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NSA Worried About Recruitment, Post-Snowden

Posted by Soulskill on from the should-have-thought-of-that-before-being-jerks dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The NSA employs tens of thousands of people, and they're constantly recruiting more. They're looking for 1,600 new workers this year alone. Now that their reputation has taken a major hit with the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden, they aren't sure they'll be able to meet that goal. Not only that, but the NSA has to compete with other companies, and they Snowden leaks made many of them more competitive: "Ever since the Snowden leaks, cybersecurity has been hot in Silicon Valley. In part that's because the industry no longer trusts the government as much as it once did. Companies want to develop their own security, and they're willing to pay top dollar to get the same people the NSA is trying to recruit." If academia's relationship with the NSA continues to cool, the agency could find itself struggling within a few years.

23 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah , well ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah, well it's not like people became disillusioned and angry after the lies started being shoveled wholesale down our throats after 9/11.

    And no, I don't mean conspiracy-nutjob-wacko theories, I mean the kind of stuff that is being lorded over the average joe and I feel like I can only talk smack about because I don't have a security clearance to be revoked.

    Call me crazy, but last time I looked in the help wanteds I started to get the feeling our society is divided into two halves: Those with above secret clearance, who live normal lives, and those without it, who are lied to and treated like animals.

    As a human being living in the US without such clearance all I can say is, you should be f***ing ashamed.

    1. Re:Yeah , well ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      I believe you've got it wrong. In the US there are two kinds of people, those who belong to the 1% of the richest who control 35% of the wealth of the country, and the rest who are divided into one fifth who are still well off and the large rest, the vast majority, who can barely make ends meet, have no power, and are constantly being screwed over. NSA employees are just some more poor government clerks who are at the whim of corrupt politicians and filthy rich oligarchs, like the vast majority of people.

    2. Re:Yeah , well ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The very model of a Bananna Republic:

      1. The small group with the money and power

      2. The thugs employed by that group to ensure that they keep their money and power and are not accosted by the unwashed masses.

      3. The unwashed masses.

    3. Re:Yeah , well ... by gatkinso · · Score: 5, Informative

      Oh really? Having held such a clearance for years (I left that work about 5 years ago) I can tell you that the situation is in many ways reversed. Your very behavior is held hostage just so you keep your job. Want to try some weed while in Colorado? Want to go see the Great Wall of China (actually, you might get this approved)? Three beers at happy hour and get pulled over for speeding? Buy a house at the height of the housing boom and your spouse lose her job so it is foreclosed upon, or she gets sick and the medical bills pile up...

      All of these things can lead to your ticket being clipped.

      Besides - people act like a clearance is some magical thing that they have earned. Nothing is further from the truth. It simply means you have a clean police and financial record, and don't hang out with militants. All of the investigations and polygraphs boil down to determining that. You fill out the forms honestly, and wait for investigators to determine that indeed you did not lie on your application. Sometimes you sit in a silly little room over by BWI with weird cloud scenes on the florescent lights and answer the same questions while some polygraph examiner tries to upset you. Again, nothing that you have earned through hard work or being special, just that you waited out the process and didn't lie.

      --
      I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
  2. Why Shouldn't I Work for the NSA? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 5, Informative

    Unpopular even pre-9/11.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    1. Re:Why Shouldn't I Work for the NSA? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, there were a few major predictions missed with that scene.

      1. The government that was supposed to be selling us oil at a cheap price has been a farce, leaving the door wide open for a terrorist organization much, much worse than the ones we even imagined back in '97 to take over. The people we were pretending to liberate are now screwed at a whole new level.
      2. The politicians who were supposed to be protecting our democracy from threats domestic and abroad have turned out to be so cowardly and corrupt that they can't be bothered to press charges when our secret agencies lie to them about such basic concepts as torturing people or killing American citizens.
      3. Said politicians can't muster the courage to back up their so-called liberation efforts with boots on the ground when we're faced with real opposition instead of a puppet that started to bore them.
      4. And of course, per your argument, they didn't even address the fact that an unpopular secret agency that consistently disregards the legal and constitutional framework of the government funding it pretty much defeats the entire purpose of a democracy, doesn't it?

