NSA Worried About Recruitment, Post-Snowden 247
An anonymous reader writes: The NSA employs tens of thousands of people, and they're constantly recruiting more. They're looking for 1,600 new workers this year alone. Now that their reputation has taken a major hit with the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden, they aren't sure they'll be able to meet that goal. Not only that, but the NSA has to compete with other companies, and they Snowden leaks made many of them more competitive: "Ever since the Snowden leaks, cybersecurity has been hot in Silicon Valley. In part that's because the industry no longer trusts the government as much as it once did. Companies want to develop their own security, and they're willing to pay top dollar to get the same people the NSA is trying to recruit." If academia's relationship with the NSA continues to cool, the agency could find itself struggling within a few years.
Yeah , well ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, well it's not like people became disillusioned and angry after the lies started being shoveled wholesale down our throats after 9/11.
And no, I don't mean conspiracy-nutjob-wacko theories, I mean the kind of stuff that is being lorded over the average joe and I feel like I can only talk smack about because I don't have a security clearance to be revoked.
Call me crazy, but last time I looked in the help wanteds I started to get the feeling our society is divided into two halves: Those with above secret clearance, who live normal lives, and those without it, who are lied to and treated like animals.
As a human being living in the US without such clearance all I can say is, you should be f***ing ashamed.
Snow fjord is waiting (Score:2, Funny)
Hey NSA
Don't worry about no one wants to join you
In /. we have our Snow Fjord, always ready to join ya !
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I believe you've got it wrong. In the US there are two kinds of people, those who belong to the 1% of the richest who control 35% of the wealth of the country, and the rest who are divided into one fifth who are still well off and the large rest, the vast majority, who can barely make ends meet, have no power, and are constantly being screwed over. NSA employees are just some more poor government clerks who are at the whim of corrupt politicians and filthy rich oligarchs, like the vast majority of people.
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The very model of a Bananna Republic:
1. The small group with the money and power
2. The thugs employed by that group to ensure that they keep their money and power and are not accosted by the unwashed masses.
3. The unwashed masses.
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Well, this should make the unwashed masses sneaking in from banana republics feel right at home!
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Re:Yeah , well ... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh really? Having held such a clearance for years (I left that work about 5 years ago) I can tell you that the situation is in many ways reversed. Your very behavior is held hostage just so you keep your job. Want to try some weed while in Colorado? Want to go see the Great Wall of China (actually, you might get this approved)? Three beers at happy hour and get pulled over for speeding? Buy a house at the height of the housing boom and your spouse lose her job so it is foreclosed upon, or she gets sick and the medical bills pile up...
All of these things can lead to your ticket being clipped.
Besides - people act like a clearance is some magical thing that they have earned. Nothing is further from the truth. It simply means you have a clean police and financial record, and don't hang out with militants. All of the investigations and polygraphs boil down to determining that. You fill out the forms honestly, and wait for investigators to determine that indeed you did not lie on your application. Sometimes you sit in a silly little room over by BWI with weird cloud scenes on the florescent lights and answer the same questions while some polygraph examiner tries to upset you. Again, nothing that you have earned through hard work or being special, just that you waited out the process and didn't lie.
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Oh really? Having held such a clearance for years (I left that work about 5 years ago) I can tell you that the situation is in many ways reversed. Your very behavior is held hostage just so you keep your job. Want to try some weed while in Colorado? Want to go see the Great Wall of China (actually, you might get this approved)? Three beers at happy hour and get pulled over for speeding? Buy a house at the height of the housing boom and your spouse lose her job so it is foreclosed upon, or she gets sick and the medical bills pile up...
All of these things can lead to your ticket being clipped.
Besides - people act like a clearance is some magical thing that they have earned. Nothing is further from the truth. It simply means you have a clean police and financial record, and don't hang out with militants. All of the investigations and polygraphs boil down to determining that. You fill out the forms honestly, and wait for investigators to determine that indeed you did not lie on your application. Sometimes you sit in a silly little room over by BWI with weird cloud scenes on the florescent lights and answer the same questions while some polygraph examiner tries to upset you. Again, nothing that you have earned through hard work or being special, just that you waited out the process and didn't lie.
This is basically my impression. I have a number of friends and coworkers with clearance. I was up for it, but was honest on my application, so I was rejected. Apparently they don't clear unrepentant pot smokers. Who knew?
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They do clear unrepentant pot smokers. But only if you are absolutely necessary to employ. If you're just a normal IT person who needs a clearance, you're done on the drug questions if you don't make it absolutely clear that you don't do that anymore.
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Well, I am yet to hear of an instance of that.
