Then they decided to turn the Big Ear inwards and go to war with US tech companies. Now firms like Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. are building active defenses against the NSA, which means that they're hiring for the same problem domain, with better salaries and benefits, no security checks or polys, and no stigma (and a lot of prestige) attached to the position. As a result, NSA is threatened with losing precisely those talents necessary to keep ahead of foreign adversaries.
The savage irony of this is that both the NSA and tech companies are at a Nash equilibrium that is non-Pareto optimal; NSA loses top-tier candidates, and tech companies have to expend resources to protect themselves from NSA and other threats. An ideal scenario would be for a trusted NSA to work with tech companies to support strong crypto and security, but that's a nonstarter in the political and bureaucratic climate.
Personally, I'd like to see the defensive aspects of the NSA broken out into a separate agency, preferably either cabinet-level or independent, with the singular mission of protecting the security and privacy of all Americans, covering everything from crypto to vulnerability discovery to privacy recommendations and (where applicable) rulemaking. You would assume that NSA would still be in competition with a hypothetical Information Security Assurance Agency for discovering vulnerabilities, but the ISAA would not have the balancing test of "does this vulnerability threaten Americans more than it helps us listen on our adversaries?" Think of it as a FEMA for the cybersecurity age.
I find it hard to believe there's any sort of recruitment shortage. The NSA does today what it did 5, 10, 15, etc years ago. People interviewing for those positions know exactly what they're getting into then the same way they know what they're getting into today. The whole "OMGZ SPYING ON MY MAY-MAYS" sells on here on reddit, but apparantly lots of people don't take that view and instead see sigint as a legitimate need, like having a standing military with nuclear weapons or intervening into foreign countries. Arguably, good sigint means less conflicts and more wins. Hitler's Germany was damaged greatly by sigint hero Alan Turing. Funny how we celebrate Turing, but a modern Turing today would be vilified instantly. The world, if anything, is much more dangerous today than in the 30s considering how many nations have nuclear weapons. Honestly, if I had the choice I'd rather work there than find new ways to deliver annoying click-bait ads at a place like Facebook or get kids hooked on some milquetoast WoW-clone.
The Chinese, Iranian, and Russian sigint guys aren't taking some moral stand either. They're just getting their assess to work the same way we do.
For that comparison to work, we would need a modern Third Reich or World War as well. Tapping into European email in 201x is hardly the same as spying on the Nazis.
Threats to what?
> There is no way to measure its success.
Convenient
> If you oppose it, pick a better reason to base your argument on.
If you support it, pick a better reason to base your argument on.
If success can't be measured then there is no success.
Throughout history, suspicionless surveillance has been carried out by mafioso to oppress and control.
Of your suspicionless surveillance, you assert "this time is different". The assertion fails.
The Nazis could use your arguments word for word on dissenters of the Gestapo.
Where did I do that?
Depends, is a modern Turing a champion of reading all domestic communications?
To Godwin this thread decisively:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/hannah-...
Spying on the rest of the world that you're not currently at war with is not such a cause, it's a travesty, an insult and has the net negative effect of fracturing the world further and reducing the amount of goodwill between NATO allies.
Please do not soil Turing's legacy by trying to conflate the two.
I'm not sure the world is a much more dangerous place than it was in the 1930s, at ground level that's just another appeal to fear, the general consensus seems to be that the world is getting safer rather than the opposite. Unless you live above a bunch of oil in the ground.
The US Military and associated intelligence branches have crafted heros, but also committed atrocities against our own men and women in uniform. That used to be the line they didn't cross.
You can give an enlisted man syphilis and see what happens. You can even overtly target black enlisted men and see what happens.
But you do the same kind of experiment with the civilian population and you are straight fucked.
I guess if we're obliterating that line, then sure, what's the difference? You're either cop or little people.
A long history of human experimentation in the United States says otherwise. Service members have been used as guinea pigs for over a century.
In the public sector we mostly consider employment solely based on its benefits because under US law there is only so much bad shit that your employer is allowed to cause you to endure.
Employment with the US Military or associated intelligence services MUST be considered with the stark fact in mind that a core tenant of your employment is signing over your life. Not to die nobly for just causes. Simply to give over your life for nearly any purpose deemed fit by your superiors.