    2. Re:Why Shouldn't I Work for the NSA? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You know what frightens me?

      I am an American by birth and residence, and for a flash moment I hesitated to (a) click on your link and (b) make this comment, because of what unseen long-term effects doing so might have on me personally and those I love.

  3. Won't meet their goal? by mariox19 · · Score: 3, Funny

    So, now they'll be the next ones crying that they need H-1B's!

    --

    quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.

  4. Boo hoo by dcollins117 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you lack morals to the extent you would consider working for the NSA you'll find it much more lucrative to sell your soul to Wall Street instead.

    1. Re:Boo hoo by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you lack morals to the extent you would consider working for the NSA you'll find it much more lucrative to sell your soul to Wall Street instead.

      Wall Street is peopled with thieves, but the NSA is peopled with traitors. A person of marginal morality could work in Wall Street while turning down the NSA on moral grounds.

    2. Re:Boo hoo by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Different levels of Hell, at least according to Dante, but I suspect we're pretty much in agreement :)

      Good call. The eigth circle was for fraudsters (Wall Street), but the ninth circle was for traitors (NSA, CIA, Congress, POTUS).

    3. Re:Boo hoo by rtb61 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The reality is, the initial premise is a total lie. The NSA is a failed organisation and they are not looking for the same kind of people. They are looking for 2nd raters, people who specialise in breaking stuff and not in making stuff. The reality is securing stuff in computers is an order of magnitude harder than breaking security. The breakers are always second rate compared to makers, it is inherent in their cerebral makeup and the 2nd rate breakers know it to the core of their being, hence instead of making, their jealousy drives them to breaking.

      The NSA were not particularly skilled at hacking, their targets were not focused enough on security and were easy to break into. Now of course the NSA script kiddie perverts are finding life much more difficult as companies become much more focused on security and are hiring the most skilled makers to make better security. The NSA stuck is now failing and that failure is far worse on the securing things side because of their chosen focus on breaking stuff on employing egoistic perverse script kiddies, incapable of securing stuff.

      The US government was warned again and again and again, that in order to effectively secure their systems they must completely separate defensive operations from offensive operations but they were locked into arrogance mode and only listen to their own bullshit and now they are stuck.

      If you are bright and interested in security, the real skill and challenge is in defensive operations, 24/7/365 operation of skills, abilities and knowledge, real investigatory skills on any exposed breaks or weaknesses and preventing them from happening again and creating a defence in depth system, giving greater opportunity to catch hacks are earlier less damaging levels. The people do not play well with breakers, not at all, the whole psychology is different.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    4. Re:Boo hoo by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yes The Equation Group [arstechnica.com] really seemed "2nd rate" and they sure didn't "make" anything.

      TAO is what you would expect to see given a sufficiently large budget spent exclusively on hacking everything possible. The hacks are impressive in the sense that they take a lot of resources and time to develop and it wasn't previously obvious to what extent governments were committing resources to infrastructure subversion. They are not especially impressive from a technical perspective: it's basically a more professional and larger scale version of the types of malware produced by Russian banking fraudsters. Working from that down into BIOS hacks and the like is the inevitable result of spending billions on hackers year after year - they need to keep finding new things to exploit. Interesting, but only because it reinforces the idea that everything seems to be hackable.

      But, what kind of people find this work interesting? I can imagine it would be interesting for a few years, especially if you're young and trapped inside a heavily propaganda controlled environment where you're told daily you're the Forces of Good in an epochal struggle against the Axis of Evil. But the amount of technical design work involved is minimal. The level of new technology is minimal. The "research" is simply finding ordinary bugs and flaws in other people's code. People oooh and aaah about the fact that these state malware platforms use a plugin architecture, whilst simultaneously finding the same thing in Photoshop entirely mundane.

      Even the data analytics stuff is essentially just an A-B-C application of big data tech originally developed elsewhere, like at Google.

      And the advanced maths the NSA is supposed to be famous for hardly shows up in the Snowden documents. It's pretty clear that their success against even crappy crypto is fragile at best (RC4), probably non-existent at worst (AES/strong RSA or anything past it). Their botched attempt to back door Dual-EC DRBG smells of desperation. They wouldn't build huge infrastructures for storing and obtaining stolen private keys if they had the mathematical tools to undo modern ciphers. So I suspect there are a lot of mathematicians at the NSA feeling kind of obsolete these days and wondering what they can contribute.