What I have seen is a very few special cases where the smoker who pisses hot (and admits it) is given the opportunity to sign a form stating that they will indeed quit while in the employment thereof, and is subject to a few random pee tests for the next couple of years.
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>> As somebody who has worked in that world, I say shut the fuck up and go find an honest job and leave.
As somebody with decent reading skills, I say shut the fuck up and reread my post, specifically the "(I left that work about 5 years ago)" part.
Jesus wept you are a moron. Uninformed, and incapable of understanding even if it is written clearly for you. While I think everybody's opinion counts, in your case I am not so sure. Had you actually sat for a FSP rather than quoting Googled articles - yo
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Call me crazy, but last time I looked in the help wanteds I started to get the feeling our society is divided into two halves: Those with above secret clearance, who live normal lives, and those without it, who are lied to and treated like animals.
Those with clearance, especially above secret, can live normal lives as long as they live conventional, ordinary lives. When you have clearance the government watches you. Not too closely perhaps, depending on what level clearance you hold and what you're working on. But if anything of any import happens in your life you must let your security officer know. And rest assured, people with clearance are lied to as well. That's partly how compartmentalization works.
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Thats the new security boondoggle that gets funding and contracts flowing. The seduction of needing a new security clearance.
People in the gov, mil and contractors have seen a huge expansion of their bureaucratic access under a "collect it all" system.
What has changed? The US domestic legal system has now seen more interest by the public asking basic privacy questions since the Church C
Well, (Score:2, Funny)
I tried a few times to make a good comment, but the guys in the black van outside made me change my mind.
Why Shouldn't I Work for the NSA? (Score:5, Informative)
Unpopular [youtube.com] even pre-9/11.
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You know what frightens me?
I am an American by birth and residence, and for a flash moment I hesitated to (a) click on your link and (b) make this comment, because of what unseen long-term effects doing so might have on me personally and those I love.
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You know what frightens me?
I am an American by birth and residence, and for a flash moment I hesitated to (a) click on your link and (b) make this comment, because of what unseen long-term effects doing so might have on me personally and those I love.
And yet people will tell you that you live in a free country.
Re:Why Shouldn't I Work for the NSA? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, there were a few major predictions missed with that scene.
1. The government that was supposed to be selling us oil at a cheap price has been a farce, leaving the door wide open for a terrorist organization much, much worse than the ones we even imagined back in '97 to take over. The people we were pretending to liberate are now screwed at a whole new level.
2. The politicians who were supposed to be protecting our democracy from threats domestic and abroad have turned out to be so cowardly and corrupt that they can't be bothered to press charges when our secret agencies lie to them about such basic concepts as torturing people or killing American citizens.
3. Said politicians can't muster the courage to back up their so-called liberation efforts with boots on the ground when we're faced with real opposition instead of a puppet that started to bore them.
4. And of course, per your argument, they didn't even address the fact that an unpopular secret agency that consistently disregards the legal and constitutional framework of the government funding it pretty much defeats the entire purpose of a democracy, doesn't it?
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You don't know what you are talking about. Lets go through it.
1. The government that was supposed to be selling us oil at a cheap price has been a farce, leaving the door wide open for a terrorist organization much, much worse than the ones we even imagined back in '97 to take over. The people we were pretending to liberate are now screwed at a whole new level.
If you are referring to Iraq, that is pretty much pure rubbish. Iraq has been a functioning if troubled democracy since soverignty was restored to its government. There have been a number of elections, and the head of government has changed peacefully. Iraq still controls the majority of its territory, and the region controlled by ISIS is an extention of the territory it controls in Syria. ISIS is not all that different from the Taliban and
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You are simply deluded. You know what was NSA called before it was widely know it exists. No Such Agency. Shining a light on it will only drive the real efforts into more secrecy. Once NSA is exposed a new secret agency we won't know about will be created. I would not be surprised if the efforts were already underway.
YOU CANNOT PREVENT THIS! The state has too much power, too little to fear. You can only mitigate the worst excesses of abuse of power, which I described above. Once you force the government int
Won't meet their goal? (Score:3, Funny)
So, now they'll be the next ones crying that they need H-1B's!
Boo hoo (Score:5, Insightful)
If you lack morals to the extent you would consider working for the NSA you'll find it much more lucrative to sell your soul to Wall Street instead.
Re:Boo hoo (Score:5, Insightful)
If you lack morals to the extent you would consider working for the NSA you'll find it much more lucrative to sell your soul to Wall Street instead.
Wall Street is peopled with thieves, but the NSA is peopled with traitors. A person of marginal morality could work in Wall Street while turning down the NSA on moral grounds.
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Working on wall street puts you at very high risk of being stolen from, and crushed by the other thieves.