What fool would take that bargain?
I'm actually not sure if I should have failed it after the second question, which was whether or not I work closely with any foreign nationals. Doesn't everyone in the tech sector? I work closely with a Romanian, a Filipino, and a guy from Sierra Leone. They may all be US citizens now, but i have no idea, so I said "no", after trying to get some guidance from the interviewer (she offered none).
Strangely, after my failed three question phone interview I still got an in person interview request and it took two calls to straighten that out.
If I lived in the Denver or DC area, I'd probably apply again in six months or so (once my one year has lapsed), but I just don't think it's worth moving across the country for a job there.
The foreign nationals question is a matter of seeing how deep your clearance process is going to go. If you're in Kansas and the only people you know are from Kansas and all of your Facebook friends live in Kansas, it's going to make it easy for the FBI agents (who conduct the clearance work) to do the required interviews. If you start listing foreign national contacts, each one of them has to be investigated individually (the ones who are close relatives), and that's a lot of work. It's basically easier to fail someone on that and hire the person in Kansas.
Interesting point about the foreign nationals. Good to know it's not an immediate disqualifier.
http://www.dhra.mil/perserec/adr/ADR_Version_4.pdf
As far as foreign national contact, most of the time, the feds just defer to the wording on standard form 86 (SF-86):
http://www.opm.gov/Forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf
It's long, but gives a pretty clear indication on the kinds of questions asked. Basically, they're looking for foreign contacts for which you've had "close and/or continuing contact" whose nature falls under 4 categories
1. Affection 2. Obligation 3. Influence 4. Common interest
If I recall correctly, that fourth one was added about five years ago. Anyway, check page 59 in the link.
Nitpick (since I just noticed it): general clearance investigations are handled by the Office of Personnel Management; special clearance investigations are handled directly by the program or agency granting the special clearance.
-Financial debt, so all of your finances are inspected
-Family connections, so all of your family is investigated
-Marital affairs, so you're asked about it during the poly
-Pirating software, again asked about it on the poly
...and all sorts of other things. The big thing you hit on is that this isn't very painful unless you try to hide it. If you try to hide something and it comes out in the investigation, you'll almost certainly be disqualified.
Also, polygraphs are pseudoscientific nonsense.
The NSA, at least, is not without imagination. They will have perceived the issue with making a stink about X causes X to be a handle for coercion. Therefore, the NSA wants pot smoking to be in issue they can disqualify people with, they want other arbitrary categories of actions to be disqualification issues. Why? My guess is control: mental health issues and sexual behavior outside of vanilla are pretty darn common. Finding such problems gives the NSA itself a handle on their own people, to coerce things from them.
And as far as "character" goes, haven't we heard enough about that in the past few years to realize that "good character" is just another form of racism/elitism, like "good breeding" or a "gentleman's C" grade at an Ivy League school?
If instead they just decided that if they found out one of their employees smoked pot that they wouldn't care the coercion potential would magically disappear overnight.
But I guess that's too logical for the government to consider.
In Germany you can only ask about drug use if the people will work with heavy machinery. No questions about race, gender, kids, or age are allowed and can be used to file a lawsuit if asked.
The federal police and intelligence agencies will also background check your friends and family. That being said, amongst German IT professionals people working for the government have the image of being a bit slow and only there for the job security. The best graduates certainly don't go there, and because patriotism/nationalism is very low the agencies cannot even advertise with "Do it for your country, if not for the money".
It'd be weird if it weren't disqualifying.
(I think it ought to be 100% legal, but until it is, users are too great a risk)
I suppose you can ask any question you like in a job interview.
It isn't that certain questions are illegal; it's that there are certain bases on which employers may not discriminate - so called protected classes of individuals[1]. If you ask someone a question about whether they are married or pregnant, you might create the perception that you are discriminating on those bases. Not delving into those areas in interviews is merely a prudent HR policy to avoid the appearance of impropriety; actually discriminating on those grounds, however, is illegal.
Job interviews are not the same as security clearance checks (which some govt/govt contractor jobs require). I don't know what if anything is "out of bounds" in the context of those...
