One is, what are you going for? Is it more important to you to be working in a hot, even bleeding-edge, field, or does your situation call for more security? If the former, how long can you wait for the payoff? If you're looking for what'll be hot in the next year or two, I think that's very to predict. But if you're trying to prepare for five years from now, I'd be willing to bet that wireless is going to boom the next time the economy is really good. I was working for Metricom (Ricochet modems) when they went under, and most people seemed to be convinced that the major stockholders, WorldCom and Paul Allen, were not giving up, but retrenching. (In fact, my guess is that they found a neat accounting trick that allowed them to dump a billion dollars worth of debt and start over.) I sure think that someone's gonna do this, and make a lot of money. Being there at the right moment could be lucrative and exciting.
On the other hand, if you need security more than excitement for whatever reason, there are a number of choices. Someone's already mentioned support; doing that job well is difficult, and can be rewarding. Databases, networks, the backbone stuff isn't going away soon.
You're already ahead of the game with your attitude of trying to make use of the time. Good luck with your search!
I wouldn't go so far as to say "Never accept a counter offer". I'd just say, "Make sure you have a good reason for accepting." Did you like your current employer before you got a better offer? Why? Was it just because they gave you a job when you didn't have one, or was it because you actually like working there? If the current employer is so great, why have they been underpaying you so badly? And how much do you trust them?
I'm willing to take a job with a company I don't like if I need the job, but I don't confuse that with loyalty. I mean, most corporations are loyal to their employees up to the moment in which management realizes they might be able to make an extra 25 cents by dumping your ass on the street. I think we, as workers, should have exactly that amount of loyalty to the corporations.
To some extent I agree with you that there's a lack of coordination in the so-called intelligence community. Some people think that's a bad thing. I'm not one of them. To begin with, when was the last time one of the intellligence agencies did something positive? COINTELPRO? Assassinating democratically-elected presidents and replacing them with military dictators, shahs, and the like? Yo, we can do that...
But my impression is that your description of the organizational issues is not quite right. For example, all the intelligence agencies (a group that does not include, for example, NIS, but does include CIA, NSA, and NRO) report to the Director of Central Intelligence, the DCI, currently George Tenet. So there is structurally a method for putting intelligence info together. The National Security Advisor, on the other hand, reports directly to the President and is normally a political appointee in the sense of being chosen by the President and replaced by the next one, unlike the DCI, who has a term that is longer than one Presidential term and is not normally dumped by incoming Presidents.
There are at least two problems with this, one of which is the lack of coordination. But this arises mostly from the secretive, distrustful nature of people who know they're doing illegal stuff. Coordinating information among a group of agencies that compete for money and power is not a simple task, and surely not one that can be resolved by setting up a small board of monitors, who by definition cannot be independent since their clearance to view the information in question would be granted by the agencies they're supposed to monitor. The Reagan administration was in many ways the end of the legitimate effort (to the extent that one was ever mounted) to analyze the available data; the CIA's analysis, in particular, became so politicized that their results were practically never anything but rehashes of the administration's nineteenth-century politics. What we need, in my opinion, is to limit the intelligence community to what it was chartered to do, which is gather and analyze intelligence, and eliminate the covert ops altogether. Such ops are not legal or moral or smart, and they most certainly violate the charter.
The other problem is the one you name, that the government responds to every event by trying to insinuate itself more into the daily lives of regular people (do they bug Gates's phone or intercept Ellison's email?). If the revelations of the last couple of weeks show anything at all, it's that the government already had more information than it could analyze. Collecting more will not help; in fact, it's likely to hurt.
But maybe these plans are not really aimed at stopping terrorism, unless you consider anti-globalization protests to be terrorism, while bombing civilians is not.
Finally, I have to admit that your last sentence got me chuckling. This administration has balls? Where? Knowledge? Sure, of how to rig the stock market and sell influence to oil companies they used to work for...
"I am hoping to release this story to the press so that the US Patent office finally wakes up, but the media is unpredictable and unreliable in terms of which stories they encapsulate."
I appreciate your predicament and sympathize with your side of the argument. However, I don't agree that the media is unpredictable and unreliable. Every statistical analysis of media that I'm aware of makes it quite clear that media outlets are finely attuned to the needs of their owners, namely the multinationals.
Just as you won't hear anything bad about nuclear (oh, sorry George, "nookyaler") power plants on NBC, which is owned by GE, which makes nuclear power plants, you also won't find the multinationals ragging on pipsqueaks who use the law as a tool for extortion. After all, the multinationals aren't against extortion as long as they aren't the target...
To name one more: anything written by Thomas Friedman, who would really have been happier at Pravda, where he could openly claim the title he has to hide in this country, Mouthpiece of the Government..
On the level of software, I've used PGP frequently but not extensively for a few years now. I often sign, but rarely encrypt, my messages. I sometimes verify software with PGP signatures; if someone sends me a message with a PGP signature, I usually verify it. But these are all partly because I enjoy doing it.
On the level of civil liberties, I think that some rights need to be exercised on general principle. If you read the literature, it's clear the government has intercepted communications by mail, telegraph, and telephone for many decades. All governments, I imagine, have done so. So do we figure it's always happened and always will? Or decide that governments (and corporations as well, of course) are abusing their rights by opening our mail, and prevent them from doing it?
