Those young people look strongly to the culture defined in large part by conferences like Defcon and BlackHat in order to make their choices. For many of them, the trip to LV is the highlight of their year. If the culture of those events changes to be substantially hostile to the NSA and its employees, I can believe that young people in that demographic would at least think twice about joining the NSA.
Basically, I think keynotes like this are part of a cultural war for this community, and I think it's an important one.
Wow. That's really above and beyond the call of duty. Thanks for being one of the good guys. Sometimes it doesn't feel like there are any left.
I also wish that Good Will Hunting were required viewing, if only for the NSA monologue.
I think it's also worth mentioning that while sometimes indistinguishable, BlackHat != Defcon, even if tptacek wants them to be.
Abu Dhabi anyone?
Given the nature of the technical problems they face, they would have to be pretty incompetent to not be good at recruiting from engineering universities.
"Would you rather build yet another CRUD app, or build systems that trawl through 20+ TB of data every day?"
Obviously there are ethical issues, but peoples' ethics are much more pliable than most of us like to believe.
The irritating thing about this is that most of us aren't taught ethics. Most people don't take philosophy courses. Most people don't take civics courses. We're expected to just figure it out through osmosis.
It's not about pliability. Most people never actually develop their own approach to ethics.
I suspect that one could teach an excellent non-religious Sunday School class by only asking difficult questions. The only people who scare me more than people who have never thought much about ethics are the ones who think they know The Answer.
These are all huge opportunities to teach ethics. We don't take them, because ethics isn't a marketable skill and has always been an implicit lesson. So we wrote standards and tests and teach to those and now here we are. Most people who graduate from high school do so believing that democracy is a flawed-but-least-flawed model of government they just have to endure, that history consists of great figures who dwarf the capabilities of the little people, and that actually understanding the breadth of our social fabric is pretty much impossible.
Ethics? Ethics is whatever doesn't piss off your best friend and still gets you laid.
I took Ethics as an elective during my C.S. undergrad and I think it's still in the top 3 of the most-formative individual courses of study I've ever undertaken. I'd highly highly recommend people take ethics or philosophy classes, if only to see how even the simplest scenarios can have complex dilemmas.
To draw an analogy, most programmers can write code. But programming class isn't really about teaching a language's order of operations or explaining its particular grammar: the value of a programming class has to do with its explanations of modularity and data encapsulation, of structuring flow and conceptualizing objects. Then examples are provided that exercise these explanations so that you can apply them in future situations.
E.g., the nice person at the mortgage issuer said the loan was good for them, so they just signed what he told them. And the mortgage guy was just doing what his boss told him. And that boss was just following the incentive plan set up. And the people buying the mortgages in bulk seemed happy with them, as did the ratings agencies. But in my view, most or all of them acted unethically; one can't swim in the mud and come out clean.
Or take a look at the content of a medical ethics class: http://web.missouri.edu/~bondesonw/MedicalEthicsSyllabus.htm...
Even if everybody wants to do the right thing, what the right thing is hard to figure out. Ethics classes force people to think things through. They can't make a sociopath healthy, but they can help everybody else to sort out right from wrong in complicated situations.
Your write-up of Alexander is spot on. He has been referred to both the most powerful and the most feared man in the world.
Again, the truth is simple: it was a press op. The event was corporate enough that nobody was going to throw pies at him, but just countercultural enough that he could be assured that someone would make him look better by heckling.
It was said, which is basically confirmed with this latest revelation, that he has all the information on everyone and can blackmail anyone....
I am trying to recall where I heard that though, originally.
"I’ve been tough on Spitzer, but we can’t forget that the reason he got in trouble was because of the new NSA domestic surveillance apparatus that was so brilliantly depicted in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Here’s the Lede.
Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon
anti-terrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data
about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious
patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on
Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks.
But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National
Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance,
has been building essentially the same system.
I haven't actually seen the Black Hat talk yet, but I can imagine the audience does not compare favorably to another recent PR event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fawN4OZEt-Y
This kind of thing helps build up the conscious and unconscious associations in the minds of many that favor the NSA a great deal.
To the extent that this audience has any engagement with public policy, that engagement is likely to take a Ron Paul-ish flavor.
Notice how he wore his uniform this year instead of something more casual like he did at last year's Def Con. I agree, this was very carefully orchestrated to help discredit his detractors.