      I'd say the only genuinely technically interesting work the FVEY guys are doing is the way they've been combining passive intercept with active, automated exploitation. QUANTUM is a pretty interesting thing and I'm not aware of anyone discussing anything like it before Snowden's leaks. However, it's also now a done deal. Beyond incremental improvements, there don't seem to be any obvious further directions for that project.

      So as a programmer, developing hacks and malware can be entertaining for some years, but eventually I think most skilled people will want to flex their muscles in other ways. They will want to build something instead of break something. The best people will have a broad span of interests. In an organisation like Google or Facebook that's OK - you can work security for a few years, do some exploit research, then go on and transfer to some other project. Or leave but keep your work on your resume. At the NSA? There it's more limited. You can't easily leave the classified world because your work experience is a gaping void. They don't do product development. You will never make something that your family uses. You will never even develop the skills needed to do that.

      Stories like this give me some hope that despite it's apparently bottomless budget, the NSA can still be beaten technically. They discard most of the qualified people because they aren't US citizens and the ones that are left would be well advised to take a career at a Silicon Valley firm where they can do very similar sorts of work, but for things that are unquestionably useful. If you go do big data analytics or security work in order to fight spam on Gmail (like I did), you don't have to worry about the moral impac

    5. Re:Boo hoo by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If it is so easy to do this, why haven't the Russian internet criminals rolled anything out on this scale? It seems to me that a platform like this would be all kinds of ideal for criminal purposes.

      They have. That is exactly what I just said - Zeus is also a modular, plugin based malware platform that is developed by Russian/east European fraud gangs. It bears a lot of similarities to the NSA/GCHQ malware platforms in terms of how it gets onto people's systems, general design, etc.

      because of the work they do and the requirements that work puts on their infrastructure they were probably into the whole "big data" mindset several years before mainstream commercial, civilian IT companies got there

      It's not the case. For instance the NSA scalable data store (Accumulo) is basically a reimplementation of Google's BigTable, and they don't try to hide it. They adopted tech from the civilian space for their own requirements but it wasn't invented there.

      With respect to your other points, I never said they don't know what they're doing, only that what they're doing is not particularly interesting and I don't think it will keep the best people interested for more than a few years before they find it becomes humdrum routine. And by "product" you knew perfectly well what I meant - not some crappy in house web app used by a few hundred people who have no other choice, I mean a product that's available in the marketplace which competes for end users, probably consumers or professionals. Something where quality matters.

  5. My experience working for the NSA... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Technically I didn't work for the NSA, but I worked for a government contractor that did a lot of classified work for the NSA. If you can name a clearance level, I probably had it.

    Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of the work the NSA does is concerned with foreign intelligence and surveillance. The part of the NSA that does domestic surveillance is relatively small and not nearly as intrusive as the tinfoil hatters want to believe.

    Still, all of the controversy recently made me think a lot about it and realize I'm not really comfortable being involved even in foreign surveillance. I don't want to be responsible for creating technology that will be used to track down and kill people, even if those people are enemies of the USA. Yes, I know foreign countries are spying on us just as much, but that isn't an excuse.

    So I quit that job, and I'll never again work on classified material. I've been much happier with my work lately.

    1. Re:My experience working for the NSA... by randalware · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I was in about the same boat, working for a sub contractor helping make things.

      The thing I was concerned about was, all the technology the we are/were using against foreign countries and terrorists are now being used against the population of the US.

      The NSA and CIA and it's immediate peers have a little common sense, but the Patriot act started a pipline of this intel to the FBI, State Police, Local police.

      Our local police have problem pepper spraying handicapped elderly people issuing a parking ticket and exessive use of tasers whil issuing regular traffic tickets
      Look at Ferguson MO, etc...

      Do we want morons like these with anymore information and power, the public needs to watch them, not the other way around.

      --
      This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
    2. Re:My experience working for the NSA... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Uh dude, the actual specifics of the programs were laid bare to the public in excruciating detail.

