NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy agency's hiring spree
washingtontimes.com
washingtontimes.com
I'm an outsider, and can't really know. I don't doubt your good will, but everything in my career from the Clipper chip fiasco, through Microsoft's incomprehensible 20 year fascination with code-signing in place of actually effective methods, and on up to the present day reinforces this impression.
I am 100% confident that there are employees at the NSA tasked with defence that are diligent and motivated. I am 90% confident their budgets and other institutional support are a small fraction of the offence side of the house. I am less confident, but still believe that at least some defence activities are compromised by the offensive mission.
The stink around Dual_EC_DRBG was the public suspecting that even the defence side of the house is lying to us, and is acting as cover for the offence side. I don't see how the NSA can ever recover that credibility after room 641A. That's a stink that's hard to wash off.
Thank you for the corrections! My limited understanding is that CSS works with standards groups to enhance the state of the art, which has a strong defensive component (e.g. help everyone secure their communications and data). I'd be interested to hear if this is incorrect.
The pay is pretty good for DMV and the hours are great (a strict 40 hours and work doesn't come back home)
edit: according to vlovich123, past drug use won't make you illegible anymore if you stop at the time of hire
They can't know.
Also I would argue people in the NSA are less honest then normal despite the background checks.
Never, ever lie or knowingly omit information on a security clearance form. If you tell the truth and you are disqualified, it’s extremely unlikely that information will be used against you. The FBI isn’t going to come after you for doing mushrooms. If you lie to the federal government while trying to obtain a security clearance, they will put you in federal prison.
Google/etc doesn't care who you are as long as you can make them profits - bad person, good person, etc. I'm glad to see that at least the government takes seriously the matter of who influences the system with so much power.
Nope. Never wanted to work in such areas. Prefer normal life.
>"...who influences the system with so much power."
You mean someone who uses private email server, keeps classified docs in wrong places (how is it even possible), says that it is all Russia's fault that Trump wins etc. etc. Yeah I feel so much safer.
You'd be within your legal rights to turn them away, of course, but I also feel that it's easier to imagine doing that when one doesn't have three armed suits standing on the porch. I think the vast, vast majority of Americans would prefer just answering a couple questions about their neighbour as opposed to willingly putting themselves on the radar.
I'm not sure how much you've dealt with the feds, but in my experience they're not the kind of folks that like hearing "go away, I refuse to answer your questions."
So you are telling that one can be harassed / threatened for unwillingness to discuss their friend's / relative's? Very nice. How about "we are a nation of laws"?
My friend barely drank alcohol and never used illegal drugs, but the interviewer pressed a few times even saying things like “come on, not even once? everyone does in college”
As for why I agreed to talk? He wanted the position, so I was glad to help if I could.
If friend / relative warned / asked for it then sure.
Large numbers of adults have either never smoked, or have not smoked within a decade.
Marijuana use is common, but it's not 100% ubiquitous. It only feels like that when you're in certain social bubbles.
The illegal restriction will definitely reduce the number of applicants, but it's not as severe as you're implying. The number of "boring" adults who work in Big Tech is quite high.
It is unlikely anyone will throw out an eager beaver working voluntary overtime. Plenty of stories about this in both private and government organizations. In fact, IIRC Snowden mentions working over once or twice.
Here is a useful comment: working for that agency results in a strong technical experience, a security stamp of approval, and a social network that often leads to very high paying contractor jobs or the development of startup businesses that end up being worth tens of millions.
Did you ever wonder why there is so much wealth in the Maryland-DC-Northern Virginia area? Well, now you know.
With that said, I understand the larger point you're making about government surveillance. I just don't see most people being able to opt out of Facebook. Moreover, the government can compel Facebook to hand over whatever data is provided by users voluntarily, making the private/public split less than airtight.
Remember a few years ago (maybe even 10 years now) when facebook started testing their facial recognition capabilities? You'd post a photo, and it would highlight all the faces, tell you who they were, and ask if you wanted to tag them. It likely has a photo of 99.99% of living people at this point, and has profiles on them, cross-linked with any relevant discussion people have had about them (even if they're not on facebook).
Any site that allows you to "log in with facebook" is running their analytics which tracks you across sites, and builds your "profile", and if you have a gravatar on one of those sites, there's a good chance Facebook can now associate you with any photo that has been uploaded of you, even if you just happened to be in the background.
