Read the U.S. intelligence reports the media won’t publish
www.kenklippenstein.com
How the United States spies on Israel, its number-one Middle East ally
www.kenklippenstein.com
I mean, we are not even surprised. This is how intelligence structure in current inter-national set up operates. It spies on foes and friends alike. Besides, recent advances in relevant technologies coupled with intelligence friendly environment of ever more connected (digitally and physically) globalized world, made it impossible to hide most things.
Today there are hardly opportunities for big surprises. (Unless you have complete overmatch. Like Israel has against Hezbullah) Generally speaking, everyone knows everything. So one barely takes it all. Hence, the measurement of success is in the details and
relativity. And there lies today's competition, if you get 55%-66% out of something, that is a relative success.
Obviously, I don't have first hand insider experience of how intelligence institutions works nationally and internationally, but what I gathered from my very incomplete understanding, is that they try to compensate for this exposure and vulnerability of today's globalized environment in several ways.
One is by leveraging 'uncertainty' stemming from your own inter-institutuonal processes and dynamcis. 'In order to confuse your enemy you must confuse yourself first' may sound like a silly joke, but this is actually party effective way to operate today. Adversary cannot know or predict our end goal with required accuracy (in time) because we/our own elements individually don't know it themselves till the end. Determining the final outward approach in each case is a contstant struggle between our own various fractions, institutions of the state and the leadership, (assuming there is proper separation of power.) Whoever comes out at the top, his version is expressed in the end. And the reason you can actually leverage this uncertainty to a degree, is because you are more involved and intertwined with your own system and institutions than your adversary.
(Centraliazed top-down autocratic approach may appear efficient, but is is also brittle and exposed. Decentralized processes of democratic states are messy and slow but more resilient.)
This is true alike for intelligence and diplomatic community. There is an excellent quote by Henry Kissinger on US foreign policy that summarizes what I am talking about very well. (Unfortunately I forgot it)
Another way, is to make the adversary race against time. See, today adversary's problem is not always that it doesn't have enough information on you, rather it may has too much of it. And they have to make sense of it fast enough to react in time.
When this coupled with the 'uncertainty' that we just talked about, you may get a small window of opportunity for you to get slight majority out of something in your advantage. Because adversary will also figure out the whole picture pretty soon. (As I said, today everything is like an open book. So one barely takes it all. And the measurement of success is in the details.)
Before the digital revolution, the art of spying was about keeping the adversary in the dark. It doesn't know where you are let alone what you are doing.
Today concealment is a nearly impossible. So it is mostly about deception, you operate in ever increasing grey zones. Adversary will see you there, and know that you are up to something, just not obvious enough what it is. (in time)