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Comment by WestCoastJustin | Hacker News Reader

It irks me a little how everyone keeps dropping the "high-school dropout" bit. If you watch the video of him speaking [1], it is readily apparent he is no flunky. At any rate, he was taken under the wing of CIA/NSA/Booz Allen, who must have seen something in him, and given a highly specialized and job specific education.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yB3n9fu-rM

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FYI: Booz probably hired him not because they trusted him, but because he possessed a Top Secret/Secure Compartmentalized Information (TS/SCI) Clearance, along with experience for the CIA. People think the CIA is very selective with who they hire: they aren't. As a guy whose former company used to make me go to career fairs every now and then to man the booth in the DC area, I was shocked at how many cocky, CIA employees looking for a way to cash in their TS/SCI clearance at a contractor would show up and have AWFUL education credentials (colleges with reputations as being diploma farms with dorms, weak majors, etc). The CIA is more likely to hire someone who went to a "joke" party school with an A average than someone who went to a difficult school with a C average. I can't speak for Snowden's skills, since I never knew him. I will say this: he worked IT security for a while. The Federal Government, and particularly IC and DoD IT security has no middle class. It is made up of the teeming masses of talentless certification whores with zero coding skills and a complete lack of offensive hacking skills. They rely on their Security +, CISSPA, etc certs, which are obtained with cramming courses followed by incredibly easy (for people who are smart enough to code) tests. Then there are the "red team" folks. These are the bad asses, the small minority who often have weird, unconventional backgrounds, write books on penetration testing (Violent Python for example) and laugh their asses off at the whole joke of a security apparatus that is the CISSPA paperwork paradigm.

Here you're wrong. The CIA and some other members of the IC are very selective in who they hire, but not in the way most top-tier companies are. The issue is applicant clearance. So if you're a genius, native-US born linguist who has lived in several Middle Easter countries, speaks Arabic, and has a honors degree from a top school, or a brilliant mathmetician/computer scientist who studied in Eastern Europe and married an Eastern European, it's relatively hard to get the level of clearance you need for the CIA, because of the way that foreign residence and/or family and friends count on your clearance questionnaire. And if you've got this background and smoked a couple of dozen joints in college, getting a clearance becomes near impossible.

On the other hand, if you're a community-college educated applicant with solid grades and military or law enforcement experience, and no foreign residencies or drug experiences and/or alcohol-related misdemeanors, you're golden. You allude to this phenomenon.

But while it relatively easy for a certain kind of applicant to get into the CIA, it's far from the truth to say that they're not selective. They're incredibly selective, and they're excluding some of the most promising candidates that apply because of their particular kind of selectivity.

Beside the loss of many highly-qualified applicants (what serious language expert hasn't lived overseas?), this is also said to create a certain culture that bears more resemblance to boot camp than to the highly-professional organization the CIA has been traditionally. Snowden alluded to this in his interview.

This is not a secret problem. In fact, there were quite a few public Senate hearings on the issue after 911. But nothing much is reported to have changed.

Ah, you make a good point. Let me rephrase: by "selective", I mean hiring the best and the brightest, as opposed to boring assholes who are easy to clear.

My time working classified projects agrees with both of you - ability to clear is more important than talent, it is essentially the first prereq - everything else is secondary. And there are a handful of highly talented security people with a strong sense of the absurd from which basically all knowledge flows and the untalented are left to implement it via glorified checklists.

Perhaps this focus on ultra-conventionality is why we are where we are now with these programs. Too many of the people involved that are essentially "go along to get along" types. You have to have a streak of rebelliousness in order to question the status quo, to see the social implications of these programs as anything other than "we are the good guys ergo whatever we do is good" and the selection process weeds out the people with that characteristic.

I live an exceptionally boring life, always have, more as a result of laziness than anything else, but having a clearance always felt like a yoke on my shoulders. I am glad that I was never in the position that Snowden found himself.

It's simple: it's an easy way to belittle him. It's part of the broad character assassination we always see when somebody tries to make waves.

How many people now hear of Julian Assange and think "he's kinda creepy and megalomaniacal?". They believe that precisely because the media relentlessly worked that image into every story about him.

They believe that precisely because the media relentlessly worked that image into every story about him.

It's not hard to get a similar impression from his own writing and speaking, or from people that worked with him.

It's still a form of ad-hominem. Ignore the messenger, evaluate the message.

Or rms, perhaps?

>It's simple: it's an easy way to belittle him. It's part of the broad character assassination we always see when somebody tries to make waves.

Sex scandal accusation is in the works I'm sure.

Given how much he has pissed them off, I am sure it will be a graphic one ...

I think it's a fairly common attitude that if you just do as you're told and don't rock the boat you'll be successful. So of course it's going to be provoking that someone who doesn't fit the mold can still make a very good living.

Well he did flee to Hong Kong of all places. So clearly he isn't the most learned person around.

Apparently, you're the less learned one. Hong Kong was a former property of HRH and still maintains, both culturally and politically, the civic values from their predecessors. As a matter of fact, judging from what I saw last time I was over there, one could reasonably argue that they handle civil dissent much better than us here in the states, both on the protesters' side and on the government's side.

Exactly. I also read that the gov't there is currently revamping their asylum rules and that for now anybody who applies for asylum can stay until the rules are sorted out, which may take quite a long time... I don't think he's done so, but it may be a more savvy location than you'd think.

I've lived in Hong Kong for over a decade so know it's culture. It's not that dissimilar from Singapore in its western leanings.

Hong Kong's history is irrelevant as they have an extradition treaty with the USA. Any normal person would not seek asylum in a country where this was the case.

Only on the surface is it close to Singapore. When you are a part of what political pundits have always hyped up as "the biggest threat to the USA/the next superpower", things change -- attitudes change. "Western leanings" sure, I'll give you that. But that is not equivalent to being pro-American. In fact, if pro-west meant just abiding by the majority of Western countries' attitudes, then on this matter pro-west might as well be equivalent to anti-USA. (I've lived in HK as well).

And the USA has basically an extradition treaty with every country. They are not always followed, either (granted, I am not an expert on this matter). Of course, they might extradite him, but I don't think it's as clear-cut as you make it out.

USA does not have an extradition with basically every country.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extraditi...

It has been widely reported just how bizarre it was to pick a country like Hong Kong given their recent cooperation with the USA.

Basically every country that he can probably go to under the conditions he made (medical), without rousing suspicion, has an extradition treaty with the USA. Certainly if he wanted to go to Afghanistan for "epilepsy treatment", it'd be weird, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_law_in_the_United_S...

Which one's good? If you really cared about the extradition treaty so much, you'd have a problem going anywhere (given his situation, and I think even for the typical tourist most countries on that list are countries you might not even ever think about visiting. Though I've admittedly visit quite a few of those, so I may be wrong on that point).

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