Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
This is an interesting observation. But honestly I don't think this is really hard to explain at all.
I think within the genre of comic books, your point makes sense. But if we're applying a lens of realism (which I think CA:WS did well, and I wish more Marvel movies would), Tony's network intrusion would not have been at all likely to have uncovered that SHIELD had been ideologically compromised.
What we see in Avengers is that Tony secured unauthorized access to read files to which he wasn't afforded access. First, it's not actually at all reasonable to assume that he had full access to all SHIELD data everywhere, ever. It's split across thousands of servers and departments. It wouldn't be universally accessible to anyone. This is true even for large institutions that aren't highly, highly sensitive intelligence operations. But it'd be doubly so for one that is. Most likely, he would've grabbed unencrypted traffic that was local to the helicarrier, recently accessed, and titled or contained notable text that was relevant to their current situation. That could certainly yield shipping manifests or operational plans to use the tesseract for weaponry.
But -- and this is really the key thing -- even if he had the ability to access all SHIELD records, and had the ability to meaningfully digest this enormous trove of information, it would still be incredibly hard to see that SHIELD was compromised. There aren't going to be any emails that say "Hey Bob: did you kill Mike for finding out that we're both Hydra foot soldiers? Hail Hydra, Lisa".
Infiltration is a process of persuasion and carefully installing dual loyalists in key positions to compromise decision making processes, as you describe. It consists of grooming intelligence assets and identifying who can be trained to groom additional assets. That all takes place primarily through interpersonal conversations. There's very, very, very little documentation of it in a file system that would reveal it if you didn't already know about some compromised asset. To the outside world, all of HYDRA's goals look so much like those of a modern international peacekeeping body that the only secret they need to keep is who the guns are pointed at and who has their fingers on the triggers. Which is fundamentally a key point of the movie.