      I think you misunderstand. Even if all of those documents were true (not all of them are), the amount of foreign surveillance the NSA does dwarfs their domestic surveillance. The amount of intelligence they gather on foreign countries is staggering. There is not a single wave on the RF spectrum over in North Korea that we don't have on a hard drive somewhere. Their domestic surveillance programs are just offshoots of that.

      And why should anyone's morality stop at domestic surveillance? Does the rest of humanity not matter?

      I'm not sure why you're taking such an argumentative tone when I obviously agree with you.

      But to answer your question, to a lot of people, yes, morality stops at the country's border. Anybody living in a foreign country is a potential enemy. Foreign governments are doing their best to spy on us as much as they can, and so the natural response is for us to do the same to them (but better, because we're America). People who are not natural-born US citizens do not have rights.

      I'm not saying that's the way it should be, or that I agree with it, but that's the way it is to the majority of people who work for the US government. Ask any of your friends who've ever been in the armed forces how much they care about the rights of enemy combatants when they're on the battlefield.

    3. Re:My experience working for the NSA... by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 4, Insightful

      > The part of the NSA that does domestic surveillance is relatively small and not nearly as intrusive as the tinfoil hatters want to believe

      That claim seems to be nonsensical, given the existence of the Echelon program, and the immunity granted to AT&T for its infamous fiber optic monitoring room (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A), Whether it is "relatively small" is also fairly meaningless, since it could mean "epsilon less than a majority of the budget".

      I'm glad for your moral standing and peace of mind that you've withdrawn from such work. But let's be very clear that much of what the NSA is illegal, unconstitutional, and against various international treaties.

  6. Precedents by Livius · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How much has ethical questions hurt recruitment at Diebold, Monsanto, Goldman-Sachs, Verizon, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.?

  7. Re:NSA can recruit Patriots! by HiThere · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you actually ARE a Greek, then this sense.

    If you believe in the values of the US Constitution, then Snowden is NOT a traitor (which is explicitly defined). And also his acts were in support of the Constitution, which is supposed to be the entire basis of the Federal government. That he revealed the current officeholders to be liars and oathbreakers is *not* a strike against him. I won't go into just how unconstitutional I believe the actions of the current and immediately prior government to be, but the only way they've been able to justify their actions are by requiring you to believe, essentially, that blue was yellow.

    --

    I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  8. Some Premises Need to be Questioned by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I am still having a little trouble with "we don't need our spies to spy". Maybe we do.

    I am also having trouble believing that the kind of encryption we use on the Internet actually stops the U.S. Government from finding out whatever it wishes although IETF and sysadmins might be kidding themselves that it can. Government can get to the end systems. They can subborn your staff. Etc.

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  9. Re:Lottery by cold+fjord · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If the NSA wants to really start recruiting talent here is a novel idea. Start providing enough information to the "good" law enforcement (the NSA knows who they are) agencies to prosecute all the crooks holding government offices (appointed or voted in). If they started cleaning house, and given enough time clean.. people would believe they rehabilitated and were once again looking out for the average citizens best interests. The reputation as the Stasi is too well known for them to attract anything but the scum of the US for a very long time.

    So you openly advocate having the national intelligence agencies spy on politicians to find incriminating evidence that makes them vulnerable, but you disparage the Stasi? Hmmmmm......

    --
    much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
  10. Re:NSA can recruit Patriots! by dissy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Snowden IS a traitor: (at least) of N.S.A., and his oath to them, exclusively, and also of U.S.A. inclusively

    How? Please be detailed.

    He upheld the laws of the USA, upheld his oath to the US government and the NSA.
    He violated no conditions of his oath what so ever.

    The NSA can not require someone to swear an oath to break the law and betray the US constitution in any legal sense - yet that's exactly what they tried to do.

    Breaking a promise to be a criminal does not make you a criminal.

    The oaths required from the DOE, DOD, and DOJ all explicitly demand you do not follow illegal orders, do not break laws without explicit exception, and to report to the higher authorities any illegal orders given - all of which Snowden did to the letter of the law and his oath.

    In short, if you demand I follow an order of yours, do not bitch and claim I'm a traitor to you when I do exactly as you demanded from me, because then everyone will see your demand and accusation as the bullshit it is.