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Encryption Government Math United States

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.
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NSA Worried About Recruitment, Post-Snowden

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  • Yeah , well ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @09:07PM (#49383297)

    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.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Hey NSA

      Don't worry about no one wants to join you

      In /. we have our Snow Fjord, always ready to join ya !

    • by Anonymous Coward
      I left my security clearance job because of the Snowden revelations.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        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.

        • by gatkinso ( 15975 )

          Well, this should make the unwashed masses sneaking in from banana republics feel right at home!

        • Banana Republics? How about every society we've ever had. Some times we dress it up in fancier clothing (Republics) and sometimes not so much (Feudalism). I'm no sure it's even possible to design a society that doesn't start out or end up this way shortly thereafter without altering the human genome.
    • Re:Yeah , well ... (Score:5, Informative)

      by gatkinso ( 15975 ) on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @07:51AM (#49385401)

      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.

      • 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?

        • by tnk1 ( 899206 )

          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.

          • by gatkinso ( 15975 )

            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.

    • 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.

    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Re "Those with above secret clearance, who live normal lives, and those without it, who are lied to and treated like "
      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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I tried a few times to make a good comment, but the guys in the black van outside made me change my mind.

  • by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @09:13PM (#49383321) Homepage Journal

    Unpopular [youtube.com] even pre-9/11.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

      • 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.

  • by mariox19 ( 632969 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @09:15PM (#49383327)

    So, now they'll be the next ones crying that they need H-1B's!

  • Boo hoo (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dcollins117 ( 1267462 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @09:17PM (#49383335)

    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)

      by DoofusOfDeath ( 636671 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @09:22PM (#49383355)

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        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)

          by s.petry ( 762400 )

          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

          • And, if the government becomes full of honest politicians, what happens to the NSA's budget?
            • 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.

          • Re:Lottery (Score:4, Insightful)

            by cold fjord ( 826450 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @11:55PM (#49383945)

            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......

            • 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

              • 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.

                • 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.

            • by s.petry ( 762400 )

              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.

          • Heck, they could earn some goodwill by using all those resources to shut down the whole "Rachel from Card Services" operation.

          • Infowars called, they really miss you.
      • Different levels of Hell, at least according to Dante, but I suspect we're pretty much in agreement :)
      • Re:Boo hoo (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @10:05PM (#49383543) Homepage

        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.

        • by f3rret ( 1776822 )

          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)

            by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @06:44AM (#49385039)

            Yes The Equation Group [arstechnica.com] really seemed "2nd rate" and they sure didn't "make" anything.

            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

            • by f3rret ( 1776822 )

              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

              • 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)

                by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @09:32AM (#49386095)

                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.

                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.

                because of the work they do and the requirements that work puts on their infrastructure they were probably into the whole "big data" mindset several years before mainstream commercial, civilian IT companies got there

                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.

      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        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

      • A person of marginal morality

        I resemble that remark.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      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

      • 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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @09:34PM (#49383415)

    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.

    • by randalware ( 720317 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @10:11PM (#49383577) Journal

      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.

    • by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @10:34PM (#49383663)

      > 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.

    • by kuzb ( 724081 )

      "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.

    • by gsslay ( 807818 )

      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.

  • It's so terrible that people don't want to work for a company with a proven track record of exploiting the very citizens it says it serves. All of us iPhone zombies [huffingtonpost.com] are truly empathatic to your cause.
  • Looks like the tribbles^W chickens have come home to roost.

  • Precedents (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Livius ( 318358 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @10:09PM (#49383573)

    How much has ethical questions hurt recruitment at Diebold, Monsanto, Goldman-Sachs, Verizon, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.?

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @10:12PM (#49383583)
    it's been money. I know a few guys who hire comp-sci for gov't jobs and they're always complaining they can't get good candidates while offering 1/3 the pay of private sector. It'd be one thing if it was a stable career path but with our right wing taking a hatchet to anything they don't like it's not even that.
    • 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).

      • by OhPlz ( 168413 )

        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

        • 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.

          • by OhPlz ( 168413 )

            I don't know anyone that worships either. Hyperbole much?

            • I find that worship is a perfectly accurate word to describe the "support the troops" cult, for example. So no.

              • by OhPlz ( 168413 )

                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?

                • 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.

    • 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.
       

    • 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)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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

    • 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

  • by _Shad0w_ ( 127912 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @10:57PM (#49383741)
    I think "You reap what you sow" sums it up.
  • by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @11:08PM (#49383785) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • 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'

  • that they're not the NSA? Perhaps they could contract people to do individual projects anonymously. And, for positions where the people have to have a security clearance, there's always sub-contractors. I reckon they'll need to be better at keeping the jobs done by the sub-contractors compartmentalized than once they were, though. You never know when a sub-contractor will accidentally hire someone with a conscience.
  • by kuzb ( 724081 ) on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @03:15AM (#49384421)

    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.

  • by kupekhaize ( 220804 ) on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @03:50AM (#49384513)

    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...

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