The article doesn't truly address such a large claim -- it basically could be titled "After Snowden, the NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge from 3 College Students".
The NSA has nearly unlimited hiring potential with just the pool of military folks alone that work there. There are constant hiring freezes for a year at a time, because a lot of buildings are over capacity.
If one of these college students were to apply to the NSA through NSA.gov (mandated as the only way someone is allowed into the agency), they would have to apply a minimum of 2-4 times, because the application stays good for about 90 days, and the average applicant waits 6 months to a year to get accepted. This is assuming they're applying straight through without having someone with hiring power pull their application from the queue. After that, the process to get a clearance could take anywhere from another 6 months to 2 years (possibly more in some exceptional cases) and costs the agency about 250k.
So, it goes without saying that bringing onboard a fresh college student who isn't going to even get to walk through the door at least a year after applying, can pale in comparison to bringing on someone who already has a clearance and training. The article assumes that the NSA relies heavily on its external recruitment, but the vast majority of folks working there just change out of a uniform into jeans and a shirt.
I do think the real issue is not whether the NSA can fill cubes, but whether they can stay ahead of the threat curve. NSA competes with, but not for, the employees of foreign intelligence services; likewise, they used to compete for the same talent pool as top tech companies, but not against those companies.
Then they decided to turn the Big Ear inwards and go to war with US tech companies. Now firms like Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. are building active defenses against the NSA, which means that they're hiring for the same problem domain, with better salaries and benefits, no security checks or polys, and no stigma (and a lot of prestige) attached to the position. As a result, NSA is threatened with losing precisely those talents necessary to keep ahead of foreign adversaries.
The savage irony of this is that both the NSA and tech companies are at a Nash equilibrium that is non-Pareto optimal; NSA loses top-tier candidates, and tech companies have to expend resources to protect themselves from NSA and other threats. An ideal scenario would be for a trusted NSA to work with tech companies to support strong crypto and security, but that's a nonstarter in the political and bureaucratic climate.
Personally, I'd like to see the defensive aspects of the NSA broken out into a separate agency, preferably either cabinet-level or independent, with the singular mission of protecting the security and privacy of all Americans, covering everything from crypto to vulnerability discovery to privacy recommendations and (where applicable) rulemaking. You would assume that NSA would still be in competition with a hypothetical Information Security Assurance Agency for discovering vulnerabilities, but the ISAA would not have the balancing test of "does this vulnerability threaten Americans more than it helps us listen on our adversaries?" Think of it as a FEMA for the cybersecurity age.
Salaries and pensions are no joke either. I was reading about how recruitment works. It seems they have a relationship with many CS and Math professors who recommend bright students directly to NSA headhunters. I imagine working on some of the problems they do can be very exciting. Not everyone feels this need to publish publicly.
I find it hard to believe there's any sort of recruitment shortage. The NSA does today what it did 5, 10, 15, etc years ago. People interviewing for those positions know exactly what they're getting into then the same way they know what they're getting into today. The whole "OMGZ SPYING ON MY MAY-MAYS" sells on here on reddit, but apparantly lots of people don't take that view and instead see sigint as a legitimate need, like having a standing military with nuclear weapons or intervening into foreign countries. Arguably, good sigint means less conflicts and more wins. Hitler's Germany was damaged greatly by sigint hero Alan Turing. Funny how we celebrate Turing, but a modern Turing today would be vilified instantly. The world, if anything, is much more dangerous today than in the 30s considering how many nations have nuclear weapons. Honestly, if I had the choice I'd rather work there than find new ways to deliver annoying click-bait ads at a place like Facebook or get kids hooked on some milquetoast WoW-clone.
The Chinese, Iranian, and Russian sigint guys aren't taking some moral stand either. They're just getting their assess to work the same way we do.
> Funny how we celebrate Turing, but a modern Turing today would be vilified instantly.
For that comparison to work, we would need a modern Third Reich or World War as well. Tapping into European email in 201x is hardly the same as spying on the Nazis.
Well that seems very much up for debate by the powers that are the U.S. Government... if you're not an American you're a potential terrorist; if however, you are an American, you're a potential terrorist too. So they're just gonna record everything and if you float, you're a witch and they'll burn you at the stake and if you drown then you were innocent and... sucks to be you; Oh wait, that was something else...