Working for the NSA puts you at very high risk of being spied on (which is no change, apparently), but otherwise doesn't put you at higher risk of financial ruin.
Being a traitor, it seems, is the safer route to financial security.
Lottery (Score:2, Informative)
One pays well, and has the potential to make you a multimillionaire. The other is a GSA employee making middle class income, and assuming you can stomach the work for 30 years a mediocre retirement check. Both jobs require a high degree of psychopathy, both result in a high suicide/mortality rate, both can result in you being disposed of if you are deemed a liability (I'm not referring to being fired, check the stats on "suicides" by things like 5 gunshot wounds to the head), and both receive tremendous p
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Nothing. The NSA exists because nations like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union existed, China, Russia, and North Korea still publicly threaten the US and other nations with nuclear weapons (and Iran hoping to join the club), and terrorist groups exist. If you think NSA exists because of "dishonest" politicains in the US you competely misunderstand the issues.
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Just over a week ago the Russian ambassador to Denmark threatened Denmark with nuclear weapons. Please find me a comparable example of the US making a similar open threat involving nuclear weaopns anytime recent.
Russia threatens to aim nuclear missiles at Denmark ships if it joins NATO shield [reuters.com]
In an interview in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the Russian ambassador to Denmark, Mikhail Vanin, said he did not think Danes fully understood the consequences of joining the program.
"If that happens, Danish warships will be targets for Russian nuclear missiles," Vanin told the newspaper.
Re:Lottery (Score:4, Insightful)
If the NSA wants to really start recruiting talent here is a novel idea. Start providing enough information to the "good" law enforcement (the NSA knows who they are) agencies to prosecute all the crooks holding government offices (appointed or voted in). If they started cleaning house, and given enough time clean.. people would believe they rehabilitated and were once again looking out for the average citizens best interests. The reputation as the Stasi is too well known for them to attract anything but the scum of the US for a very long time.
So you openly advocate having the national intelligence agencies spy on politicians to find incriminating evidence that makes them vulnerable, but you disparage the Stasi? Hmmmmm......
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There's nothing wrong with an accountability system in principle - we want politicians to follow the law and avoid corruption, after all. The problem is bias in enforcement. If you get the NSA to spy on politicians, they are sure to find more than a few who are taking bribes (Or as we put it today, violating what few rules on campaign finance remain). That much is fine - but you can also expect them to take a much longer, harder look at any politicians who propose cutting the NSA budget, and deliberately no
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Although you are quit bright, at times you express some really bad ideas. This is one of them. Politicians are accountable to their constituents, and ordinary law enforcement will do fine, thank you. Keeping the military and intelligence agencies apolitical in a democracy is a good thing unless you have a taste for coups.
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I don't think we are in disagreement. I explained that accountability is a good thing in practice, but that it creates serious problems with corruption when the organisation supposed to enforce accountability is itsself unaccountable and subject to both corruption and political bias.
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Are you trying to suggest that Politicians are above the treatment everyone else in society receives? Do you somehow believe that even though every cable and communication you send to grandma gets archived and sifted through, people like Hillary Clinton should be exempt? Evidence provided to law enforcement agencies by the NSA can not include those "special" class of people?
No, you must have something else in mind and simply failed so state your case properly.
Re: Lottery (Score:2)
Heck, they could earn some goodwill by using all those resources to shut down the whole "Rachel from Card Services" operation.
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Re:Boo hoo (Score:5, Interesting)
Different levels of Hell, at least according to Dante, but I suspect we're pretty much in agreement :)
Good call. The eigth circle [wikipedia.org] was for fraudsters (Wall Street), but the ninth circle [wikipedia.org] was for traitors (NSA, CIA, Congress, POTUS).
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Re:Boo hoo (Score:5, Insightful)
The reality is, the initial premise is a total lie. The NSA is a failed organisation and they are not looking for the same kind of people. They are looking for 2nd raters, people who specialise in breaking stuff and not in making stuff. The reality is securing stuff in computers is an order of magnitude harder than breaking security. The breakers are always second rate compared to makers, it is inherent in their cerebral makeup and the 2nd rate breakers know it to the core of their being, hence instead of making, their jealousy drives them to breaking.
The NSA were not particularly skilled at hacking, their targets were not focused enough on security and were easy to break into. Now of course the NSA script kiddie perverts are finding life much more difficult as companies become much more focused on security and are hiring the most skilled makers to make better security. The NSA stuck is now failing and that failure is far worse on the securing things side because of their chosen focus on breaking stuff on employing egoistic perverse script kiddies, incapable of securing stuff.
The US government was warned again and again and again, that in order to effectively secure their systems they must completely separate defensive operations from offensive operations but they were locked into arrogance mode and only listen to their own bullshit and now they are stuck.
