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NSA Risks Talent Exodus Amid Morale Slump, Trump Fears (reuters.com)
Dustin Volz and Warren Strobel, writing for Reuters: The National Security Agency risks a brain-drain of hackers and cyber spies due to a tumultuous reorganization and worries about the acrimonious relationship between the intelligence community and President Donald Trump, according to current and former NSA officials and cybersecurity industry sources. Half-a-dozen cybersecurity executives told Reuters they had witnessed a marked increase in the number of U.S. intelligence officers and government contractors seeking employment in the private sector since Trump took office on Jan. 20. One of the executives, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, said he was stunned by the caliber of the would-be recruits. They are coming from a variety of government intelligence and law enforcement agencies, multiple executives said, and their interest stems in part from concerns about the direction of U.S intelligence agencies under Trump. Retaining and recruiting talented technical personnel has become a top national security priority in recent years as Russia, China, Iran and other nation states and criminal groups have sharpened their cyber offensive abilities. NSA and other intelligence agencies have long struggled to deter some of their best employees from leaving for higher-paying jobs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
This is completely anecdotal; I'm a mathematician and I know a lot of people who work for the NSA. Almost every single one of them right now is quietly or not so quietly looking for other work. At least one of them has an undated resignation letter in their desk ready to go if they are asked to do anything that they find morally questionable (and this is someone who has generally defended NSA's actions in the past). The morale at NSA right now is in a massive slump.
Just Obama loyalists. Any time a new administration takes power, current people leave and new people come in. This is especially the case when a new party takes power.
You'll also find those who support Trumps agenda joining the administration.
With Snowden and Binney and Drake before him...why now? It's not as if the stuff that these folks are being asked to do is changed in any appreciable way.
The "same" thing happened when Obama was elected. Bush had significantly expanded many intelligence programs and there lots of folks in the intelligence community who feared that Obama's campaign focus on closing Guantanamo and pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan along with his focus on transparency and civil liberties meant that he would gut the entire community and all of its big programs.
They were wrong. It wasn't long before morale rebounded when people figured out Obama wasn't going to drastically shake things up.
Now, I think Trump, given his personality and what he has done so far, is more likely to shake things up then Obama was, but in the end this will end up being something that we point to the next time the administration changes and there is a story about people in the intelligence community fearing changes suffer a morale slump and start thinking about leaving.
Heck, the intelligence community loses way more people to the private sector because of things like "I can keep my phone with me at my desk," "I can talk about my work in public", and "I don't have to deal with the insanity that is government bureaucracy" way more than "the president might ask me to do something I find objectionable."
The truth is that the intelligence has a very robust oversight apparatus and you don't have to look very hard to see that congress actually like holding the intelligence community accountable. Are there abuses? Definitely, just like with anything else. However, they are about as common as instances of actual voter fraud. In addition to that, if Trump gets the defense budget increases he is seeking, that will translate directly into increased funding for the intelligence community, which will likely improve morale overall.
I'm pretty sure that they have nothing to worry about. They'll have plenty of opportunity to keep spying on the American people under Trump.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Fake news much? Despite all the alleged help from the intelligence community, the DNC newsletter CNN still hasn't proven squat. The way Putin walked all over Obama for all these years, it's likely to be Obama who's the Russian plant all along.
Great, that way nothing changes, it's going to be the same people doing the work!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
FTA:
"The problem is especially acute at NSA, current and former officials said, due to a reorganization known as NSA21 that began last year and aims to merge the agency's electronic eavesdropping and domestic cyber-security operations."
"The changes include new management structures that have left some career employees uncertain about their missions and prospects. Former employees say the reorganization has failed to address widespread concerns that the agency is falling behind in exploiting private-sector technological breakthroughs."
"Some NSA veterans attribute the morale issues and staff departures to the leadership style of Rogers, who took over the spy agency in 2014 with the task of dousing an international furor caused by leaks from former contractor Edward Snowden."
But you have to love how Reuters concludes the article:
"Trump's criticism of the intelligence community has exacerbated the stress caused by the reorganization at the NSA, said Susan Hennessey, a former NSA lawyer now with Brookings Institution."
You do realize Reuters, he wasn't the cause....
I know there's been a lot of back-and-forth about Trump.
But the way most everyone in the world views him, is that he has always been, and remains the living symbol of arrogance and greed. Trump does not serve the United States of America, the USA functionally serves Trump as it stands.
Working in any position where you were spending your life promoting that would suck. It's painful enough that an otherwise wonderful nation elected that dude.
Yes, defending Ameirca is crucially important, and our nation still stands for a lot of very important principles, but when all of that sits in service to, well, Trump, it would be very difficult to not want to go off and help it some other way.
