The NSA can't recruit or retain hackers because the pay sucks and the Agency is a bureaucratic mess

boing
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Mmmm, not really. I feel like this is projection. The person making the statement is now in the private sector. His point is, and this is with any branch of government which needs some sort of professional skill, the reason to do the job with the government is rarely a monetary one. Stability, good benefits, etc are good reasons to get a government job. But for some fields that are in super high demand, especially for the “best of the best”, the only reason to get the government job is for a sense of duty (i.e. serving your country) and/or because of a moral sense of upholding the “good” (which may or may not be tied to God.) Otherwise any other place is going to give you better money and benefits.

As much as I dislike citizen surveillance, and some other programs, the NSA still provides an important role.

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How do you explain the people who worked for the various institutions for the US government during the Cold War? Historically, they had the same problems the NSA has now - the CIA was especially unaccountable, but they recruited well and it was considered a prestigious job for many. And they often worked with various private cultural and charitable organizations in secret, with the leadership in full knowledge of what they were doing.

I’m not sure it’s a moral question, because plenty of people feel and have long felt that working for the American security apparatus is not only morally justifiable, but the morally correct thing to do. We may disagree with that, but I’d suggest that just as many millennials have actively and willingly participated in the war on terror as baby boomers and some Gen Xers actively and willing participated in the Cold War. Likewise, I’m sure there are similar percentages of those who are alienated and do not condone that same apparatus. I’m failing to see the difference here, frankly.

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What illegal/immoral activity did Winner blow the whistle on?

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The pay sucks, only $200,000? There might be better offers in private industry, there always are. But sucks?

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Faith in post-war America, the unbridled fear of Russia/Communism and a culture of homogeneity that blindered people to the realities of their actions and the ethical implications. Those ideas are so abstracted these days, especially with a president who doesn’t even respect the mores that have guided the office. Of course, it’s foolish to paint any generation with such a broad brush, but I find that so many people born in the last few decades just don’t have those same old lies to fall back on. In addition to that, the promises (for white Americans, at least) of the attainable American dream have all but vanished and those left behind have a very cynical view of the spirit that buoyed so many through half of the last century.

I’m sure you’re right about there being plenty of young people willing to do the dirty work, but anecdotally, at least, I don’t hear very many people under 30 speak about America the way my parents’ and grandparents’ generations did.

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Also the boss sucks and does stuff to ruin and or make your job more difficult every day.

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Except that there were plenty of people who did not have faith in postwar America, didn’t not fear the Russians, and rebelled against the homogeneity of the mainstream culture, well before the 60s revolt. And there were certainly people who could put two and two together about our actions overseas. People in the 1950s and early 1960s (many of whom are still alive and well today, of course) were no less capable of critical thinking than we are today. I’d argue that the biggest difference is that there is more of a chance to publicly voice dissenting views today (social media and the shift to an information etc) and to get a hearing from the general public, as well as there is a much less unified media landscape today, with media outlets actively competing for viewers by appealing to our sense of righteousness.

That goes back to the 1970s, a very real outcome of a) revelations of lying by our government, and b) a right wing propaganda campaign to make the government small enough to drowned in bathtub in order to dismantle the New Deal liberal order that benefited the working classes and later minorities.

There seems to be plenty of people who despite being skeptical of the government (which I agree is a real phenomenon - though it often is expressed through partisanship as opposed to just anti-government sentiment), are fully in support of the war on terror. At least plenty enough millennials have signed up to serve overseas. Plus, how many work for private corporations that do the dirty work and get paid pretty well for it.

A promise that never existed for many non-white Americans, of course.

The most cynical ones seem to be the Trump voters, who are overwhelmingly boomer, white, and upper middle class.

That may well be true, but it’s due to long term historical changes, not anything inherently wrong/unique to the millennials. And I’d say that many boomers and gen Xers are likely wise skeptical about the government, however they might have felt in the past.

I don’t mean to flog this dead horse, but the whole “these kids today” tropes just seem really ahistorical and kind of blinkered to me… given that “they” said the same thing about my (our?) generation (Gen X - remember the whole “slackers” designation) and the boomers, too. Since the 50s, there has always been handwringing over the youth today, and I’m not sure it’s doing much to help us understand the actual zeitgeist of our collective lack of trust of our government. I do think we have very good reasons to be mistrustful of organizations like the NSA or the CIA, but we also have good reason to think that we can correct at least some of the problems of these institutions - believe it or not, sometimes congress actually is responsive to problems of governance with regards to bureaucracy.

