The NSA Is Looking For a Few Good Geeks 388
itwbennett writes "Dan Tynan noticed something curious when he was reading a TechCrunch story (about Google's mystery barges, as it happens). There was a banner ad promoting careers at the NSA — and this was no ad-serving network fluke. Tynan visited the TechCrunch site on three different machines, and saw an NSA ad every time. In one version of the ad, a male voice says, 'There are activities that I've worked on that make, you know, front page headlines. And I can say, I know all about that, I had a hand in that. The things that happen here at NSA really have national and world ramifications.'"
world ramifications... (Score:5, Insightful)
"The things that happen here at NSA really have national and world ramifications."
Like making the rest of the world distrust and hate the USA.
Good geeks? (Score:5, Insightful)
At this point, no "good" geek would work for the NSA.
Not worth my time. (Score:5, Insightful)
I looked into the NSA and the CIA. neither pay anywhere near what the private sector pays. Both want to pump you up on "Doing your national duty", "Serving your country", and/or "Protecting your fellow Americans"
If they want IT talent, they need to pony up the cash.
Re:Good geeks? (Score:5, Insightful)
I like this post, because I can't tell if it means
"No honorable person would work for the NSA"
or
"Anyone applying to the NSA is out to betray them."
Re:Good geeks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Define 'good' and define 'geek'.
If you think there aren't people who work in the tech field who will say "I'm totally in favor of this, because it protects us from the terrorists", you're likely sadly mistaken.
Geeks aren't some uniform group of people who all believe the same things. Reading Slashdot should show you that quite readily in about 2 minutes.
Many of us might say "yeah, not on your life", but I bet almost as many might say "sure, I'm in, sounds fun".
I'd shake anyone's hand that joined (Score:2, Insightful)
Post WWII the NSA/CIA and intelligence agencies of the free world have been vital for keeping the peace. I don't see that changing anytime soon. We are all likely alive at least in part due to their actions.
Give me a break. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously? Improving it as in finding holes [nytimes.com] that they can exploit [nytimes.com] and tell no one else about? Or spending millions [nytimes.com] on research into how to create holes they can hope to get included [propublica.org] as encryption standards [propublica.org]?
From the link above:
The N.S.A.'s Sigint Enabling Project is a $250 million-a-year program that works with Internet companies to weaken privacy by inserting back doors into encryption products. This excerpt from a 2013 budget proposal outlines some methods the agency uses to undermine encryption used by the public.
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Re:America (Score:5, Insightful)
Enough advertising overcomes any negative consequences of your actions.
Pretty much this.!
By "owning" it in advertising and public speeches and press releases, they hope to pull a "Toyota" maneuver.
(When Toyota was facing run-away vehicles and brake problems with spectacular crashes, they began an ad campaign touting their safety. They are still at it today with a drumbeat of ads telling how safe their cars are and totally ignoring the massive recalls they were forced into. I suspect Toyota learned the technique from Iomega which did the same thing in the face of their Famous Click of Death [wikipedia.org] drive series).
I predicted this some months ago. I suspect going forward they will just start saying in effect: "Yeah, we read your mail. Get over it." Now that its out in the open, they will become bolder and brasher, and no mere legal barriers will stand in their way, (not that they ever did). There are just enough useful idiots out there that believe this is a "good thing" that the NSA will probably get away with this tactic.
Technical solutions are going to have to be devised, better encryption, multi-path routing, etc. And instead of welcoming their contributions, crypto developers are going to have to understand that they can't be trusted.
Re:Hello, future leakers! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a very myopic view of the situation.
People with expertise in data systems have a wide range of opinions and come from a variety of backgrounds. There is no monolithic community that is implied with possession of this knowledge.
Even if you are in the subset that supports Snowden you don't have to have the opinion that what the NSA does is fundamentally wrong. It may be that all it really needs is more enlightened political leadership and restructured laws. After all even the most ideal free societies have opponents and will have a need to protect themselves to ensure their continuation.
Re:world ramifications... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Nazi war machine contributed to a several engineering accomplishments in history. Does that make World War 2 any less bad?
Not being evil (or not 100% evil) is not an excuse for allowing evil people to take advantage of a seemingly unstoppable tool.
