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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

This is what every activist needs to do.

Unhappy at how a government agency works? Apply for a job and change it from within. Agencies are made of people.

I saw a story a while ago about how the CIA was having trouble finding people to hire, because of Snowden.

This is backwards! People should be jumping to work there and make the place better.

For example, Zoos used to be quite different from how they are run today. What changed? People who loved animals figured it would be a neat place to work. Over time zoos have changed to conservation and public education oriented places, instead of public exhibition places.

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> People should be jumping to work there and make the place better.

You don't just get to sign up to work for the CIA and make things better - you'll spend years doing damn distateful things before you're ever in a position to affect positive change, assuming you haven't been properly corrupted by then. If you refuse to toe the line, then you'll find yourself fired or pressed with criminal charges.

Selling your soul for a small chance to change the CIA seems quite the price to pay.

Exactly. The government is going to be receptive to an activist asking them to stop bulk data collection and mass surveillance because they're trying to change from within.

How do you know they will be receptive?

I'm entirely sure he was being sarcastic.

Oops. I accidentally typed is instead of isn't.

> If you refuse to toe the line, then you'll find yourself fired or pressed with criminal charges.

The difference between this and activism would be...?

You should not be facing charges for refusing to take part in a criminal conspiracy and doing your best to cause the appropriate legal action to be taken to mitigate that criminal conspiracy. That statement should be completely uncontroversial.

You're completely missing my point.

Activism can very frequently involve being fired from your job (which is why many activists end up forming organizations and getting paid specifically for their activism) and being threatened with charges pressed.

Having to deal with this inside the organization you're trying to change rather than outside of it isn't actually different. It's a different psychological experience (namely, it's far more hostile), but the threats don't change.

> You should not be facing charges for refusing to take part in a criminal conspiracy

The people that do not want to work for the CIA to begin with are doing just that, only they make up their minds a bit earlier.

> and doing your best to cause the appropriate legal action to be taken to mitigate that criminal conspiracy.

Snowden did try to talk to his superiors about this sort of thing.

http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/edward-snowden-interview

He makes it quite plain that he tried to go through 'channels' first.

For the past 2 administrations the CIA has had a terrible record of trying to punish whistleblowers. I agree that people inside the CIA need to speak up, but at the highest levels, people who have tried just that have had their careers ruined.

I don't think we were talking about infiltrating the CIA for the purpose of dumping all its secrets, were we?

The organisation will not change without external pressure. External pressure cannot be applied without knowing what it is doing. Knowing what it is doing is illegal. The organisation will not change.

Does this sound like some part of the reason for why the corrupt high ups hate Wikileaks and their ilk(1) with a passion?

(1) where their ilk means: the New York Times, the NewYorker, The Washington Post, The Intercept

> Apply for a job and change it from within

That's not at all how I read what happened. Rather, I read that the two worked back and forth until they came to this present arrangement, and he was hired specifically for the purpose of making an organizational change. There has to be a culture there that is open to change or you will just make yourself an outcast by entering such an endeavor on your own. Unless you have some highly exceptional leadership and people skills, and likely connections in congress and the upper echelons of defense, this will go exactly nowhere at a place like the CIA.

Completely agreed.

This case is news precisely because it is so rare for a government agency to be open to change. It takes a very unusual mindset for a police department to hire an activist rather than sue him, shoot him, arrest him, ignore him, or do any of a thousand other things that the police is known to do to gadflies. Kudos to Seattle PD, and shame to everyone else.

Instead of blindly attacking or cooperating with government agencies, activists need to take a twin-track approach. Those who are open to change will get help. Those who aren't will be, uh, "disrupted".

Politics loves to devour those who approach it with a naive, one-size-fits-all ideal. As in business, you need to carefully determine which ones you want to cooperate with, which ones to merely tolerate, and which ones to drive out of the market asap.

I've tried to work at places to try to change them, but it simply doesn't work. If it's an incredible uphill battle to try to get a group of people who don't want to unit test their code to unit test their code, I can't imagine it's easy to change, say, a police department.

EDIT: And to clarify, I'm not saying unit testing is always necessary, but here it was. Their code was (and apparently still is) buggy and needlessly convoluted with no clear documentation.

> Apply for a job and change it from within.

That is a nice thought, but it doesn't really work that way. Most organizations don't have the flexibility required to make that a possibility (due to constraints of mission and efficiency in general).

An extreme example:

It is not possible to infiltrate the mafia and convert it from within to a girlscouts-like force of good. Such a transformation, were it possible, would conflict with the organization's goals and culture - it would no longer be the mafia. The same can be said about an insider attempting to reverse the NSA's efforts to spy on everybody.

Institutions protect themselves culturally. Bureaucracies have momentum. It's just the effect of self-interest and incentives (carrot and stick).

If you really want to change something like the CIA, the government has to impose meaningful and powerful oversight. Legal avenues have to be opened up for confrontation and change to be possible.

And of course to start it all off you usually need a true believer turned whistleblower. How else would the whistleblower have been shown all the damning evidence?

"This"? This story does not at all involve someone who applied for a job and tried to change it from within. It is about a guy who was external to the group, hassled them with FoI requests enough to make news and be noticed up higher, and then they offered him a job.

You aren't going to make the CIA better unless you are willing to risk a treason charge.

You've never heard of the security clearance requirements, I take it.

The change goes in both directions.

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