
Spy Kids - jseliger
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/28/spy_kids_nsa_surveillance_next_generation?page=full
======
finnh
Charlie's argument is that the vast majority of people growing up today will
not have sufficient loyalty to "the state" to fill the ranks of the state's
spy apparatus.

While I find it persuasive that people's loyalty to institutions may be in
decline, that population-wide generalization is not dispositive for the hiring
ability of spy agencies.

You don't need an entire generation of loyalists to fill out the NSA. You just
need a couple percent, tops.

And those people will always exist, helped along by talk-radio fear mongers
who continually generate a stream of xenophobic, america-fuck-yeah types who
will happily spy on their countrymen in exchange for that ever-elusive "secure
job".

~~~
msg
"A" hires "A"; "B" hires "C". And Generation Z's "A" players will not work for
the NSA.

You don't just need loyalists. You need loyalists who are good enough to
operate your systems, who are also conscience-free enough to dissociatively
split what they're doing from how they do it, day to day. And you have to have
100% accuracy to avoid the next Snowden.

Speaking as an engineer hiring for software, we are desperate for good people.
It is a seller's market out to the horizon. "A" engineers will be picking
among many options for at least the next decade, another generation of change.

I am at the head end of Generation Y. I have a nice computer job. And in my
personal life story I have already voted with my feet against working for
similar institutions. I can pick my post, more or less, and I picked one that
doesn't offend my personal convictions about privacy and power.

Computer science does force you to think hard about bullshit. You can't
bullshit a compiler. I remember thinking in an early experience with C, my
code is right, there must a be a bug in the compiler. You get chastened in a
hurry with that kind of attitude.

I guess I'm just saying there is a negative correlation between the anti-
knowledge you get from Fox News and the sense of mastery you get from making a
computer do what you need it to. So the future of the NSA is decay.

~~~
eshvk
I read your entire argument. With its logic statements and your rambling about
compilers and such. There are some assumptions you are making here:

1\. Everyone who is "good at Computer Science" is automatically a logical
person and is perfectly rational when it comes to everything they do in life.
I am just going to point out the famous mathematician Ramanujan who was also
intensely religious. Let us face it: Pure math is way harder than any computer
science problem you are going to solve.

2\. You are assuming that every single person who works for the NSA or has a
sense of patriotism is necessarily a person whose ideology is influenced by
Fox News.

~~~
msg
Re: 1, I guess I use myself as an example of a technologist who is aware of
the moral implications of his work. I don't deny that there are sellouts and
such. A technologist in the next decade is free to choose the work that
catches their fancy, and free to have moral objections to their work and leave
for more satisfying work. I also believe that wholesale surveillance is on the
wrong side of history, and in the long run, people who are free to choose will
not support the surveillance state. Thus the surveillance state will get the
dregs, plus or minus.

Re: 2, I'm actually responding to this point in the parent, which says the
source of the next generation of NSA recruitment pool is: _talk-radio fear
mongers who continually generate a stream of xenophobic, america-fuck-yeah
types who will happily spy on their countrymen_. You may be able to see how I
connected the dots to Fox News.

I will connect them further. Fox News has an aging viewership for many
reasons. Watching talking heads, as a model of receiving information about the
world, is on the way out. Fox has committed to ideologies that, for one reason
or another, are not believed by young people. In parallel to the changes to
work noted by Stross, there are changes to media consumption that are also
driving younger generations farther from the baby boom culture.

------
arethuza
Any time I think about loyalty to organisations or countries I am reminded of
what E.M. Forster wrote in his essay "What I believe" in 1938:

 _I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my
country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my
country. Such a choice may scandalize the modern reader, and he may stretch
out his patriotic hand to the telephone at once and ring up the police. It
would not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the
lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius
Caesar rather than their country Rome._

[NB It is also worth noting that Forster was an associate of the members of
the infamous Soviet spy ring started at Cambridge - although this wouldn't
become public until a long time after this essay was written.]

~~~
cafard
It is also worth noting between the world wars Germany and Japan operated such
that the rule of law, "country" if you will, counted for a good deal less than
other loyalties. No doubt Forster was thinking of someone much more like
himself, rather than of the assassins of Erzberger or of assorted Japanese
Army putschists. The Weimar Republic, though, is probably a far better
representation of a world run by the rules he proposes than the England of the
late 1930s was.

------
tokenadult
I like Charles Stross essays for the interesting points they bring up, but I
think this one is missing something. There will continue to be enough loyal-
to-country people to staff the major intelligence agencies (and their
contractors) in the major Western powers as long as there is some meaningful
difference in governance and individual civil liberties between the West and
the regions from which the West gathers intelligence. And there is. And there
will be for a while. If eventually few people in the civilized, democratic
countries of the West feel the need to spy on other countries, that will be
mostly because those countries have become more civilized and more democratic
--that is, more like the West.