People were writing about this stuff in the '80s; it seems like some don't realize we're already there.
The surgeon general recently suggested that children should stay off of social media because it's bad for their psychological development: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/surgeon-general-kids-under...
There's growing evidence that social media is also bad for teenagers. Rates of teenage depression and suicidality have increased in recent years, and there is a direct correlation to social media use.
Cigarette companies are viewed as evil because they peddled addictive, cancer-causing products to kids. Our industry is peddling a different type of poison, and I suspect we'll have a similar legacy.
It’s a social meme I just don’t buy into, like opinions on movies and memes.
Every rich person is just one of billions, their fiat wealth is based upon mathematical inference, information shaping, nation state propaganda.
Depending on my mood, if we were together I may ignore Bil Gates, punch is teeth out, or ask about the weather; I would not treat him as special.
I’ve worked with people who have answered fundamental questions about reality. Some nerds who read a consumer machines manual and structured syntax appropriately are far dumber than that. There was no manual for folks building LHC.
Often I've found that the people who think money isn't important think nothing is important.
There definetly is old money in the city, but it's honestly about as prominent as Pac Heights old money in the Bay Area and absolutely gets dwarfed by out of towners.
But things began to change during the Cold War, and then accelerated during the military buildup under Reagan. The Washington metro area began to explode economically as defense contractors that had once been spread around the country started moving to DC. The acceleration was compounded again under Bush with the war on terror attracting a broader range of security and IT companies wanting to cash in on Federal largesse. A big part of the reason for this is that Republicans preferred outsourcing Federal work to contractors, to avoid Federal unions. Federal policy didn't care where the contractors headquarters were located, whereas older agencies like the Social Security Administration, Federal Reserve, etc, had always been forced to locate most of their work elsewhere, both the labor and most of management--mostly only the political appointees were in DC.
What the government should do is return to the old policies of pushing administrative agencies back out into regional centers. Though it would probably look different in the sense that what's more important now is pushing agency directors and other political appointees along with their teams out of DC, whereas in the bygone era the emphasis was on the mass of Federal workers. You want the leadership teams out of DC because that's what's attracting the companies, not Congress.
But DC has probably grown too economically powerful to reverse the course of things.
I understand there is some exaggeration here, but this take is far more accurate than the parent comment.
Personally I've definitely heard arguments from both sides, but I've never known which one was "more" true.
Talk to the carpenters and plumbers working on wealthy houses. Once you see people regularly dropping 200k+ to redo a bathroom, those government toilet seats don't seem all that extreme.
Apple is the only commercial enterprise I am aware of that attempts to have similar supply chain controls, and their products aren’t cheap.
Just say "F-35"...unless your only purpose is more overly simplistic "free market" cheerleading typical of HN.
yeah, people who actually create surplus value through their labor tend to get irritated by people who steal their wealth for themselves via political corruption. I'm sure Boeing and Lockheed earned their contracts fair and square despite SpaceX being 20x cheaper. Definitely wasn't their lobbying payoffs
How about people who time and again been bailed out by government, had friends in power pass laws and generally benefited from corruption, tax cuts, and special subsidies, or just piled up externalities cost on society and the environment?
You know, like most of the "surplus value creating" private sector...
The wealth in the area (if you can even call it that) exists because of networking, namely people with connections to decision makers in the government are very valuable because they can bring in companies lots of money when they win contracts. The way you get promoted in the area into the high paying exec roles is solely though people skills. The amount of metaphorical dick sucking that goes on would make any sane person barf (on one occasion I was working in the Pentagon with setting up some software, as a civilian, and my boss who was there with me told me to stand up when some upper rank military guy came in the room to show respect, because otherwise it would look bad for the company). If you aren't connected or know anyone, you basically fit into the standard working class, and really don't make that much money factoring in high cost of living
And those people pretty much are working towards making in the 200s. My friend who was in "systems engineering" (i.e microsoft word/excel operations) got a position where he made 220-260 depending on bonus, and that was considered EXTREMELY good for the area. I didn't have the heart to tell him that a fresh hire at Amazon can work 2 years and make that much at a minimum.
The thing also with government contracts is that government sets rates for how much companies can charge the government for a certain person with certain qualifications, and companies essentially try to pay people as little as possible under that value to maximize profit. This also drives salaries down.