The point of omnipresent surveillance is to be proactive and prevent threats before they arise. There is no way to measure its success. If you oppose it, pick a better reason to base your argument on.
Unlike you, I don't believe success, or really anything, is necessary to justify the existence of the NSA or what they do. Realistically, that boat sailed the first time necessary and proper was invoked.
How considerate. As if the legal system matters at all to the existence of the NSA. Wikimedia's case notwithstanding, it's abundantly clear the spy agencies can only be peacefully resisted with privacy enhancing technology. It's obvious why they've been degrading public cryptographic standards and pushing for back doors.
The Stasi controlled every aspect of life in East Germany, including the postal service and communications industry. In the US, FOIA documents reveal a history of domestic political spying on civil-rights leaders such as MLK, and on a wide variety of legitimate organizations.
Throughout history, suspicionless surveillance has been carried out by mafioso to oppress and control.
Of your suspicionless surveillance, you assert "this time is different". The assertion fails.
The Nazis could use your arguments word for word on dissenters of the Gestapo.
No, but his team was also on the receiving end of policies like only using Enigma data for certain events. He knew of attacks that were probably avoidable that led to significant casualties. We can play the moral card all day here.
There's a world of difference between systematically eradicating privacy rights across the globe and withholding potentially life saving information because revealing it would risk exposing your source and thus your ability to do more good in the future.
We celebrate Turing because he contributed a lot to a fairly noble cause.
Spying on the rest of the world that you're not currently at war with is not such a cause, it's a travesty, an insult and has the net negative effect of fracturing the world further and reducing the amount of goodwill between NATO allies.
Please do not soil Turing's legacy by trying to conflate the two.
I'm not sure the world is a much more dangerous place than it was in the 1930s, at ground level that's just another appeal to fear, the general consensus seems to be that the world is getting safer rather than the opposite. Unless you live above a bunch of oil in the ground.
The US Military and associated intelligence branches have crafted heros, but also committed atrocities against our own men and women in uniform. That used to be the line they didn't cross.
You can give an enlisted man syphilis and see what happens. You can even overtly target black enlisted men and see what happens.
But you do the same kind of experiment with the civilian population and you are straight fucked.
I guess if we're obliterating that line, then sure, what's the difference? You're either cop or little people.
Sorry if I wasn't clear, that's what I intended to convey.
In the public sector we mostly consider employment solely based on its benefits because under US law there is only so much bad shit that your employer is allowed to cause you to endure.
Employment with the US Military or associated intelligence services MUST be considered with the stark fact in mind that a core tenant of your employment is signing over your life. Not to die nobly for just causes. Simply to give over your life for nearly any purpose deemed fit by your superiors.
Had an interview with them about three months after I applied. Well, had a phone interview with them at least. It lasted about three questions because, unfortunately, I had smoked pot in the last year (the one time I had done it in my life actually).
I'm actually not sure if I should have failed it after the second question, which was whether or not I work closely with any foreign nationals. Doesn't everyone in the tech sector? I work closely with a Romanian, a Filipino, and a guy from Sierra Leone. They may all be US citizens now, but i have no idea, so I said "no", after trying to get some guidance from the interviewer (she offered none).
Strangely, after my failed three question phone interview I still got an in person interview request and it took two calls to straighten that out.
If I lived in the Denver or DC area, I'd probably apply again in six months or so (once my one year has lapsed), but I just don't think it's worth moving across the country for a job there.
The pot question won't immediately disqualify you -- you'd just have to sign a waiver saying your employment means you're not allowed to use illegal substances. They'd also ask you and confirm this in the lifestyle polygraph.
The foreign nationals question is a matter of seeing how deep your clearance process is going to go. If you're in Kansas and the only people you know are from Kansas and all of your Facebook friends live in Kansas, it's going to make it easy for the FBI agents (who conduct the clearance work) to do the required interviews. If you start listing foreign national contacts, each one of them has to be investigated individually (the ones who are close relatives), and that's a lot of work. It's basically easier to fail someone on that and hire the person in Kansas.