Re:world ramifications... (Score:5, Insightful)
I am probably going to get modded and/or flamed to oblivion for saying this, but listening to that podcast made me believe that not everything the NSA does is bad.
Of course not. Very few things in life are all black or all white. The NSA is like the neighbor who poisons any dog that comes onto his property, and you're pretty sure he shoplifts, but if you need a hand hoisting an engine or a ride to the store, he's always willing to help.
That doesn't mean he shouldn't be locked up, though.
Re:What's the news here? (Score:4, Insightful)
Right. They've been open about it for years. NSA has a long history in computing.
At one time, going to NSA HQ was very mysterious, and travel expenses were paid with a check from a furniture company. But they gave up on that years ago. Now, like the CIA, they have signs outside.
Until the USSR went down, all NSA really cared about was what the USSR was doing. Anything else had lower priority. After the USSR went down, there were lots of retirements and layoffs. After 9/11, everything changed. Suddenly the threat was from little groups, not a superpower. Huge internal realignment. Much more pressure for timely info (the USSR was a slow-moving opponent) and for data sharing with law enforcement. That's when NSA became more intrusive.
Re:world ramifications... (Score:4, Insightful)
We are what we do. The NSA is doing evil, regardless of what their intentions are.
Obvious Failure of "Profiling" (Score:4, Insightful)
We all know that so called ad targeting works by building up profiles on people intended to categorize their interests -- very much like the NSA's own automated profiling and analysis systems. But the profiling system can't tell the difference between a favorable interest and a disgusted interest (much like they can't tell if you've already bought those shoes you were searching for two weeks ago and so keep showing you ads for shoes).
That they've decided to show the guy recruiting ads because he's been reading articles about how the NSA is a bunch of nationalistic spying assholes is the cherry on top, a perfect demonstration how pervasive surveillance can't actually understand the intent of people and thus will have an overwhelming percentage of false positives.
If real people at the FBI can't even tell the different between someone reporting a threat against themselves and a threat against the FBI [theguardian.com] profiling systems can only automate keystone cop level of surveillance effectiveness.
Re:world ramifications... (Score:5, Insightful)
The choice isn't between having the NSA or flushing that $10 billion down the toilet every year. The choice is between having the NSA or increasing the NASA budget by 50%. The choice is between having the NSA or better endowing social security. The choice is between having the NSA or paying down the national debt.
You're right, not everything they do is bad, but what little good they have done is trivial compared to what $10 billion should have contributed to our society each year.
Re:world ramifications... (Score:4, Insightful)
For all Its faults, the NSA is more of a flawed character than an evil one.
Breaking the law and a patent disregard constitutional rights is a "flaw"? It's not "evil" to make a secret court that makes secret laws that nobody is allowed to see? What the NSA is engaged in is an egregious exercise in government spying and spending "gone wild". Running unchecked and unrestrained. How the hell does anyone get tax dollars approved to build a replica of a Holodeck?
We are not talking about a simple matter of other countries complaining they saw an SR71 blackbird over their air space, or that the shot down a US spy drone that wandered over their borders. We are talking about a government entity which has broken many laws and side-stepped the rules and regulations in place which were designed to prevent this exact thing from happening.
The NSA and it's ilk have set up a system with a generic rubber stamp where they can excuse everything they do because "It got approved, see the stamp?". How is it a "flaw" that the public cannot lie under oath, yet the NSA director is somehow excused from that? No, sorry. I don't see anything reasonable about the "job" they did. Reason left a long time ago and now we have a runaway train doing whatever it wants with no regard to the law. I'm sure there's plenty we don't know about yet.
Re:Give me a break. (Score:5, Insightful)
President Carter make a rule that the CIA can't employ unsavory characters as local operatives (e.g., we can't have an actual terrorist as a mole in a terrorist organization). Our human intelligence took a nosedive and never really recovered. Maybe it's time to fix that (if we haven't already), and just live without the NSA for a while.
I've said it before but: defund the NSA, fire everyone, bulldoze the buildings, and let it serve as an example to other agencies about overreach. Sure, loss of SIGINT will be a problem, but the NSA has become a bigger problem. End it, and start over once you're sure it's really gone.
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Re:world ramifications... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good geeks? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're an idiot.
