New Campaign to Help Surveillance Agents Quit NSA or GCHQ | Hacker News Reader

New Campaign to Help Surveillance Agents Quit NSA or GCHQ

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176 pointsjobu90 comments

>SUPPORT GROUPS HELP cult and gang members break free of their former lives. Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous help addicts overcome their dependencies. And now one group of privacy campaigners wants to offer its target audience an escape route for what it sees as a equally insidious trap: Their jobs working for intelligence agencies like the NSA.

I doubt most people working in this field think they need some kind of AA support group because they are brainwashed and need an escape plan. These people are perfectly sane, reasonable and content with what they are doing. I don't see how hard that is to understand, that some folks might hold a different worldview about surveillance than you do, and that in fact they are not idiots.

Need of a support group or working for the surveillance apparatus does not imply idiocy, no more than you just implied being addicted to a substance implies the same.

If someone is perfectly content with what they're doing, then this is not for them. Simple stuff. But it's a near certainty there are people in there who are not content with what they're doing, who think it's varying degrees of wrong but keep doing it anyways because job, family, patriotism, whatever.

I would like to see our society stigmatize these kinds of jobs the same way an alcoholic is, FWIW. As in, if you're getting hired somewhere, having intelligence connections on your resumé is grounds for having it thrown in the trash.

You need not be a moustache-twirling Saturday morning cartoon villain to be complicit in perpetrating a great wrong.

And as far as brainwashing goes, you get wonderful things like this[1] being circulated in internal newsletters. It's bald-faced, pro surveillance propaganda designed to get those who it's intended for to stop thinking so hard about it.

[1]: https://edwardsnowden.com/2015/08/25/the-sigint-philosopher-...

> Need of a support group or working for the surveillance apparatus does not imply idiocy, no more than you just implied being addicted to a substance implies the same.

This is not a fair reading of GP's comment. The reason he said that people working for the NSA are not idiots is because people tend to imply that the only reason they continue working at the NSA is that they are idiots. GP was pointing out that there are other possible reasons, including that they are of the considered opinion that what they are doing is not wrong.

For addictive substances there is an obvious alternative reason why people might need a support group to help quit: addiction! But I don't think anyone argues that NSA employees are addicted to snooping, so one is compelled to search for an alternative explanation.

>GP was pointing out that there are other possible reasons, including that they are of the considered opinion that what they are doing is not wrong.

And that would be sign of involvement in a cult, because that is how cults work.

There are no human activities immune to the proclivity towards so-called reasoned association with idealistic/authoritarian ideology as a means of life experience. And it is precisely because of this fact that we must not allow the intelligence apparatus to gain so much ground in terms of having control over society.

You might think that its okay to have spymasters, spying on everyone. But in a culture of effective, total secrecy between a people and its masters, who are actually supposed to be serving the people, there is much, much danger.

Offering those 'in the cult' a way to re-integrate with society is the very first door towards resolution. If those doors are closed, we have the conditions ripe for exploitation by those who are, in fact, masters of infiltration, usurpation and total control over any human group. This is the power that the NSA/GCHQ cult-members have today.

You cannot do politics by saying "everyone who disagrees with me is in a cult". That's pretty much exactly what McCarthyism was.

You can overload cult with whatever psychosemantic meanings you wish, but let's compare the NSA's behavior with a checklist of cult behavior:

[X] The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law.

    - "Keeping the US safe" über alles, even the law and the wishes of society.

[X] Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.

    -  Directly corroborated by Snowden

[X] The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.

    - Snowden again, and to a lesser extent, the leaked newsletter from earlier.

[X] The leader is not accountable to any authorities

    - NSA lied before congress. Zero accountability. Also the "loveint" thing.

[X] The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary.

    - See: Every time an NSA spokesperson makes a statement

[X] The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s) and members.

    - See: Recruiting ads, the newsletter, etc.

List from [1], and not including things I either couldn't substantiate or didn't think fit.

[1]: http://www.csj.org/infoserv_cult101/checklis.htm

There are also a lot of items on that list that do not fit. As far as I know, you can quit/retire from the job -

The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt iin order to influence and/or control members. Often, this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion.

‪ Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before joining the group.

‪ The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.

‪ The group is preoccupied with making money.

‪ Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities.

‪ Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.

‪ The most loyal members (the “true believers”) feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be, and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave (or even consider leaving) the group.