Generally, for something like pot, agencies are going to want a year of abstinence before they'll talk to you. Likely, it'll come up in your clearance interviews and you may have to sign a piece of paper stating that you won't do it again. For longer term drug use or other drugs, the agencies may funny about it. If you're curious the Adjudicative Desk Reference (ADR) gives some guidelines on how the process works:
It's long, but gives a pretty clear indication on the kinds of questions asked. Basically, they're looking for foreign contacts for which you've had "close and/or continuing contact" whose nature falls under 4 categories
1. Affection
2. Obligation
3. Influence
4. Common interest
If I recall correctly, that fourth one was added about five years ago. Anyway, check page 59 in the link.
Can't speak for NSA, but CIA bans all illegal substances in the last 365 days. That may have changed in the past 10 years though. If you have any history of substances, you'll have to do the waiver.
That is the standard for DOD clearances in general. No illegal substance use in the past year, and any at all needs to be adjudicated (to use their terminology).
Nitpick (since I just noticed it): general clearance investigations are handled by the Office of Personnel Management; special clearance investigations are handled directly by the program or agency granting the special clearance.
Is asking such questions (smoking pot, questions about your social life) in a job interview legal in the US? From what I know, this would be illegal in most European countries.
For national security positions; absolutely. Those questions are due to the potential for coercion as well as character determination. As far as Europe, MI6 definitely asks those questions. Not sure about DGSE in France though. If you answer in a way that's "negative" that doesn't hurt you as much as lying. If everyone knows about your transgressions, there is less leverage for cohesion by a foreign agency. But if you're keeping a secret, that's exceptional leverage that can be used to blackmail you into betraying secrets.
You hit on a great point. The possibility to be coerced is pretty much the single biggest part of the entire security investigation. It includes being coerced because:
-Financial debt, so all of your finances are inspected
-Family connections, so all of your family is investigated
-Marital affairs, so you're asked about it during the poly
-Pirating software, again asked about it on the poly
...and all sorts of other things. The big thing you hit on is that this isn't very painful unless you try to hide it. If you try to hide something and it comes out in the investigation, you'll almost certainly be disqualified.
One thing I learned in the briefings I saw after getting my clearance was that the single biggest motivator for betrayal was a thrill-seeking narcissistic personality, followed closely by political agendas. Financial (including bribery/blackmail) and romantic blackmail concerns were so tenuously correlated as to be laughable to suggest they are meaningful as a potential exploitation.
The only reason that "smoking pot" has potential for coercion is that the US government makes such a doggone huge stink about it. Homosexuality and mental health issues lie in the same category - if they didn't make a stink about it, being gay or whatever wouldn't be an issue, and nobody would be able to coerce anyone about it.
The NSA, at least, is not without imagination. They will have perceived the issue with making a stink about X causes X to be a handle for coercion. Therefore, the NSA wants pot smoking to be in issue they can disqualify people with, they want other arbitrary categories of actions to be disqualification issues. Why? My guess is control: mental health issues and sexual behavior outside of vanilla are pretty darn common. Finding such problems gives the NSA itself a handle on their own people, to coerce things from them.
And as far as "character" goes, haven't we heard enough about that in the past few years to realize that "good character" is just another form of racism/elitism, like "good breeding" or a "gentleman's C" grade at an Ivy League school?
The coercion justification is really bizarre though. The only reason anyone could coerce you because they know you smoke pot is because it's a big deal to the NSA, so the NSA asks because they know that because of their self-imposed policy it creates the possibility for coercion.
If instead they just decided that if they found out one of their employees smoked pot that they wouldn't care the coercion potential would magically disappear overnight.
But I guess that's too logical for the government to consider.
Varies by state and a lot is illegal (age, race, marital status), but in this specific case they're talking about clearance questions which are different (getting a secret/top secret clearance). For these questions basically anything goes.
At least in Sweden you can in principle ask any question you want, but you open yourself up to lawsuits if the person being interviewed feels they didn't get the job due to their answer (or refusal to answer) any question about family/politics/religion/sexuality etc. etc.
In Germany you can only ask about drug use if the people will work with heavy machinery. No questions about race, gender, kids, or age are allowed and can be used to file a lawsuit if asked.
The federal police and intelligence agencies will also background check your friends and family. That being said, amongst German IT professionals people working for the government have the image of being a bit slow and only there for the job security. The best graduates certainly don't go there, and because patriotism/nationalism is very low the agencies cannot even advertise with "Do it for your country, if not for the money".
