Er, it was never a strategy in the first place? Or this is just a joke? :)
But to be clear, law enforcement agents (all as far as I'm aware) are allowed to do illegal things to catch their mark. In the US at least, this is not entrapment unless they forcibly coerce you to do something you normally wouldn't; just smoking or snorting some stuff in a casual setting isn't enough, they'd have to have you more or less at gunpoint or threatening in another way to make you do it.
Just a very important fact for people to remember: Law enforcement agents in the US can and will lie frequently and do illegal things in pursuit of their goal.
Entrapment does not mean what most people think it does, so it's not good to rely on this, as entrapment has a very narrow legal definition far away from the layperson definition.
I'm not talking about law enforcement. Consider that many people on HN do work that the spooks would find "interesting" but would not be "illegal". As such, most of the intelligence community is not related to law enforcement. You might be surprised about just how many 3 and 4 letter agencies exist.
Er, it doesn't matter though :) Federal "spook" agencies do the same thing and are equally above the law. You can't know really if your past business partners joined you for a fun evening just because or if their multi-letter work places got all the forms in order for them to do "whatever it takes" to catch you doing something illegal.
If your active threat scope involves governments, don't expect them to behave with regards to the laws where you are; either they don't care and will just deal with the fallout, or they have explicit approval do to illegal or wrong things.
I don't have an answer on how to check for spooks, I guess you'd have to do reverse reconnaissance, but I have no idea how feasible it is. But testing legal and social norms is not reliable; governments are not really bound by their own rules, especially when it comes to branches dealing with security or intelligence.
Being serious, I think this is the correct take. There's a lot of in misinformation about outing undercover cops, most famously the mistaken belief that cops can't lie about not being a cop. Regardless, from my experience on a federal grand jury that almost exclusively dealt with drug cases, the cops just get someone in your group to flip, and possibly wear a wire.
Bonus: Hanging up a sheet between the kitchen and the living room when you cook meth, isn't enough to protect the people in the living room from catching a case of Conspiracy to Manufacture.
The US government has never had a policy against recruiting drug users as intelligence field agents. Just because they aren't public servants doesn't mean they're not snitches.
It took me a minute to get the semantic distinction here.
People directly working for a government intelligence agency, in the sense of drawing a regular salary, receiving benefits like a pension plan, and probably enjoying the protection of some sort of cover (like attache for cultural affairs at the embassy) are "operatives" or "officers."
"Agents" are people in the foreign country whom the officers convince to provide information or services for them.
Aldrich Ames, for example, was an "officer" in the CIA, working for the US, but also an "agent" of the KGB, working for the Soviets.
So, to return to the article, the US government never had a problem hiring drug users as "agents," but would not hire them as "officers."
I don't even worry as much about field agents. Analysts (i.e. Snowden types) outnumber them significantly and are more likely to be the ones "checking up" on the kinds of people who post here.
I'd be shocked if there weren't a bunch of people who work for one intelligence agency or another and who read or post here for reasons not connected to their official duties.
“your stoner friends”, lol, where are people like you still found?
In California, and the entire West Coast, recreational use of marijuana is as normal as alcohol use.
People that use substances are different than those that abuse substances, and yet you are
conflating the two.
“Senate lets people that have had a drink before work at Intelligence agencies” “my alcoholic friends working as spooks would be a threat to national security”
While I agree with your general point, recall that DC is on the East Coast, and that there recreational marijuana use isn’t nearly so culturally accepted as it is on the West.
consensus on the floor was pretty much unanimous this year, while the committee vote was party line, it got out and everyone else is like “yeah we agree”
“As more states legalize cannabis, it becomes less and less tenable to deny security clearances to those who have used it,” Wyden said in remarks inserted into the report. “The amendment…will help the Intelligence Community recruit the qualified personnel needed to protect the country.”
There's a difference between a person who uses weed for fun, and a "stoner" which is closer to a functioning addict. A person who takes a toke every other night "to calm down" probably isn't a stoner. The guy who has to puff before work because he doesn't function otherwise is a stoner.