And because that area is filled with those type of people who by their nature tend to be pretty materialistic (in addition to a lot of foreign presence with Korean and Middle eastern people who also tend to be materialistic), seeing endless bmws/mercs/audis may make it seem like there is wealth in the area, but there really is not - you can easily do the math on cost of living versus salary and figure out that all that shit is financed at maximum length loan terms. Have been in conversations where people talk about having 30k worth of CC debt like its a normal thing.
As far as tech goes, there are 2 things that happen. First, a lot of the work gets subcontracted out by the 3 letter agencies to all the companies in the area, and 2, the work is VERY compartmentalized. So if you do end up working on something in the NSA or on a contract for the NSA it could be literally some basic shit, like a library to parse some stuff out of http, and you ship that and you never see it used or know what the bigger picture is. So no, working for NSA, other 3 letter agencies, or contractors of, won't give you an advantage in terms of experience.
You may get a clearance but that is only valuable to companies in the area since they will hire you because of your clearance then shove you onto a project that you may be ever so slightly qualified for, so they can collect money from the government while not having to pay for your clearance.
TLDR; that area sucks, no smart people ever go work for government or contractors of. Because smart people realize that they can not only make more money in the private sector, but have favorable living arrangement, especially with remote work, and can do engineering instead of circle jerking management to get promoted.
Also, DC is much less wealthy than the Bay Area. The upper bound on salaries in the DMV is around $150-200k with 15-20 years of experience because of how prominent government employment is. It's a very solidly middle class feeling metropolitan area.
Sure, it's just a bunch of doctors (NIH), lobbyists, defense contractors and government lawyers that skew that towards only being upper middle class and probably not as many ultra high net worth people, but it's extremely affluent.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...
I got the job through family, my uncle was able to get in the industry in the 80s.
I don't think that enabling capricious air strikes is the kind of work that is going to allay most people's ethical concerns.
Seriously for a second I was like, maybe the NSA isn't such a bad idea anymore. They're out there making Ghidra and other open source tools so that's nice. And then I read this and immediately thought of that monologue from Good Will Hunting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJHvSp9AKYg
That's gonna be a no from me dawg.
Even without going into contracting or starting a business, having worked a high level job at an agency like the NSA comes with a resume boost. It may not mean much to a mid-level hiring manager on the west coast who only knows about the NSA from what they read on Twitter, but it carries some weight in communities that understand what goes into these careers.
Although, ex-mil psyops are not much lower on the list...
Should similar forms of micro-judgement stemming from macro concerns also be applied to candidates from other industries such as adult entertainment or legal cannabis operations?
Edit: blep_, all salient points, thanks for sharing.
But it doesn't actually matter: we're talking about "are there people who believe this and will that belief negatively affect me", not "should those people believe this".
Hiring managers need to build out their team with whoever will do the best job. You aren't entering into a relationship with their former employer, you're hiring the employee for what they can do for you.
HN commenters might say they'll discriminate against FAANG employees or NSA employees or otherwise hold weird grudges against employees of companies they don't like, but that's mostly just internet bluster. Real hiring managers (that you'd actually want to work for) aren't going to discriminate against good candidates just because they worked for a big company that the hiring manager doesn't like.
I suppose there are exceptions to this. If you were head of financial controls at FTX, you're in trouble. But if you were a front-end developer at FTX and you do good work, I'm not going to hold FTX's failure against you.
Nobody who's ever read their pay stub wonders.
I would also point out that, historically, a lot of "startup" culture comes directly from people fleeing from the more conservative east cost workplace culture. Consider if you can get the life you want working for a security service.
Obviously making between 100 and 200k is a healthy salary, but we shouldn't pretend that it's at the top of the industry. You're agreeing to a very particular work culture in return for middle-industry compensation.
There is also still a concept of national service in such places. Even as a civilian, some people would rather design systems to protect their county than design systems to support real estate in the metaverse. Do you want to do data analysis to catch terrorists or track international drug shipments, or design another algorithm to better serve ads to elderly people needing regular diabetic testing supplies?
Edit: I also want to point out that there are many tech jobs available in the government sector (state / transit / local / etc). They generally pay less, but are also less restrictive. You don't have to sign up for an intelligence service (and everything that means) to serve your country.
