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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.'"
Enough advertising overcomes any negative consequences of your actions.
Given that the NSA is recording everything, and probably has broken all your encryption keys, you would think the NSA would already know who to target for employment. Thus the obvious conclusion is that these ads are fakes or honeypots.
Sometimes we will flesh these immoral or illegal business plans out a little bit, realize just what is involved in the process, and then sigh, "I could be rich if I didn't have any ethics."
Many people make the news every day. Most often these include major scams and crimes or immoral behavior.
Yes, there is work to be had and money to be found in those activities, and you can make global news from them. If you don't have any ethics.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
There's a podcast interviewing former NSA officer Brian Snow that was recorded before the Snowden leaks, and provides some valuable perspective on what the NSA does. I am probably going to get modded and/or flamed to oblivion for saying this, but listening to that podcast made me believe that not everything the NSA does is bad.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Boots on the ground? It always worked before we had high tech. I mean, before there were phones, they had to plant people inside an organization to learn its secrets unless they just happened to get lucky enough to catch a courier. The fact that communication channels are back to being moderately secure is uninteresting. It's really just a correction of a weakness that high tech introduced in the first place.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
'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.
That's silly/ There are not many headlines in the last few years that the NSA is proud of. And if you work at the NSA and had a hand in something that made front page headlines, you probably aren't allowed to talk about it anyway.
My friends who work at the NSA hate when the NSA comes up as a topic, because it is never good news. They just have to hide their heads and walk out of the room. Sometimes that is because they are not allowed to talk about it. Other times it is because they are sick of hearing the flak.
No, you would not. Once upon the time, I worked for an organization named "Department of the Citizens' Safety". It was in a different time, in a different country, and I had not had a chance to say no - I knew computers, a few Western languages, and had passed (or failed) a bunch of IQ and psychology test. I had barely gotten my first star, and had only a few missions under my belt when the government fell, and I found myself out on my ass, forbidden from holding any government jobs at a time when the only legal jobs were either government, or you had to create them yourself.
I'm fine now. I am neither dead, nor in organized crime, the way three quarters of my colleagues ended up. I know, now, that I was working for some pretty evil people, and what I was doing was pretty evil. I have pretended being a priest, and wiped my ass with the secret of confession, I have infiltrated literary clubs, and framed the most brilliant of their members for not-so-petty crimes, and I even killed in the line of duty once. It's all in the past, and I'm not even bothering to hide my IP - if you find out who I am, I'll just tell you that I was making shit up - on the internet, no one knows you are a dog.
That said. Never in my life, not before, not since, had I felt that my life was so simple, that what I was doing was so right, that I was going to bed with such a clear conscience. And of course, never have I felt as powerful and untouchable, but that's a much easier state to achieve.
When you work for this kind of organization, there is a support structure, a camaraderie, an atmosphere that insures that you are either out before you actually start, or that you are happy and confident with what you are doing, and the only real people are your colleagues. Well, at least it was for me, then. But I doubt the US NSA is testing, vetting, training and supporting their personnel less than my old country did in the late eighties.
Really? The USSR paranoia was such that moderate socialist governments in Latin America were overthrown with the help of said agencies. Result? Military juntas in the Western hemisphere. Compare and contrast this with the Scandinavian countries, which were just too inconvenient to get at for that sort of thing. The Swedes certainly had some choice words for the US at the time; but it just wasn't practical to do anything about them. The USSR didn't invade Scandinavia. It was more trouble than it was worth; but I digress.
The proxy war in Latin America have an impact today, beyond the dictatorships and bloodshed. The popularity of a radical like Chavez is attributed to this somewhat. The idea is that if moderate socialism is going to get you punished by the CIA, you might as well go full bore and form alliances with Cuba and various other countries that hate the USA. So what is all this about keeping the peace?
OK, so the agencies just shit in our own hemisphere, right? Wrong. Google the history of Iran the last 50 years. Wow, just wow. It's amazing that there are any Iranian people left who still like us; but there are because the ideals of the USA are powerful, even if the practice isn't. There's a lot of other crap in the Middle East and south Asia, those are just examples. Oh, the British were part of that too. I'm sure MI-6 or MI-69, or whatever it is they call themselves were all up in it too.
I bet we still don't know the half of how these 3-letter ass holes are meddling in world affairs in ways that have nothing to do with "keeping the peace" and everything to do with the selfish interests of people in power at the time, or some combination of "this will be good for us, and yeah, as a side effect it'll keep our enemies in check a bit even if it kills 100 million brown people".
Yeah. Kept the peace... riiiiight.
not every godwin instance is bad.
Godwin isn't supposed to be bad in the first place: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."
It's a simple observation. It only posits that such comparison occurs. It doesn't say whether such comparisons are good or bad at all.
Many people think Godwin's law is "Ha! You used the N word! You just lost the argument." or "If you bring up the Nazis you ruin the discussion" (what GP did in this case).