NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy agency's hiring spree

Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by lern_too_spel on Sunday February 05, 2023 @11:20AM (#34666083)

If you're smart enough to work in BigTech, you're smart enough to understand the programs, unlike Snowden. If Snowden had just leaked documents about the telephone metadata program, the only extant illegal US government program in the entire trove of documents he gave away, he would be sitting pretty in the US with a book deal. Instead, he misunderstood the PRISM slides, which drove him to leak documents about systems the US had compromised in China in a failed attempt to gain asylum in Hong Kong, and now every computer literate person knows he's an idiot, and the US government brands him a traitor.

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Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by kilgnad on Sunday February 05, 2023 @11:23AM (#34666110)

I don't think most people (programmers included) followed it in detail as closely as you. Care to elaborate on Snowden's misunderstanding or prism?

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Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by samdcbu on Sunday February 05, 2023 @11:37AM (#34666248)

During the first days of the Washington Post’s reporting on the Snowden documents, the outlet misreported the mechanism for how PRISM obtained it’s data. It was initially reported, seemingly based on Snowden’s misunderstanding of PRISM, that the NSA has a direct connection into the servers of Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. That wasn’t actually true, as the data for PRISM was obtained through Section 702 requests the FBI sent to tech companies which was a practice established in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

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Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by hulitu on Sunday February 05, 2023 @12:39PM (#34666806)

> That wasn’t actually true, as the data for PRISM was obtained through Section 702 requests the FBI sent to tech companies which was a practice established in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

Nice. Not thrilling, but nice. I'm really sure that how they are working because i read it somewhere. /s

Then again ? Why do they need to tape telecom operators ?

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Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by lern_too_spel on Sunday February 05, 2023 @11:27AM (#34666141)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34510696

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Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by notinfuriated on Sunday February 05, 2023 @11:23AM (#34666107)

> and now every computer literate person knows he's an idiot

So if I don't "know" that he's an idiot, then I am computer illiterate. Great argument.

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Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by lern_too_spel on Sunday February 05, 2023 @11:34AM (#34666208)

Fair. I misspoke. Every computer literate person who looked at the documents Snowden leaked instead of just the batshit interpretation of the documents he gave to Greenwald knows he's an idiot.

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Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by notinfuriated on Sunday February 05, 2023 @11:40AM (#34666286)

Fair correction. Your other linked comment describing why was helpful. Thank you.

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Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by ChuckNorris89 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @11:43AM (#34666324)

>If you're smart enough to work in BigTech, you're smart enough to understand the programs, unlike Snowden.

There's really no such proof for this kind of casualization. To get in to big tech you mostly need to grind leetcode, a known set of problems that have already been solved and well documented. I met plenty of people who can grind leetcode but aren't really good at many other basic things in life like boiling some pasta or understanding why women's bathrooms have tampons. Just because you can grind leetcode, doesn't make you smart at everything else.

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Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by lern_too_spel on Sunday February 05, 2023 @11:48AM (#34666377)

That's all you need to do to get hired in BigTech, but to work in BigTech, you need to understand system diagrams and be able to describe the pieces involved. This is exactly the thing that Snowden couldn't do, which put him in the situation he now finds himself in.

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Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by astrange on Sunday February 05, 2023 @01:01PM (#34667083)

I'm in big tech and don't know what that is, know anyone else who knows what that is, and doubt my mostly-older-than-me coworkers are not just hiding it from me.

I mean, I know it's a Blind meme, but I assume they just made it up.

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Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by giardini on Sunday February 05, 2023 @12:20PM (#34666645)

"...and the US governor brands him a traitor...."

Ha, ha! It's the little things that mark a poster as natively non-English speaking. But I see you corrected it quickly!

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Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by lern_too_spel on Sunday February 05, 2023 @01:34PM (#34667436)

You're right that autocorrect doesn't speak English. It usually swaps one word in for another, often apostrophe errors but occasionally errors with larger edit distances like this one.

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Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by qualudeheart on Sunday February 05, 2023 @01:03PM (#34667107)

Could you describe what he misunderstood in greater detail?

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Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by lern_too_spel on Sunday February 05, 2023 @02:36PM (#34668264)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34510696

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