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How Does the CIA Keep Its IT Staff Honest?
Tootech points out this story for anyone who's been curious about getting that top-secret clearance and the promise of a cushy pension from the CIA, as a reward for decades of blood-curdling, heart-pounding, knuckle-whitening IT service: "Be prepared to go through a lot of scrutiny if you want to work in the Central Intelligence Agency's IT department, says chief information officer Al Tarasiuk. And it doesn't stop after you get your top secret clearance. 'Once you're in, there are frequent reinvestigations, but it's just part of process here,' says Tarasiuk, who also gets polygraphed regularly, though he won't be more specific. For those senior IT managers who are the 'privileged users,' meaning system administrators, 'there is certainly more scrutiny on you,' Tarasiuk says. 'It's interesting: there's so much scrutiny that a normal person might not want to put up with that. But it's part of the mission.'"
What use would the CIA have for honest staff?
By only employing people who are willing to work for money, and paying them well?
I am John Hurt.
"Cushy pension"? Federal Employees get 1% for each year of service i.e. work 30 years and get 30% of your annual salary as a pension. They also get a 4% contribution to a 401(k). Better than nothing, but not really "cushy". Employees who are required to carry guns get a better deal, but TFA had to do with "IT" employees.
But 2008 wants its stories back.
And I thought my companies change management process sucked.
If you mess up, you get waterboarded and if you really mess up you go to Gitmo!
And that's why we trust the CIA.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I don't think most of what the CIA does would qualify as "honest". They're spies, aka liars, thieves and criminals.
Is it that slow of a news day?
Anyone remember the portrayal of US Fed programmers in Snow Crash? So scary it must be true!
Well being put in jail for life without even a trial if they're not honest might have something to do with it.
If you treat your IT staff like shit, it's no wonder you end up with staff that can't keep drones out of enemy hands.
Fuck, if they're already putting the nation's security into the hands of a pseudoscientific carnival trick, why not also use an E-meter?
Keeping them honest is a simple affair, they just remotely monitor the radio emissions coming from their brain's with an A.I.
The rest is just theater.
"Cushy pension"? Federal Employees get 1% for each year of service i.e. work 30 years and get 30% of your annual salary as a pension. They also get a 4% contribution to a 401(k). Better than nothing, but not really "cushy". Employees who are required to carry guns get a better deal, but TFA had to do with "IT" employees.
$150K salary at retirement, 30% = $45K / year guaranteed. That's more than the average working household, so it is pretty cushy. It may even be more than the new IT guy fresh out of college. So each retiree is like a currently employee on the staff.
Plus keep in mind that these people have paid off their house, put their kids through college, etc. So the 30% of your final salary goes a lot farther than you may think.
CIA doesn't need honest emplyees. It needs employees loyal to the institution and the country.
I have always wondered how Microsoft keeps its staff honest. The open source folks have continued to struggled with closed Microsoft office formats with little or no progress in some areas. Are employees subjected to the same treatment?
With all the scrutiny, polygraphs, no doubt surveillance, nobody there would dare do drugs.
Therefore, they aren't the type to come up with original ideas, therefore the place runs on old ideas forever, therefore it becomes a stultified bureaucracy.... ...therefore, they can take in $40B a year and STILL miss 9/11, still get WMDs wrong, and all the earlier stuff in Tim Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes" about never being able to successfully plant moles at any number at any depth into China, North Korea, or Russia.
THEREFORE we need to legalize drugs immediately...to save the CIA. This is to protect America, people!
I expect the CIA effectively keep each other honestly dishonest.
Just remember, the Internet was a Darpa project. It was open and sniffable from its inception. For some...
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Threat of detainment or execution without trial.
If you read about the actual history and accuracy of polygraphs, you will find that they are not "lie detectors" at all, but merely tools of intimidation. (I could cite many, many sources. While not authoritative, the Penn & Teller show "Bullshit" has a very informative episode on the matter. And yes, the show is called "Bullshit" for a reason. Polygraphs are bullshit.)
Polygraphs are used as tools for intimidation in order to interrogate. By themselves, they are worthless. They are security theater, much like the TSA. I really hate to see our country run by people who believe in (or pull) this kind of BS.
"By only employing people selfish and/or stupid enough to want to work for the CIA."
I can assure you they do not hire stupid people.
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I would have more respect for them if they did not rely on an instrument that is easily fooled and has no scientific basis for its use -- the polygraph.