I empathize with the folks making those choices.
Ryan Fenton
How could anyone possibly spin this as a bad thing? If Trump does nothing else this would be a win for the American people and the rest of the world as well.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Stop being so damned reasonable.
This is another opportunity to blindly bash Trump and up our leftist street credentials with no evidence whatsoever, just some anonymous reports with no numbers in them which can't be refuted or intelligently discussed because this entire story is completely anecdotal.
Anecdotal trumps Trump! Or something like that.
Now where's the slashdot story about how Bill Nye got schooled by Tucker Carlson over global warming? We haven't given the mindless left a chance to down mod intelligent people over climate change on slashdot in a while.
Not to be a smartass, but do we really want our best and brightest in the NSA? Whether you are politically left, right or agnostic, the surveillance state should be a serious concern for all those who value privacy and liberty. This isn't a Bush, Obama or Trump thing: this is an individual rights thing.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
>> NSA Risks Talent Exodus Amid Morale Slump, Trump Fears
NSA has talent ?
aaaaaaa
So in these supposed dark times these deep state traitors get up and leave? And they sat through manning, snowden, dotcom and assange but now someone new gets elected and they throw a seditious traitorous treasonous tantrum? I spit on you and I spit on your friend and I hope these deep state globalist traitors not only leave the NSA but go the fuck to hell.
The Trump administration is very different. At least, the security and intelligence communities think so.
In a Christian Science Monitor poll of "influencers" in this space (November 2016), 27% thought the Trump admin. would improve cybersecurity, and 73% thought it wouldn't. If you read the comments, many of the 27% said essentially they thought cybersecurity is such a serious topic that the administration would be forced to improve things.
More to the point of this article, here is a quote, in which Peter Singer states exactly the problem. He is a big thinker in the cyberwar / nation-state cybersecurity space:
Personally, I'm in a graduate-level infosec program that included a class in advanced exploitation. We participated in the NSA Codebreakers Challenge, and I did very well. I was seriously considering working for the NSA until Trump won. I suspected then (and now) that he is an incompetent manager who will damage all federal agencies. I was also concerned that I would build weapons he would then hand over to Russia.
As a final note, the metadata monitoring reported by Snowden appears to be a very small piece of what the NSA does. In the 2016 Codebreaker Challenge, we were given software that used cryptography to remotely detonate improvised explosives, and we were tasked with reverse engineering and cracking it. This is the kind of signals intelligence that is within the NSA purview.
"One of the executives, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, said he was stunned by the caliber of the would-be recruits. They are coming from a variety of government intelligence and law enforcement agencies..."
So yet again Mr Trump has come up trumps! He is already delivering on his promise to stimulate the business sector and create jobs. here are large numbers of America's most brilliant minds, being prized out of dead-end, stultifying jobs in a government bureaucracy that performs no useful function (and might, if given its head, kill us all) and made available to the private sector. There they can help corporations expand and employ more people; boost the GDP; and earn far more for themselves and their families.
This is as close to a "no downside" result as any government could ever produce.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The people that are leaving or considering leaving are dishonest hacks.
If we assume this article is true, none of them has any integrity whatsoever.
If what you're doing is right, it's right regardless of who you're doing it under. If what you're doing is wrong, it's wrong regardless of who you're doing it under.
It can't be right under Obama and wrong under Trump. If you're doing it because you think it's the right thing to do, you grit your teeth and bear it.
You should not be doing these illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral acts. And you know it. You know it because you're leaving.
The biggest problem here is that this creates a huge hole for people that want to abuse the unconscionable amount of power collected. These unelected people are now going to have access to everything about your senators, representatives, etc. How many of them will have scruples about getting their way? Even assuming they do, how can you be so sure that future waves will be the same? The plain fact is that this abuse is unprecedented in scale and scope and will have ramifications. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
You should not have this power in the first place, but even so, you're irresponsibly wielding it by abdicating it to others. Sleeping at night would be temerity.
Did I miss some sarcasm in that post? Or are you serious?
If you are serious, then you clearly are not reading the news. There is no effective oversight of the intelligence community by Congress. Just look at what happened with the CIA torture report, or Clapper lying to Congress and suffering no consequences for his lies. Read or listen carefully to what Senator Wyden is saying about the intelligence community: if he expresses concern that something may be happening, then it is.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Before I begin, I will say that my opinion would be the exact same no matter which party held the office. The NSA is not supposed to be a political entity, it is supposed to serve the American people as a whole. Any person in any agency that refuses to support the current administration should absolutely leave, and do so in a hurry. Any person in the agency being forced to work against the interests of the current administration should blow the whistle on the people making demands which harm the Country.
