The NSA's Philosopher

An anonymous reader writes: In 2012, the NSA decided it needed an in-house ethicist to write about the philosophy of surveillance. They searched within the organization for a candidate, finally giving the job to an analyst who had abandoned a writing career that hadn't worked out. The Intercept got its hands on some of his work: "The columns answer a sociological curiosity: How does working at an intelligence agency turn a privacy hawk into a prophet of eavesdropping?" At one point, the analyst wrote, "We probably all have something we know a lot about that is being handled at a higher level in a manner we're not entirely happy about. This can cause great cognitive dissonance for us, because we may feel our work is being used to help the government follow a policy we feel is bad." The article analyzes this man in detail, including his life history and his personal blog — it's a strange coupling of invasiveness and anonymization, for they take steps to avoid revealing his identity. The article's author correctly notes (while the NSA does not) that surveilling somebody doesn't mean you really know them.

Comments

Long term

[AHuxley]

It was interesting to see terms like "total surveillance", been "loyal" and a "higher level".
"Total surveillance" is great for budget growth and domestic expansion requests.
The German "orders are orders" aspect vs the US constitution is another interesting idea that seems to be well established over decades.

Long term the US is facing the same issues the UK faced in the 1930's -1970's
A flood of staff with skills but no vetting just to get the needed Russian or German or later computer skills worked for the UK short term.
After the 1950-60 UK vetting was found to be vital again and outsourcing was used to fill the skills gap with loyalty been the only new test.
What the US and other nations found is that "loyalty" alone does not bring a fully rounded person, a smart person with life skills for the world stage.
The UK solved the issues by adding more expensive excellence in terms of working conditions, ongoing education, better wages, real advancement options at every level, making every domestic action legal and ensuing only the very best staff where kept long term.
The understanding of total compartmentalization also helped the UK.

The US now the huge internal tasks of ensuing every loyal staff member is comfortable with their working around the US constitution domestically, ensuring another Church Committee like report is never made public again and no more whistleblowers.
Constant internal legal reassurance over illegal domestic spying, pay issues, a living wage, spending on further education of loyal staff, the new external contractors testing US gov staff for loyalty with new tests and tracking.

What can be said about US intelligence capabilities long term if the loyal only trend continues? Loyal gov staff with few advancement prospects, rising living costs surrounded by highly paid expert private sector contractors is not a great mix.
Now the US has now funded internal, domestic "total surveillance" as a bureaucratic growth opportunity for its huge numbers of loyal gov staff.
More domestic electronic "total surveillance" will be the only solution available to any issue.
Weak domestic crypto, working with big US brands for more trap doors, back doors will ensure total domestic surveillance. The East German issue of bureaucratic surveillance size to population size will become a US budget issue.
A domestic controlled opposition system would have been much more effective and cheaper but the US seems to be sold on public/private/mil total surveillance.