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zachsdorfman.bsky.social
National Security Reporter. Work in Politico, Rolling Stone, Wired, Foreign Policy. Working on a book on the history of deep cover for Penguin-Random House. It’s always Berlin 1989 somewhere. Email: [email protected]
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Posts 22 Comments 16

From a FOIA perspective, "the entire federal workforce should write down and email what they did last week" is extremely funny

submitted 5 hours ago • 126 comments

This seems like a phisher's dream. Announcing that a government email is about to go out and that recipients are required to respond to it seems like the kind of thing cybercriminals would love to spoof in order to infect workers or trick them into revealing their login credentials.

submitted 8 hours ago • 47 comments

Dear OPM FOIA staff - Remember to preserve all of these email responses, as we will be submitting FOIA requests for this consolidated compilation of information on what the entire federal government did last week. Thx - FOIA community

submitted 7 hours ago • 122 comments

Let’s hope this didn’t get forwarded to anyone undercover in the field on an insecure email address. Trust me, crazier things have happened.

submitted 7 hours ago • 1 comment

submitted 9 hours ago • 1 comment

This is an utter impossibility in the high-side space. You gonna rush to your COVCOM in a hotel room in Djibouti tomorrow to fire off a list of all the clandestine source meetings or technical sensors your emplaced in the last week? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

submitted 9 hours ago • 6 comments

If this is at all interesting to you, you’ll like my forthcoming book!

submitted 10 hours ago • 2 comments

Niche post: Bill Colby writes quite openly about handling NOCs as a COS in Scandinavia in the 1950s; & I recently found an obscure CIA memoir from a NOC officer under Colby. The NOC was under student (and later journalism) cover, setting up anti-Soviet stay-behind networks/arms caches. Cool stuff!

submitted 10 hours ago • 1 comment

"GT/GENTILE's grandson is Ed Big Balls who works for the meme dog department," I scream, as the county psychiatric facility staff sedate me and throw me in the animal control van.

submitted 17 hours ago • 1 comment

To the airy proponents of a need for greater convergence between national security agencies and American captains of industry to better prosecute a Cold War 2.0 with China: here’s your praxis.

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

Spot on. CIA director Richard Helms worked as a journalist in his early life. Both he and CIA CI chief JJ Angleton (a former poet who edited a literary journal at Yale called “Furioso”) apparently despised Le Carre for his cynicism toward their chosen profession; irony, perhaps, was beyond both men.

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

Teenage DOGE worker Edward Coristine is grandson of former KGB spy Valery Martynov who was an officer in Line X - the technical espionage division of the KGB. Martynov became a double agent after FBI recruited him and began feeding Soviet secrets to the Bureau www.jacobsilverman.com/p/prominent-...

submitted 1 day ago • 17 comments

Definitionally the aesthetics of neofascist camp. Let a thousand dissertations bloom.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Gutting the agency responsible for the safety and security of encryption protocols. What could go wrong?

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

The post-Watergate system is dead. Out with a whimper. The drive for partisan power has overtaken the prerogatives of institutional power.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

San Francisco is, of course, an overwhelmingly Democratic town. But the Presidio is close to the oldest-money (Pacific Heights) part of the city, where real power resides, not all of it liberal. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/20/u...

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

Spy services are normative institutions. You cannot betray foundational aspects of their identities without blowback. People are going to go to the other side. Probably not the Russians or the Chinese—maybe some uber-cynics—but the Europeans, or other allies, yes. People will go to the other side.

submitted 3 days ago • 8 comments

The Israelis, the French, and the Dutch all come to mind.

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

Spy services are normative institutions. You cannot betray foundational aspects of their identities without blowback. People are going to go to the other side. Probably not the Russians or the Chinese—maybe some uber-cynics—but the Europeans, or other allies, yes. People will go to the other side.

submitted 3 days ago • 8 comments

an important part of good journalism is, seriously, humility. understanding that you don't know the answers leads you to ask good questions; understanding that something might not be clear leads you to write with clarity sneering at the reader helps no one, least of all journalism

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

Richest man in the world muses about Jailing reporters, nothing to see here

submitted 5 days ago • 2338 comments

🚨 SCOOP: DOGE is seeking personal taxpayer data at IRS, sources tell me. 🚨 Trump admin is pushing IRS to agree to an MOU that would give DOGE access to granular data on every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country.

submitted 6 days ago • 289 comments