A few months back the US Navy's CTO asked LinkedIn why technically-talented people were leaving his organization and hundreds of people flocked to the comments to answer him [1]. Based upon some of the replies there are secondary considerations that override the concept of "national service" and stop people from working in this space.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/don-yeske-b7957510_peoplefirs...
If you have tech skills and a clearance you could probably bill around 200/hour for full time work which would be pretty healthy income.
Edit: article I wrote about the topic:
https://blog.clearedjobs.net/leveraging-your-clearance-to-be...
Not to mention that those nominally earning more in SF/SV often have worse quality of life than those earning less elsewhere due to housing prices and overall cost of living.
Also, low cost of living is great. I have a fully work from home position so I could move to a lower cost of living location if I wanted. That kind of flexibility is unusual in government work in my experience.
Edit: Also - I wasn't saying the pay was bad, or that 200k was the max you'd get - I was saying it comes with a work culture you might not like. It's not a situation where the pay is so much better in return for restrictive culture.
My takeaway is that you get to do some very technically interesting and challenging work. But politics, both organizational and electoral, means your cool thing is likely to sit on a shelf. They are good places to be if you like building for the sake of building. Not so good if you like both building and shipping.
There’s an entire industry built around influencing how the Federal government allocates the vast sums of money that it allocates. Everyone in the industry is wealthy and nearly all of them live in that area. But yeah, it’s because the NSA.
because they are parasites leeching off the tax payers via corruption?
>a social network that often leads to high paying jobs
at least you are honest about it
Decades of blank DoD checks for ya
Same problem as submarine recruiting. Lots of 'really cool' stuff going on, none of it available for discussion.
In contrast, if people refuse to work for rogue agencies, it has real and immediate effects. First, it increases staffing costs as the pool of immoral prospects is heavily in demand from the private sector. This means funds that could have gone to other rogue agencies must go to this one. Second, it reduces the quality of output as competence and morality tend to be correlated.
Or perhaps not. Complete the initial phrase: "I got an offer from the NSA to be a hitman." hardly qualifies one for general employment! I would prefer to not be the one who turns down such an applicant for a job.
Founder: Yong Myung Moon, Founder of the Unification Church
There’s no negotiation though, either the billet is part of the program (CISA calls their CTMS) or it’s not, and either you check the box (usually with a certification) or you don’t.
Edit: found this on their site.
Absolutely wild and shortsighted.
Not sure how requirements work when your “customer” is intelligence chiefs and requirements relate to gaining access to data in …unconventional ways
Then again, they probably both have lots of jobs where they do very little work.
The other thing I have gleaned is that the work involves tech that no one else would ever invest in. For example, a former professor of mine worked on an integrated circuit VLSI design that was, at the time, at least 10-fold larger than any commercial chip. Entirely in secret, of course.
The salary may not be world-beating, but - from what I can glean - the work is rewarding and meaningful in ways that compensate for the difference in pay.
Sure there’s a chance, which is equal to the chance the NSA will coerce you into it by blackmailing you based on the info they have on you.
There is no-doubt in my mind a lot of those programs are still running and new ones have been initiated.
Although The government protects whistleblowers, the government does not really protect whistleblowers that whistleblow government shit.
Also the scope of the NSA is much more broad and you'll also have the possibility to work on stuff that could be closer to ops stuff as well.
For example I don't think palantir works on shit like stuxnet or deploying stuxnet.
Last I read about palantir it was some boring ass search graph relationship thing.
You mean they don't help prevent a hostile state from developing nuclear weapons? All withou causing anything approaching the collateral damage (and risk of open war) that a traditional attack on infrastructure would cause?
Setting aside the fact that the NSA work sounds a lot more interesting from a technical perspective [0], a lot of people would find the work far more fulfilling than convincing people to buy widgets they don't need.
[0] Especially considering that the day to day work of working for a large government organization is far more boring, even without the extra headache that comes with working with classified materials.
I think the parent comment fully agrees with you on this. Their whole reply is just saying that despite paying more, Palantir isn't nearly as layoff-proof as NSA, and you don't get to work on such a wide range of "cool" things (such as stuxnet) at Palantir either.
