Spooks Portal

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Welcome to the Spooks Portal on Spinprofiles

Welcome to the Spooks Portal on Spinprofiles—your guide to networks of power, lobbying and deceptive PR. This portal focuses on Intelligence agencies and their activities.

Theorists have traditionally divided the activities of the world's spies into four areas: intelligence collection, intelligence analysis, counterintelligence and covert action. The last of these covers covers a wide range of political interventions, from propaganda and disinformation, through support for front groups to terrorism and guerrilla warfare.

Major Intelligence Agencies

Main page: List of intelligence agencies

Spinprofiles has a policy of strict referencing and is overseen by an Managing editor and a Sysop and several Associate Portal editors. The Editor of the Spooks Portal is Tom Griffin.

Priority pages on Spooks and Intelligence


Historical

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The Elements of Intelligence

Despite the secrecy which surrounds intelligence agencies, the general nature of their activities is well-known, being based on practices that are thousands of years old. Each of the four main intelligence disciplines present profound issues for democratic societies.

Intelligence collection

Intelligence analysis

Counterintelligence

  • Classification: Categorisation of information according to its sensitivity, e.g. secret, top secret.
  • Security Measures taken to obstruct hostile intelligence services such as personnel vetting and physical security.
  • Counterespionage: Measures designed to actively frustrate a hostile intelligence service, such as surveillance and collection of intelligence on agents.
  • Offensive counterintelligence Attempting to turn one's opponent's intelligence operations to one's own advantage, e.g. Operation Double-Cross.
  • Deception: Operations designed to mislead an opponent's intelligence analysis, e.g. Operation Fortitude
  • Feedback: Intelligence indicating whether a deception has successfully influenced an opponents analysis.

Covert action

Covert action is a term of art used by the American intelligence community to describe "the attempt by a government or group to influence events in another state or territory without revealing its own involvement."[1] Similar terms include the British Special Political Action or Political warfare and the Russian aktivnye merpriiatiia or active measures.

Recent Articles on SpinWatch

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Categories

There are a list of categories associated with this page:


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References and Resources

Getting Started

Looking for somewhere to start?

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Research and Writing Tips

How to research front groups | Resources for studying propaganda | Research using the web

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There is an automatically updated page which includes the pages which have been signalled by Spinprofiles users as most wanted. In addition there is a page which includes a list of Things you can do to help.

Or if you would like some other suggestions closer to your interests you could drop Spinprofiles editor, David Miller an email. His address is editor AT spinprofiles.org

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Spinprofiles history

Spinprofiles is a collaborative venture initiated by Spinwatch in collaboration with Lobbywatch, GM Watch Red Star Research and Corporate Watch, but put into effect by a wide variety of volunteers and independent researchers.

Contributors are now working on 19,139 articles.

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References

  1. Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards, by Roy Godson, Transaction Books, 2001, p.3.