“It was an offer to cooperate,” Mr. Artimovich said.
“Why else would you work for the government?” he added. “The salaries are tiny. But if you do something illegal, and go to prison for eight or nine years, the F.S.B. can help you,” he said, using a Russian abbreviation for the Federal Security Service."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/world/europe/how-russia-r...
We need ideas that are somewhat out of the box. Something that isn't already being done that we can start doing to bolster our capabilities.
"Since 2000, Mitnick has been a paid security consultant, public speaker and author. He does security consulting for Fortune 500 companies and the FBI, performs penetration testing services for the world's largest companies and teaches Social Engineering classes to dozens of companies and government agencies."
Russians who work for GRU serve Putin. Of course Putin is not going to put those to jail. The USA isn't going to put NSA employees to jail either.
At least according to all these episodes of Law and Order and such I've seen...
And nice, high-backed office chairs. And dual monitors for each workstation, with the computation hardware refreshed at least every three years--to include a real graphics card, that actually works with virtualization, because of 3D mapping.
And the kitchenettes should also be enclosed in their own rooms, so microwaved fish or broccoli smells don't permeate all the offices at lunch time. Not that I definitely know that's a thing that actually happens, but I imagine that if it did, if might break a software developer's concentration. Every. Danged. Time.
For national security!
Should probably recommend these "critical security precautions" to all of our allies, too. And potential allies. And probably the adversaries will copy them, but not much we can do about that.
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Huh? Why the united states couldn't? It's government/military budget is much higher...
As for the "force them", China and Russia don't need to force anyone to work for their cybersecurity teams either (nor it would be wise to have someone do such crucial tasks against their will).
Paying goes a long way...
I won't compromise my personal ethics, though. Not at that price. I'd need another $300k/year, a real defined-benefit pension, family gym membership, company-leased car, tuition benefits, and a bullshit story that I can tell myself in order to sleep at night.
And in order to set aside my personal vendettas, such as by actually propping up AT&T or Bank of America in some way, I'll need 8 figures and a 30-hour work week. And unrestricted common stock--not so much that the CEOs have to kiss my ass, but enough that I don't get automatically ignored.
In the government agency I'm employed with, the cyber security manager for our products has only a logistics management background. The information assurance personnel are contractors, but they don't have much impact on the real decision making.
I'm not sure how they can fix this, but I do think it will need to be addressed if they want to hire and retain top talent. They have interesting problems but no one will work on them if they feel they are, in the end, hurting their fellow country-people.
The other half is admitting that the government did something wrong in the first place, which they can do by prosecuting officials who broke the law, retire those that quasi-legally facilitated domestic dragnets, and pardoning Snowden, Winner, etc.
That’s going to take politicians who aren’t jingoistic.
If I knew a 3-letter federal organization was dedicated to defensive tools, white-hat pen testing, and US infrastructure cyber security, I might consider joining. But the NSA has managed to tarnish its name with domestic cyber spying on US citizens, and that should have been the realm of the FBI, which is supposed to follow laws and can be audited.
Stop spying on and collecting all of "Random Joe's" emails and chats, and start targeting people who are actual threats to national security (and don't misinterpret any random petty crime as "national security issue" to give you an excuse to abuse those powers either).
Economic espionage or to help corporate friends should never happen either. No, it doesn't matter that "China does it, too".
We can only hope that NSA actually has some of these types of guys and we just don't know about it. But I'd argue that if the NSA was getting any of those types of guys, they weren't getting very many.
Another thing to think about is the athletics analogy. Schools like Stanford and Northwestern can't get the athletes that a place like Alabama can get. However, they do a good job of training up the athletes they can get to the point where these schools have actually been respectable from time to time. It would be interesting to consider the realistic feasibility of hiring "2 stars" or "no stars", so to speak, and then training them up. (Of course, this doesn't always work. Most schools have teams that suck. That's kind of the danger with the "train them up" idea.)
Where is the money going to come from? We cutting something else? Like outdated military infrastructure since we should be ramping up for the cyber future? Or are we instead going to ramp up the deficit spending more to cover the extra expenses?
Have you actually thought your proposed solution through? Have you considered the larger picture?
We're already deficit spending at a level approaching USD1.5T. How do we handle the financial implications of such a shift?
Most of the "best and brightest" in America, are not, in fact, American. How do we get them the necessary security clearances? Should we be giving them that level of clearance?
I won't even go into the fact that the private sector would still be making all of the best tech as they gobbled up intellectual capital from around the globe, and we only have the US to snap people up from. Sure France, Germany, Russia, China etc can only snap people up from their nations too, but they have much better educational systems.
This problem requires more considered thought, and very likely a little bit of creativity, to work through.
The OP's plan seems like a good one to bolster national security. OP doesn't need to lay out every single step of the solution, all the way down to the US education system, in order to make it a good point.
From the money we currently pay third party contractors to do the job.
>We're already deficit spending at a level approaching USD1.5T. How do we handle the financial implications of such a shift
By realizing that a gigantic increase in their salary would not be remotely large enough to constitute "a shift."
>How do we get them the necessary security clearances? Should we be giving them that level of clearance?
With the same bogus system we use for everybody else.