I used to be one of a group of people who other people thought were spies. I was living abroad at the time. At first this aspect was extremely irritating. Some locals would point at me and say "spy".

But the more I thought about it, the more I met people like me who I thought would make terrific spies, and the more I met local friends who I thought I could probably recruit as spies to have local culture on my side.

Then I started to casually explore the countryside like a dumb tourist, and I would emerge from a random forest to see locals' gaping mouths, later to learn it was a sensitive area. I started to think--no wonder they think we're spies!

Later on I went home and found out that a LOT of people who did what I did were recruited as legitimate spy-types. One of them was a childhood friend who apparently drank some magic government potion and became a CIA officer who went on to be extremely visible in US national politics.

It's a fascinating lens on life, superficially at least. Misdirection works for you and against you. You can make just about anything seem true or false. And weirdly while supposedly a hyper-objective effort (go $my_country!) I understand it often has a tremendous personal impact on those who are deeply involved.

> But there are some more Youtubers who seem to travel around to hotspots

These are the ones I'd recruit for a modern-day BRIXMIS. If you watch the BRIXMIS videos, the officers interviewed had a tremendous psychological overlap with traveling Youtubers who are very curious about things, to the point where _touching_ or _going to those things_ feels like a victory of its own. Digging up poop near an encampment because Soviet soldiers used log pages as toilet paper--they did that.