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The NSA Has an Advice Columnist
First time accepted submitter DTentilhao writes "On Friday, Glenn Greenwald's new website The Intercept published a number of internal NSA documents that didn't necessarily reveal any great state secrets, but instead cast some light on the NSA's office culture. Those documents, leaked by former security contractor Edward Snowden, were actually from an advice column series, written by a 20-year veteran of NSA management under the pen name 'Zelda.'" Here's the Intercept report.
You and your co-workers could ask [the supervisor] for a team meeting and lay out the issue as you see it: “We feel like you don’t trust us and we aren’t comfortable making small talk anymore for fear of having our desks moved if we’re seen as being too chummy.” (Leave out the part about the snitches.) Tell him how this is hampering collaboration and affecting the work, ask him if he has a problem with the team’s behavior, and see what he says. Encourage him to come directly to the employee in question if he has a concern (rather than ask a third party to gather intel for him).
Trust is hard to rebuild once it has been broken. Your work center may take time to heal after this deplorable practice has been discontinued, but give it time and hopefully the open cooperation you once enjoyed will return.
Ironic, Big Brother.
From he TFA:
Here’s the scenario: when the boss sees co-workers having a quiet conversation, he wants to know what is being said (it’s mostly work related). He has his designated “snitches” and expects them to keep him apprised of all the office gossip – even calling them at home and expecting a run-down! This puts the “designees” in a really awkward position; plus, we’re all afraid any offhand comment or anything said in confidence might be either repeated or misrepresented. Needless to say, this creates a certain amount of tension between team members who normally would get along well, and adds stress in an already stressful atmosphere. There is also an unspoken belief that he will move people to different desks to break up what he perceives as people becoming too “chummy.” (It’s been done under the guise of “creating teams.”)
We used to be able to joke around a little or talk about our favorite “Idol” contestant to break the tension, but now we’re getting more and more skittish about even the most mundane general conversations (“Did you have a good weekend?”). This was once a very open, cooperative group who worked well together. Now we’re more suspicious of each other and teamwork is becoming harder. Do you think this was the goal? Silenced in SID
Holy s**!. They have an old school spying operation within their new fangled hi-tech enterprise. This is how every single commie regime including the one in my old country used to operate. Everyone around you could be a snitch and something as innocent as an anecdote told to a friend could get you in trouble. You have to love the irony!
They're paid for by your taxes. I'd say you have a right to see whether they're doing their job or whether your money is being squandered on frivolous crap like an "advice column".
But if you don't care, hey, it ain't my money!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
selling US government secrets to the remnants of the old Soviet Union is now called 'free market capitalism'
Yes. Yes, it is.
What, you were expecting something more idealistic? Sorry, sucker, welcome to the real world.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Is there any reason this should have been leaked?
Yes. It gives people some interesting insight into the culture of such an organization. The general public gets an idea of how insulated from mainstream society and ethics these employees have to be kept in order to remain functional in their jobs.
The alternative would be hoping that your employees obfuscate details of their job functions when writing to Dear Abbey. "How do I tell the guy in the next cubicle not to laugh out loud every time he reads Angela Merkel's e-mails?" Beyond that, handling basic ethical and moral issues need to be handled differently. How would you explain to a parent and NSA employee that their teenage kid needs some personal space and trust as they grow up when you are logging all of their text messages, e-mail and phone conversations?
Have gnu, will travel.
They're paid for by your taxes. I'd say you have a right to see whether they're doing their job or whether your money is being squandered on frivolous crap like an "advice column".
Managing employees is hard. If you just crack the whip and make them do nothing but focus non-stop on the task at hand, they're going to be much less productive and waste much more of your money than if you actually invest a bit of money on keeping morale high and put out the small fires in human interaction that happens when not everyone in your team is socially compatible.
The NSA would be no different in this than a private company. You take a tremendously successful company like Google, and they're spending money on play rooms and free food for their employees. If that makes them more productive by causing some of them to not have a problem staying in the office longer to work on a problem and others to get a burst of creativity that you only get when you quit thinking about the problem for a bit and free your mind, then that investment is worth every penny. If that advice column is helping your team deal with problems they encounter in an effective way and thus making them able to work together more effectively, it's far from "frivolous crap."
If, on the other hand, it was a leak about the NSA giving every project manager a free Ferrari, you'd have a point.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
I feel I have every right to know what my lovely little government thugs are doing.
Is your point of view that there should be no such thing as classified information, and that every single thing the government does and knows should be public domain and easily accessible to everyone?
If so I disagree with you, but find your position internally consistent and wouldn't argue with it. It's just a matter of opinion, and I don't share yours as I find that secrets are sometimes necessary and unavoidable. If, however, you see the benefit in the government keeping some secrets, then you must expect people who are in position to have access to these secrets to exercise a high level of caution and discreteness when they find it necessary to overrule the system in place that decides what is classified and what is public. When necessary to stop illegal behavior, you disclose what it is absolutely necessary and not a single thing more.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
"just doing a job" is no excuse.
This. A huge number of corporations and firms, generally because it happens do be profitable rather than out of malice, do *really* bad things. It's not like the guy whose job it is to deny insurance claims or the insurance "adjuster" is somehow insulated from moral culpability because it's his job to basically commit fraud. Excuse me, minimize claims.
"Just following orders" is a highly relevant phrase here. If freedom from government surveillance is a basic right, then people who are "just following orders" to abridge that right are culpable for having done so, even though they were following orders.
I have heard that sysadmins here regularly take salable material home, but when I asked my boss, he said I was being silly. Can I really have a side business selling secrets so long as it's to Americans? Or do I have to leave all that money on the table...
davecb@spamcop.net