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FBI Says It Will Hire No One Who Lies About Illegal Downloading
wabrandsma writes with this excerpt from The State Hornet, the student newspaper at Sacramento State On Monday, Sacramento State's Career Center welcomed the FBI for an informational on its paid internship program where applications are now being accepted. One of the highly discussed topics in the presentation was the list of potential traits that disqualify applicants. This list included failure to register with selective services, illegal drug use including steroids, criminal activity, default on student loans, falsifying information on an application and illegal downloading music, movies and books. FBI employee Steve Dupre explained how the FBI will ask people during interviews how many songs, movies and books they have downloaded because the FBI considers it to be stealing. During the first two phases of interviews, everything is recorded and then turned into a report. This report is then passed along to a polygraph technician to be used during the applicant's exam, which consists of a 55-page questionnaire. If an applicant is caught lying, they can no longer apply for an FBI agent position. (Left un-explored is whether polygraph testing is an effective way to catch lies.)
Is downloading copyrighted material illegal? I downloaded copyrighted material by opening this page with the /. logo.
. The rule that what I create with my own hands os mine to give away, trade, or sell exists for a very good reason.
And what's that reason? Not everyone agrees about imaginary property Ray. The concept is rather new. You're free to disagree, but the world is changing and as information is so easy to copy fewer and fewer people are seeing things your way. I don't really know anyone that really thinks you're a criminal if you share a TV show with your friend for instance. TV is already valued at approximately $0, since it's been free for so long. You seem to have an attitude that laws and cultural values are set in stone rather than the amorphous and variable concepts that they actually are.
These sorts of laws are cultural ones, and the culture is changing. It's not exactly clear what's going to happen with copy written property, but a good many people don't see it your way. That tends to change laws. 30 years ago it was unimaginable that marijuana and gay marriage would become legal, but the culture changed and now it's inevitable they'll both be legal in all 50 states. Are you prepared if copy write laws are reformed in another 30 years?
AccountKiller
A multimeter which always reads zero is the most precise meter possible. Precision isn't accuracy.
And Abrahamic God is the single most powerful myth known to man. Unique doesn't imply useful.
My IQ is 142, my net earnings are ~$90k/year, my highest qualification is a PhD in mathematics, and you're an idiot.
You deride IQ tests, but hold up your own as a sign of intellect. That does not sound very bright to me. Precision is a quality of instruments, accuracy is the quality of being precise. Accuracy is nothing without precision. A PhD in math would know that. Further, people with PhD's rarely make 90k.
I'll side with Occam's razor and claim you are full of shit.
One of my former bosses said "you can get good people, available people and people with no police record. Pick two"
Time and experience has shown me that "good people" and "people with no police record" has become more and more synonymous as more and more inane laws are being pushed into existence. You don't get "good" in this field if you're learning it from text books. Ponder this for a moment: Malware analysis consists to a rather big portion of looking at decompiled code someone else wrote and quickly identifying specific sections, often involving reverse engineering some kind of encryption or obfuscation. Now where do you think you would almost invariably have to develop that skill set. Little hint: It ain't really a very legal activity.
Most of the "good" security people I know didn't get there by choosing it as a career and studying. They got there because they ... well, wanted to accomplish something.
And if they're good at it, they never got caught doing it...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What's an ideal IQ? 200? 500? The scale is open ended at the top, and even a perfect score on different tests equates to a different maximum.
Plus, I'm pretty sure that your "less than ideal" would apply to some of the most brilliant people in history (James Clerk Maxwell, estimated IQ 115 (note that people who achieved something that applied to practical discipline, such as engineering or medicine, seldom did it nearly as early as precocious musicians and novelists, and so are always estimated lower unless the estimater includes a fudge factor. Mozart gets estimated much higher than Beethoven without that, because he started at 6, not 22. The way the fudge factor is calculated is to simply set both those great musicians to an (apparently arbitrary) 165, and adjust for age of first composition based on that ratio in calculating other historic musicians scores - this makes Wagner among the very elite, and Bach only 'fair to middlin').