[1]: http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/index.cfm
EDIT: For a bit more information on the types of questions you might run into during a clearance check, here's a PDF of the form you fill out, SF86[2]. I don't know how closely they hew to this in the in-person interviews but I've heard anecdotally that the investigators primarily clarify and confirm responses you gave on the clearance form. Note that it is 127 pages long. The first 60 or so pages are basic information about you, your relatives, your marital status, people who know you well, education, personal military history and employment. Here are some of the more interesting sections along with the page number they start on:
- Foreign Contacts (p62)
- Foreign Activities (p66)
- Foreign Business, Professional Activities, and Foreign Government Contacts (p75)
- Foreign Travel (p83)
- Psychological and Emotional Health (p87)
- Police Record (p89)
- Illegal Use of Drugs and Drug Activity (p96)
- Use of Alcohol (p103)
- Financial Record (p109)
- Use of Information Technology Systems (p116)
- Association Record (p119) features the question: "Are you now or have you EVER been a member of an organization dedicated to terrorism, either with an awareness of the organization's dedication to that end, or which the specific intent to further such activities?" along with a form which you can helpfully use to provide the name and street address of the organization as well as any contributions you made:
At a guess that question is only there so you can be prosecuted if the answer you give is in contradiction to what is already known about you. I highly doubt they actually expect to find anything new like this.
There is no compulsion to answer, however.
With the understanding that there's also no compulsion for them to hire you if you don't answer.
Excellent. I see an opportunity here. Apply en-masse and let it go after you get the clearance.
How is a polygraph test stressful? I mean, obviously it's probably stressful just for the fact that some random stranger is going to ask questions, some of them probably pretty personal, but other than that which I think applies to any random stranger (with or without a poly in hand), why exactly did you make that remark? Is there anything out of the obvious that would make it even more stressful?
The only similar thing I Can think about, was this TV show I saw once (pretty shady if you ask me), where a guy and a girl (best friends testing their best-friendship supposedly) where put on a "polygraph" test (as far as they explained, it was just a heart rate detector), and the tv host would then proceed to make personal questions, getting more "intense" and earning more money as the show progressed, losing money everytime the "poly" detected a lie, or winning if it was the "truth".
At the end they asked questions like, "are you in love with her?" and of course, being that a lot of best-friendships were probably just friendzoned-friends, almost always the answer was "yes".
And so the amount of stress of publicly expressing that hidden love, at the risk of (that almost always happened) having the girl answer the same question with a big "no", for a chance to win money, was pretty tacky and stressful.
Is this related to what you were talking (minus the money,k the tv show, the girl... the fun basically)?
The goal of the exercise is to make you fearful, intimidated, and compliant, and to reinforce the government's dominance over you. The polygraph is just a prop. The examiner is the one really measuring you. Even if your saint's halo is still slightly visible at noon on a sunny day, you will always be given the impression that you barely passed.
So it hardly matters that a polygraph is pseudoscience, because the placebo effect is real. If you think you're being objectively measured by a machine, instead of subjectively judged by a man, that makes his job simpler.
Otherwise, it's Iocaine Powder.
(I can neither confirm nor deny whether I have any actual experience with polygraph testing, or whether I know anyone who does.)
I couldn't help thinking that the polygraph might have worked in that situation mainly because he believed it would!
Edit: maybe this also belongs in http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ClapYourHandsIfYo...
Pity, that just about negates your otherwise informative comment.
Pseudoanonymous people posting on the Internet can't be trusted anyway, right?
Not all of them. But I'll make an exception for you ;)
And the contracting companies usually make us wear khakis and polo shirts.
We all envied the ones that worked for companies that let them wear jeans. :/
Now the same contracts are hiring people on at 40-50k, and people are taking the jobs because they already gave up their government spot. The contracting world has pretty much turned inside out because of the upheavals over recent years. Most of the contractors I know are aiming for government jobs now.
There are so many re-competes and re-bids for contracts that are supposed to be multi-year, that pretty much every fucking year a new company comes in and under-bids a contract. The company isn't going to take the hit, so the employees basically get to re-apply for the same position at a lower salary.
The government claims that this system was developed to ensure fairness to the companies bidding on jobs, but it seems an awful lot like the real purpose was to drive employee wages down. Hopefully it doesn't start to drive down private sector wages in the DC area.