It's an illegal substance; it must be bought from illegal merchants; engaging in black market commerce exposes one to the risk of blackmail, coercion &c.
It'd be weird if it weren't disqualifying.
(I think it ought to be 100% legal, but until it is, users are too great a risk)
Well, sure. In itself. But in terms of a security clearance, a use of drugs means you might be susceptible to bribery/ extortion/ blackmail over such use (or someone might helpfully keep you supplied in exchange for information).
As a technicality, they're not asking it as part of the job interview itself, they're asking it as part of either a security clearance, or a "pre" security clearance to see if they should even bother.
> Is asking such questions (smoking pot, questions about your social life) in a job interview legal in the US?
I suppose you can ask any question you like in a job interview.
It isn't that certain questions are illegal; it's that there are certain bases on which employers may not discriminate - so called protected classes of individuals[1]. If you ask someone a question about whether they are married or pregnant, you might create the perception that you are discriminating on those bases. Not delving into those areas in interviews is merely a prudent HR policy to avoid the appearance of impropriety; actually discriminating on those grounds, however, is illegal.
Job interviews are not the same as security clearance checks (which some govt/govt contractor jobs require). I don't know what if anything is "out of bounds" in the context of those...
EDIT: For a bit more information on the types of questions you might run into during a clearance check, here's a PDF of the form you fill out, SF86[2]. I don't know how closely they hew to this in the in-person interviews but I've heard anecdotally that the investigators primarily clarify and confirm responses you gave on the clearance form. Note that it is 127 pages long. The first 60 or so pages are basic information about you, your relatives, your marital status, people who know you well, education, personal military history and employment. Here are some of the more interesting sections along with the page number they start on:
- Foreign Contacts (p62)
- Foreign Activities (p66)
- Foreign Business, Professional Activities, and Foreign Government Contacts (p75)
- Foreign Travel (p83)
- Psychological and Emotional Health (p87)
- Police Record (p89)
- Illegal Use of Drugs and Drug Activity (p96)
- Use of Alcohol (p103)
- Financial Record (p109)
- Use of Information Technology Systems (p116)
- Association Record (p119) features the question: "Are you now or have you EVER been a member of an organization dedicated to terrorism, either with an awareness of the organization's dedication to that end, or which the specific intent to further such activities?" along with a form which you can helpfully use to provide the name and street address of the organization as well as any contributions you made:
> Are you now or have you EVER been a member of an organization dedicated to terrorism, either with an awareness of the organization's dedication to that end, or which the specific intent to further such activities?
At a guess that question is only there so you can be prosecuted if the answer you give is in contradiction to what is already known about you. I highly doubt they actually expect to find anything new like this.
Regarding the pot question, they came to my college and gave a group interview and someone asked the pot question and they told a story about a girl who had applied and passed, but they found pot in the last year, even though she passed the polygraph. They figured out she was sauced at a party and smoked, and were unable to let her in. Granted this was 10 years ago, so something might have changed.
> After that, the process to get a clearance could take anywhere from another 6 months to 2 years (possibly more in some exceptional cases) and costs the agency about 250k.
Excellent. I see an opportunity here. Apply en-masse and let it go after you get the clearance.
You don't want to endure an SCI or a single scope clearance unless you have to. It is not fun at all. My clearance back in the day took over a year before it was finally granted and it involved turning over lots of rocks I would have rather left unturned. NSA and CIA clearances involve a poly, which is an experience one doesn't generally enjoy. Several days in some hotel room outside the Beltway getting drilled over and over again; or so I've heard.
I found the process of getting a mere "Secret" clearance in 1985 and again in 1991 pretty invasive, enough so that I don't believe I would take a job that required any clearance. I'm not a shady character at all, but having old friends call you up and say that a sweaty guy in a suit is asking questions, and then telling you "I spilled my guts" is not a good experience. If you get a clearance, your family and a lot of old acquaintances are going to have brushes with The Law. This may not be a good experience for everyone.
They are debunked, but they're still intimidating enough to be useful on a lot of people. I have friends who claim to have 'faked out' their poly, and friends who claim they cracked under the pressure and tried to admit everything wrong they'd ever done in their life (not that the examiner cares about throwing a frog at your sister when you were 5). On balance, it's useful for weeding out a certain percentage of people.
