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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
Enough advertising overcomes any negative consequences of your actions.
They fire everyone, and now they have to hire people? Imagine that.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
why the NSA would need to seek out new team members, you would think they already know who the brightest and best are from the data collected!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
At this point, no "good" geek would work for the NSA.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
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.
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.
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
Have gnu, will travel.
I know this former SysAdmin in Russia who had to resort to tech support FFS. Already has clearance. He'd be just what you deserve.
If you want to apply for a job at the NSA, just pick up the phone. Any phone.
There's an American dude named Edward, currently hanging out in Russia, who's currently looking.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Working for the NSA or any of their ilk is probably like any other job: day-to-day routine stuff and some really cool shit. With, of course, the proviso that you can never breathe a word of it to anybody, and they'd rather you not discuss the fact that you even work there.
The MI5 recruiting web site discusses some of this. If you want the approval of others on what a neat job you have, think again. This certainly limits the pool of available candidates. I wonder what it means for the intelligence community in general.
Hang on a sec...there's somebody at the door. GIDYW*(YW*DHNDW
NO CARRIER
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.
'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.
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.
That was then. This is now. Most likely they spied on the USSR, and those people are retired or dead by now. Also, I'd like some verifiable proof, after all they are an agency that sees no need to tell the truth, before I go all gushy on how the agency of lies. If the proof shows that some people there had been amazing in the past then I would be sad for that since the NSA would have fallen since then, if not it's just gone from ineffective to horrible and ineffective.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Do we really have proof we can verify that the NSA is actually worth having around?
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
"'There are activities that I've worked on that make, you know, front page headlines."
Though not always in a positive light. Come join us and be part of the problem!
Their employment ad slogan should be: We know you want to... we really do know this.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
I suppose I may click through to see what the actual ad said, because the person above suggested that it was at least indirectly addressing the Snowden situation, but for years I've seen them heavily active in recruitment and even small business outreach. If you go to a technical conference expo, it wouldn't be a surprise to see them have a booth, or the CIA, or FBI, or whatever. I think most people don't realize how big of a place the NSA is. Like all other large institutions (National Institutes of Health, any of the National Labs, all universities) they have divisions that specialize in work on this or that, so this group over there might be involved in the data surveillance thing, but these groups over there are doing completely different things. Any ad from them to recruit you to come work for them is going to say you'll do real cool work, and it will have an appeal to a sense of God and country. How else are you supposed to do the sell?
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.
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.
An old joke nearly served. The NSA is not a place where God coddles his minions.