EDIT removed (was editing the wrong comment).

quit/retire from the job? Ummm .. no. If you are an NSA analyst who suddenly quits, you will be put on the observation list and the Spy-Apparat will be directed towards your life activities .. for the rest of your life .. to ensure you do not violate the mores of the cult you left. [X]

Leaders inducing shame/guilt: Yeah, this is being done every single time the leaders get in front of Congress/Parliament and say "if you don't let us do this, there will be terror attacks and people will be killed". Its not shame/guilt thats being used, but rather: TERROR itself. [X]

Cut ties with family/friends: doesn't matter, with TotalSurveillance (tm), the cult can know everything they want to know about your family/friends in a matter of seconds. No cults have ever had that power - we're talking Cult 2.0 here. [X]

Bringing in new members: yes, they recruit the hell out of people. [X]

Preoccupied with making money: have you ever seen the NSA budget go down? It only goes up, year after year - or else: TERROR. [X]

Inordinate amounts of time: if you're a spook, you live for the company. End of story: [X]

Required to live/socialize with other group members: if you have secret clearances, you are required to report any contact you make with peace groups, protestors, anti-MilitaryIntelligence groups, etc. Unless its your job to infiltrate and usurp such groups, association with them - upon discovery by your case officer - results in immediate reduced clearance status. [X]

"True Believers": 'if we do not do this, the TERROR begins'. [X]

The 5-eyes nations are in the grips of a fascist cult.

| There are no human activities immune to the proclivity towards so-called reasoned association with idealistic/authoritarian ideology as a means of life experience |

This is true; it's why lots of car salesmen think that plaid jackets and bling is cool. Culture is usually just an excuse for bad behavior.

Halvar Flake suggested in a talk that some people working for spy agencies are (or kind of might be) addicted to hacking. Or the agencies themselves.

http://www.isaca.org/chapters2/Norway/NordicConference/Docum...

>I would like to see our society stigmatize these kinds of jobs the same way an alcoholic is, FWIW. As in, if you're getting hired somewhere, having intelligence connections on your resumé is grounds for having it thrown in the trash.

AKA guarantee that people working there keep working there?

I suspect their resumes already look a bit like this:

10 years of experience in $redacted

5 years of writing operational manuals for OMS-SPEC-DCPINET

2 years performing $redacted for BLUE SPARROW

3 years as a project manager specializing in coordinating teams of $redacted for challenges like $redacted, $redacted, and ANST-PRMCON

Kind of limits your options unless you're selling services to someone that's already within that sphere of influence and has both expectations for this sort of thing, and has clearance to know what some of them are.

I did programming work for a US defense contractor in the distant past. Had I been staying in the industry, and were I interested in moving to a new company, my resume would have looked more or less like your example.

When I moved out of the industry, my resume focused on what I did and what I learned as part of the work whose details I can never talk about. The thing about programming on classified projects is that it's pretty much exactly like programming on unclassified projects, but with added data handling, reporting, and facility security headaches.

Where do you draw the line then? would you include Google et all the local cops.

And for some one who left redit in a huff because they clamped down on hate speech your a fine one to talk about eithics

If you sincerely hold the opinion that intelligence agencies do more harm than good, this is a perfectly reasonable method of communicating that.

Can you point to a terrorist attack they've disrupted that they were not the primary initiators of in the first place?

What about a bad government that they've overthrown that hasn't been replaced with a worse one?

What about a social/cultural program that has had a positive effect?

What about a surveillance program that hasn't been abused for coercion and personal or corporate profit?

In complete fairness, the very nature of those operations ensure that, even if successful, you likely wouldn't hear of that success (or if you did, you wouldn't attribute it to the operation)

Not excusing this by any means, in fact I'd say this is grounds for much more comprehensive oversight and transparency, but right now, it is what it is.

That's just not true, especially in the case of domestic surveillance. We're not - yet, anyway - droning people based on meta data within the US.

What terrorism cases there have been have been astoundingly weak and cooked-up using informants acting as provocateurs and enablers.

I believe you misunderstood the comment to which you are replying.

Your argument is that the cases and events we hear of and know of are disastrous at best. Parent is stating that there is a very large bias in what cases and events we hear of, to the point where a lack of visibility into the data makes meaningful analysis impossible.

No, seriously, are you telling me that the lame-ass prosecutions and ginned-up FBI cases are hiding valor and competency keeping us safe from terrist supervillains?? That's a hell of a good cover story. I was totally convinced.

Are you telling me those cases (which we disagree on the validity of, BTW) are the only ones that exist?

Are there secret trials in the US? Secret extra-judicial punishments? If not, then yeah, those are the cases the FBI decided deserved their resources.

Failures are loud. Intelligence successes are generally silent.

There's literally no way for us to know. It's unwise to assert a universal negative in the face of the unknowable.

