymerization by adding an inhibitor like hydroquinone.

I don't understand why a storage tank for this stuff doesn't have an injection port, independent from any other pipes or valves, that could be used to add an inhibitor. Maybe it does and it's broken (clogged with PMMA from the reaction) as well?


They tried to neutralize but couldn’t apparently.

“But when members of GKN Aerospace’s response team arrived to inject a neutralizing agent into the tank to reduce the liquid’s volatility, they learned that the tank’s valves were gummed up, making the interior inaccessible, said Mr. Covey.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/23/us/garden-grove-chemical-...


It’s not simply that the tank might explode. That is one hazard, but spilling the chemical is another serious hazard.

You’re trying to make a distinction without a difference.

It’s notoriously difficult to build here BECAUSE of NIMBYs, house values preservation, “preservation of character”, CEQA (a state law that gives LOTS of different people who shouldn’t have this power an effective veto for any new construction).


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