While we have seen some churn in every administration change, what I notice quite differently with this one is that agencies believe it's okay to damage the country instead of just leaving their job. I spent a decade working DOD and experienced numerous administration changes. Taking a crap on administration was never before seen as okay, yet that is what the current leaks are designed to do.
Another anecdote to consider is that my family was mostly Democratic party members. The behavior of the Democratic party for the last several months has pushed every single one of them away. The current behavior has turned them into enemies of the Democratic party. That sentiment is being echoed across the country as they continue to try and destroy the current Administration. The Democrats continuing to push hard for identity politics is going to continue to diminish support. Look at their visual in the message last night in the Response to the Presidential address to Congress. What image does a bunch of elder white people from the South, all sitting with stern faces, project? Racial harmony sure didn't come to mind. (these shots are well planned, not impromptu)
The job of the minority party in Government is not to undermine the majority, it is to keep their side relevant in law making and conversation.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Retaining and recruiting talented technical personnel has become a top national security priority in recent years as Russia, China, Iran and other nation states and criminal groups have sharpened their cyber offensive abilities while the NSA wasted their resources on attacking their own civilians.
There, fixed that for you.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Those of us in IT know firsthand just precisely how evil the NSA has become.
All the NSA cages in various data centers, anyone? Enough estimated storage in Utah to store all the information of note on every single human being on the planet , anyone?
The NSA, CIA, FBI, and anything else filled with those who spy on Americans should be immediately and permanently disbanded; and any employees barred from any form of Government work, nor working for any company with Government contracts. Also, round up anyone you can prove spied on Americans and try them for treason.
Finally, the NSA Utah data center should be evacuated and then nuked. A Constitutional Amendment should then be ratified that specifies the site should be nuked every 100 years at the nation's Centennials -- as a radioactive warning to all future generations of what a free society never builds.
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
Yeah, stop leaking the White House staff's communications to press, you "Deep Throat" wannabes...
This part, actually, sounds great — consumer's technology gets a chance to improve beyond the government's ability to spy on us.
And not just American Government's — by far the most benign of the three — that of Russia and China as well.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
More open positions for non-SJW CS, math and Cyber security professionals.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
I feel SO SORRY that the professional constitutional and human rights violators aren't feeling all that chipper about their work.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Did I miss some sarcasm in that post? Or are you serious?
If you are serious, then you clearly are not reading the news. There is no effective oversight of the intelligence community by Congress. Just look at what happened with the CIA torture report, or Clapper lying to Congress and suffering no consequences for his lies. Read or listen carefully to what Senator Wyden is saying about the intelligence community: if he expresses concern that something may be happening, then it is.
First, I specifically said the following, right after where you cut off my quote: Are there abuses? Definitely, just like with anything else. However, they are about as common as instances of actual voter fraud.
Second, I have said this before and I will say this again: the government (at all levels, from local to federal, including military, policy, intelligence, etc.) is a representation of the society from which it is drawn. To think that intelligence (or military, or police for that matter) harbors nothing but miscreants and malcontents who wish to flout the law for their own personal gain and pleasure is an insult not just to them, but to every American.
Now, with that out of the way, the intelligence community is huge. The overwhelming majority of people who work in the intelligence community are good stand up people who respect the law and want to do a good job. Just like with police. Do we see instances of people abusing their power? Yes, it happens with police and it happens with the intelligence community as well. However, every time that people point to a single incidence or something like that and then use it to characterize the entire community of intelligence or law enforcement, all it does is make those people feel like they are being attacked. That is not actually a good thing. If you think it is, go talk to the people in neighborhoods that the police now avoid because they feel like they don't have the support of the community. Ask them if they think it is a good thing.
Absolutely, if something is being done against the law, the perpetrators need to be dealt with. In fact, when you look at law enforcement and intelligence, the special power which they have over their fellow citizens means that any violation should be dealt with very harshly. That serves to both underscore the extreme gravity of the positions of trust they discharge and to discourage others from going astray.
So, please do everyone a favor and help deal with the specific problems as they are identified. Please don't look at one incident and translate that into "they're all criminals."
I'm fascinated by the concept of a "morale slump" after someone revealed to the world how evil the NSA is.
I've seen the cages in Facebook and Microsoft's Des Moines data centers with my own eyes. They capture any and all data -- inbound and outbound -- and (I assume) sends it to Utah for permanent storage.
Tell me this isn't utterly evil.
The NSA is evil. Its employees are not doing important work: they are evil.