You are also asserting that there is a secret system of successful criminal investigation and punishment of terrorists, INSIDE the US, separate, and vastly more competent the the visible cases the FBI has publicized. You are confusing "24" with reality.

I am not, have not, and shall not assert any such thing. I bid you good day.

Are you interpreting my comment to be supportive of intelligence agencies?

Depends on who you want to communicate that opinion to, no?

If somebody came up to me and said "You need to join a support group" that would not be a very effective means of convincing me to care about their opinion.

Perhaps most are like that, but it's likely that a significant number of them could also be there mostly for the money and because they were lured there in their early career with the promise of "doing something cool", but then became disappointed by what they were told to do. However, they don't want to say anything because they don't want to have to flea to Russia to do it or go through what Thomas Drake went through.

Many substance addicted people don't think they need help because they think that they are in control and not addicts. This doesn't stop AA/NA from being valuable to those that do realise that they are not in control.

And, practically, they all have great exit options and know it. In fact, one of the biggest struggles for the intelligence community is keeping talented people when your salary maxes out at like 120-150k on the GS scale.

>I doubt .. they are brainwashed and need an escape plan.

I don't know.

Have you seen the brainwashing program that GCHQ recruits go through? I'm positive that these groups have militarized the mind-control techniques that society has to offer - it is after all, what the 'warrior-elite classes' do with all of societys' technologies: weaponize it.

These people are perfectly sane, reasonable and content with what they are doing

That could be said of cult members, gang members, alcoholics, crack addicts, and others.

I'm glad a support group like this exists. Some people need help getting out of situations that are otherwise reasonable. Some of them may want a regular job but are unsure how to switch careers, maybe there's some questions on how clearances work if they want to work for a different government department or if that's event possible, etc.

Support groups aren't attended or helpful to people who don't think what they're doing is having a negative impact on their life. Plenty of fully functional drug users out there - more then a few likely on this very forum.

Implying people in a bad place are idiots is mean and actually keeps people from getting the help they need.

I don't see how hard that is to understand, that some folks might hold a different worldview about surveillance than you do, and that in fact they are not idiots.

You're right, they aren't "idiots." The correct term, at least in the US, is "criminals." They have no more right to install a Narus box at the local telephone switching station than I do.

Err not to get all Wikipedia would you like to provide some proof of that assertion.

Legally, it would come down to duelling court decisions, I'm afraid. I believe your side is currently winning, but watch this space.

Morally, the answer is either obvious or it's not, and all the Wikipedia citations in the world don't tend to sway existing opinions.

I don't see how hard that is to understand, that some folks might hold a different worldview about surveillance than you do, and that in fact they are not idiots.

Their worldview isn't just different; it's bad. It's different and bad.

I wonder if this has the potential to influence mass surveillance or will just accelerate evaporative cooling of the internal dynamics of the agencies. Cults become more extreme when their moderate members leave....

Agreed. We should have a campaign to get more rational people to join the intelligence agencies.

Don't know why you are being downvoted. Spy agencies going away is a fantasy that brings into question the sanity of the believer. Better to have moral people there.

They don't need to go away, they can just be neutered. There were two massive cutbacks in spy agencies in the last 50 years, having a third is not a fantasy.

"I can make this organization by and for evil people marginally better by joining it and being less evil" isn't exactly a new idea either but hasn't aged well.

The general mindset of comments on articles like these is they should not be spying on anyone and I said go away not a mere cutback.

As Drake explains in the linked video, just asking questions about what was going on - nevermind actual accusations - was enough to be excluded. We see similar behavior in police departments, where people have tried to join to add to the number of "good cops".

Unfortunately, when this type of groupthink becomes so entrenched, anything resembling a contradictory idea has to be crushed, removed, or ignored immediately. It is a basic fight-or-flight response, because nobody wants to admit they've been doing the wrong thing for years.

The solution is similar, and ideas like intelexit will help. Instead of wasting energy trying to push against groupthink, help people leave where they can form so they can form a different origination. For example, it would be nice if we had an actual agency focused on defense and the hard problem of securing computers that had even a tiny fraction of the NSA's budget.

That's true, but the more moderates that leave, the more chances we have at a Snowden 2.0 who is going to throw the family jewels to the internet on his way out the door.

Snowden is still an outlier in people's minds-- they don't know about Binney or Drake. More people from the inside joining these voices would really help.

To be fair, it doesn't seem like many HN people know much about Binney and Drake either. Both supported another elaborate system of dragnet surveillance ("ThinThread"), which apparently attempted to use cryptography to mitigate privacy concerns. Both left the agency after ThinThread was jettisoned in favor of "Trailblazer", which had the virtue of being a darling of government contractors.