The polygraph is the security industry's equivalent of chiropratic to the medical industry.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
They constantly attempt to entrap each other so know one will ever know if that opportunity in front of them is real or not.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
All others we polygraph.
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$45K salary at retirement, 30% = $15K / year guaranteed. That's more than a two person, poverty-level working household, so it is pretty cushy. It may even be more than the new Walmart stocker drop out. So each retiree is like a currently employee on the staff.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Hopefully good for all of that scrutiny.
It doesn't.
The open source folks have continued to struggled with closed Microsoft office formats with little or no progress in some areas. Are employees subjected to the same treatment?
Having read the Microsoft "Open XML" specification, I'm pretty sure Microsoft doesn't really understand all the details of the classic Office file format, either. Seriously. I'd bet good money there's a lot of old, poorly documented that nobody really understands anymore. It was prolly written by programmers in 1995 who have long since moved on.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I don't think most of what the CIA does would qualify as "honest". They're spies, aka liars, thieves and criminals.
While that's certainly true of the CIA's operational aspects, their IT guys are mostly just IT guys, just like any other organization -- just with higher value IT assets than most orgs. File storage, printing, word processing, spreadsheets, databases, etc., don't change just because the data is classified. Communications (phones, networks, email, etc.) get rather more complicated, due to security, but ultimately they're after things the corporate world is, too -- they just have rather higher security standards than most orgs. But ultimately an Exchange server is still just an Exchange server.
You need a lot of support personnel for every actual spy, or even intelligence analysis. IT, accounting, HR, purchasing, engineers, doc control, etc. Even PR (marketing).
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Fear!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Harassment does not an honest employee make. And lo and behold, these people are anything but honest. So much so that they'll believe anything, including "in order to save the world, we had to destroy it", just to make the pain of all those polygraphs bearable. Extraordinary rendition is but an outlier, but one far less extreme than we'd like to think. There really is much, much murky crap they're pouring out over the world in their own misguided belief they're helping improving it.
When the CIO's name is a both known and 'Al Tarasiuk' no wonder Bradly Manning could download a 1/4 million secret documents to a cd burner.
FFS the CIO (or his family) is an obvious target for kidnap and torture to attempt to suborn him to get information out of him.
... a "vacation" in cuba...?
Leaving only persons who have a good reason to be willing to put up anything to work inside the CIA infrastructure. Like, you know, foreign spies.
We asked Jane Q. Public, "Were you just making things up when you said lie detectors are inaccurate?" Jane said, "No." The lie detector determine... THAT WAS A LIE!
I've attended FBI, CIA, NSA ... uh ... events.
Straight and narrow-fests. Usually boring people. Often from small towns.
They make it clear that your job will usually suck and have nothing to do with what you see on TV or read in books 99% of the time.
You generally do not get to say what you do. Sure, the boring stuff isn't classified, but I've learned it is easier just to never talk about anything. Ever.
The FBI guys who I've met were all boy scouts.
The CIA sends out pretty people. Even the men tended to be pretty. In the back office are regular people.
The NSA ... I can't say.
Low government pay when compared to non-startup corporate jobs. EMC employees would laugh at CIA pay. You can look up the government pay scales. http://www.fedjobs.com/pay/pay.html A G-12 makes less than $80K! The only way to be well paid in the government is to stay there for 30 yrs. I'd call that an IQ test failure. Guess I'm not government employee material. I was earning over G-15 rates at age 35 in the private sector.
BS... Have a friend whom was an all around thug working there...
he had a lot of mental tricks to do it too. he convinced HIMSELF that he wasn't lying, and then he was able to tell the interviewer he wasn't lying without breaking a sweat.
id call his argument structure something like 'post modernism' crossed with lawyer-speak. i dont remember the details but it was something like this:
say you steal 50 grand. you give it to your wife. she buys you a fancy car.
also, it just so happens her parents are rich.
the interviewer asks you 'where did the money come from for the car', 'my wife. her parents are very rich.'.
did you lie? technically, no. you got the money from your wife. and her parents are rich.
tell yourself that over and over, and maybe you will eventually believe it.
now go to the polygraph, you dont even break a sweat.
I saw an actual questionnaire for a similar service position. It said, "Have you ever had sex with an animal?" Honest, it said that.
Table-ized A.I.
(correction: "asked", not "said")
Table-ized A.I.