The NSA should be immediately disbanded. The Oak Ridge facility apparently working on cracking PGP should be destroyed with bunker-busters and reduced to sand and ash.
The Utah data center is an entirely different matter. When you have enough estimated storage for all the pertinent information on every human being on the planet, you've descended into near-dictatorial waters.
The Utah facility needs an end that sends a message to all of humanity for all time:
Nuke it.
Then pass a Constitutional Amendment to re-nuke it every July 4 of the nation's Centennial. There needs to be a permanent, radioactive hell as a warning to all future generations everywhere that a free society never, ever builds anything that horrifically evil,
Then start rounding up any and all NSA employees who can be proved to have spied on Americans and try them for treason.
The NSA is pure, unadulterated evil. Those who work there may have convinced themselves they're patriots, but they're not. The patriotic thing would be to quit in disgust.
The NSA is evil. And you'll not that despite the fact that I know this thread is being captured; and that it can be tied to my real name if you try hard; and that I'm replying to someone who has deluded themselves about the NSA; that there is every possibility this post will be reported to or flagged by the NSA.
I don't care. The NSA is evil and the people who work there are the worst sort of scum. The sooner the NSA and its various appariti are forever destroyed, the better.
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
and worries about the acrimonious relationship between the intelligence community and President Donald Trump
As a member of the intelligents community, I feel the same way!
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I can agree with the not branding entire groups of people because of the actions of a few. That said voter fraud would appear to be far less common and less significant than abuses within the intelligence community. Not everyone in those organizations is going to be authoritarians, but they will be much more common simply because of the way recruiting and promotion works.
There was a time, not even a decade ago when I would have been happy to work for any number of federal agencies. These days though I find that I've got a list of acceptable employers and it seems to get smaller and smaller all the time.
. . .and they've uniformly complained about the glacial pace of promotions there (and the senior people are camping in their positions as long as they can), the tendency of No Such Agency to pigeonhole them in their niches. . . . and the fact that the pay is crap, even for contractors.
However, couldn't hire any of them, they also were demanding Silicon Valley Rockstar salaries for Federal Contract positions in DC Metro . . .
The NSA is evil. Its employees are not doing important work: they are evil.
The NSA is a huge organisation with a dual mission. They are tasked with protecting critical infrastructure and being able to attack other people's critical infrastructure. These are fundamentally contradictory (you find a zero-day vulnerability in something like OpenSSL: mission 1 requires that you disclose it and get it fixed ASAP to protect your infrastructure, mission 2 requires that you keep is secret so that you can use it to attack everyone else) and as such they're largely isolated into different parts of the organisation. Even if you completely disapprove of mission 2, arguing that mission 1 is not important work and is inherently evil makes you seem like an idiot.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
go home.
The "same" thing happened when Obama was elected. Bush had significantly expanded many intelligence programs and there lots of folks in the intelligence community who feared that Obama's campaign focus on closing Guantanamo and pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan along with his focus on transparency and civil liberties meant that he would gut the entire community and all of its big programs.
They were wrong. It wasn't long before morale rebounded when people figured out Obama wasn't going to drastically shake things up.
That was partly them misunderstanding Obama, he's a pragmatic realist, he really believes in civil liberties and pulling out of wars, but he's also understands the current system evolved for a reason and is/was extremely cautious about breaking it.
But that was also just worries about downsizing, they didn't find Obama morally objectionable, they just thought they might lose their jobs.
Now, I think Trump, given his personality and what he has done so far, is more likely to shake things up then Obama was, but in the end this will end up being something that we point to the next time the administration changes and there is a story about people in the intelligence community fearing changes suffer a morale slump and start thinking about leaving.
Heck, the intelligence community loses way more people to the private sector because of things like "I can keep my phone with me at my desk," "I can talk about my work in public", and "I don't have to deal with the insanity that is government bureaucracy" way more than "the president might ask me to do something I find objectionable."
I think Trump really is fundamentally different. He doesn't seem to respect a lot of the informal rules that keep democracies democratic, and he seems quite happy with hostile foreign intelligence agencies attacking the US as long as they're attacking his enemies. There's even allegations that he's actually been under the direct influence of Russia intelligence operatives, it's not proven, but the fact that the allegations aren't insane is very disturbing.
I stole this Sig
That can't be the best you've got. Please try again.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Wow Trump effect is just magical in 2 months - NOT !! Grow up people this is all about $$ and promotions They cannot pay the salaries that private sector can provide for doing the same work. There is no promotion process in place for good tech employees, you get lumped in with the same pool as everyone else for promotions. For all the morality people, try to find some day about how much information Google and Facebook have on you and your personal movements, and then talk about the "evilness" of a surveillance state coming out of silicon valley.