If you are bright and interested in security, the real skill and challenge is in defensive operations, 24/7/365 operation of skills, abilities and knowledge, real investigatory skills on any exposed breaks or weaknesses and preventing them from happening again and creating a defence in depth system, giving greater opportunity to catch hacks are earlier less damaging levels. The people do not play well with breakers, not at all, the whole psychology is different.
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The reality is, the initial premise is a total lie. The NSA is a failed organisation and they are not looking for the same kind of people. They are looking for 2nd raters, people who specialise in breaking stuff and not in making stuff. The reality is securing stuff in computers is an order of magnitude harder than breaking security. The breakers are always second rate compared to makers, it is inherent in their cerebral makeup and the 2nd rate breakers know it to the core of their being, hence instead of making, their jealousy drives them to breaking.
The NSA were not particularly skilled at hacking, their targets were not focused enough on security and were easy to break into. Now of course the NSA script kiddie perverts are finding life much more difficult as companies become much more focused on security and are hiring the most skilled makers to make better security. The NSA stuck is now failing and that failure is far worse on the securing things side because of their chosen focus on breaking stuff on employing egoistic perverse script kiddies, incapable of securing stuff.
The US government was warned again and again and again, that in order to effectively secure their systems they must completely separate defensive operations from offensive operations but they were locked into arrogance mode and only listen to their own bullshit and now they are stuck.
If you are bright and interested in security, the real skill and challenge is in defensive operations, 24/7/365 operation of skills, abilities and knowledge, real investigatory skills on any exposed breaks or weaknesses and preventing them from happening again and creating a defence in depth system, giving greater opportunity to catch hacks are earlier less damaging levels. The people do not play well with breakers, not at all, the whole psychology is different.
Yes The Equation Group [arstechnica.com] really seemed "2nd rate" and they sure didn't "make" anything.
Re:Boo hoo (Score:5, Interesting)
TAO is what you would expect to see given a sufficiently large budget spent exclusively on hacking everything possible. The hacks are impressive in the sense that they take a lot of resources and time to develop and it wasn't previously obvious to what extent governments were committing resources to infrastructure subversion. They are not especially impressive from a technical perspective: it's basically a more professional and larger scale version of the types of malware produced by Russian banking fraudsters. Working from that down into BIOS hacks and the like is the inevitable result of spending billions on hackers year after year - they need to keep finding new things to exploit. Interesting, but only because it reinforces the idea that everything seems to be hackable.
But, what kind of people find this work interesting? I can imagine it would be interesting for a few years, especially if you're young and trapped inside a heavily propaganda controlled environment where you're told daily you're the Forces of Good in an epochal struggle against the Axis of Evil. But the amount of technical design work involved is minimal. The level of new technology is minimal. The "research" is simply finding ordinary bugs and flaws in other people's code. People oooh and aaah about the fact that these state malware platforms use a plugin architecture, whilst simultaneously finding the same thing in Photoshop entirely mundane.
Even the data analytics stuff is essentially just an A-B-C application of big data tech originally developed elsewhere, like at Google.
And the advanced maths the NSA is supposed to be famous for hardly shows up in the Snowden documents. It's pretty clear that their success against even crappy crypto is fragile at best (RC4), probably non-existent at worst (AES/strong RSA or anything past it). Their botched attempt to back door Dual-EC DRBG smells of desperation. They wouldn't build huge infrastructures for storing and obtaining stolen private keys if they had the mathematical tools to undo modern ciphers. So I suspect there are a lot of mathematicians at the NSA feeling kind of obsolete these days and wondering what they can contribute.
I'd say the only genuinely technically interesting work the FVEY guys are doing is the way they've been combining passive intercept with active, automated exploitation. QUANTUM is a pretty interesting thing and I'm not aware of anyone discussing anything like it before Snowden's leaks. However, it's also now a done deal. Beyond incremental improvements, there don't seem to be any obvious further directions for that project.
So as a programmer, developing hacks and malware can be entertaining for some years, but eventually I think most skilled people will want to flex their muscles in other ways. They will want to build something instead of break something. The best people will have a broad span of interests. In an organisation like Google or Facebook that's OK - you can work security for a few years, do some exploit research, then go on and transfer to some other project. Or leave but keep your work on your resume. At the NSA? There it's more limited. You can't easily leave the classified world because your work experience is a gaping void. They don't do product development. You will never make something that your family uses. You will never even develop the skills needed to do that.
