Not so long ago, Secret Agent Man could globe-hop with impunity (
sing-a-long) and hide with undercover diplomatic immunity. Now, he may as well wear the Scarlet Letter "A", for Agent.
WTF happened? Quite a bit...
9/11, for one. It's not so easy to fly
under the radar these days.
In 2014, U.S. spies were exposed when the Office of Personnel Management was hacked. About 22 million fingerprints, security clearance background information, and personnel records allegedly fell into Chinese hands. In 2015 it happened again.
One can be fairly sure this isn't just a problem for U.S. spies. Other countries get hacked, too. You just don't hear about it.
If all this wasn't bad enough, a spy's best friend turned on him in the 2000's. Technology.
Video cameras are planted everywhere, and
facial recognition is becoming more
accurate every day. It is being used at airports, in
buildings, and with in conjunction with
city surveillance cameras. This list will grow, of course.
The latest advancement is
analysis of video streams using
artificial intelligence logarithms. Suspicious movements, packages left unattended, predictions of future movements and crimes are analyzed by mindless machines 24/7, waiting to trigger an alert.
On the communications side spyware is a concern. Smartphone and GPS tracking don't help spies hide either.
It has been reported that some countries are compiling real-time databases which incorporate the above-mentioned speed bumps with: taxis, hotel, train, airline, credit card, customs and immigration information. As soon as one enters the country, they know where you are—minute by minute. And, if one takes too long going between locations, or a dual timeline appears (being in different places at the same time), a security alert is generated.
Couple all this with countries sharing information, e.g. EU, being a spy who needs to make in-person contacts becomes nearly impossible.
Think staying out of view is a good spy strategy? For now, perhaps. However, progress is being made by constructing a person's face by the
sound of their voice.
The future of spying (no, it won't go away) will be radically different out of necessity. One can only guess how, but I understand they are working very hard on
mind-reading.
Be seeing you.
Scientists are reporting that they have developed a virtual prosthetic voice, a system that decodes the brain’s vocal intentions and translates them into mostly understandable speech, with no need to move a muscle, even those in the mouth.
According to University of Washington computational neuroscientist Rajesh Rao and UW Medicine neurosurgeon Jeff Ojemann, the combination of a brain implant and a complex algorithm has given researchers the ability to predict human thoughts with unprecedented speed and accuracy. In fact, the duo says, they’re able to track what we’re thinking as we’re thinking it, bringing us closer to mind reading than ever before...
At Yale University, researchers recently used a brain scanner to identify which face someone was looking at — just from their brain activity. At the University of California-Berkeley, scientists are moving beyond "reading" simple thoughts to predicting what someone will think next. 
"This is exciting and a little scary," said Henry Greely who played no role in the study but is familiar with its contents, in a news release. "It demonstrates, first, that we can see when someone's dealing with numbers and, second, that we may conceivably someday be able to manipulate the brain to affect how someone deals with numbers." 
Opening up the possibility that a sort of mind-reading might one day be possible, scientists say that through a kind of surgical wiretapping they were able to translate brain electrical signals back into single words overheard by patients, and to do it with 89 percent accuracy. 
It takes a while for the TPJ to develop, but by adulthood it lights up brightly in brain scanners when moral judgments run hot.