Thank you for posting this. Blaming the NSA employees for the growth in the security state is like blaming soldiers for our military interventions. People go to work for the Agency (the nation’s largest employer of PhD mathematicians, by the way) because they believe it is a place where they can use their abilities on behalf of the country. The failure of our political leaders to do their job and give appropriate direction to the Agency is a political failure. The employees who are leaving are lucky they have this option with which to demonstrate their lack of faith in their leadership.
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There is something about the selection process that puts negative pressure on “good people.” You have to be conformist enough to qualify for, and then live your life in a way that won’t disqualify you from, holding a security clearance. Most people with strong beliefs about freedom occasionally act on those beliefs in unproductive ways simply because that’s human nature. If you believe people deserve the right to be occasional screw-ups without ruining their lives, that’s frequently because you’ve screwed-up a few times.
The culture of classified work discourages that. It doesn’t eliminate it, but you can even see it in Snowden’s own evolution of character in his posts on Ars – he started out as a pretty rigid and authoritarian sounding guy in the way that so many ideological libertarians come across as authoritarians in sheep’s clothing. If he had been mentally where he is now I think he would have been less inclined to even start working for the NSA to begin with.
FWIW, I’m speaking from my own experience. I held a clearance for a great long while. And even though I am about as generic and innocuous in my lived life as you can get, the invisible pressure to conform chafed me every day. The money was damn good, but the day I was able to deactivate my clearance was a day of freedom for me.
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Perhaps they aren’t idiots and can see they are being asked by their nation to violate the privacy of its citizenry…
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“They are doing exactly what our nation has asked them to do…"
"…they are doing something wrong,”
The way these two phrases go together…
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Don’t need staff when the data collection is automated.
No, they don’t read it all as it comes in; that would require staff. But, after the fact, once you’ve drawn their interest, then they read it.
It’s utterly useless as a terrorist-prevention measure. But its perfectly functional as a blackmail-generator.
It ain’t a tool of safety; it’s a tool of control.
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Like humans, I’m sure their system is good at detecting patterns where none exist, and everyone is within six degrees of separation from a terrorist.
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Why not? Our military will bomb you if you are 60 feet from one.
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Key words there. Director. And consultant. As in the guy running the show and people who are not government workers but private sector contractors.
And 160k is kind of “paltry” for running an agency. I know plenty of cops and federal workers for other agencies who pull down more than that despite not sitting in a management sort of roll.
In my experience salaries for entry level jobs are pretty damn good if you’ve got a college degree and can qualify for the mid to top tier pay grade for a position. Usually higher than comparable private sector jobs, with far better benefits.
However depending on agency and field that tapers off quick. You pretty rapidly exhaust the pay grade, available raises and advancement that experience and service time alone can provide. At which point you need continual training and additional schooling to advance up the ladder or increase pay. As in for the rest of your life. Always another cert, always another degree. So there’s a sort of soft cap to how far you can go and what you can make. Even if your talking about a field where salaries are initially competitive. The private sector doesn’t have that. But it also doesn’t have pensions and decent health insurance by default.
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I find them beneficial.
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I believe Trump has stated his intention to have a hiring freeze on all federal government jobs and he plans on downsizing the government workforce substantially. If you have talent and you work for the feds, it seems like a good idea to get another job now before there’s a glut of unemployed civil servants competing with you.
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NSA’s employees are leaving in small numbers, but that is still a big problem. The Department of Human Resources was happy with a 96% retention rate until the technical people pointed out that many of the best new hires were leaving. However, the loss began well before Edward Snowden mistook foreign surveillance for domestic surveillance. The old bureaucracy and the new talent were separated by a cultural divide.
For example, the new software developers wanted to contribute to open source software related to their expertise on their own time, but the NSA prepublication review rules made that almost impossible. They saw it as a chance to become more skilled, and management saw it as a security risk.
I hope they found a solution. This old mathematician no longer works there.
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Surely they knew this before they took the job. I almost joined you at the Agency 38 years ago, and was very thoroughly briefed early in the employment process about restrictions connected to the position. I finally withdrew my application for essentially this reason, but I was impressed by how upfront they were.
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Not convinced that your ethics are better looked after in the private sector. Their are this private sector firms selling surveillance technology to Bahrain a.s. Shouldn’t necessarily facilitate good night sleep…
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The candidates for jobs are informed, and like in your case, the restriction persuades some to withdraw their application. Yet consider the misplaced priority. The chance of accidentally leaking classified information by writing software for a non-NSA project is so small that losing an excellent new employee does more harm than the prepublication review would prevent.
That was only one example. Plain, ordinary bureaucratic paperwork, such as a six-month procurement process to buy off-the-shelf commercial software, is another example. The NSA has a culture of helping each other to overcome such hurdles, but solutions that work for most people are inadequate for the exceptional people. They complain that they can’t stand working as slowly as processing paperwork requires.
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This, exactly.
An interesting statement.
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One would hope that at least a few of the most ethical ones would follow Julian Assange’s advice to stay, observe, and discretely report back to the American people via whistleblowing and leaks about the shady activities of our secret government.
Especially now.
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There just isn’t a cluebat weighty enough to deal with people who either cannot distinguish or refuse to acknowledge a difference between slander and the ‘bad optics’ of being caught doing something nasty.
If somebody telling the truth about you makes you look worse; the problem is on your end.
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I suspect that the enhanced mole-hunting has made that prospect a bit more nerve-wracking. Even if they hadn’t turned it up to 11 after Snowden; I can only assume that the ‘Shadow Broker’ thing didn’t exactly dissuade the inquisition.
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That probably has a lot to do with why people are leaving too. Nobody wants to be subject to an inquisition, so they might be separating the “If I’ve done nothing wrong, I have nothing to hide” true believers from the sane people.
I remember reading this story about MI5 and how at one point they tended to think that low case closure rate meant that you were probably a Russian spy. Intelligence agencies don’t live up to their name.
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