LinkedIn profiles of people working on #PRISM or affiliated programs | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn profiles of people working on #PRISM or affiliated programs

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49 pointsFredericJ31 comments

You can similarly map people on the CIA, from desk analysts, to PMOs in the field, and Special Operations Command (esp. "Tier 1" personnel) sides of the house. DEVGRU guys really like big 4x4 trucks.

I've done extensive research into these 3 areas on LinkedIn for years. I'd love to publish my information, but jail or causing grief to these people and their families doesn't sound appealing to me.

The US Intelligence Community still has a dire operational security issue with employees and social networks. A good number of people think they're practicing good security by not mentioning their agency, but these missing dots are easy to connect when you examine their timelines, places of employment/residence (which can be cross-checked with Intellius and so on), and LinkedIn connections.

These agencies know about this problem, but they've failed to shore it up properly. Unfortunately, enemies of the US also know about this problem and exploit it routinely. Sadly, it's going to take a sustained media shit storm before something is actually done about it.

Yeah, a lot of tier one operators strive to keep their LinkedIn bios current. I hear the new trend is to skip challenge coins and just use linkedin endorsements.

> I'd love to publish my information, but jail or causing grief to these people and their families doesn't sound appealing to me.

Jail for publishing linkedIn data?

enemies of the US also know about this problem and exploit it routinely

How so? I mean, i can imagine a variety of ways, but what have you seen?

Flagged for being a witch hunt. I know the rule about flagging club is you don't talk about flagging club, but this is rather egregious.

Even if we decided this was ok, there are two major problems:

First, consider that there are several government projects named PRISM that are not secret and are unrelated to the NSA. Example: http://www.mitre.org/news/digest/advanced_research/03_13/rem... and http://www.dot.gov/individuals/privacy/pia-prism.

Second, the claims about the secret NSA PRISM program that Greenwald initially made have been contradicted by The Washington Post, The New York Times, every tech CEO, and have been walked back by Greenwald himself. I know a lot of people will never believe that and have been conflating PRISM with other issues (such as telephone call logging), but at this point a lot of the initial claims made regarding unfettered access to tech company data are without merit.

What's interesting is that while the media is attacking Snowden for his lack of "elite" higher-education credentials, a cursory look at these analysts reveal that they too don't have the "elite" higher-ed credentials.

Several profiles list University of Maryland University College [1] (an online state institution with very similar operations as competing for-profit schools), American Military University [2][3][4](for-profit school), community colleges [5], and so on.

[1] http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidamerson

[2] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/linnea-jones/67/319/8b9?trk=pub-...

[3] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/taina-robles/56/4b9/3a1?trk=pub-...

[4] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/danna-rey/18/252/2bb?trk=pub-pbm...

[5] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/shawn-atkinson/14/1b3/587?trk=pu...

(edit- formatting)

Cosmetologist / Apprenticeship PH 4.5 August 2011 – Present (1 year 11 months) Old Towne Alexandria, VA

The all seeing eye of the world's most powerful government is staffed by beauty school drop outs? Is this for realsies? The low standards to getting a spy job are a more shocking revelation than anything Snowden has put forth so far.

Being willing to ignore the Constitution and do as your told seem the main prerequisites.

The low standards to getting a spy job

What would the best qualifications be, I wonder? Being an incredibly good liar and having a great attention to detail aren't available as college courses yet.

You've never worked retail?

No.

Lucky you. Most people -- even defense contractors! -- have probably worked some jobs outside of their field of study at some point.

If you want to search for linked profiles without paying linkedin use this tool [1]. It generates Google boolean search strings [2] that you can use to see Linkedin's indexable profiles.

[1] http://recruitin.net/ [2] http://goo.gl/xs6sc

If someone has the paid-for LinkedIn access we could see their connections and discover a few things about the likely activities of the NSA, given that there are others who are as free with resume keywords.

Who has a paid-for LinkedIn?

So? If I were given the opportunity to work on this amazing technology for the salaries they were making I would have taken it as well.

Indeed.. I guess if your interested in working with top levels of government these are good resumes to scan to give you some insight on what to know and/or expect.

Yes, there are always those willing to sell out their fellow man to make a buck.

Meh, I mean, they were going to create this regardless. I would rather be on the ground floor to try to enforce some measures of security, make sure it's done properly, and if not, ruin my life by notifying the public.

I don't think the tool itself is necessarily evil (actually, I think it's super impressive from a technical standpoint), but it has to be implemented properly. It needs to have proper access restrictions and data retrieval methods built in from the ground up. One person shouldn't be able to query anything they want, multiple people authorizing any access, perfect logging, etc etc.

It could be an amazing tool for tracking down lost persons, solving crimes (aka bad people doing things to good people), etc etc. That is, assuming that our government isn't full of corrupt shitty people (mostly false).

>it has to be implemented properly. It needs to have proper access restrictions and data retrieval methods built in from the ground up

US intel agencies aren't known for self-restraint. They are usually lobbying for more, not less access. Additionally, if the data's collected, it's not just vulnerable to abuse of power, it's also vulnerable to being hacked.

According to Snowden, accesses to the current system are largely unaudited (even accesses from foreign intelligence agencies: only 5% of accesses by GCHQ were audited). It doesn't sound like there's anything stopping the current system from being abused to gather business intelligence, etc.

>It could be an amazing tool for tracking down lost persons, solving crimes

There are lots of things that could be done for public safety that have the downside of being open to potential abuse by the state (sampling the DNA of newborns, implanting tracking devices in newborns, etc.).

>That is, assuming that our government isn't full of corrupt shitty people (mostly false).

Folks involved in PRISM have been knowingly working on a secret program that violates the 4th Amendment: I'd say that counts as shitty. But if that doesn't qualify in you mind, history offers many more spectacular examples of egregious abuses by shitty people: in America COINTELPRO, MK ULTRA, etc. Banking on your rights not being abused by trusting in the good of mankind isn't a great strategy.

Something about glass houses...

>> "fellow man"

hahaha, that's rich; "fellow man"

One thing that I find strange is that a few of the profiles have full bio's and cv's in place including responsibilities in their current and previous roles.

They do however only have 3 or 4 connections. I'd imagine someone who puts so much effort into tailoring their linkedin would have connected to more of their previous and current colleagues.

Makes you think with this info on people who seem to be trusted with critical infrastructure, they would now be targets for people to gain access to their systems…

"ArcGIS" shows up in most of them, anyone used it?

ArcGIS is the most widely used proprietary software for GIS analysis and arguably one of the most powerful ones as well. It comes armed with mapping tools, spatial analysis, statistical tools and a plethora of other such applications. Since there is a significant spatio-temporal angle to data mined by the NSA, I would not be surprised if the people are familiar with the tools. Just think how much information can be deduced by knowing hte spatial reach of who calls whom, where and when, plot it on a map, compute the region where the target is moving about etc. You can do all that and build customized applications with ArcGIS

It's a very popular mapping system (you can create maps, visualize stuff and make interactive maps for in the browser)

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

Nice work Freddy!

From http://www.linkedin.com/pub/brandi-lightcap/40/9b6/453 profile's summary: "data dining"? :)

What is the point supposed to be?

Defense contractors -- they're just like us!

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