Stories like this give me some hope that despite it's apparently bottomless budget, the NSA can still be beaten technically. They discard most of the qualified people because they aren't US citizens and the ones that are left would be well advised to take a career at a Silicon Valley firm where they can do very similar sorts of work, but for things that are unquestionably useful. If you go do big data analytics or security work in order to fight spam on Gmail (like I did), you don't have to worry about the moral impac
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Many, many words
Yes, and the Apollo program was just fireworks with an unlimited budget.
I realize you, and many others, have a lot of axes to grind with the NSA, but they are an organization of skilled people who actually know what they are doing.
If it is so easy to do this, why haven't the Russian internet criminals rolled anything out on this scale? It seems to me that a platform like this would be all kinds of ideal for criminal purposes.
And saying that you cannot put any of your work on a resume is just a boldfaced lie
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a lot of the software that the NSA (or more likely, NSA subcontractors) develop are developed for a very limited and specialized audience
...and they give it to the users free of charge, with complimentary installation and tech support. ;-)
(I agree completely with your post, BTW)
Re:Boo hoo (Score:5, Insightful)
They have. That is exactly what I just said - Zeus is also a modular, plugin based malware platform that is developed by Russian/east European fraud gangs. It bears a lot of similarities to the NSA/GCHQ malware platforms in terms of how it gets onto people's systems, general design, etc.
It's not the case. For instance the NSA scalable data store (Accumulo) is basically a reimplementation of Google's BigTable, and they don't try to hide it. They adopted tech from the civilian space for their own requirements but it wasn't invented there.
With respect to your other points, I never said they don't know what they're doing, only that what they're doing is not particularly interesting and I don't think it will keep the best people interested for more than a few years before they find it becomes humdrum routine. And by "product" you knew perfectly well what I meant - not some crappy in house web app used by a few hundred people who have no other choice, I mean a product that's available in the marketplace which competes for end users, probably consumers or professionals. Something where quality matters.
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Citing the biggest underachievers online in arstechnica doesn't help your case here.
I could cite Kasparsky Labs [securelist.com] if you'd rather.
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Depends on your personal ethics.
If you find that pursuit of personal wealth (many refer to this as "pursuit of happiness") is the most important aspect, Wall Street is the better option.
If you find that pursuit of hegemony of your state (many refer to this as "patriotism") is the most important aspect, NSA is the better option.
And if you find that things like human rights actually mean something, you find both to be unacceptable options.
Unfortunate reality however is that all three aforementioned aspects ar
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A person of marginal morality
I resemble that remark.
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whores makes lots of money.
if you want to whore yourself out and turn the clock back on privacy and individual rights, sure, go right ahead.
I consider google workers to be whores, too. and facebook. people who can convince themselves that they are doing good work, but really, they are turning back the clock on progress and freedom.
if you work for the surveillance state, you deserve your own private hell. I firmly believe that. I hope I am not ever forced to decide between caving in and working for evil
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whores makes lots of money
Bah! What street do you walk, Sister? It's the pimps that make all the money - as any good whore or pimp knows. Clearly, you're not either...
(sorry, couldn't resist :-)
Worried? (Score:2, Insightful)
If they would accumulate data that was appropriately focused and legally gotten, they'd probably have plenty of manpower, given the tech they already have. They only need more "analysts" to sift through all the excess data they are accumulating.
blunders
My experience working for the NSA... (Score:5, Interesting)
Technically I didn't work for the NSA, but I worked for a government contractor that did a lot of classified work for the NSA. If you can name a clearance level, I probably had it.
Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of the work the NSA does is concerned with foreign intelligence and surveillance. The part of the NSA that does domestic surveillance is relatively small and not nearly as intrusive as the tinfoil hatters want to believe.
Still, all of the controversy recently made me think a lot about it and realize I'm not really comfortable being involved even in foreign surveillance. I don't want to be responsible for creating technology that will be used to track down and kill people, even if those people are enemies of the USA. Yes, I know foreign countries are spying on us just as much, but that isn't an excuse.
So I quit that job, and I'll never again work on classified material. I've been much happier with my work lately.
Re:My experience working for the NSA... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was in about the same boat, working for a sub contractor helping make things.
The thing I was concerned about was, all the technology the we are/were using against foreign countries and terrorists are now being used against the population of the US.
The NSA and CIA and it's immediate peers have a little common sense, but the Patriot act started a pipline of this intel to the FBI, State Police, Local police.
Our local police have problem pepper spraying handicapped elderly people issuing a parking ticket and exessive use of tasers whil issuing regular traffic tickets
Look at Ferguson MO, etc...
Do we want morons like these with anymore information and power, the public needs to watch them, not the other way around.
