The NSA Wants Hackers, And It Wants Them On Its Side
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
After growing up and dealing with many kinds of brilliant hackers, all kinds in fact, from hard core US Democrat style liberals, to UK climate change and evolution deniers, I now realize genius hackers come in all political varieties.
And the NSA has some and they are paying them well to work full time. So now I think even in the era of pure information warfare, governments still have the upper hand.
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/edgeofthewest/2012/08/17/ge...
but we do not live in an ideal world, and while we live in the world we all live in, I am glad that the governments of free countries with representative democracy are developing hacking capabilites. Hacking used for defense protects our secrets and thus reduces our vulnerability to attack of all kinds, and hacking used for offense often is more precise in targeting and saves civilian lives and property while decreasing an enemy's means of waging war.
I'll give one example of an activity that free people in free countries (employed by government agencies or not) could do to increase the prospect of world peace. Break down the great firewall of China and help everyone in China have full access to uncensored news. Then do the same for North Korea, for Iran, for Belarus, and for anywhere else where there is significant government censorship. Wikileak all over the world the internal documents of the Communist Party of China and its allies. Help the common people of the world's most oppressed countries understand their current condition and what they could to gain more freedom. That would reduce the risk of war among any combination of state or non-state actors, and help all of us enjoy more peace and prosperity. You could do this without working for the NSA, and without living in the United States. But anyone who can do this ought to consider doing this. More free flow of information with less censorship is desperately needed in many countries,
http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-wor...
http://transparency.org/country
and any hacker contributing to that cause would be helping humankind.
I don't want to get into this much, but I'll just say this has been done for years by multiple independent groups.
For open source information, google "bronc buster", "hong kong blondes", and "hacktivismo" circa 1990s/early 2000s. Those search terms should lead you to applicable information. Also, Tor/proxies/VPNs are in widespread use by the Chinese.
There's also the fact that many-if-not-most hackers are... shall we say... "unsuited" (in terms of their temperament) to the kind of work environment found in government security agencies. Let's just say that your tolerance for pointy-haired administrative BS had better be pretty dang high (like, somewhere between "ISS" and "Earth-Moon L1") if you're going to go down that particular professional path.
I imagine the NSA is well aware of the correlation between "very clever" and "difficult to work with".
I know people who work for GCHQ, and while they never talk about the work they are happy that the managers keep them insulated from the PHB stuff.
Very real. Best hackers spend their time hacking, not trying to get grades or climbing the hierarchical ladder.
Just think of Steve Wozniak, he was so afraid of not being able to engineer anymore if Apple gave him executive power. He refused to climb the ladder so he could continue tinkering in the lab.
In those big orgs the people that want to get power use to be sociopaths and "power addicts"(people that choose power over everything else in life).
There are several reasons that come to mind, a few of which are hard problems to solve.
1. Market competition. The information security industry is currently undergoing major growth. As a whole, it is a thriving and exciting place to work. This allows companies to recruit top talent and, sometimes more importantly, pay top dollar. Sure, there's the occasional genius that comes out of the NSA (like Charlie Miller, for example), but even he is now at Accuvant. If you're a scraggly kid who spent all his high school years behind a terminal, and you're offered low wages to work for the FBI or DoD, or extremely high pay to work for a large consulting firm, which would you pick? Patriotism doesn't help all that much.
2. While less security guys have criminal backgrounds than many would think, the strict clearance required to perform intelligence-related work conflicts with a lot of personalities. Infosec people generally fall into one of two categories: very clean cut, professional, etc., or the typical "dirty hacker" that hangs out in a basement or studio apartment, breaking into networks and slugging beers. Three letter agencies say they want these guys, but there's no way they'd conform to government standards or pass a strict background check. No drugs for ten years? That's a problem for a lot of people.
3. Lastly, and this is probably the weakest point, but a lot of people disagree with things the U.S. government is doing. NSA wiretapping? Security professionals generally don't want to be a part of that. I'm hesitant to make sweeping generalizations, but if you go to a security or hacker conference (DEFCON comes to mind), you'll notice that a lot of the talks and sentiment are of a "rebellious" nature. At the very least, security people are strong advocates of privacy. Working for the NSA or the Air Force Cyber Command doesn't generally sit well with a lot of these people.
China has their best hackers in their military, working for the state. The United States has their best hackers in the private sector. I'm not saying that there aren't a few seeds of genius laying around Fort Meade, but it's not the same as what you see in the private sector.
If the government wants to recruit more hackers, they need to sweeten the offer; but how can they do so with (a) government-controlled funding and salaries, (b) strict background checks that are required for sensitive work, such as national security and (c) a mandate that many people they're trying to recruit simply don't support?
It sound to me like the sentiment is not so much rebellious, as it is very ethical.
Sure, I just meant rebellious in the sense that the participants tend to rebel against what is seen as government fascism or privacy violations - not that they're evil anarchists.
They can do it with how they are going about it. Lets look at what is going on here.
The US government is funding education that is tailored to focus on their topics of interest. These students then spend 2 years working for the government getting more education and experience.
At this point, (a) is remedied by leaving government positions for better paid contractor ones (I think the US government / contractor relationship is greatly misunderstood in general) or feeding off into private industry. If you read through several bios of people in the industry you find ties to DoD and intel agencies all over the place (some are as contractors). But the idea here is (in my opinion), the government isn't concerned about who is on their payroll, but rather they have more capable professionals trained for this type of work in the country. People whose skills they can pay for one way or another.
