government agency? hardly. try private corporation employing a workforce that includes some percentage of employees with security clearance, the result of the legislative branch outsourcing national security to the private sector instead of funding the executive branch.
they can use your tax dollar for that, not mine.
why i said please.
I cannot understand what youâre on about. The NSA was established by President Truman as a government agency, and as far as I know that is still the case. Like many government agencies, they do contract some work out to private contractors (such as Snowdenâs former employer).
I cannot understand what youâre on about.
fair point given the topic. how much work? sounds like all of it, but specifics are a matter of ânational securityâ. basically the any excuse i referred to earlier covers that. doesnât legally cover it, is that what you donât understand? maybe youâre still worried about president truman. iâd be more concerned about any information gathering being âcontractedâ out.
You have to search for âclandestine serviceâ. See:
https://www.cia.gov/offices-of-cia/clandestine-service
Sure Iâm still worried about Truman; heâs still the only guy I can think of that has ordered someone to drop an atomic bomb.
Like you I am not a fan of the use of contractors at NSA, or of people outside of the government having so much access to our information. However, the agency itself employs something like 40,000 people, all of whom are public servants (in the technical sense), so I think a fair amount of work is still being done in-house.
There is nothing intrinsically immoral about working for the government
you are in an odd mood today.
Iâve received several targeted recruitment ads from the CIA in my e-mail the past year or so. Iâd previously applied to government jobs through the USA Jobs website, but the CIA e-mails (which seem to check out as legit) came to a different e-mail address than the one I used there.
They are so lame - like this NSA ad - that only cubicle schlubs in bad suits (like the people pictured in the CIA ads) with delusions of being super-spies would ever actually apply through the ads. Which explains a lot.
Because they seem to have gotten my address from my other internet activities, though, I have to admit I enjoyed considering the possibility that I was actually being personally recruited like in a spy novel. And perhaps the lameness is the start of a test, and if you pursue it youâll be offered a series of increasingly difficult riddles (weeding out the schlubs), and then finally find yourself facing an anonymous-looking trench-coated dude in a parking structure who hands you a final puzzle, where you must find a pass for the nearest Air Force base and a ticket for the black helicopter ride to Langley.
Part of the first test might be tracking you online and hijacking traffic to show you lame NSA or CIA recruitment ads on random sites like the Asia Times. Like how your parents are surprised when they see ads for garbage bins showing up on all their sites after they looked for garbage bins on Amazon, except itâs all NSA ads. That of course will only get the attention of all the clever techies who arenât using ad-blocking, though. Which perhaps also explains a lot.
I donât think it was ever fiction, TBH.
There are, however, government jobs that, on the face of it, would appear to be intrinsically immoral.
Largely because of that particular line in that particular scene in Bladerunner, I was reminded of the situation of immigrants to the US in the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century, who attained a measure of respectability by joining the police, and then were employed to beat down fellow immigrants who were unionists or radicals.
Oh, but they do.
may be all they do with it. supposedly politicians spend 30-70% of their time in office campaigning. wonder how much time and effort the nsa spends on recruiting and âpublic relationsâ. obviously, from the example ad, they arenât very good at it.
Eh, my jobâs canny useful. It involves making sure someone doesnât die, so Iâm cool with that 
Huh? What are you on about?
He is in an odd mood today.
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