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NSA Recruitment Drive Goes Horribly Wrong
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian is running a story about a recent recruitment session held by the NSA and attended by students from the University of Wisconsin which had an unexpected outcome for the recruiters. 'Attending the session was Madiha R Tahir, a journalist studying a language course at the university. She asked the squirming recruiters a few uncomfortable questions about the activities of NSA: which countries the agency considers to be 'adversaries', and if being a good liar is a qualification for getting a job at the NSA.' Following her, others students started to put NSA employees under fire too. A recording of the session is available on Tahir's blog."
They get "targets" handed down, and don't decide who is an "adversary."
So we are all targets.
Great.
These are people doing a job.
So were the Stasi.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
No, they are government employees, which according to our HIGHEST LAWS means they answer to US the PEOPLE. If they can't handle people asking them some hard questions, then it's a good chance they know that they are doing things they shouldn't.
Now no one beat them up, no one attacked them. But these "recruiters" jobs is to spread propaganda, and it's about time people started calling them out on it.
And yes physically attacking a cop just because they're a cop is a horrible idea. But asking a cop to abide by their OATH to Protect and Serve, and calling them out on it verbally when the police office they work in is breaking the law? There's nothing wrong with that, as perhaps they shouldn't let their fellow officers break the law in the first place.
Those that hold themselves up over others as authorities, or as law, should also be held to the strictest standards.
What utter bullshit. You can't be a "nation of laws" when the laws apply differently to different subsets of the nation, when you're not allowed to know how the law works, and when those enforcing the law are above it.
If you want to keep sucking off your jackbooted masters, you'll need a new sound bite to try to excuse it. That one stopped working decades ago.
>We are a nation of laws, not men
Lol! Really? So when is James Clapper going to be charged with contempt of congress for telling them that the NSA isn't spying on millions of Americans? When are the people in the previous administration going to be held responsible for ordering torture - also a felony? We ceased being a nation of laws a while ago.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
You're never going to make it at that rate. Mother Theresa has been criticized for some time. Perhaps most amusingly by Penn and Teller on their BS show where she is described as a fraud, a fanatic and a fundamentalist, corrupt, nasty, cynical and cruel by Christopher Hitchens.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Asking who they consider adversaries is excellent journalism. I'd actually like to hear an answer to that question.
She was unprofessional as a journalist and came off as immature as well. These people weren't squirming, they were just answering this bull dog's questions as best they could without getting fired in the process. She was clearly interested in painting them in a negative light so I would not attribute journalist credentials to her in this exchange. They did clearly state that policy makers hand down the requirements of their job--in other words the NSA doesn't choose targets the politicians do. End of story really. She seems angry.
I can't comment on this apart from the partial transcript, because the blog is down. But from what i read, it was perfectly acceptable behaviour from a journalist. Perhaps you are not familiar with journalists who ask hard, uncomfortable questions to someone's face. If you are in the US, you are probably used to interviews where the questions are vetted beforehand, and "questioning" is done in the absence of the questioned in clearly biased opinion broadcasts. Professional journalism in a functioning democracy consists of asking people hard questions to their face, and either have them answer them fully or partially, make a promise to give an answer if they don't know, or obviously refuse to answer them. An important part of that sentence is the bit allowing them to answer the questions; "opinion" televeision does not allow that. The only time I saw an american president being asked hard unscheduled questions in a live interview, it was a foreign journalist who later received death threats for being "rude" enough to ask the president a question he had not agreed beforehand was an acceptable one for him to answer. And you call yourselves the land of the free.
...and yet you guys still invaded Iraq.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
We are a nation of laws, sure... Secret laws overseen by secret courts who round up people and hold them in secret prisons. Hard to be proud of these laws.
A functioning democracy needs the voters to be sufficiently aware of what their elected officials are doing to be able to be informed voters. Adopting an attitude of only sharing with the country what you have to, instead of only hiding what you have to undermines the whole logical argument supporting the concept of a self governing populace.
Oh well.
We are a nation of laws, not men. If you don't agree with the actions of a governmental organization then you need to lobby your governmental representatives with your views.
You also need to accept that your views might not be the majority and that, to some extent, we're a country of majority rule.
Freedom does not depend on majority rule. In fact, it frequently stands against it. That's what the "tyranny of the majority" means.
Desegregation was unpopular. Interracial marriage was unpopular. Letting groups like the KKK and Communists have speak their minds was unpopular. Burning draft cards was unpopular, and burning the flag in protest still is. Keeping church out of state is unpopular. The right to marry whoever and however many people you want is unpopular.
Interring Japanese and German citizens during WW2 was popular. Laws requiring everyone to salute the flag regardless of minority religious belief were (and still are) popular. Prohibition was popular -- at first. Racially restrictive housing covenants were popular in the communities that "benefited" from them.
If polls today show that a slim majority support the NSA spying on us, then remember that equivalent numbers sat out the revolutionary war or actively aided the British. The majority is not always right. The majority does not always stand for real freedom -- all they want is the freedom to keep living their narrowly-focused, myopic lives in the same day to day way that they currently do, and to hell with everyone else.
I think most Americans would gladly vote in a dictator if that dictator established that everyone had to live the way that they think people should, if they called it the "freedom" to do so. History is filled with peoples who chose to do just that.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
HR recruiters are a potential employee's first contact with a company and ought to be able to answer any reasonable questions a potential employee might have. "Who does your agency consider an adversary," is a valid question to ask of an agency that's trying to recruit you. It's akin to asking a business, "Who do you consider a potential customer?"
It's a core function of an organization's representatives to have answers to these simple questions and understand the organization's purpose. Even without the current situation the NSA is in, this sort of thing is something that a potential recruit may be curious about. I'm surprised they didn't have an answer ready for it.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
The normal rule of gunnery is to shoot, and then whatever you happen to hit: call that the target. ;-) With terrorism, whoever you missed is the target. And whoever you hit, is your weapon against that target. But in order to work, it requires the cooperation of the target. If the target does not choose to react fearfully, then the terrorism does not accomplish its objective.
No. The goal of carjacking is to get a ride; the goal of robbery is to obtain value. Deciding to not fear it, does not deny your adversary his goal.
But terrorism is about persuading the survivors, the technically-not-victims. Nobody ever carjacks in order to get the next car to lock their doors. Nobody commits armed robbery in order to manipulate a third party (movie script counter-example: Die Hard, but the FBI was manipulated as part of a "Briar Patch" strategy, rather than terrorism(*)).
e.g. Not Terrorism: "Your tank factory and its workers are gone. This gains me a numeric advantage in next month's tank battle." Terrorism: "Your tank factory and its workers are gone. Surrender or else I'll wreck more of your expensive factories and kill more of your workers."
(*) Does this happen in real life? What believed acts of terrorism were actually not?
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