Stuxnet was developed in a way that Palantir or other people outside the ultra secrete government cyber weapons labs, could have been contracted to work on parts of it, government may have merely assembled parts of code sourced from private industry to create the malware.
Saying that though, working for govt in any form comes with its own risks. https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:NSA_GCHQ_and_the_Death_... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6585263/Damning-new... https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Chelsea_Manning https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Julian_Assange
Sometimes being in the public spotlight is the less dangerous path, which these NSA jobs are not. https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Bill_Clinton
Accidents happen. Prison happens. Intelligence gathering comes in all shapes and sizes, but one thing is for certain, it was previously thought being on the right side of the law was a psychological advantage, its not any more, it could be extremely risky. This is the era of psychological warfare, and the best candidates are those who volunteer for their trauma as any Emergency Response (Police/Fire/Ambulance) person knows.
Psychological trauma is a life long condition with no visible scars.
How you survive working for the state largely depends on your own intelligence, but you can bet your bottom dollar you will be experimented in ways that science dictates that subjects are not too be made aware of any said experiment.
I'm not saying that they are going to subcontract out everything or the important things, but their advantage is being able to leverage private industry for specific knowledge and expertise.
For the NSA I'm sure you'll literally be able to look up personal details on anyone.
NSA is waaay worse then Google. Or waaay cooler. Depends on your perspective.
The government does shady stuff, but would you really have more trust in a corporation?
I have less trust for the NSA and CIA because of past infractions. For example how the CIA was selling coke to the US to fund their programs. That's next level shit that not even a corpo will do.
I think it's still easier to rationalize working for the CIA than Purdue, and easier to work on mass-surveillance for the NSA than for Google. National security vs private yachts. I mean, I'd understand if you say you wouldn't work for the CIA or NSA because you don't believe in their approaches to things, but I doubt you'd say "... but I have no problem writing software to push more oxy into rural communities and kill a few tens of thousands citizens a year as long as my bonus comes through".
This is contrary to everything I’ve heard about their internal controls, especially after Snowden. He was able to get as much as he could because he was a trusted administrator, and that was reportedly tightened significantly afterwards.
Without a warrant? That would attract all sorts of creeps and stalkers to the organisation.
Sort of true, but not exactly true. Thomas Drake was a whistleblower. Snowden might have started out as a whistleblower (without going through the proper process), but has released a lot of detailed information beyond what is necessary to be a whistleblower, which could even possiblt cause net harm.
Edit: why disagree?
Then almost a year to the date of the first publishing of the Snowden docs, along came heartbleed, which clearly showed the Snowden documents were legitimate. As more technical leaning documents came out, they also proved it. Without those documents though, we'd be told it was all a fairy tale.
The NSA is incapable of building the type of mass surveillance infastructure we see today. That infrastructure is built and maintained by private tech companies. The NSA comes along repurposes that already collected data to their own ends.
Further, the NSA's usage of said information has never been linked to any population wide mental health crises, unlike big tech.
There is also a wide range of work the NSA does, and most people working there don't know much beyond their own need to know.
This is false, the snowden releases showed they have extensive infrastructure that aggregates data from many different sources.
At the end of the day, worldwide profit scales systems faster than even national security dollars.
Granted, they do not snoop on you to the maximum extent the hardware of these devices allow. But, take a look at [0]. Unless you are one of the few people who goes out of their way to limit tracking, do you think that the NSA would be able to get that detailed tracking of everyone's movements.
And this is just the obvious part (which Google is nice enough to share with its users as a feature). Big tech companies have also built detailed models of most people's interests; which is simply not possible without the large amount of data that comes from people actually interacting with them.
All of the NSA's dragnet surveillance is built on the back of private industry, and works because that private industry has convinced people to participate in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2348156
"AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA" (eff.org)" (2011, 200 comments)
However there's also the massive Ogden Utah data storage center run by the NSA and contractors, which has a constant demand for 65 MW of power, I think that counts as mass surveillance infrastructure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
Seems pretty Orwellian.
Assuming the NSA catches and stores the traffic (i.e. it passed a keyword/subject filter), they still have to break the encryption.
And even if they have devices capable of doing so, they don't have capacity to do so on an unlimited volume of messages.
They're still pushing this stuff today, not surprisingly:
https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/NSA-director-pushes-C...