That doesn't stop the NSA from doing them. I applied to work for the NSA as a mathematician in 2007-8 and went through two separate trips to Fort Meade and two separate polygraphs.
It's not about collecting or verifying information.
The goal of the exercise is to make you fearful, intimidated, and compliant, and to reinforce the government's dominance over you. The polygraph is just a prop. The examiner is the one really measuring you. Even if your saint's halo is still slightly visible at noon on a sunny day, you will always be given the impression that you barely passed.
So it hardly matters that a polygraph is pseudoscience, because the placebo effect is real. If you think you're being objectively measured by a machine, instead of subjectively judged by a man, that makes his job simpler.
Otherwise, it's Iocaine Powder.
(I can neither confirm nor deny whether I have any actual experience with polygraph testing, or whether I know anyone who does.)
I remember seeing a U.S. government counterintelligence film (maybe linked from HN?) meant to discourage people, especially exchange students, from being recruited as assets of Chinese spy agencies. It was based on a true story in which an American was recruited and then applied for a clearance at the instigation of his foreign contacts. In the film, he was caught as a result of failing a polygraph: when uncomfortable questions arise during the examination, he asks to discontinue it and withdraw his application, and they don't let him get away with that; they end up prosecuting him and he pleads guilty to espionage charges.
I couldn't help thinking that the polygraph might have worked in that situation mainly because he believed it would!
That's somewhat of an insider joke about security clearances. (Though I can still neither confirm nor deny that I am an insider, or that I understand why the joke I just told may or may not be funny.)
Pseudoanonymous people posting on the Internet can't be trusted anyway, right?
I've never taken a polygraph or even heard about this. Care to elaborate?
How is a polygraph test stressful? I mean, obviously it's probably stressful just for the fact that some random stranger is going to ask questions, some of them probably pretty personal, but other than that which I think applies to any random stranger (with or without a poly in hand), why exactly did you make that remark? Is there anything out of the obvious that would make it even more stressful?
The only similar thing I Can think about, was this TV show I saw once (pretty shady if you ask me), where a guy and a girl (best friends testing their best-friendship supposedly) where put on a "polygraph" test (as far as they explained, it was just a heart rate detector), and the tv host would then proceed to make personal questions, getting more "intense" and earning more money as the show progressed, losing money everytime the "poly" detected a lie, or winning if it was the "truth".
At the end they asked questions like, "are you in love with her?" and of course, being that a lot of best-friendships were probably just friendzoned-friends, almost always the answer was "yes".
And so the amount of stress of publicly expressing that hidden love, at the risk of (that almost always happened) having the girl answer the same question with a big "no", for a chance to win money, was pretty tacky and stressful.
Is this related to what you were talking (minus the money,k the tv show, the girl... the fun basically)?
We used to help guys get contracting jobs in the 100k-120k range in D.C. (300k for afghanistan).
Now the same contracts are hiring people on at 40-50k, and people are taking the jobs because they already gave up their government spot. The contracting world has pretty much turned inside out because of the upheavals over recent years. Most of the contractors I know are aiming for government jobs now.
The way government contracting is set-up, it was guaranteed from the beginning to end up this way.
There are so many re-competes and re-bids for contracts that are supposed to be multi-year, that pretty much every fucking year a new company comes in and under-bids a contract. The company isn't going to take the hit, so the employees basically get to re-apply for the same position at a lower salary.
The government claims that this system was developed to ensure fairness to the companies bidding on jobs, but it seems an awful lot like the real purpose was to drive employee wages down. Hopefully it doesn't start to drive down private sector wages in the DC area.
FYI, this doesn't happen at Raytheon SI. They're mainly in Florida, Maryland, Virginia, and Texas. They're hiring. Desired skills relate to reverse engineering, disassembly, emulators, JIT, hypervisors, compilers, binary static analysis, and embedded systems. It's a place with extreme flex time, T-shirts and jeans (or shorts even), normally 40-hour weeks with the option for paid overtime if you want it, your choice of desktop OS, real walls (most locations), and lots of mischievous bright nerds with maker attitude.
Its not just a fucked company, its most of the large defense contractors. The building I worked in had people from most of the largest companies. I don't think we had anyone from Raytheon, but most of the other big names were present.
