Has modern technology made espionage easier or more difficult?
On one hand, its easier for a spy to communicate with their handlers.
On the other hand, mass surveillance make it more difficult for the spy to hide their activities and thus make it easier for them to get caught.
About the same. Things like the internet have made exchanging secrets easier, but things like metadata retention has caused spy rings to be identified and eliminated.
The GDR was known as a first-class surveillance state. But if you look at the amount of data they actually collected, the modern agencies are in a complete different league. There was a thorough calculation some years ago showing that the NSA collects the same amount, that the GDRs StaSi secret service amassed in the 40 years of existence, several times a day.
Commies were not wrong... They were just early.
I bet with the current tech their regimes could have better economic success along with even more oppression
Both got much more interesting. Also, don't underestimate modern encryption
Yeah encryption is pretty good. These days the most reliable means of cracking it is a wrench.
yes
Way easier, most of us do carry 24/7 a tracker and store our data in foreign host cloud. This also includes target of interest who still use social media, Ms office/google/apple cloud and more.
Special forces and submariner do post on strava letting everyone know where they are, weapon industry engineer bring work at home saving data on Microsoft cloud and way more stuff which are supposed to be forbidden but happen
I imagine most espionage these days is openly done on the internet, where you're not even going to notice what's going on because it's that well hidden or going on in private chats.
Social engineering is also the same as ever. You don't need to send in James Bond to snap photos of documents if those documents are on a server connected to an external network and you can gain remote access to it. Or even on a private network, if you can trick some random employee into giving it to you or installing a virus.
Same reason I don't use the most up to date rules for Shadowrun; the hacker PC being able to hack into the BBG's network from a cafe across town is lame. I like the old school rules where you have to connect directly to the mainframe to hack shit, so you actually have to get creative with how you gain access to it.
I imagine easier right?
Like, you don’t have to 007 to set up a thirst trap tumbler that eventually slips “weird Dave” in gov HR a malware link to log key strokes…
I know it's made it harder for me to get into my own accounts.