> "WASHINGTON (AP) (Jan 12 2023) — A top U.S. intelligence official on Thursday urged Congress to renew sweeping powers granted to American spy agencies to surveil and examine communications, saying they were critical to stopping terrorism, cyberattacks and other threats."
"Other threats" such as what, populist movements unhappy with the increasingly feudalist-aristocratic nature of the United States and the gross corruption seen in Congress and the federal bureaucracy?
At some point, the metadata is (user X talks to SaaS service Y), and then the trail goes private.
If ATT had really pushed back, the NSA would have been hard pressed to install and run tapping equipment. And that's on hardline voice, where CALEA obviously applies. But as far as I know ATT didn't really fight, once they were legally covered from liability.
The modern large scale cloud or social providers are younger companies, have fewer government ties, and (critically) have worldwide business.
I would automatically assume they all have data sharing agreements with the NSA, as a maximal threat assumption, but as a likely threat I expect it'd be a lot harder for the NSA to co-opt them.
I.e. why the NSA instead chose to tap Google's private fiber between their data centers
You still think that the "security" certificates make you secure ? that s in https stands for security ?
Why would a spy agency collect TB of data without a mean to decrypt it ?
And the NSA is doing that because they can break a percentage of it, or anticipate they can in the future.
And it's order of exabytes of data.
Yes. When we elect our officials we grant them significant power. We have rules they must abide by to protect us from that power (I.e. using this data to interfere with elections to continue/advance their power.)
This is substantially different than private industry. Don’t get me wrong, surveillance capitalism is its own shade of gray. But the government laundering away constitutional rights through collaboration with private industry and protecting themselves from prosecution for their crimes by labeling these collaborations a state secret?
Between their clandestine organizations, their militaries, and their law enforcement - the government is capable of perpetuating more crimes against humanity than their private industry counterparts.
The NSA is a big old bitch,
"so are your fangs and VCs"
says the crowd who has the itch
for cool projects but sees
all really as prostitution. Stitch
up the foul mouth hey, one who pees
in the water is bound to filth drink,
work, make, grow rich but don't think.If the paycheck is ok
But either way, it's the same thing.
My impression is that so many people move from IC to Manager at startups because they seek comp increases.
You know how anytime you see more then one cop they are always talking about seniority and benefits and how many years, months, and days until their next pay grade or benefit tier kicks in? That will be you every day for thirty years. I knew people who got jobs at NASA, their life long dream, finished their first project in record time - were informed the project was a three year contract so even though they were done they needed to fill the desk for the next two and a half years - so they left.
How can one in big tech know that the things that happen in their life are genuine and not due to the influence of an agent who sees this tech worker as a future "agent of change" which needs to be "cultivated"?
How many big tech workers are basically living in a lower stakes lower quality Truman show world ran by the three letter agencies?
[1] - https://archive.ph/OPror
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
It's not guaranteed, but I would guess that Congress would do the same thing again.
You can get a very decent salary with amazing benefits and job security working for the government, living in a far lower cost area than SF or Seattle and retire early on a very generous retirement plan.
If you're talking about DMV, it's not that different.
This random calculator has SF[1] as 15% more expensive and Seattle[2] as slightly less expensive
[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/mortgages/real-estate/cost-of...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/mortgages/real-estate/cost-of...
And GS salaries are bad. GS-15 tops out at like 160k at the most senior levels.
Maybe NSA puts them on a special track, but even that isn’t very good.
The GS salary, as you noted, is the bigger issue.
The GS upper limit is on base pay. Just as with FAANG, you'd have to look at bonus structures too.
It's definitely not the same as FAANG upper limits, but it's also going to be a more stable and steady-paced job that still pays more than the median developer salary.
There are a lot of burned out ex-FAANG employees out there who will gladly take a pay cut to work at a different pace. Not all of the FAANG jobs are like the "I only work 3 hours per day and make $300K per year" anecdotes that get posted here all the time.
Ransomware attacks come to mind. It wouldn't be hard to subcontract that out and keep even the hackers themselves from knowing who they're working for.
This is just a paid advertisment.
So now you get to decide if you want to be a pawn for the government and entertain their stupid offers so that you can essentially be a monkey in front of a keyboard, or if you want to wait and improve your skills for a time when they are not trying to take advantage of you being jobless and for when you have a newfound confidence in yourself.