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It's Time To Split Up NSA Between Spooks and Geeks
Hugh Pickens writes "Noah Shachtman writes in Wired that most of us know the National Security Agency as the supersecret spook shop that allegedly slurped up our email and phone calls after the September 11 attacks, but not so many know that the NSA is actually home to two different agencies under one roof: the signals-intelligence directorate, who can tap into any electronic communication, and the information-assurance directorate, the cybersecurity nerds who make sure our government's computers and telecommunications systems are hacker- and eavesdropper-free. 'The problem is, their goals are often in opposition,' writes Shachtman. 'One team wants to exploit software holes; the other wants to repair them.' Users want to know that Google is safeguarding their data and privacy. The trouble is that when Google calls the NSA, everyone watching sees it as a package deal. Google wants geeks, but it runs the risk of getting spies, too."
Aren't they smart enough and rich enough to hire their own geeks? SIGINT is the main job of NSA, period. If you want to hire the wolf to guard the hen house, you take the consequences.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Okay, so TFA is arguing that creating a new agency 'that didn’t include the spooks would' avoid conflict and bring about 'acceptance across the government and the private sector'.
But right in the beginning, it says '[Google] wants geeks, but it runs the risk of getting spies' when it contacts the NSA.
If there is no guarantee that Google doesn't end up getting spooks from the NSA, who can say this new agency won't have spooks in there from the NSA?
Am I missing something here, or is there some magical reason why this new agency won't have spooks embedded there, and it should be trusted any more than the NSA?
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
We do not need yet another federal agency. Splitting them in two will only result in two bigger agencies with an ever ravenous appetite for more tax funds.
One of the worst things Bush did post 9/11 was creating the spate of new federal agencies. Can anyone say that their flying experience is actually better after TSA was created? Anyone?
How much good did creating yet another layer of intelligence bureaucracy do us? Did intelligence get any better after we made the Director of Central Intelligence obsolete by creating a Director of National Intelligence? Not one damn whit. It just grew the federal payroll some more, and added more bloat and bureaucracy.
Vital intelligence work needs to be done, but we need to be trimming down these agencies, not creating new ones.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Keeping our systems secure, and breaking into the other guys' systems, are damn near the same job. It is a good thing to have the people responsible for both working together, and maybe trading jobs occasionally. There is no American computer security and Russian computer security and Chinese computer security: there is only computer security, and systems which are more or less secure. The NSA has historically been about the only government agency that really seems to get this, and it would be a real mistake to break it up.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
and you can't have Red Hat without a subscription (well support at least).
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
This is old info, but NSA used to have a big internal division - the important stuff was at Fort Meade, and the less important stuff was at "FANX", the "Friendship Annex" (out near Friendship Airport, now called Baltimore Washington International). Support functions like personnel were at FANX, and still are.
Computer security was at FANX. Which was a problem. Being banished to FANX was bad for your career. The top NSA people didn't go to the computer security side of the house. So computer security languished for years.
All this was back when the USSR was the enemy, and NSA has changed a lot since then. But they still have Fort Meade and FANX, and less important stuff is still at FANX.
For a while, in the 1980s and 1990s, NSA did do serious computer security evaluations. Industry hated it, because products could fail. The original policy was that a company could submit products for evaluation by NSA. In the first round of evaluation, the NSA people told the company what was wrong, and gave them a chance to fix it. The second round was pass/fail; if NSA could break into it, it failed. There was no third round. Some highly secure systems did pass the tests, but they were not mainstream systems.
The process is now more "industry friendly". Evaluations are made by outside labs, paid by the companies being evaluated. Companies can keep trying over and over until they pass. Failures are not publicized. There are versions of Windows that have passed some level of Common Criteria testing.
The "geeks and spies" division in the article is bogus. NSA is all geeks. (Mostly the middle-aged federal employee version thereof.) It's buildings full of people working at desks. There are no "NSA agents". The spies and the guys with guns are at CIA, FBI, DIA, and in the intelligence units of the armed services.
SIGSTOP is handled by KAOS.
SIGCONT is handled by CONTROL.
SIGHUP? It's handl#`%${NO CARRIER
Careful there. Being good at math---being capable of learning higher level math concepts---is not the same as having taken the time to do so. A lot of very people don't bother going beyond a certain point simply because their primary interests lie elsewhere. And to some degree, being too analytical can actually hurt your ability to write good software.
Writing software is not an entirely analytical process. It has some analytical components, particularly in understanding how the parts fit into the whole. However, creating the code itself is also an artistic process in many ways. You must consider all the different ways of doing something and choose the best one, based not just on the current needs, but also on a general feeling about what you might want to do with the code in the future without going overboard.
Thus, good programming requires a very delicate balance between analytical abilities and creative/artistic abilities. Analytical skills are necessary, but not sufficient.
I would actually argue that programming skills tend to be more strongly correlated with musical ability than math education. Good musicians are generally good at analytical tasks, including math, but also have the artistic ability needed to take that critical step back and pay attention to the system design, the UI, etc.
I've always found it staggering how many of my coworkers are musicians. In my department alone, it's at least one in three, and many of the people who aren't musicians have kids who are. Whenever we have a department party, we usually get together a group of people and jam. And my previous employer was the same way.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.