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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.)
Hopefully at some point in time the FBI will realize that their mission shouldn't be to protect corporate rights, but to protect rights for the individual citizens.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
The polygraph, along with IQ tests, are a very American forms of superstition.
I suspect this will be quietly dropped in the near future when they see their supply of young recruits dwindle to nothing.
Am I out of consideration if I refer to the polygraph as 'truth dowsing' while it is being administered? How about asking if it can detect witches?
Guess they can't reach out to the NSA for candidates.
The FBI and other TLAs are constantly engaged in illegal downloading of the private information of Americans. How ironic that they're so anxious to recruit only people who have never committed the very types of "crimes" they're being hired to do. What, do they find it cheaper to train beginners than to hire someone already experienced in the job? (I wish this post was purely a joke.)
Then they won't hire you.
I thought polygraphs were most notable for giving a lot of false positives.
That's really not such a bad characteristic for security clearances.
So basically the FBI is only hiring people over the age of 50?
> Of course, if all they want are upper middle-class drones who follow every rule that has ever been made, just because it's a rule, then I suppose this is effective.
You can drop the "upper middle class" part, as this is about following the law. Full stop.
The FBI and especially the intelligence services will tell you that they very much try to hire people who follow the law and other rules. In some cases, being sloppy about following the rules can have huge consequences. So they lool for military people and people from certain social groups who culturally tend to follow the rules.
The irony of that is obvious.
As to "just because they are rules" -
Not that we need to debate it, and you'll probably never give up your excuse for taking stuff without paying for it, but my family and coworkers have been greatly harmed by the seachange shift to a culture of most people taking what they want illegally rather than paying the 99 cents to buy it from those of us who create it. The rule that what I create with my own hands os mine to give away, trade, or sell exists for a very good reason. Yes, it does mean that app or song I spent a year working on will cost you a whopping $1, but that's just how it is. (Coming from a guy whose daughter would be MUCH better taken care of if everyone who uses my software regularly had paid a dollar for it. Buying another candy bar is more important than doing the right thing, though. )
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I found one weird trick to stream every GoT episode from bing videos - search for "game of thrones". Seriously. it's so stupid how MS is so viciously focused on licenses and piracy on one hand, but on the other hand in a mad scramble to catch up to youtube will stream all manner of ripped tv shows, movies and pr0n. It's a seriously sketchy place.
they will probably hire you. it's like a military security clearance. they don't like it when you lie to them, but they are OK if you admit wrongdoing.
Default on student loans? Sickening.
Over 50 and straight edged boy scout
I'm over 50 and used to be a boy scout. I don't smoke, drink very moderately, help little old ladies across the street, recently came to the assistance of a young woman who was in a physical altercation with her boyfriend (which turned out to be her attacking him, but I didn't know that 'til I got involved) and just today used my pocket knife (which I carry because I was a boy scout) to help an elderly man deflate a beach ball he and his grandson had been playing with (by prying out the extremely stuck plug, not stabbing it.)
And I illegally downloaded a movie last night (there were extenuating circumstances, but still...)
So I'd say the FBI is going to be restricted to Amish who were too wasted during their rumspringa to download anything.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Then they won't hire you.
They may hire you if you did something illegal and are honest about it. They will not hire you if you did something illegal and lied about it.
I have just reported your admission of copyright infringement to the FBI. Enjoy federal prison.
The FBI doesn't want its agents to lie, or default on student loans (the latter is often simply a matter of economics, not honesty), but yet the Snowden documents reveal that the FBI commits perjury in federal court to hide the true, illegal sources of information they got from the NSA. Described here, http://www.alexaobrien.com/sec... Search for "Parallel Construction"
AccountKiller
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.
No, you misunderstand. The FBI is only hiring people who can lie on a polygraph test and not get caught...and those few who are not interested enough in music, games, or movies to bother to download them, legally or otherwise,
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Just means the FBI will only be hiring people who are good at lying about wrongdoing. Which is probably really more useful and what they want in the long run.
But it's not what they want. You know what the word is for "guy who can blithely lie his way through a polygraph?" It's "spy."
Polygraphs are pseudoscientific bullshit, but the only people they weed out are the honest ones. I know you're worried about abusive/sociopathic cops, and that's one problem. But if I if I can switch to Fedspeak, for a moment - the risk isn't that the FBI's recruitment policies select for sociopaths, it's that they select for double agents. Moronic ideologue non-threats like AQ/IS and domestic terrorists like the Sovereign Citizen derpers might not make it past this screening, but they're practically begging FSB and PLA to infiltrate them. It's assinine, it's self-destructive, and it doesn't even serve the larger gains of the FBI, just of the bureaucrats who have a vested interest in the revolving door between the IC and polygraph-reliant clearance-processing industry.
I am over 50 and an Eagle Scout. I downloaded warez over a Hayes 2400 modem. Most of the Eagle Scouts I know enjoy the Good Herb. I was thinking of a good retirement career. Maybe the FBI would suit.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
The law of "don't talk to cops about anything".
If you tell a police officer you smoked pot last week, whaaaaaat law did you just break?
None yet. If you're in your car, you have now given him "probable cause" to search your vehicle. In some states, if there is one seed, you're under arrest. Never talk to the police.
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.
Nutmeg is a gateway spice.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
But it's not what they want. You know what the word is for "guy who can blithely lie his way through a polygraph?" It's "spy."
Polygraphs are pseudoscientific bullshit, but the only people they weed out are the honest ones. I know you're worried about abusive/sociopathic cops, and that's one problem. But if I if I can switch to Fedspeak, for a moment - the risk isn't that the FBI's recruitment policies select for sociopaths, it's that they select for double agents. Moronic ideologue non-threats like AQ/IS and domestic terrorists like the Sovereign Citizen derpers might not make it past this screening, but they're practically begging FSB and PLA to infiltrate them. It's assinine, it's self-destructive, and it doesn't even serve the larger gains of the FBI, just of the bureaucrats who have a vested interest in the revolving door between the IC and polygraph-reliant clearance-processing industry.
Likewise, they are insuring their agents are clueless socially broken idiots who are also sanctimonious twatwaffles about it.
Which makes them neither effective nor able to get the best and brightest. From what I have observed about the next generation of folks entering college about now, they will nave ZERO chance of hiring anybody in that age group. It'll be easy to identify the FBI undercover guy, he'll be the one with the walker and the gray hair.