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Comment by sharkweek | Hacker News Reader

No condescension intended, I am honestly just more curious -- I'd love to read some honest, uncensored interviews from people working on these things, mostly to just get their side of things.

I totally agree that people have varying beliefs on this stuff and for some this might be just as noble as any other way of serving their country.

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> I'd love to read some honest, uncensored interviews from people working on these things, mostly to just get their side of things.

Because losing their job and being charged with a felony for breaking a TS clearance is totally worth doing that for you. The NSA isn't a startup in stealthmode. I can guarantee you that some HNers know NSAers, and no doubt many HNers are NSAers, but there are very strong reasons why they're not participating in this dialogue.

Trust us we have really good reasons and arguments but we just can't tell you. lol

Also, we will lie about what we are actually doing. I can understand taking some drastic measures to prevent epic disaster, however, I see no good reason to cover up what is actually going on; threats and countermeasures. By lying, they are forcing us to assume the worst.

And if you assume the worst, they don't (and shouldn't) care. This isn't a popularity contest for them, and the NSA operates as if there is a legitimate national security purpose to what they're doing.

I don't like the fact that they're doing it, but presuming that they should operate in total transparency just so that the silicon valley "proper thinkers" won't assume the worst is fairly naive, IMO. They believe they're fighting a critical intelligence war, and secrecy is an integral and necessary part of that battle.

I wouldn't work there, but I respect the people who do, both for their technical ability and for their patriotism. (I may not agree, but I can respect.) In particular, they're making significant individual sacrifices in order to do the work they do. It's not the same sacrifice as doing IED patrol in Afghanistan, but anyone doing high level crypto for NSA could likely make more money and have a cushier life in the private sector.

In particular, they're making significant individual sacrifices in order to do the work they do. It's not the same sacrifice as doing IED patrol in Afghanistan, but anyone doing high level crypto for NSA could likely make more money and have a cushier life in the private sector.

Where does the funding come from? From the tax payers. Who gets spied on? Everyone and their dog. So yeah, they're making a sacrifice, but even bigger sacrifices are forced on just about everyone else.

>I don't like the fact that they're doing it, but presuming that they should operate in total transparency just so that the silicon valley "proper thinkers" won't assume the worst is fairly naive, IMO. They believe they're fighting a critical intelligence war, and secrecy is an integral and necessary part of that battle.

This would be a much more sensible argument if they weren't going around outright coercing Silicon Valley's tech companies into becoming their tools.

If the NSA wants to spy on everyone, they should do it the hard way!

We already have mountains of evidence that government secrecy is 99.999% trivial and petty. It's there to protect against embarassment, not terrorism.

Read the Wikileaks documents. Triviality. Small-thinking. Nonstrategic low-value goals being pursued. The diplomatic equivalent of spam. Read it, and you will be convinced there is no bear in the woods, no boogie man under your bed that the NSA can't tell you about.

And that last 0.0001%? We can afford that price for freedom. Total transparency won't hurt America at all.

> I'd love to read some honest, uncensored interviews from people working on these things,

That's very unlikely to happen, because it's all classified and secret or top secret or whatever.

There are a few interviews around.

Here's an ex-director (He stopped being director in 1978) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039vhp0 - this is the first time he speaks about his time at GCHQ

Here's a radio documentary from 2010. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p007fqc4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rmssw

Just be aware that Gordon Correra's programmes about GCHQ ( and prior to that MI5 and MI6 ) are made with the co-operation of those agencies.

I have written to the BBC and asked what conditions the agencies laid-down but I did not receive a reply.

Read this guy's tweets: https://twitter.com/justinschuh

I'm certainly not a fan of his ideology, but he gives an insight from someone who came from the NSA and is supportive of the executive branch's behavior.

Holy crap. He's exactly the type the government could recruit inside a company like Google.

Is this a Google security engineer publicly stating that he sees nothing wrong with the NSA accessing all of Google's traffic? I can't believe that he'll stay employed by Google for long. At least, I hope he won't be.

I'm not surprised that I'm getting smeared by a sock puppet on HN, but I'll try to use it as a chance to clarify myself in more than 140 characters:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JustinSchuh/posts/SiSd4T9fgXH

I don't work for the NSA, obviously, but I agree on the point of the fourth amendment's obsolescence. A world where information is universally available and infinitely reproducible with minimal cost is necessarily a world without privacy. We need to get used to it as a society. People who grew up under the old system will be resistant to change like on every other social issue in history, and will die out to make room for the new generation.

My only objection to the NSA stuff is not the collection of information, but the asymmetry. Snooping on all my emails isn't wrong because email should be private, it's wrong because you have power over me by knowing my email without me knowing yours. Fortunately, things like facebook and twitter acclimatizing people to publishing everything about their lives which will eventually eliminate this asymmetry.

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