I think a lot of people misunderstand the requirements of (b). And those that can't qualify for top clearances can be fed as "infosec engineers" into other agencies where a secret clearance is all that is required (FAA for example). Again, just having more trained people spread about is the goal here.
Additionally, contractors can conduct work in non-classified environments with non-cleared personnel in some situations and/or you have more distant relationships. Think vulnerability selling / purchasing.
As for (c), it is often hard to tie someone's direct work to some mandate. Where do you draw the line? Not working in a specific group? Specific agency? Contractor? Supplier? At some level, Microsoft is supporting the work NSA does. Different people draw different lines at different places.
They were brilliant. Honestly it's going to be hard for a govt agency to recruit people like this - people who are incredibly passionate about security and cryptography may tend to care about privacy issues as well, for which the government currently incurs a negative sentiment, and this is compounded by the fact that brilliant people these days tend to work on problems they are ideologically aligned with. This isn't the Manhattan Project era anymore...
But you just never know, people come from all sorts of political backgrounds.
Now, a €500 laptop (which people have for sending email) can provide most of what you need to be world class. If you have the brains, you don't need the government.
House Approves Sweeping, Warrantless Electronic Spy Powers: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/house-approves-spy-...
Fast forward 10 years, Wired runs monthly articles about exactly how much the NSA spies on its own citizens. My enthusiasm? Curbed.
How do you find an extrovert at the NSA?
He's the one looking at someone else's shoes
Now, fascism, on the other hand is whole different matter!
in out
x n
n e
b r
l a
f y
s o
c t
i f
j h
v u
z w
o g
u s
d v
h d
k j
m c
p i
q k
r m
a p
g b
Not sure if it's my mistake or their mistake, but there are two typos in the cleartext.
"when angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, an hundred" -thomas jefferson
"when angry, count four; when very angry, swear." -mark twain
And another thorny issue in reading something like this on HN: the internet is international.
Lots of us are not even from the US, and couldn't care less about defending THAT particular country. Not to mention that the defending part mostly means offending or spying on other countries, mainly our own.
Well, I do care in the sense that I am disgusted by it.
I just wanted to point out that "oh, how honorable to work for them, it's our patriotic duty" response to a story like this doesn't work in the intertubes, where we're not even from the same country.
The Internet is the perfect place for articles like this. You are getting insight to what other nations are doing. The Internet affords us this much. It's not just International, it is free.
No one was cheerleading for or against any particular country in this thread.
Disadvantages include not being able to publish some of it. That's significant if other people independently discover something after you.
If you enjoy abusive cheating, lying, manipulating, and morally corrupt relationships; then that is the place for you.
In the last two weeks at least two US bombs from WW2 exploded. None of them harmed people. One of then in the Danube, Vienna which caused tons of dead fish and could have also harmed people, if there was a ship there at that time. Nobody knew it was there. The other was in Germany, which took a lot of time and effort and had to be detonated (lots of people had to be evacuated and buildings began to burn (and of course tons of windows broke)). Lots of other bombs are regularly found, but gladly it is usually not causing such troubles.
Video from the one in Germany/Munich: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBSZ1WhTKfg
And these are two rich successful countries with lots of experts in that area, using high tech, like robots and stuff.
I agree, it's still an act of war, but I'd much rather have that than what wars could look like.
He was not interested on secrets(he avoided them as much as he could) and probably because of that they keep giving him more and more high level responsibility.
In an ideal world things are made the "right way", in the real world occasionally real people do bad things, and you know it, and you can't say anything to anybody, even your family or your deep friends, and you become extremely dangerous to some people in power.
What he was told inside the organization was on the lines of "because bad guys do bad things we have to do bad things to fight bad guys".
You don't want t become whistleblower. They will make your life Hell for you and your family for the rest of your life.
In the case of hiring "hackers", the NSA (and whatever other Double Secret TLA is out there, that we're not supposed to know about) should hire people who very literally think outside the box. The NSA has the problem of what to do with disruptive ideas, or they have the problem of no disruptive ideas. Maybe the "hackers" they hire write Stuxnet NT, or maybe they develop algorithms that solve the Traveling Salesman Problem and open a bigger can of worms than thought possible.
Or maybe the NSA gets nothing from their "hackers" because 9-to-5 regular day jobs in a building with no windows, except fake ones on the fake building around the real building, causes a near-total physiological and psychological block on new ideas. Net loss to society, since some of the "hackers" could be writing code for the next Pets.com .
Or maybe the NSA can't hire any real "hackers" since they almost universally have showstopping blots on their records: sampling illicit drugs, committing minor fraud, getting expelled from school, undergoing psychiatric treatment, nominal homelessness, participating in OWS, whatever, you'd be surprised at what prohibits someone from getting an exotic clearance, which you certainly need to have to work at the NSA. What if the NSA can only hire poseurs and lamers?
Yes, this is indeed a trap.
NSA clearly got it wrong, "hacking" is not for "your country" it's a selfish act, for your personal goals, i mean, let's say you work for NSA and you stop or make a stuxnet like virus... you cannot brag about it, as a hacker, you got to show your work, to proudly say: i did that.
IMHO