Secrets of Deceitful-Type Proportions
When looking up the Mi6 building for the post below, I came across a gazeteer of secret state sites in London which is well worth a perusal. Curious though how public all this presumably once rather furtive skullduggery has become - Mi6 squatting aggressively and loudly at Vauxhall, Thames House featured on Spooks, adverts for the secret service on the 129 bus, the head of the clandestine wing of the state collaborating on dossiers with a grubby Fleet Street thug like Alistair Campbell - all this from organisations that weren't even acknowledged to exist until very recently. A sign of declining or increasing power?
posted by owen hatherley at 6:15 pm
3 Comments:
perhaps:
decreasing (concrete, projectable, show-of-force) 'power,' increased (pervasive, invasive, panopticist) power.
Whether or not they're more open about certain locations (many related locations remain hidden from view) the intelligence agencies have massively increased in size recently. For example, MI5's doubled its personnel in the past five years or so.
On Spooks, Thames House was represented by a building double — Freemason's Hall (see http://www.ugle.org.uk/)
You probably know this, but there are now spy tours in DC where you can go to famous spook sites - not just the CIA headquarters, but Watergate, where Angleton and Philby got drunk together, etc., etc.
The world is being cut into ever finer demographics all the time.
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