I got my ts clearance at a young age in the army and used to process these things. God help you if you can't remember a former address, can't get names and contact info for a bunch of people you knew at those places, or don't fill out your paperwork correctly. "Oh, you have to fix this, this, this... this, and this. Just resubmit this giant questionnaire and we'll get it submitted again." Fifteen tries later... "Ok, fix this, this, this... this, and this. See you again tomorrow." The older you are and the more frequently you move, the bigger the headache becomes.
Just think of a payoff: They'll pay you a million dollars for X information. You get caught, go to prison for 20 years at least. That's only $50,000 a year. You could have made a lot more than that as a cleared admin, and avoided a romantic relationship with Bubba.
In reality, they don't usually pay that much for a run-of-the-mill information passer. Jonathan Pollard got $1,500 a month from the Israelis, and got life in prison. Robert Hanssen was a very high level spy, not just an admin, so he got $1.4 million over 22 years, and the rest of his life in prison (where he will die).
And if you think you're so smart that you have a very low chance of getting caught, then you're an idiot. Hanssen himself was a counterintelligence agent, and that helped him go for as long as he did, but he still got caught.
BTW, one of the things they check is unaccounted indicators of wealth, and they do ask friends and neighbors, and check your financials. I remember a new soldier was investigated back in the 80s because he showed up one day with a new BMW 7-series. This wasn't even caught during a reinvestigation, they just noticed. Turns out dad was rich and gave him the car as a reward for joining the Army. With such a clear reason he was okay, but had he not been able to show a solid source for the money he would have been in a whole heap of trouble.
Coke Importing Agency
CIA plane crashes with 4 tons of cocaine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KShM9gbB2ew
Every organization has its people who just run things.
Even the CIA needs admins, desktop jockeys, janitors and window washers who have nothing to do with spying.
But the CIA RQ-170 Sentinel downed by Iranians case is still developing and it doesn't look too good that CIA guys havent' bee too smart lately.
http://theaviationist.com/category/captured-stealth-drone/
“Three U.S. and four Israeli drones captured in Iran to be put on display soon”: Tehran Times says. “Downed” RQ-170 saga continues"
There is some kind of standardization of ID cards.
They *might* have some generic code, you might get "DOD", "DOE" but also a common one is "U.S. Government" for the entire Intelligence Community (which is a term of art referring to quite a number of agencies). I've seen business cards on them with little more than a "U.S. government" identifier and some generic identifiers for email or phone number.
What is indicated pretty clearly by some kind of color & pattern code is (a) authorization level (b) bool isContractor
The most striking thing about the CIA (and many other cards), is that they don't even have the person's *NAME*.
Yes, I have some first hand knowledge, as I was inside the CIA HQ building about 10 years ago and my escort mentioned how the ID cards don't have any names on them, intentionally.
How do spies, and any other branch of government/LEA handle the consequences of lying to others, if they're religious and their religion forbids lying? Is it a simple side-step with the excuse it's for the greater good, or do they really care they're breaking a commandment or tenant of their faith?
It may be the CIA that is getting this treatment, but in another 10 years i can see the average IT guy getting the same treatment, thanks to the homeland security department.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
There have been/are double agents.
I'm amazed at the number of people here who have precise insight into the goings on at the CIA and various other three-letters while having never worked there nor even possessed a clearance. Such intuition must be priceless in other markets such as finance, fortune telling and used car sales. Idiots.
... Guantanamo Bay. Crystal clear water. Luscious beaches. What's not to like?
please excuse my apathy
As long as you're not a f*ck up.
No criminal history, no drug or drinking problems and not up to your eyeballs in debt ( yes excessive debt can disqualify you ) you should have no problems with the clearance. They'll do the background check, talk to your friends, coworkers and neighbors to make sure you're not a loon and that's about it.
You have to keep your nose clean though because if you do anything that revokes your clearance, they'll likely fire you on the spot.
Oh and you'll have to sign a form stating you'll never discuss any classified info on threat of getting a personal prison cell.
Other than having to deal with the security silliness, it's no different than any standard job. Besides, who the hell would even be interested in hearing the details of IT work ? I try to explain what I do to folks and their eyes just glaze over :|
Generally, working for the federal govt in the U.S., for skilled or highly skilled people, means accepting a ~30-year commitment to public service, during which time you get low pay, reasonable insurance, reasonable vacation time, and (theoretically) reasonable treatment from management during your working years. It also means a fair (not guaranteed unless you hired on before about 1983 when the rules changed) shot at a decent retirement package.