Re:My experience working for the NSA... (Score:5, Insightful)
> The part of the NSA that does domestic surveillance is relatively small and not nearly as intrusive as the tinfoil hatters want to believe
That claim seems to be nonsensical, given the existence of the Echelon program, and the immunity granted to AT&T for its infamous fiber optic monitoring room (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A), Whether it is "relatively small" is also fairly meaningless, since it could mean "epsilon less than a majority of the budget".
I'm glad for your moral standing and peace of mind that you've withdrawn from such work. But let's be very clear that much of what the NSA is illegal, unconstitutional, and against various international treaties.
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> Let's be very clear that the real situation is that you wish that much of what NSA does is illegal and unconstituional
Much of it is is clearly illegal. Take a careful look at the "retroactive immunity" granted AT&T for their collaboration in the "Rooom 641A" surveillance center, the fiber tap on one of the backbones of both digital and voice communications for the entire Western United States, and of long distance communications both foreign and domestic. Now multiply that by the similar facilities
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But let's be very clear that much of what the NSA is illegal, unconstitutional, and against various international treaties.
Let's be very clear that the real situation is that you wish that much of what NSA does is illegal and unconstituional. Unfortunately the law, courts, and Congress are against you. Your wish is just that, a wish, and it isn't coming true any time soon.
ORLY? http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/16/... [cnn.com]
That was literally the first hit on Google for 'Judge Rules NSA Illegal'. Do you even Internet?
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Wasn't it a guy at Google who said that, if you don't want people to know you're doing something, maybe you shouldn't be doing it? The US people have a right to know what, in general, the NSA does. Not the specific techniques or operational details, but the goals and general actions. The NSA has been spying on US citizens en masse and lying about it.
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"The part of the NSA that does domestic surveillance is relatively small and not nearly as intrusive as the tinfoil hatters want to believe."
There's this guy named Snowden who showed us just how much complete bullshit this really is. Their domestic surveillance may not be as hardcore as their foreign, but it's still pretty damn hardcore. We don't really need tinfoil hats for this one - the evidence was provided.
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Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of the work the NSA does is concerned with foreign intelligence and surveillance.
The rest of the world has no problem believing this. And they don't like it.
Re:My experience working for the NSA... (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh dude, the actual specifics of the programs were laid bare to the public in excruciating detail.
I think you misunderstand. Even if all of those documents were true (not all of them are), the amount of foreign surveillance the NSA does dwarfs their domestic surveillance. The amount of intelligence they gather on foreign countries is staggering. There is not a single wave on the RF spectrum over in North Korea that we don't have on a hard drive somewhere. Their domestic surveillance programs are just offshoots of that.
And why should anyone's morality stop at domestic surveillance? Does the rest of humanity not matter?
I'm not sure why you're taking such an argumentative tone when I obviously agree with you.
But to answer your question, to a lot of people, yes, morality stops at the country's border. Anybody living in a foreign country is a potential enemy. Foreign governments are doing their best to spy on us as much as they can, and so the natural response is for us to do the same to them (but better, because we're America). People who are not natural-born US citizens do not have rights.
I'm not saying that's the way it should be, or that I agree with it, but that's the way it is to the majority of people who work for the US government. Ask any of your friends who've ever been in the armed forces how much they care about the rights of enemy combatants when they're on the battlefield.
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All the FIVE EYES countries get other countries to spy on their own citizens when they can't, so even if what you say is true it just means that the NSA does likewise and asks GCHQ for intel on US citizens that it isn't allowed to gather. It ignores security laws to allow GCHQ to do that on its behalf.
The NSA also helps GCHQ and other national crime^H^H^H^H^Hspy agencies subvert and pervert the laws of their own countries through its foreign spying programmes.
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But to answer your question, to a lot of people, yes, morality stops at the country's border.
Only if you're an international douche bag of the highest order. Occupying the lowest stratum of moral behavior is what damns organisations to fighting themselves as much as they fight real enemies.
I feel so bad for them. (Score:2)
No surprise (Score:2)
Looks like the tribbles^W chickens have come home to roost.
Precedents (Score:4, Insightful)
How much has ethical questions hurt recruitment at Diebold, Monsanto, Goldman-Sachs, Verizon, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.?
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I meant to put Bell Canada and Rogers at the top of the list.
The problem's never been reputation (Score:3)
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If there's one thing that you don't need to worry about taking the hatchet from the right wingers, it's the NSA (and the military-industrial-police state complex in general).
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Were the right wingers the ones that had the feds saying that possessing a Gadsden flag was a sign of domestic terrorism? The real right wingers want to shut down most of the federal government, or did you miss that part? The right does generally support a strong military, but the NSA isn't supposed to be military.