FYI, this doesn't happen at Raytheon SI. They're mainly in Florida, Maryland, Virginia, and Texas. They're hiring. Desired skills relate to reverse engineering, disassembly, emulators, JIT, hypervisors, compilers, binary static analysis, and embedded systems. It's a place with extreme flex time, T-shirts and jeans (or shorts even), normally 40-hour weeks with the option for paid overtime if you want it, your choice of desktop OS, real walls (most locations), and lots of mischievous bright nerds with maker attitude.
A lot of the blame lies with the leadership of the organizations that are hiring the contractors. At some places, a government agency will stick with the same company as long as things are going well, at other places, they automatically accept the lowest bid every single year, even though doing it sabotages their own projects and puts people out of work.
Sounds like your company (or at least your part of Raytheon) is willing to fight for its employees. I made the move to private sector a little over a year ago after my entire team was laid-off. Things are so much better now that its hard for me to consider ever working for the government again, but if things change I'll probably look into Raytheon SI first.
We only got involved in big contracts, though. New business that wasn't measured in at least tens of millions was ignored, unless it was an add-on to an existing contract.
Well - NSA _is_ military.
I think you're picking hairs. While NSA is not strictly a military branch, NSA is a defense agency within the DoD. It is not directed by a civilian, but by a commissioned officer of the military. That seems pretty damned close enough to me.
> the vast majority of its member agencies are all civilian agencies
I don't know how you came to this conclusion, as the actual numbers and ratio of military vs. civilian personnel is still classified to the best of my knowledge. To the best of my (circumstantial) knowledge, the ratio for civilian vs. (usually US Navy) military personnel is likely somewhere around 60/40. I couldn't tell you which category is civilian vs. military, though.
> the person who heads it up (Secretary of Defense) is a civilian.
No, the person who heads it up is an Admiral in the Navy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_S._Rogers
The SECDEF oversees the DoD as a whole.
I'd love to know how you came up with your conclusions, as you seem to have some familiarity with the Beltway, because they don't match my experiences.
[EDIT: also you seem to have edited your comment 3 times in less than 5 minutes, without mentioning the fact. Some people consider this rude.]
I'm not saying this to be mean, but you didn't parse my comment properly, so I'll break it down.
>Although this department includes the military forces (minus the coast guard), the vast majority of its member agencies are all civilian agencies, and the person who heads it up (Secretary of Defense) is a civilian.
This department is referring to the Department of Defense. The next sentence refers to its member agencies, not the members of its agencies. The member agencies (the agencies that are a part of the Department of Defense) are mostly civilian agencies, which you can see listed out on the wikipedia page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Def...
In it, you'll see that there are 15 defense agencies, 4 intelligence agencies, and 3 military departments, for a grand total of 19 to 3.
> No, the person who heads it up is an Admiral in the Navy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_S._Rogers The SECDEF oversees the DoD as a whole.
The "it" in that sentence is referring to the Department of Defense -- which was initiated by "this department". The person you linked to DIRNSA, which has nothing to do with what I was saying.
Anything under DoD should be considered military, as it falls under the jurisdiction of the DoD, which is military.
A little circular.
Disclaimer: I never worked at the pentagon, but am a US Army veteran who was in Military Intelligence from 2001-2005.
The NSA has nearly unlimited hiring potential with just the pool of military folks alone that work there. There are constant hiring freezes for a year at a time, because a lot of buildings are over capacity.
If one of these college students were to apply to the NSA through NSA.gov (mandated as the only way someone is allowed into the agency), they would have to apply a minimum of 2-4 times, because the application stays good for about 90 days, and the average applicant waits 6 months to a year to get accepted. This is assuming they're applying straight through without having someone with hiring power pull their application from the queue. After that, the process to get a clearance could take anywhere from another 6 months to 2 years (possibly more in some exceptional cases) and costs the agency about 250k.
So, it goes without saying that bringing onboard a fresh college student who isn't going to even get to walk through the door at least a year after applying, can pale in comparison to bringing on someone who already has a clearance and training. The article assumes that the NSA relies heavily on its external recruitment, but the vast majority of folks working there just change out of a uniform into jeans and a shirt.