It's not about what I'm saying in my message. It's about whether I have the right to send a message without it being read by Big Brother. Using tools like PGP and GPG makes a statement that may turn out to be important in the near future. If no one is using encryption, the security honchos will argue that only criminals would use encryption, so we can afford to outlaw strong encryption and settle for an updated Clipper chip. Or just stick to the old leather strap 'round the stick trick.
Slashdot Mirror
One is, what are you going for? Is it more important to you to be working in a hot, even bleeding-edge, field, or does your situation call for more security? If the former, how long can you wait for the payoff? If you're looking for what'll be hot in the next year or two, I think that's very to predict. But if you're trying to prepare for five years from now, I'd be willing to bet that wireless is going to boom the next time the economy is really good. I was working for Metricom (Ricochet modems) when they went under, and most people seemed to be convinced that the major stockholders, WorldCom and Paul Allen, were not giving up, but retrenching. (In fact, my guess is that they found a neat accounting trick that allowed them to dump a billion dollars worth of debt and start over.) I sure think that someone's gonna do this, and make a lot of money. Being there at the right moment could be lucrative and exciting.
On the other hand, if you need security more than excitement for whatever reason, there are a number of choices. Someone's already mentioned support; doing that job well is difficult, and can be rewarding. Databases, networks, the backbone stuff isn't going away soon.
You're already ahead of the game with your attitude of trying to make use of the time. Good luck with your search!
I'm willing to take a job with a company I don't like if I need the job, but I don't confuse that with loyalty. I mean, most corporations are loyal to their employees up to the moment in which management realizes they might be able to make an extra 25 cents by dumping your ass on the street. I think we, as workers, should have exactly that amount of loyalty to the corporations.
But my impression is that your description of the organizational issues is not quite right. For example, all the intelligence agencies (a group that does not include, for example, NIS, but does include CIA, NSA, and NRO) report to the Director of Central Intelligence, the DCI, currently George Tenet. So there is structurally a method for putting intelligence info together. The National Security Advisor, on the other hand, reports directly to the President and is normally a political appointee in the sense of being chosen by the President and replaced by the next one, unlike the DCI, who has a term that is longer than one Presidential term and is not normally dumped by incoming Presidents.
There are at least two problems with this, one of which is the lack of coordination. But this arises mostly from the secretive, distrustful nature of people who know they're doing illegal stuff. Coordinating information among a group of agencies that compete for money and power is not a simple task, and surely not one that can be resolved by setting up a small board of monitors, who by definition cannot be independent since their clearance to view the information in question would be granted by the agencies they're supposed to monitor. The Reagan administration was in many ways the end of the legitimate effort (to the extent that one was ever mounted) to analyze the available data; the CIA's analysis, in particular, became so politicized that their results were practically never anything but rehashes of the administration's nineteenth-century politics. What we need, in my opinion, is to limit the intelligence community to what it was chartered to do, which is gather and analyze intelligence, and eliminate the covert ops altogether. Such ops are not legal or moral or smart, and they most certainly violate the charter.
The other problem is the one you name, that the government responds to every event by trying to insinuate itself more into the daily lives of regular people (do they bug Gates's phone or intercept Ellison's email?). If the revelations of the last couple of weeks show anything at all, it's that the government already had more information than it could analyze. Collecting more will not help; in fact, it's likely to hurt. But maybe these plans are not really aimed at stopping terrorism, unless you consider anti-globalization protests to be terrorism, while bombing civilians is not.
Finally, I have to admit that your last sentence got me chuckling. This administration has balls? Where? Knowledge? Sure, of how to rig the stock market and sell influence to oil companies they used to work for...
I appreciate your predicament and sympathize with your side of the argument. However, I don't agree that the media is unpredictable and unreliable. Every statistical analysis of media that I'm aware of makes it quite clear that media outlets are finely attuned to the needs of their owners, namely the multinationals.
Just as you won't hear anything bad about nuclear (oh, sorry George, "nookyaler") power plants on NBC, which is owned by GE, which makes nuclear power plants, you also won't find the multinationals ragging on pipsqueaks who use the law as a tool for extortion. After all, the multinationals aren't against extortion as long as they aren't the target...
To name one more: anything written by Thomas Friedman, who would really have been happier at Pravda, where he could openly claim the title he has to hide in this country, Mouthpiece of the Government..
Just FYI, you can easily get to the excellent
article "In the beginning was the command line"
by Neal Stephenson at
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
I especially love his metaphor of MS, Apple, BE,
and Linux as a set of car dealerships.
"You don't know how to maintain a station wagon
either!"
HTH...
On the level of software, I've used PGP frequently but not extensively for a few years now. I often sign, but rarely encrypt, my messages. I sometimes verify software with PGP signatures; if someone sends me a message with a PGP signature, I usually verify it. But these are all partly because I enjoy doing it.
On the level of civil liberties, I think that some rights need to be exercised on general principle. If you read the literature, it's clear the government has intercepted communications by mail, telegraph, and telephone for many decades. All governments, I imagine, have done so. So do we figure it's always happened and always will? Or decide that governments (and corporations as well, of course) are abusing their rights by opening our mail, and prevent them from doing it?
It's not about what I'm saying in my message. It's about whether I have the right to send a message without it being read by Big Brother. Using tools like PGP and GPG makes a statement that may turn out to be important in the near future. If no one is using encryption, the security honchos will argue that only criminals would use encryption, so we can afford to outlaw strong encryption and settle for an updated Clipper chip. Or just stick to the old leather strap 'round the stick trick.