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Hmm. I think we’re agreeing here, so I’ll assume it’s a fault in the language I’m using.

That’s what I’m failing to say. If there’s anything that one could ascribe to a generational set it’s that the changes that were suggested by forward-thinking individuals from previous generations are adopted and subsequently become the moral and ethical guidance of subsequent generations. In other words, it takes time and I have a lot of faith in “the kids these days” in large part because they haven’t been so infected with jingoism and silly concepts of American Exceptionalism.

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Okay, that makes more sense to me. However, I would argue that this notion of mistrust is intergenerational, in both the way you’re putting it (handed down from older gens), but also it’s newly developed in some older people, too. It exists outside of the idea of generations, I think.

And I think the idea of mistrusting the government came from both “forward” thinking folks and backward thinking folks. it’s a meta-concept of politics I think, instead of one that embedded in one particular political side.

But I think where we diverge here is that I think, despite our collective mistrust of government, these are alive and well, across generations. I think they’re just manifest in different ways. I think at this point, we’d have a hard time even coming up with a coherent notion of American identity writ large, and I do think this is a cross generational phenomenon. And our government still is carrying out the same sorts of policies that we did during the Cold War for largely similar reasons. So, someone supports them, and I don’t think it’s just the boomers here.

So yeah, I think I was misreading you, and we largely agree here? Good show, us! :wink:

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None. She is just a naive silly girl with strange obsessions.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_for_Cultural_Freedom

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On the other hand you had serious Western intellectuals at the time whose “critical thinking” led them to believe that the Soviet Union was a utopia (not that they experienced it if at all other than in controlled visits where everything ugly was hid away) and that Stalin rather than a being a monster was instead a great friend to humanity.

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So once again Snowden is part of why we can’t have nice things

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Did I say anything that made you believe I was somehow defending the Soviet regime? Why would you think that?

The Cold War was not built on one side or the other being virtuous and the other duplicitous (keeping in mind, also, that both sides believed this about themselves, that the body count most notably of the global south - of Vietnamese, of Afghans, of Angolans, of Ethiopians, of Nicaugra, the list goes on - were entirely acceptable. It was built on mutual hostility, mistrust, lies, manipulation, and proxy wars on both sides. None of what I said assumes that Stalin (who died in 53, BTW, very early in the CW) was a great human being or that people who believed that he was weren’t duped or willfully blind. And it ignores the very “Quiet Americans” I’m discussing here.

This is a key problem of our historical understanding of events like the Cold War. As long as we continue to view them through a blinkered nationalist lens, we’ll never understand why it happened and ensure it doesn’t happen again. If we can’t pick apart our own national thinking and understand the institutions that make them up historical, and how they’ve been used and misused for various purposes,

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And cost of living in the DC metro area is high while promotion and pay raise prospects are poor.

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Anyone who doesn’t like the NSA’s hidebound rules, bumbling leaders and government pay-scales can go to work for a myriad of contractors, or set up shop on their own, and end up doing basically the same job they did for the NSA, for an order of magnitude more pay, and without any of those strictures.

If you really think contractors have fewer rules or regulations to abide by as compared to government employees, I don’t even know what to tell you.

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No, the article said $200,000 is the salary the young cybersecurity experts receive if they leave for the private sector. Checking the 2018 government pay tables, a new technical hire at the NSA would have a salary of $60,000. If I still worked at the NSA, as a mathematician with 25 years of experience, my salary would be only $126,000. I don’t see a problem with NSA cybersecurity experts becoming cybersecurity experts in American businesses. Businesses need good security, too. The NSA ought to step up its training program to meet the demand for both itself and private enterprise.

The millennials I worked with at the NSA were bright, talented, hard-working people who loved their country though not necessarily its politicians. But Human Resources hired them at low wages. My office had to devote most of its promotions toward raising their wages closer to the government-level pay they deserved.

The only solid work-life benefit at the NSA was the strict 40-hour workweek.

Contractors had better pay, but much less control over what they or the NSA did. They were still under NSA’s hidebound rules.

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This is true.

However it is also true that the explicit phrasing and sequencing of “for God and country” does - or should - ring alarm bells.

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During the Cold War there was a genuine existential threat to the US from offshore. Now the existential threats are all internal … but government agencies are fundamentally about maintaining the status quo.