Please don't look at one incident and translate that into "they're all criminals."
It's not that the incidents directly mean they're all criminals. It's that the incidents show that checks and balances don't exist or are not working. If you don't have working checks and balances, that's an environment which criminals are going to take advantage of.
Reuters are supposed to be a news channel but this piece seems to be an opinion. There is a lot of talk about fake news but opinion disguised as news is fake.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
NO! The TV told me "draining the swamp" was about getting rich guys out of the government and not getting rid of all the corrupt globalist scumbags that are shitting up our governmental apparatus. The TV then scoffed as Trump put more of the same kinds of assholes in charge and never mention that the small-fry scumbags that enable the shitty policies of past governments are the ones who really need to go.
That NSA friend someone mentioned above is part of that swamp. Good riddance. The sooner we purge the Neo-con cancer from state institutions the better.
I see one major difference between Obama and Trump. While many in the intelligence agencies feared that Obama would scale back their programs due to a change in the focus of his administration, Obama never denigrated the intelligence community--I'm sorry the "so-called" intelligence community. For their fears about Obama it was a fear about the change in priorities. For Trump it is a President who has openly mocked their importance and jobs to the country and the world.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Hail Kek!
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
I may be wrong but AFAIK NSA is only tasked with protecting military infrastructure and a few critical government facilities as external "clients", so the two tasks are not as contradictory as they may seem. They're not tasked with making Internet Explorer more safe unless it's used by Sergeant Joe Plumber on a nuclear submarine.
In addition to that, if Trump gets the defense budget increases he is seeking, that will translate directly into increased funding for the intelligence community, which will likely improve morale overall.
No it won't. You're somehow assuming that increased defense spending will somehow equate to higher salaries, which is simply preposterous. Increased spending just means more mandates to do more stuff: build more ships, more weapons, etc. That doesn't mean that individual salaries will actually go up, in fact likely the opposite, because Trump is really big on decreasing Federal spending and "doing more with less". So sure, maybe the intelligence community will get more funding, but that comes with the provision that they hire more people and do more stuff. The actual workers will still be held to the same Federal worker pay schedules, and most likely the cost-of-living increases will be cut to keep spending low.
It's military and government infrastructure and it turns out that a lot of government infrastructure runs on commodity hardware and software (actually, so does a lot of military stuff). This means that they end up auditing a lot of proprietary and open source code that's widely deployed. This is why Heartbleed was so embarrassing for them: OpenSSL was explicitly on the list of 'critical infrastructure' software that they're meant to be securing.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
However, every time that people point to a single incidence or something like that and then use it to characterize the entire community of intelligence or law enforcement, all it does is make those people feel like they are being attacked.
Every time cops do something wrong, all the other cops, and the prosecutors and judges, stand behind them even when it's as blatant as shooting unarmed people in the back.
These people *should* be attacked.
That is not actually a good thing. If you think it is, go talk to the people in neighborhoods that the police now avoid because they feel like they don't have the support of the community. Ask them if they think it is a good thing.
Why should I care about what a bunch of thugs and murderers think is a good thing? If they weren't such abusive assholes, then maybe they'd have more community support. They've earned their reputation fairly.
Second, I have said this before and I will say this again: the government (at all levels, from local to federal, including military, policy, intelligence, etc.) is a representation of the society from which it is drawn.
Now this is exactly correct. The problem is, our society is not homogeneous. So the police are not drawn from across society; they're drawn from one part of society that loves authoritarianism and approves of brutality and murder of anyone who doesn't meekly obey their racist authority. But there is a significant part of society which does back up the police, including authoritarians like you, which is why they stay in power.
Absolutely, if something is being done against the law, the perpetrators need to be dealt with
Except when it's done by the police, right? Because that's the way it's been up until everyone and their brother had portable video recorders in their pockets to document their abuses.
In fact, when you look at law enforcement and intelligence, the special power which they have over their fellow citizens means that any violation should be dealt with very harshly.
Sounds great; an authoritarian giving lip service to doing the right thing. Problem is, it doesn't work out that way in practice; people like you will always side with the cops no matter how blatant their abuse.
Ah yes, from the "all morale issues are created equal" camp.
Though I agree that there is a germ of truth here. From the military's perspective, there's no morale issue so great it can't be resolved by threatening an even worse outcome.
Joyeux Noel to you too, and many Paths of Glory.
Condolences about your grandpa. He was an ass, but the twelve crapper salute was worse than he deserved.
He's the ultimate PHB, but the points come out the front.
Table-ized A.I.