Note in the "inb4" category, just so we don't get sidetracked - people who tell you feds are overpaid have an axe to grind and are misusing statistics to prove their point. The fed pays an almost-living wage to bottom end employees, something that inflates the overall payment stats. They also provide decent health insurance with a similar impact on overall per-person compensation stats. For highly skilled or highly educated employees, though, federal pay is generally lousy. As a Unix SA, for example, I turned down multiple offers of employment over the years. I don't think I ever got an offer that would not have, at minimum, tripled my pay. I didn't take any of them because I liked the idea of working for an employer who I felt reasonably sure would still be around to pay me the pension that (among other factors) persuaded me to take the job in the first place.
In return for stability and a shot at a decent retirement, you have to work till you're old enough to retire. Everybody knows it and accepts it when they sign on.
I wouldn't really call that "dog eat dog". What is the retirement like for public employees in your country? How is it so much better that you think of ours as "dog eat dog"?
Yet another perk of public-sector jobs. Work for 10 years and anything remaining on your student loans is wiped clean.
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By a really big bag of $5 wrenches
cb_is_cool knows where his towel is.
I interviewed with the CIA in '98 for a "Consular Officer" position. Basically you live at an American embassy in some shithole country and pretend to be a regular member of the Foreign Service. You spend your time attending diplomatic functions trying to recruit informants. Yes, it really is that ridiculous.
The woman interviewing me was the station chief for Europe. The interview consisted of role playing scenarios like "You're in a car with your informant at night and run over a kid's dog. Do you stop?" (Uhh, duhh, no?) It went downhill from there. The stated salary was $30K/yr. After working for 10 years it might go up to $50K/yr if you manage to avoid disappearing into a foreign prison because, um, it's so hard to tail people going in and out of the embassy.
Anyway the woman was such a mental midget I decided anyone who would put their lives in such a person's hands for $30K/yr would have to be catatonically stupid. I cut the interview short and left. 3 months later there was an article in the New York Times about the Russians arresting an American spy, whose picture was shown. It was the same chick.
How can an agency that entertains such idiocy be anything but a joke?
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
IMHO, the government pension has become a risky proposition, due to politics. As people in private industry loses their pension, there is a lot of jealousy and acrimony over government pensions. At some contractor-staffed federally-owned facilities, they first quit offering pensions for new employees, and now are modifying the pension formula to drastically reduce benefits for on-roll employees under the old plan. In state and local governments it is even worse; I think many municipalities will declare bankruptcy, mainly to repudiate their obligations to their retirees. Our govt. has become dysfunctional and I'm not sure it can really make commitments 30-40 years into the future any more.
In God We Trust, Everyone Else We Polygraph
Once you're in, there are frequent reinvestigations,
Meh. When I fail, I just log in and change my score.
Didn't anyone in the CIA watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off? Or War games?
Have gnu, will travel.
I would have to agree with http://slashdot.org/~Jane+Q.+Public that polygraphs are not accurate at all. The fact they are not admissible in court as evidence is enough proof of the fact they are not a legit form of evidence.
You don't want to send someone to prison on the base of "he showed signs of discomfort when asked about topic XYZ".
It may be entirely reasonable to deny someone employment because "he showed signs of discomfort when asked about topic XYZ" - just in case. Who cares about some false positives when there are millions of potential employees?
And you'll always get some false negatives but any additional test (no matter how silly) increases the cost of preparing them.
Following this line of argument you could argue that all the background checks, interviews, ... don't primarily serve to determine whether your past is clear or not but to test how much you really want to work for the government. Is it just another job for you or are you committed enough to accept very uncomfortable investigations into your private life just so you can serve your country?
The guy's family are in a location known to the CIA. They were proactively placed into protective custody hours before he got his promotion and were replaced with CIA shills. The shills are living the public life of his family while he knows that if he steps out of line, his family die. Sequentially. And when the kidnap attempt comes ... the CIO carries on working in the knowledge that the gun in his family's face is a CIA gun, not the kidnapper's.
Remember, you're talking about agencies and agents who are perfectly willing to murder to get their political master's way. Makes me think of how the German's (generally) kept control of their Sonderkommando. Efficiency and pleasantness are not frequent bedfellows.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
What sort of items that turn up do they reject?
Let's assume that felony crimes of violence are an automatic rejection, but what else is rejected?