The supposed right wing politicians are the ones that support this crap, along with the left wing politicians who renewed the "Patriot" Act. I would bet you the actual people of the right detes
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I don't know who the 'real right wingers' are, but I suspect it's a specimen of the same sort as the True Scotsman. What I know is that the people whom most everybody, including themselves, and who number in the millions, worship the military and the police.
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I don't know anyone that worships either. Hyperbole much?
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I find that worship is a perfectly accurate word to describe the "support the troops" cult, for example. So no.
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I'm not surprised you don't understand a person willing to sacrifice their life for someone else or why those that do deserve respect.
Got your reservation for the new iWatch yet?
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I'm not surprised you don't understand a person willing to sacrifice their life for someone else or why those that do deserve respect.
I hope you do pay due respect to the fallen Waffen SS troops.
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Didn't take long to Godwin. Not surprised.
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Would you prefer the Red Guard as an easy way to make the point?
Of note is that you didn't actually have a meaningful answer.
Re: The problem's never been reputation (Score:3)
Yep. Government salaries are just hopelessly uncompetitive for any position requiring high-level skills. They try to paper over the problem with flag-pin symbolism, but that doesn't work now that the mystique has been replaced by stench.
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There's a bit of that. If they paid well, I'm sure there'd be more candidates.
But working for the government has always been about patriotism and patriotic duty. Nerd types aren't really going to go establish a beachhead, but those among them who wish to protect their country will elect to do so in ways that they can. This is especially true for bright, starry-eyed college grads.
Now, the NSA has lost even that candidate pool.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I tried to apply for an NSA job after I graduated, just a basic entry-level programming position. They had outsourced recruitment to some group that was totally uninterested in recruiting, did not seem to know how to recruit, would not return emails, etc. Finally, after weeks of cajoling, they invited me in for an interview. This seemed quite forward at this point in the process, so I pulled more information out of them. It turns out they were inviting me to a scheduled *career fair*, the in-person equivale
Money or the background check exclusions? (Score:2)
Is it really the money or is it the background check nonsense that scares people away?
I would think the latter would be a big influence. Even if you had no serious skeletons in your closet (no arrests, not a drug user, etc) there's still a certain paranoia that the FBI is asking a lot of people a lot of questions. And who knows what some asshole that doesn't like you might say?
And MOST people have some kind of skeleton in their closet (smoke/smoked pot, some kind of sex thing, whatever).
It'd be curious to
In summary... (Score:3)
Some Premises Need to be Questioned (Score:4, Insightful)
I am still having a little trouble with "we don't need our spies to spy". Maybe we do.
I am also having trouble believing that the kind of encryption we use on the Internet actually stops the U.S. Government from finding out whatever it wishes although IETF and sysadmins might be kidding themselves that it can. Government can get to the end systems. They can subborn your staff. Etc.
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I am still having a little trouble with "we don't need our spies to spy". Maybe we do.
Agreed. I thought the old idea of "gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail" had gone out of style decades ago.
Like many other questionable things that governments do, I think the basic calculus of spying still holds: the other guys are going to spy, so we'll be at a severe disadvantage if we don't do the same. To do otherwise would be admirable but quite naive.
In that vein, the recurring self-righteous outrage at NSA that we see here following the Snowden revelations actually seems kindda cute. Aren'
Shouldn't they be good at pretending (Score:3)
Good. (Score:3)
People didn't trust the government before Snowden either. The only difference here is that Snowden offered us definitive evidence that what we all suspected was going on really was going on. Fuck the NSA. It has strayed so far from its actual purpose I hope it drowns in its lack of educated help. At this point, even tech companies with a strict profit motive are more trustworthy than the US government.
Trust... (Score:3)
Anyone who still trusted the NSA before the Snowden revelations just wasn't paying attention to begin with. The stories about room 641A in San Francisco told me pretty much everything I needed to know. This is just one of many similar rooms across the country. They are sitting on major backbones, T'ing everything off to special carnivore / aka DCS-1000 (whatever the latest variant is) rack(s) that save whatever they tell it to, or pass it along somewhere else. It's unlikely they are saving all due to the sheer amount of data but I'd be insanely surprised if the vast, vast majority aren't saved at least for a short time while some kind of rudementary analysis is done.
What kind of analysis could be done on that volume of data? It's not hard to picture when you think about it. Think SpamAssassin scores. Encrypted anything gets a bonus, data from a "known source" gets a major bonus, data from a mandated target is an immediate +1000 to cross any threshold that is set. Key words, in the right amounts etc etc can all be programmed in to tell the system what to save for further analysis. Headers are tracked, countires of origins, time of day, prior call history (caller +2 data everyone made such a big deal about a while back) -- all of this is metadata that some kind of SpamAssassin clone program can take into account in order to decide whether to score the data as "interesting" (aka spam normally) or ignore it and let it expire after a few days and disappear off the drives to make room for something else. This is all technology we had in place 20 years ago that was unclassified even then. Does anyone really have any doubts on what is being done today?
