The honeypot idea probably does rely at least in part on you not knowing that’s what it is so, if you for some reason thought that was happening then… Nothing is stopping you. I guess you could operate on the assumption at all times but that’s going to be difficult especially when they’re trying to extract the information from you in a way that doesn’t seem like they’re trying to do that so you’d have to maintain your facade and chicken feed story in response to even the most banal things that don’t seem like they’re probing. There’s also the fact that you would now be aware of the forces you’re dealing with and also the potential blowback to you if you’re wrongly suspected of colluding or being less smart than you in fact are.

I used to work for a large defense contractor as a consultant. The best way to damage China would have been to let the spies see everything and hope they implemented the same fucked-up shit over there.

Describe the technical specifics of your job in a way that misleads them as to the actual information you’re working with, but that won’t be immediately obvious to an expert that’s potentially even more familiar with the source material you’re working with than you are.

It’s just hard to keep that kind of lie going - it’s not impossible, but fooling someone with an entire intelligence agency requires a whole lot of both luck and planning.

apparently counterintel is really hard to do, according to some other lemmy comment i read before somewhere.