I doubt many of us would have been happy with a full-scale deployment of ThinThread either.

According to them, ThinThread had the added benefit of completely disregarding domestic communications. Only after the agency gutted the protections did Binney and Drake come out.

That is not how I understand ThinThread. Rather, ThinThread does bulk collection, and then applies "crypto" to the problem of keeping the wrong people from seeing domestic communications.

The premise of ThinThread is, like other NSA programs, that NSA gets carte blanche access to the AT&T and Verizon firehose.

I know a number of people who used to work for UK secret organizations and quit. Invariably they cited pay and mismanagement, along with the social difficulty of not being able to talk about your work and the rubbishness of living in Cheltenham.

They recruit from the civil service entry stream, and of course Cambridge since the days of Turing and Philby. If you want to disrupt the organisation through its staff, you should run a counter-recruitment operation among students. They have enough difficulty persuading mathematicians to come work for a quarter of the pay they'd otherwise get in the city.

Quit the NSA and skip the middle man by working directly for any number of the corporate benefactors of economic spying! Ideally bring your specific industry sleuthing expertise, right down to an intimate knowledge of office politics.

Continuing with my unserious tone... if I was a single and overworked at the NSA I'd consider digging into the lives of future office co-workers and finding myself a wife after flipping through her 23andMe, any medical records, personality testing performed by a professional, dental hygiene, potential in-law difficulties and I guess bank account. That's how an intelligence worker makes an effective exit.

Obtaining those records would be just as illegal if you worked for the NSA as it would be if you worked for McDonald's.

But probably the McDonald's employee would have a lot more difficulty committing this crime.

And you'd get busted - you don't think the CIA NSA don't have internal controls.

Didn't Snowden get his documents without leaving a trail? There are several other articles saying their internal controls are/were very poor.

I suspect they are stricter now - and I though Snowden socially engineered his way around some of the bariers.

And I suspect actual access to the live data might be more locked down. Snowden seems to have harvested a load of docs about the process but not that data.

^This.

There is an awful lot of perception of what Snowden got that in no way lines up with the presented reality.

You hire for the smartest tech whiz and then try to restrict what they can do via internal controls.

Yeah, I can totally see that work.

I read that NSA workers find nude photos and share them with others in the office. According to Snowden, the auditing is weak and this is considered a "fringe benefit" of working there.

http://www.engadget.com/2014/07/17/nsa-nude-photos/

http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/jul/17/edward-sn...

Do the agents get assigned Soviet handler on the first visit, or do you have to attend a few meetings first?

It's a good question. Why isn't this org targeting other intelligence agencies as well, particularly the Chinese and Russians?

You're jesting, but this is actually a very legitimate concern.

It's not enough to poach people away from the intelligence agencies, they have to land somewhere that they won't continue doing the exact same thing for someone on the other side. Remember how much people howled about Snowden being an FSB mole? It wasn't entirely groundless. A public exit to a known competitor doesn't look good.

Either this or its a way for these orgs to identify individuals who may be at risk. Thats what I would do if I was NSA.

Oh, I don't know. Now that Google et c are encrypting traffic, encouraging a few loyal people to apply in private companies sounds like just what NSA needs..

One thing that springs to mind is that, while being very technical in nature, NSA work is even more secretive. I would imagine that more than a few of these folks have a hard time leaving based on the fact that many of them can't disclose their previous experience, prima facie.

Is that a problem? Is it surmountable? Sorry to muse in the comments, but that seems like it might be a more real problem here.

The other possibility is, as res0nat0r mentioned, that the employees there just don't share the viewpoint that their work is immoral.

I've heard first hand from academics who have this problem.

It's less of a problem if a) you're doing something more applied/normal, like software development, where you can just have a conversation or work some problems to demonstrate ability; or b) you're happy with working for gov't contractors (and don't want to e.g. return to academia).

> It's less of a problem if ... you're doing something more applied/normal, like software development, where you can just have a conversation or work some problems to demonstrate ability

My experience trying to get a job with highly-classified non-intel software experience (distributed real-time, to boot) is that this is still extremely difficult. The conversation couldn't include anything really interesting. Hell, my resume couldn't contain anything really interesting so I rarely got the conversation in the first place.

I have been gone for 3.5 years, but I still have that problem because the work I did then is what I want to do, and the work I'm doing now (Java-based NLP) was the escape. I can only given detailed information about what I do now, though, which skews everyone into thinking I'm a Java or ML developer. :/

Ah, I stand corrected. Sorry to hear that :-(

This is one concrete way that something like Intelexit could actually make a difference -- find companies who are willing to hire people with intel backgrounds.

