Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

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> if the NSA is going to spy on us, wouldn't you like that to be as secure as possible?

I have a friend who worked for the NSA. We had a heart to heart over drinks about a year ago. She asked what I thought about her working there. I responded, honestly, that if I didn't know her personally I'd be starting to wonder if she was, for whatever reason, unable to pass muster at Google et cetera. Not the best decision to drop that after a day of drinking together. But I'm glad I did--it was apparently the nudge she needed to quit.

Going to work and feeling like you're working on secret, cutting edge kit with the smartest people in the country is tremendously important to many people. The NSA lots its veneer of whiz kids confidentially cracking codes for good with Snowden. It now feels like another federal bureaucracy.

Postscript: She now works in the private sector and is thrilled with how much closer to her intelligence her new colleagues are. If you work for the NSA and are not a numpty, you're selling yourself short.

Response to your postscript: I know quite a few people who've worked for the NSA's mathematical research arms. They're not numpties. They're among the smartest people I've ever met (and I've been hanging around tier 1 research institutes, both public and private, my whole adult life).

Maybe that's because one of the biggest hiring firms for mathematicians is the NSA.

Not one of - they’re famous for being THE biggest employer of mathematicians.

For clarity, let me emphasize: The people I'm talking about stood out among professional mathematicians, not just among the general population.

Presumably that's because the alternative line of employment for mathematicians is academia, which I can imagine pays even worse.

Most math PhDs work in industry, not in academia or government. Industry pays the best of the 3 by far. But NSA has nonetheless attracted some very smart cookies. Personally, I sleep a bit better knowing that they're there.

> most of the tech companies, banks, insurance, a number of retail corps as well as consulting all hire mathematicians.

the NSA is a bit overhyped there

Yes, but those government jobs often come with great work life balance which is extremely difficult to find in the private sector.

If you're newer than 3 years at facebook or google, there's no way in hell you're going to have any work life balance. And even if you make it past the 3 year mark, it still depends on which team your on.

> if I didn't know her personally I'd be starting to wonder if she was, for whatever reason, unable to pass muster at Google et cetera. Not the best decision to drop that after a day of drinking together. But I'm glad I did--it was apparently the nudge she needed to quit.

So she stopped being an indirect servant of popular will, and started selling ads. Great.

> She now works in the private sector and is thrilled with how much closer to her intelligence her new colleagues are.

Not only richer, but less moral and more likely to pat herself on the back. Even better.

Ads are incredibly useful and have prevented trillions of dollars of waste.

And sold cigarettes. Don't forget that.

He didn't say she moved to Google.

Serve Trump and the runaway deep state, or serve spam. That's bleak. That's not the only two options though.

Not to get into the politics of it, but isn't the"deep state" supposed to be the entrenched government employees that work against Trump?

> So she stopped being an indirect servant of popular will, and started selling ads. Great.

You do realize Google does more than sell ads, right? Search and Maps alone are tremendously useful tools, not to mention the dozens, hundreds of other products. Drive, Docs, Photos...

Most of which are funded by selling ads, and then feed back into the cycle though, right? But I'm not as cynical as gp about it.

> You do realize Google does more than sell ads, right? Search and Maps alone are tremendously useful...

Proftable? Not so much.

Google is a surveillance company that currently makes money off ads, and gathers data through Maps, Search, Drive, Docs, Photos... Think about what happens when the current ad bubble pops.

Another POV might break it down as: stopped helping spy on her fellow citizens and got an honest job.

Might be good to cite sources with direct evidence, if you’re claiming that somebody broke the law.

Snowden let that cat out of the bag years ago in voluminous detail. You absolutely do not need to cite sources re: illegal NSA surveillance anymore.

If you believe that his claim was proven by a leak, I am not sure why it would be difficult to produce a citation. My understanding is that it is not a true claim.

His claim was the leak, and it was huge, and I'm not going to dig through it for you for quotes just because you're a contrarian. The NSA did a shit ton of surveillance that was not justified under known US law, and that's pretty well accepted at this point.

What claim don't you think is true? Was the NSA not indiscriminately scooping up and querying communications between US citizens?

> What claim don't you think is true? Was the NSA not indiscriminately scooping up and querying communications between US citizens?

Correct. That would be a very big deal in my opinion. After reading through the hundreds of source documents leaked by Snowden, I did not find evidence of any sort of mass collection on US persons. Only foreign collection, which is the job of a spy agency (Perhaps plenty of ethical arguments there of course, but that is besides the matter of USPI collection/reporting).

Nobody claimed anyone broke any laws. He claimed that the NSA spies on american citizens and that it is better to have an honest job.

The fact that it is legal for them to do this is the problem, obviously.

That is absolutely not legal though, which is why I asked for a citation, as it would be pretty big news.

It WAS big news. It was called the Snowden leaks.

For example, the government argues to this day that it is ok to do drag net collection of phone meta data.

Having access to every single person that you have called, counts as spying in my book, even if they aren't listening in to the conversations specifically.

The comment was present tense.

I certainly agree with you regarding previous handling of phone metadata, among other issues such as secret interpretations of law, but I was satisfied by changes/fixes made in the USA Freedom Act[1]. What current issue are still outstanding which you believe need to be addressed? (Serious, I like to learn and would be great to know if I am missing something).

[1] https://www.congress.gov/114/plaws/publ23/PLAW-114publ23.pdf

Does the shtick of crying citation needed on well-documented public knowledge actually work, anywhere?

Not crying anything. I have seen no proof of the claim, I only ever see unsourced comments, oddly claiming the matter is documented yet not citing anything. It is very strange.

Nevermind fellow citizens. The NSA openly spies on other countries people and certainly doesn't do it with their interests at heart. Americans hypocritically don't like being spied on but they're more than happy to do it to everyone else.

Would you please not post this sort of nasty snark? Even if you're right, the acid rots the container here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You break the HN guidelines quite a bit like this, so we'd appreciate it if you'd clean up your act.

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