If You See Something, Say Something

Voters in the United States are learning more about the contacts between President Trump's administration and Russia. In Ben Macintyre's 2018 book, The Spy and the Traitor, they can learn what a country is capable of doing to its enemies:

• Gather and analyze information about enemies
• Recruit informants, agents, and double agents who are: lonely; hurt by fate or nature (they might be ugly or short); have inferiority complexes; crave power, influence, a promotion; need money; can be compromised/blackmailed
• Aid a spy's career by helping him or her rise to positions that provide greater access to information and to influence on polity decisions
• Infiltrate anti-government movements
• Deploy "illegals" who live as ordinary citizens in foreign countries, are more difficult to detect by counterintelligence investigation than spies under diplomatic or consular cover, and can be mobilized for any purpose
• Employ methods to avoid surveillance
• Create escape/exfiltration routes for a spy who is compromised
• Provide secret communication and copying equipment for spies
• Establish sites where secret information about where to meet or when can be signaled to spies in plain sight, such as by chalk marks on mailboxes or orange peels under park benches
• Establish secret dead drop sites for hiding messages or money without personal contact with spies
• Transfer information to spies during an undetected quick brush pass by another person
• Manipulate media to influence public opinion, create fake news, cultivate officials and opinion makers sympathetic to a cause
•  Provide disinformation; create false evidence about foreign dangers, such as packages of arms labeled "Made in China"; provide inflammatory posters
• Forge documents and foreign currency
• Implement sabotage, supply arms
• Bug homes and offices
• Kidnap, drug, torture, kill

Conclusion: As long as a country has enemies, citizens are not free to accept everything they see at face value. They need to report their suspicions to authorities.