Or try Charles Darwin, and Copernicus, both estimated IQ 160, (The same score, as Dolph Lungren's actual test results). President Bush (41) scored a 98 - his son Bush (43) scored 125. Steven Hawking scored "only" 160, same as the estimated score for Einstein - both are eclipsed by actor James Woods and John Sunnunu (180 actual score each)
President Carter scored at least 10 points above any other president or presidential candidate of the 20th or early 21st centuries, and of the current crop, Hillary Clinton is 5 points lower than Carter, but still beats everybody else that has shown any interest in running this time by at least anoher 10 points.
So I'm going to take this oportunity to deride the test - look maw, I'm a hipster!
Who is John Cabal?
Actually, no there is not. There is no provision in law that makes obtaining copyrighted materials illegal if the copyright owner doesn't consent other than copying and distributing. If somehow I missed it, show me.
Nope. There is no provision in law about downloading or any activity close to it. If you purchase a DVD from a street merchant and it turns out to be counterfeit, you have broken no copyright law.
I applied to the CIA when I was looking at finishing grad school about 4 years back. As with the FBI, one of the things they mentioned was illegal downloading, of which I had done quite a bit while in college. I mean, we're talking hundreds of films, thousands of TV episodes, thousands of audio tracks, both foreign and domestic for all of those, from any number of decades, genres, and budget sizes.
I was upfront with them about it during a pre-screening interview held at my school's campus. I actually brought it up with them and asked if it'd be a problem. They indicated it wouldn't be, and formally invited me to fill out a proper application with them so that they could advance me through the process.
I answered truthfully regarding it on the application and any subsequent questionnaires that I had to fill out. I never got any word back regarding that specifically, but their response was to ask me to fly up to Washington D.C. for a three-day session with them, which I did.
I provided exacting details regarding my illegal downloading to the polygraph examiner at my polygraph session, as well as to anyone else who asked about it. I let them know the quantity, nature of the content, and how recently I had engaged in it. I passed the polygraph with flying colors and was told I didn't even need to come in for the second session they had scheduled since they were confident I told the truth about everything (and I had...in excruciating detail, in fact, just because I knew, being the pedant that I am, that if I left out any little detail, I really would be considering myself to be lying; as an aside, one of the other applicants I was hanging out with lied to them about the recency of his drug use and got caught in his lie).
And how did they respond to all of this? They asked me when it would be convenient to move on to the final stage of the application process (a thorough background check...which I'm confident I would have easily passed), since the folks I'd be working with were excited about bringing me onboard and wanted to keep things moving. Which is to say, the fact that I had downloaded loads of files illegally in the past clearly wasn't a problem. They let me know that it'd need to stop and that it would come up again in the every-five-years polygraph everyone working there submits to, but otherwise, they made it clear to me, both explicitly through their words and implicitly through their deeds that they really didn't have a problem with me having engaged in it at a relatively large scale in the past.
P.S. Just to state what I hope is obvious: an actual polygraph session is NOTHING like what is shown on TV (the room was well-lit, there wasn't an angry detective yelling at me, beads of sweat were not pouring from my brow, and no one was pounding on any desks). I don't want to get into a load of details, but suffice it to say, the environment was heavily controlled to eliminate external stimuli, the questions and their meanings along with the terms and their definitions were all explained in detail to me in advance, I was able to voice any misgivings I had about them to the examiner (in fact, we spent 2.5 hours of the 4 hours doing just that, since my inherent pedantry meant that I had all sorts of ideas like "well, technically I've compromised government systems when I lent a friend my password at our state university" or "I can't rule out the possibility that I unknowingly supported terrorists through a front that they're maintaining", which led to a lot of the questions getting rephrased to be prefixed by "insofar as you know" or "besides what you have disclosed here"), and the questions were all read to me over and over and over again in even, metered tones that were about as un-aggressive as you can imagine.
The ideal IQ is 100. That's what the world is built for.