Cheating on your wife? Collecting porn? Smoking Pot? Heavy Drinking? Unconventional political attitudes, such as supporting libertarians or something other than conventional two-party candidates (assuming your beliefs are non-treasonous and non-seditious)? Gun ownership? Religious beliefs outside mainstream Catholic/Protestant/Jewish (IIRC, the CIA's original management was anti-Jew, anti-Catholic, too, but that was kind of a typical 1940s prejudice, too).
Are they looking to blackball you for not being a model citizen, or do they just want to *know* about your weaknesses and if they will compromise you?
I figure everyone has vices and selecting people without vices in my experience means picking people who aren't very good at much of anything.
They are looking for things that make you "bribable" For example if you gay (not that there's anything wrong with that) and didn't admit it you would probably be denied. If you were open about it, then no problem. Basically anything they know about that you don't admit is grounds for rejection.
How Does the CIA Keep Its IT Staff Honest?
Does no-one know grammar anymore? I'm not great at grammar, but that just sounds wrong.
*How Do the CIA Keep It's IT Staff Honest?*
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Certainly not to the same degree, but as a sysadmin that runs the trading systems for a broker-dealer in new york I had to agree to background checks and get finger-printed and give access to my private investment accounts which they monitor. Also all e-mail and faxes are saved and a certain percentage read through manually to look for anything suspicious. Some also do recording of the voice calls, as well.
Hmm more paranoia than Mother :-)
They want people who are smart enough to do the job, but who also don't think too much.
That is, you're capable of following orders, of making complex associations required for substantive problem solving, but at the same time will not make the vital connections which would lead to your blinking up from the dream one day declaring, "Waaaait a second. This job is total bullshit. All I'm really doing is treating the masses like livestock."
Such people exist. Smart but stupid all in one package.
Cowardliness is also a prime quality they look for, I'm sure. People who truly fear authority and don't step out of line even if they do have any inconvenient epiphanies.
They're looking for things a little more sophisticated than porn.
At least, that'll be how it where it counts. On the bottom rung where it's just a bunch of morons playing spy, they're just looking for propaganda-believing retards who follow orders and can't be black mailed. "Smart" isn't particularly important at some levels.
At some levels, it's worse than that. The town where one set of my grandparents used to live, Pritchard, Alabama, simply stopped paying their pension obligations. They filed bankruptcy and got it thrown out under a quirk of Alabama law that disallows such filings from any municipality that doesn't have bond debt and are fighting through the courts to get the bankruptcy reinstated. Meanwhile, the pension checks haven't gone out since September of 2009, even though none of them are large and most of them are ridiculously small (under USD$15K/year).
However, federal retirements are on a much better footing. The Civil Service Retirement System (which is what people think of when they talk about feds getting a particularly good pension deal) stopped taking in new members nearly 30 years ago. It was then and remains today a fully-funded system, with current receipts adequate to cover current and future obligations. In fact, the only reason it was stopped was that it was so well funded that the pols in Washington decided to raid the CSRS retirement fund and divert it to the general fund so they could play some accounting tricks and make it look like they had done some responsible budgeting. CSRS always took in enough money to pay for itself and it's destruction is a testament to short-term thinking over long-range planning, kinda like lots of the private sector is doing these days. The replacement for the CSRS, the current Federal Employee Retirement System, is completely different and has only a miniscule pension component. Thus, funding there isn't a problem, either.
City and county retirement systems are in a lot of trouble. States are nearly as bad. I'm surprised that you bring up "contractor-staffed federally-owned facilities" since I wasn't even aware that such places offered any sort of pension. But the bottom line is that, financially at least, there's no reason to expect the federal government to fail to meet its pension obligations for the foreseeable future.
Yes, of course, things could go completely to hell. When the Soviet Union dissolved, lots of pensioners stopped getting checks. The nightly news occasionally had stories about veterans of the Great Patriotic War who were reduced to begging. I see no even slightly likely scenario under which such a thing could come to pass in the U.S. due to financial reasons.
If, however, such a thing were being proposed for political reasons, I think things would be different. Big Labor, AARP and the analog groups for ex-feds would march on Washington, vote the bastards out, and clean their rifles. I doubt it would come to pass.
Yet, after having said all that, I'm a recently retired fed who gets enough of a pension to live on yet I'm still working on starting a new part-time career to boost my savings. I figure you can't be too careful.
In reality it's an interview with a security officer who has done this hundreds or thousands of times and knows how to manipulate people. You've done this zero to a few times. You're not likely to win in hiding dishonest intent when he's trying to pry it out of you.
The machine is just a tool he has, it's not the arbiter of truth.