A lot of the blame lies with the leadership of the organizations that are hiring the contractors. At some places, a government agency will stick with the same company as long as things are going well, at other places, they automatically accept the lowest bid every single year, even though doing it sabotages their own projects and puts people out of work.
Sounds like your company (or at least your part of Raytheon) is willing to fight for its employees. I made the move to private sector a little over a year ago after my entire team was laid-off. Things are so much better now that its hard for me to consider ever working for the government again, but if things change I'll probably look into Raytheon SI first.
While my corner of Raytheon was not nearly as nice as milspec's is, it was not the situation you describe either. Layoffs from my business unit were rare, though a former business unit had some serious problems after a number of contract losses and overruns. I got raises every year, though about half of them were shit.
We only got involved in big contracts, though. New business that wasn't measured in at least tens of millions was ignored, unless it was an add-on to an existing contract.
This is spot on. Everyone thinks contractors make more, this is no longer the case. A lot of contractors I know personally are going fed because of the stability and job security.
It's....not. It's part of the Department of Defense. Although this department includes the military forces (minus the coast guard), the vast majority of its member agencies are all civilian agencies, and the person who heads it up (Secretary of Defense) is a civilian.
> It's....not [part of the military]. It's part of the Department of Defense.
I think you're picking hairs. While NSA is not strictly a military branch, NSA is a defense agency within the DoD. It is not directed by a civilian, but by a commissioned officer of the military. That seems pretty damned close enough to me.
> the vast majority of its member agencies are all civilian agencies
I don't know how you came to this conclusion, as the actual numbers and ratio of military vs. civilian personnel is still classified to the best of my knowledge. To the best of my (circumstantial) knowledge, the ratio for civilian vs. (usually US Navy) military personnel is likely somewhere around 60/40. I couldn't tell you which category is civilian vs. military, though.
> the person who heads it up (Secretary of Defense) is a civilian.
I'd love to know how you came up with your conclusions, as you seem to have some familiarity with the Beltway, because they don't match my experiences.
> I don't know how you came to this conclusion, as the actual numbers and ratio of military vs. civilian personnel is still classified to the best of my knowledge. To the best of my (circumstantial) knowledge, the ratio for civilian vs. (usually US Navy) military personnel is likely somewhere around 60/40. I couldn't tell you which category is civilian vs. military, though.
I'm not saying this to be mean, but you didn't parse my comment properly, so I'll break it down.
>Although this department includes the military forces (minus the coast guard), the vast majority of its member agencies are all civilian agencies, and the person who heads it up (Secretary of Defense) is a civilian.
This department is referring to the Department of Defense. The next sentence refers to its member agencies, not the members of its agencies. The member agencies (the agencies that are a part of the Department of Defense) are mostly civilian agencies, which you can see listed out on the wikipedia page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Def...
In it, you'll see that there are 15 defense agencies, 4 intelligence agencies, and 3 military departments, for a grand total of 19 to 3.
The "it" in that sentence is referring to the Department of Defense -- which was initiated by "this department". The person you linked to DIRNSA, which has nothing to do with what I was saying.
It is a building where the DoD and all of the top military brass work. All DoD aka "military" decisions ultimately come from the Pentagon, where the final say for all things DoD reside.
Disclaimer: I never worked at the pentagon, but am a US Army veteran who was in Military Intelligence from 2001-2005.
The NSA has nearly unlimited hiring potential with just the pool of military folks alone that work there. There are constant hiring freezes for a year at a time, because a lot of buildings are over capacity.
If one of these college students were to apply to the NSA through NSA.gov (mandated as the only way someone is allowed into the agency), they would have to apply a minimum of 2-4 times, because the application stays good for about 90 days, and the average applicant waits 6 months to a year to get accepted. This is assuming they're applying straight through without having someone with hiring power pull their application from the queue. After that, the process to get a clearance could take anywhere from another 6 months to 2 years (possibly more in some exceptional cases) and costs the agency about 250k.
So, it goes without saying that bringing onboard a fresh college student who isn't going to even get to walk through the door at least a year after applying, can pale in comparison to bringing on someone who already has a clearance and training. The article assumes that the NSA relies heavily on its external recruitment, but the vast majority of folks working there just change out of a uniform into jeans and a shirt.