So why just those two agencies, many countries have such agencies for spying. So to single out those two based upon nothing that the others have not done and do albeit even less open about or leaked about; Seems somewhat curious to me. As it does somewhat presume other spy agencies are not listening in to private conversations and even the hacking=groups leaks showed that is not so in equal ways than Snowden leaks. Hence my curiosity and I'll admit, questioning the motivation of this.

This is great, I highly support this effort as well as any efforts to socially/emotionally/professionally/economically disrupt, shun, or humiliate people who participate in or are complicit with mass surveillance against the public.

The sooner we start making the people who participate in mass surveillance filled with guilt or otherwise miserable, the sooner they will stop spying on us.

Campaigns like this have the potential to send a strong message that oppressors and their proxies are not welcome in our society.

It might be much more effective to ask them to only take part in or start defense-related activities at NSA or GCHQ.

Even if they only work at protecting the US and UK from foreign agencies, that will still result in mostly securing the whole world since hardware and software is used worldwide.

It's also more realistic since it doesn't involve destruction of those intelligence agencies but merely retasking over time.

The best defense is a good offense. Why secure the whole world when you could just secure yourself and your allies, and keep everyone else full of holes you already know about?

Is there a plan to drive the van out to Silicon Valley? It seems like surveillance workers there are more conflicted.

I don't know if I want the most ethical, privacy-conscious employees of the NSA to be encouraged to leave.

It is quite strange that a Berlin based group would be targeting the NSA and GCHQ, and have absolutely no mention of the BND. It might be easier for Germans to convince other Germans to leave.

The BND is a joke. The NSA and GCHQ do most of the actual spying and pass it on to the BND. It's also a great way to get data you can't easily collect yourself for legal reasons (e.g. surveillance of German citizens in Germany).

Firstly: I'm 100% in favor of people leaving the NSA Snowden-style.

I don't think any of the people involved in this campaign have anywhere near the resources required to actually help anyone leave the intelligence community. The lengths Snowden went to and the things he had to do to remain safe from the US government were insane, and anyone leaving now will have ten times as much to escape from, given how much the US government is presumably watching for any Snowden copiers. If anyone is actually considering exiting the intelligence community, I truly hope they don't look at a website set up by German hobbyists.

Even if someone was simply planning a normal exit, sending a premade resignation letter (!) based off three different checkboxes (really?) is simply ridiculous. If anyone working there is stupid enough to send a pre-formed resignation letter that would burn bridges with most all of their colleagues, by all means do so, but I really doubt a single person in the intelligence community will use this site seriously.

Finally - imagine if someone came up to you and said "working at your job is comparable to being an alcoholic or a crack addict, break free and come with me" - I'd literally laugh in their faces. This site is the opposite of productive.

In general this seems like a great idea (based solely on the headline). I wonder, though, could this be used as a system for placing assets in useful positions at targeted companies? In other words, even if someone wants out, will they actually be let out?

What prevents someone from leaving the NSA or GCHQ and going to work in private industry in a capacity that would give them access to user data. If nothing, what prevents them from staying on agency payroll?

Isn't that the same question as what can these agents do with their resume? They shouldn't mention about being an agent, should they? Would you hire them?

Isn't that the same question as what can these agents do with their resume? They shouldn't mention about being an agent, should they? Would you hire them? We are always about equal opportunity employment right?

Wouldn't this have the effect of draining dissent from those agencies? Isnt objecting from within better than quitting, even if they don't seem to respond?

I'm not sure whether evaporative cooling [1] could be a result of that, i.e. that if the sane quit, you are left with the insane. If that's the case, such a campaign would make things worse.

[1]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...

Oh yeah, give them a website to visit, the NSA most certainly won't know what websites their employees visit.

(99% of dns queries aren't encrypted at all)

You can use an anonymous internet access point, say fo example in a library. The target audience are "spies", I'm sure they can figure it out.

Ah so a way for BAE system BT, Halliburton and Booz Ma kidney to recruit DV/TS cleared staff :-)

This actually Happened when unions where banned at GCHQ - they lost a huge proportion of staff to the private sector.

There's no point pretending tech as a whole is somehow holier than government here. If only there were a similar plan for Google or Facebook.

I just donated to them, and you should too:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/intelexit-the-backdoor-to...

This has to be one of the best way to spur change within the intelligence gathering community. Hit them where it hurts, their people power.

I didn't donate, and neither should you.

See how weird that sounds?

sound like an easy way to get put on a list...

You're probably already on the list.

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