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The NSA Is Looking For a Few Good Geeks
itwbennett writes "Dan Tynan noticed something curious when he was reading a TechCrunch story (about Google's mystery barges, as it happens). There was a banner ad promoting careers at the NSA — and this was no ad-serving network fluke. Tynan visited the TechCrunch site on three different machines, and saw an NSA ad every time. In one version of the ad, a male voice says, 'There are activities that I've worked on that make, you know, front page headlines. And I can say, I know all about that, I had a hand in that. The things that happen here at NSA really have national and world ramifications.'"
"The things that happen here at NSA really have national and world ramifications."
Like making the rest of the world distrust and hate the USA.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
At this point, no "good" geek would work for the NSA.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I looked into the NSA and the CIA. neither pay anywhere near what the private sector pays. Both want to pump you up on "Doing your national duty", "Serving your country", and/or "Protecting your fellow Americans"
If they want IT talent, they need to pony up the cash.
Post WWII the NSA/CIA and intelligence agencies of the free world have been vital for keeping the peace. I don't see that changing anytime soon. We are all likely alive at least in part due to their actions.
Seriously? Improving it as in finding holes that they can exploit and tell no one else about? Or spending millions on research into how to create holes they can hope to get included as encryption standards?
From the link above:
The N.S.A.'s Sigint Enabling Project is a $250 million-a-year program that works with Internet companies to weaken privacy by inserting back doors into encryption products. This excerpt from a 2013 budget proposal outlines some methods the agency uses to undermine encryption used by the public.
Enough advertising overcomes any negative consequences of your actions.
Pretty much this.!
By "owning" it in advertising and public speeches and press releases, they hope to pull a "Toyota" maneuver.
(When Toyota was facing run-away vehicles and brake problems with spectacular crashes, they began an ad campaign touting their safety. They are still at it today with a drumbeat of ads telling how safe their cars are and totally ignoring the massive recalls they were forced into. I suspect Toyota learned the technique from Iomega which did the same thing in the face of their Famous Click of Death drive series).
I predicted this some months ago. I suspect going forward they will just start saying in effect: "Yeah, we read your mail. Get over it." Now that its out in the open, they will become bolder and brasher, and no mere legal barriers will stand in their way, (not that they ever did). There are just enough useful idiots out there that believe this is a "good thing" that the NSA will probably get away with this tactic.
Technical solutions are going to have to be devised, better encryption, multi-path routing, etc. And instead of welcoming their contributions, crypto developers are going to have to understand that they can't be trusted.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
That's a very myopic view of the situation.
People with expertise in data systems have a wide range of opinions and come from a variety of backgrounds. There is no monolithic community that is implied with possession of this knowledge.
Even if you are in the subset that supports Snowden you don't have to have the opinion that what the NSA does is fundamentally wrong. It may be that all it really needs is more enlightened political leadership and restructured laws. After all even the most ideal free societies have opponents and will have a need to protect themselves to ensure their continuation.
Right. They've been open about it for years. NSA has a long history in computing.
At one time, going to NSA HQ was very mysterious, and travel expenses were paid with a check from a furniture company. But they gave up on that years ago. Now, like the CIA, they have signs outside.
Until the USSR went down, all NSA really cared about was what the USSR was doing. Anything else had lower priority. After the USSR went down, there were lots of retirements and layoffs. After 9/11, everything changed. Suddenly the threat was from little groups, not a superpower. Huge internal realignment. Much more pressure for timely info (the USSR was a slow-moving opponent) and for data sharing with law enforcement. That's when NSA became more intrusive.
We all know that so called ad targeting works by building up profiles on people intended to categorize their interests -- very much like the NSA's own automated profiling and analysis systems. But the profiling system can't tell the difference between a favorable interest and a disgusted interest (much like they can't tell if you've already bought those shoes you were searching for two weeks ago and so keep showing you ads for shoes).
That they've decided to show the guy recruiting ads because he's been reading articles about how the NSA is a bunch of nationalistic spying assholes is the cherry on top, a perfect demonstration how pervasive surveillance can't actually understand the intent of people and thus will have an overwhelming percentage of false positives.
If real people at the FBI can't even tell the different between someone reporting a threat against themselves and a threat against the FBI profiling systems can only automate keystone cop level of surveillance effectiveness.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
One of the theories out there is that the downsizing of US SIGINT capability during the 1990's was the reason al-Qa'ida was successful in carrying out 9/11. This has some credibility because even though the FBI was tracking some of the perpetrators of 9/11, the NSA had no information on their intent.
Then there is the fact that SIGINT played a large role in finding the location of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.
No, the idea the NSA is not needed is hopelessly naive. What IS needed is getting rid of the Patriot Act and instituting real oversight.
Which is precisely the problem. We who have forgotten the history of the USSR and East Germany, two surveillance states that collapsed under the institutional paranoia and economic deadweight of their own security bureaucracies, have condemned ourselves to repeat it.
For what it's worth (Cold War kid here), I'll make the tradeoffs as follows:
1) If it saves a region from devastation or prevents the collapse of human civilization, surveil away.
2) If it saves a city or prevents something that takes more than 1M lives, meh, OK, that might be worth giving up freedom. Because we sure as shit won't have freedom under martial law afterwards.
3) If it saves us from 9/11: I'll take the billion dollars and month's worth of automobile accidents any day over the trillions we've wasted since.
4) "Look at how much damage" Boston did? Dude, watch the six o'clock news every friggin' day. If that's the price of freedom, so be it. I'm not scared of terrorists. I'm scared shitless over people who can't do risk assessment.
Everyone's entitled to make their own mental tradeoffs for themselves. Growing up with an armed and capable adversary that could (even if it didn't particularly want to) end civilization with the push of a button, and reading stories of my parents/grandparents wars (in which millions died and any individual battle cost thousands of lives) gave my tolerance for risk-of-death-at-the-hands-of-wartime-enemy vs risk-of-death-due-to-ones-own-totalitarian-government what it is.
I'm not dissing "Kids these days...." -- if you grew up in the '90s, you grew up in an age in which "going to war" meant a few weeks of conflict and fewer than 300 US casuaties, (half of whom died from accidents or hardware malfunction vs. enemy fire!) If that's your idea of war, and if OKC or the Beirut Barracks Bombing was your idea of terrorism, I can't really blame you for saying "never again, even at the cost of our freedom" against 9/11. You just saw something that killed 10 times more Americans than Gulf War I, or any terrorist attack you saw in your lifetime. And it's easy to lose sight of what "our freedoms" mean when you don't have things like the USSR / Iron Curtain / rest of the Warsaw Pact for contrast them against.
I suppose it's a little easier to appreciate our freedoms now that we're gone and we're living in a surveillance state whose capabilities exceed Stalin's wildest dreams. When those who have that power start to abuse it -- and even if it hasn't happened yet, history is pretty clear that it's a when, not an if, and it doesn't matter who -- it's too late.