That was von Braun, for one. For another, Oppenheimer was aghast at the destruction caused by the atomic bomb (he quoted the Bhagvad Gita, "I am become Death -- the destroyer of worlds." after the Trinity Test) and actively campaigned for non-proliferation.
If anything, his sympathies towards the other sides caused him to be a martyr to McCarthyism. Hell, even von Braun commented that, "In England, Oppenheimer would have been knighted."
Oppenheimer is the poster child for how scientists have little control over the political consequences and use of their discoveries, and how the political institutions would happily discard them once they're wrung dry.
Re:world ramifications... (Score:4, Insightful)
Breaking the law and a patent disregard constitutional rights is a "flaw"? It's not "evil" to make a secret court that makes secret laws that nobody is allowed to see?
I think I'm as concerned about the NSA's overreach as the next guy, but it should be noted here that it wasn't the NSA that established those secret courts [cornell.edu] and National Security Letters [cornell.edu]; it was our Congress.
Re:Has the NSA done anything? (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the theories out there is that the downsizing of US SIGINT capability during the 1990's was the reason al-Qa'ida was successful in carrying out 9/11. This has some credibility because even though the FBI was tracking some of the perpetrators of 9/11, the NSA had no information on their intent.
Then there is the fact that SIGINT played a large role in finding the location of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.
No, the idea the NSA is not needed is hopelessly naive. What IS needed is getting rid of the Patriot Act and instituting real oversight.
Re:world ramifications... (Score:4, Insightful)
I said "paying down", not "paid off". 1 cent paid towards the debt is paying it down; $10 billion towards it is still paying it down.
If the NSA budget were zeroed and the money just not spent on anything else, you'd barely notice a change in either the federal budget or the deficit.
If I used my entire paycheck to pay down my mortgage, I'd barely notice a change. I think I'll just stop paying my mortgage then.
Re:I think a certain type of person could work the (Score:2, Insightful)
Which is precisely the problem. We who have forgotten the history of the USSR and East Germany, two surveillance states that collapsed under the institutional paranoia and economic deadweight of their own security bureaucracies, have condemned ourselves to repeat it.
For what it's worth (Cold War kid here), I'll make the tradeoffs as follows:
1) If it saves a region from devastation or prevents the collapse of human civilization, surveil away.
2) If it saves a city or prevents something that takes more than 1M lives, meh, OK, that might be worth giving up freedom. Because we sure as shit won't have freedom under martial law afterwards.
3) If it saves us from 9/11: I'll take the billion dollars and month's worth of automobile accidents any day over the trillions we've wasted since.
4) "Look at how much damage" Boston did? Dude, watch the six o'clock news every friggin' day. If that's the price of freedom, so be it. I'm not scared of terrorists. I'm scared shitless over people who can't do risk assessment.
Everyone's entitled to make their own mental tradeoffs for themselves. Growing up with an armed and capable adversary that could (even if it didn't particularly want to) end civilization with the push of a button, and reading stories of my parents/grandparents wars (in which millions died and any individual battle cost thousands of lives) gave my tolerance for risk-of-death-at-the-hands-of-wartime-enemy vs risk-of-death-due-to-ones-own-totalitarian-government what it is.
I'm not dissing "Kids these days...." -- if you grew up in the '90s, you grew up in an age in which "going to war" meant a few weeks of conflict and fewer than 300 US casuaties, (half of whom died from accidents or hardware malfunction vs. enemy fire!) If that's your idea of war, and if OKC or the Beirut Barracks Bombing was your idea of terrorism, I can't really blame you for saying "never again, even at the cost of our freedom" against 9/11. You just saw something that killed 10 times more Americans than Gulf War I, or any terrorist attack you saw in your lifetime. And it's easy to lose sight of what "our freedoms" mean when you don't have things like the USSR / Iron Curtain / rest of the Warsaw Pact for contrast them against.
I suppose it's a little easier to appreciate our freedoms now that we're gone and we're living in a surveillance state whose capabilities exceed Stalin's wildest dreams. When those who have that power start to abuse it -- and even if it hasn't happened yet, history is pretty clear that it's a when, not an if, and it doesn't matter who -- it's too late.
Re:world ramifications... (Score:4, Insightful)