Just saying...
The primary question (Score:2)
What is peace of mind worth?
Re: doesnt matter (Score:2)
That makes what they do known.
Additionally, that only works if the company has the keys and they aren't locked in a HSM.
Re:NSA can recruit Patriots! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you actually ARE a Greek, then this sense.
If you believe in the values of the US Constitution, then Snowden is NOT a traitor (which is explicitly defined). And also his acts were in support of the Constitution, which is supposed to be the entire basis of the Federal government. That he revealed the current officeholders to be liars and oathbreakers is *not* a strike against him. I won't go into just how unconstitutional I believe the actions of the current and immediately prior government to be, but the only way they've been able to justify their actions are by requiring you to believe, essentially, that blue was yellow.
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absolutely correct.
in ALL cases - ALL of them - its ALWAYS ok to 'do the right thing' above all else.
there are local laws and rules and so on. transient stuff that changes over time.
but 'do the right thing' is kind of universal. we all know, to some degree or another, what that means. some call it 'sense of right and wrong'.
snowden broke US laws, but he Did The Right Thing, and for that, he is a hero.
history has many examples of those who dared to break rules and DTRT. its too bad that they are often, o
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DTRT isn't universal at all. If it seems universal, then you are not considering a broad enough array of cultures.
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DTRT isn't universal at all. If it seems universal, then you are not considering a broad enough array of cultures.
True. After all, most of the abuses and attacks on the American concepts of liberty and freedom over the last few decades have been done by people "Doing the Right Thing" - as they saw it.
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Works historically, too. You don't have to compare just cultures of today, but cultures of the past too. There were periods in both England and America where 'the right thing' was to kill witches. They were not only intrinsically evil, they were a threat to the welfare of others and of the community.
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Had he kept his data dump focused on US domestic concerns he would not be a traitor. However, all the information released about Foreign intelligence programs does make him a traitor although I think traitor is to strong of a word. His real crime was believing he alone knew what information was dangerous to release and what information was relatively benign in nature. He and his supporters want to paint a picture of some heroic fighter for truth and justice when in reality he is just the best propagandist e
Re:NSA can recruit Patriots! (Score:5, Insightful)
Snowden IS a traitor: (at least) of N.S.A., and his oath to them, exclusively, and also of U.S.A. inclusively
How? Please be detailed.
He upheld the laws of the USA, upheld his oath to the US government and the NSA.
He violated no conditions of his oath what so ever.
The NSA can not require someone to swear an oath to break the law and betray the US constitution in any legal sense - yet that's exactly what they tried to do.
Breaking a promise to be a criminal does not make you a criminal.
The oaths required from the DOE, DOD, and DOJ all explicitly demand you do not follow illegal orders, do not break laws without explicit exception, and to report to the higher authorities any illegal orders given - all of which Snowden did to the letter of the law and his oath.
In short, if you demand I follow an order of yours, do not bitch and claim I'm a traitor to you when I do exactly as you demanded from me, because then everyone will see your demand and accusation as the bullshit it is.
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Heraclitus might agree with you, but I do not.
The US Constitution has some of it's roots in Greek philosophy, but many of them are more directly derived from British Common Law and "The Rights of Englishmen". If you want to understand the purpose behind the Constitution, read Locke. (The Federalist Papers are too focused on the politics of the time to give you a good perspective.)
OTOH, there were disagreements among the "founding fathers", and I think the branch lead by Alexander Hamilton would agree with
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Traitor is defined explicitly in the constitution. They betrayed their oath of office, they violated the law, they ignored the constitution. All that is true, and it doesn't constitute treason as defined by the constitution.
Mind you, I feel that they should all be given a decade of extreme solitary confinement. (I.e. *NOBODY* gets in to see them or talk to them except once a month a doctor & their lawyer in a combined visit (the doctor leaves first). And nobody includes guards. I'm thinking of a st
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>> Perhaps the only difference is that they've been caught?
That's pretty much it.
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It's a shame you can't identify who the real monsters are. The real monsters are putting truck bombs in crowded city streets, crucifying children, and stealing women by the thousands for rape, forced marriages, or to be sex slaves. Some US citizens agree with those ideas, and even go overseas to help the monsters. Those monsters believe it is their duty to force their "civilization" on you. On top of that are several countries that would love to cripple or destroy the US. The NSA is part of why the real monsters and evil countries are held in check.
Oh, don't worry. There are monsters on all sides. No one has a monopoly on inhuman behavior. And the atrocities of others do not excuse our own.