The far right is scaring away Washington's private hacker army | Hacker News Reader

The far right is scaring away Washington's private hacker army

politico.com

13 pointsonychomys27 comments

I knew someone who participated in a similar program, and they left because the director was incredibly toxic. It was unclear if the director had intentionally been put there to sabotage the program through their own incompetence.

You would think so but no. Government employees are impossible to get rid of and the atmosphere is such that those with any kind of mental issue are attracted to government work and they can't leave because they wouldn't last anywhere else.

Not sure what in the OP you're saying "no" to. If you have someone who works for you who is terrible at their job, it makes sense to put them on some project or organization you dislike for political reasons. [EDIT: Or even just projects that nobody wants to work on or have onerous management requirements or as a way of punishment]

Not saying all the incompetent leaders in government are put there in order to destroy what they're working on, but the number is certainly more than zero.

I'm saying no because it's far more likely it's just incompetence all the way to the top, and not a conspiracy.

There is no conspiracy required for that scenario, it sometimes only takes one decision maker to place a toxic leader on an out-of-favor project.

I've worked with many talented folks in govt. Fortune 500 and startups like to poach talent from my organization on a regular basis - they are regularly grabbing a significant % of our top talent and offering > 200% increases in compensation. I think more of the challenges of the govt revolve around continuing resolutions, and the ever shrinking discretionary budget.

Some protections for government personnel exist because of the challenges of working across administrations. As a non-political career civil servant you have to be very willing to work on someone with an R or D after their name's key priorities in order to excel. Having a non-partisan approach towards professional work is a big thing. Despite being a libertarian I eagerly supported Potus#44 by volunteering for some of his broadband initiatives.

It is easy to get rid of non-performing government personnel if an adequate paper trail exists. I knew a fed that committed fraud regarding covid19 and he was fired same day by the IG once the investigation concluded.

There's also the antiquated "can't have ever been involved with cannabis" and related rules for government contractors that thin out the field of possible applicants quite a bit. The FBI has trouble with this too.

Which has nothing to do with the article at all. These are private company employees giving information to the government.

The article also talks about a lack of technical expertise within the government agency, which (allegedly) is mostly lawyers and policy folks.

Does anyone still get fooled by rags that call anyone who's not into 1984 "far right" in a lazy attempt to discredit people with genuine concerns?

Mentally, I put an asterisk next to every occurrence of "far right" and "extremist" (and to be fair, a lot of other terms). They've been overused and abused into meaninglessness. If you want to describe something or someone, you need to use more precise terms.

Many of these programs have been superseded by industry specific information sharing groups anyways, mostly because JCDC kinda sucked.

You'd have to be desperate to want to work for the US government after you've seen how things work there.

Or patriotic. There are lots of highly competent people who work in govt because they want to bring some competence to it.

You'd last 3 months.

I doubt you speak from experience, but I do - I've spent a couple decades doing government contracting of one sort or another. I'm not desperate - I know I could make a lot more money in another sector - I'm patriotic. And I would say the majority of people I've worked with over the years fit that description. Certainly not all of them, and certainly it depends on where you go, but I think it's more the norm than the exception.

One thing I've seen a lot over the years is people moving around the industry to what they perceive as problem spots, with the intention of making everything better. They get there and find it's much more difficult than they expected. I'm not saying there's no corruption or abuse, I hear about it on the news the same as you. But it's rare enough compared to the sheer amount of honest work that I've never seen it personally. I think a lot of what is perceived from the outside as dysfunction is people trying to solve hard problems imperfectly. Government is hard.

keyword here is contracting

I know many counter examples. Maybe you’re projecting?

Abolishment of the Civil Service Commission in 1978 that guaranteed competency invited incompetent employees into the federal workforce. And if you've ever worked with someone incompetent, you look for the exit doors as fast as possible -- or a way to push them out. But given its hard to fire people in FedGov, all the competent employees work in the private sector as subcontractors. If a politician ever wants to bring back state capacity, they need to bring back the CSC.

> And if you've ever worked with someone incompetent, you look for the exit doors as fast as possible -- or a way to push them out.

As long as they're not your immediate boss, there's a third option: route around the damage and freeze them out.

"CISA’s efforts to combat disinformation ahead of the 2020 election..." No thanks, free speech has been attacked enough these past 10 years.

The “I don’t like comment moderation” to “psyops don’t exist” pipeline has to be one of the internet’s goofiest.

The other side is "psyops only come from the other side," and "moderation must share our global editorial agenda" which is pretty goofy too.

Of course psyops exist, but allowing tax-funded government agencies to decide what's a psyop and what isn't sounds even goofier. If a countries citizenry can't figure this out themselves, the solution isn't having the government decide for them, it's to fix the critical thinking problem.

You're arguing as if these organizations are just going around shutting off sources of information for saying the wrong things. That's not what's happening, as even "the wrong things" and even psyops are in fact protected by the 1st Amendment.

Anyone can put up a web page with whatever they want.

Public corporations not wanting to broadcast lies and misinformation is not an attack on free speech.

Free speech is about legal consequences to what people say.

CISA got caught with their hands in the cookie jar weaponizing the triumvirate of "disinformation, malinformation, misinformation" against both the right and the left (JFK Jr.). The hacking community at large has been broadly anti-voting machine for as long as I can remember, and hearing CISA pushing the safety and security of these black box machines as "most secure ever" is comical.

By contrast:

The FBI's Infragard program [1] is considered much more successful because the FBI excels at outreach, has been in the game for awhile, is very broad [2] and robustly supported sharing data, and interfacing actively with the hacking community.

[1] https://www.infragard.org/

[2] https://www.infragard.org/Files/InfraGard_Redesign_2-24-2022...

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