I have no desire for my daughter to live in a country where she can't obtain a
full education, so there are at least a few countries in the world that have
current policies that are absolutely opposed to my values, and, I think, the
values of all civilized, rational persons. Over the years, there have also
been national governments that have not flinched from exporting support to
terrorist movements that seek to establish dictatorships where democracy is
already established. (Yes, over the years, the United States itself has been
in that category, but the United States seems largely to have learned from its
comeuppance in some countries where it previously deposed elected leaders.) As
long as there is fundamental international conflict based on core human
values, there will still be people defending the best values by any means
necessary.

Charles Stross is based in Britain, and he talks about generational
differences, but he doesn't go back even enough generations in Britain to
notice that cultures can change in the direction of MORE loyalty to country as
well as to less. The famous 1933 debate at Oxford about whether that year's
students at Oxford would defend "king and country"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_and_Country_debate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_and_Country_debate)

(the answer that year was no) was followed up by a Britain that fought
tenaciously for king and for country to defeat the Axis. I'm confident that
there are plenty of Americans and will continue to be plenty of Americans who
know enough history and understand enough about current world conditions to
continue supporting United States governmental intelligence agencies and their
contractors.

~~~
cstross
_The famous 1933 debate at Oxford about whether that year 's students at
Oxford would defend "king and country"_

I think you misunderstand the historic context of that debate. Students at
Oxford in 1933 would have been born between 1912 and 1915. Around 10% of the
adult male population of the UK died in war between 1914 and 1918, and another
10% were injured in battle; the casualty rate among junior officers was
terrifying, higher than the average for enlisted soldiers. Because Oxford was
the domain of the privileged back then, this was a generation largely
consisting of war orphans or children of traumatized veterans.

Note that the students aged 18-21 in 1933 were aged 24-27 when war was
subsequently declared in 1939. They weren't notably more reluctant (or eager)
to fight than their fathers' generation.

------
ansible
The USA, and by extension the three-letter agencies the implement it's policy
has often been viewed as the World's policeman. If that's the case (and here
we are about to stick our nose in Syria where it doesn't really belong), then
it's time we started acting like real police.

There's a whole bunch of rules for how police are supposed to act, how they
determine suspects, how the collect evidence, and so on. It is well past time
for the national agencies like the NSA to operate within clear (and public)
guidelines similar to that.

Then, if the NSA hires people who are loyal to the rules and the ideals of the
work (rather than because of nationality or institutional loyalty), then it
can operate effectively, without much fear of leakers like Snowden and
Manning.

I have no idea what it would take to reform these big institutions though. And
I fear for the damage they (and those who oppose them) will cause before they
are replaced by more effective agencies who are based around the old ideals of
"Truth, Justice, and the American Way".

------
tsax
Ah yes, "dog eat dog economic liberalism." And then people say Ayn Rand wrote
caricatures. Infact, this phrase has been in decline, as it was used to
buttress the industrial monopolization of the National Industrial Recovery Act
in the New Deal as competition was considered harmful back in the 1930s.

------
cafard
Many countries have lost more secrets to money than to split or shifting
loyalties. John Walker, Aldrich Ames, and Robert Hanson were in it for the
cash (and in Hanson's case thrills). But there have always been cases of
competing loyalties, sometimes sectional (think how much of the Old Army went
over to the Confederacy), sometimes international--in the 20th Century
commonly either communism or fascism.

The main difference I see now is the ease of copying and publication.

------
aznjons
In light of these predictions, I am more curious as to how governments will
address this problem. I find it difficult that governments will easily give up
on their surveillance goals.

The question then becomes how will they work around the shifting generational
trend that Charlie has identified? For example, will they leverage new
analytical technology that enables them to employ a smaller number of people
by automating tasks?

For those of you who have read his Laundry Files novels, the SCORPION STARE
network grants panopticon surveillance combined with lethal line-of-sight
gorgonism emulation, which hypothetically enables automated control of a wide
network of remote controlled camera weaponry to a few pilots instead of
employing large numbers of people with guns.

Maybe Charlie has predictions as to how governments will automate their
surveillance systems or other new ways of maintaining their control in their
supposed mission to protect the people in the face of less loyal prospective
workers?

~~~
shabble
You might find "Rule 34"[1] has some interesting ideas for automation and
control.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Rule-34-Charles-
Stross/dp/0441020348/c...](http://www.amazon.com/Rule-34-Charles-
Stross/dp/0441020348/charlieswebsi-20)

------
latj
Do I really have to log into something to read this article? Oh well, lots of
other stuff to read...

------
xerophtye
Is it just me, or is everyone just focusing on the "declining loyalty to
state" trend? What about the observation that future kids are totally NOT the
"spy material" ?? They aren't exactly anonymous beings. They'll ALL have a
HUGE internet presence and a compulsive habit to photograph and
document/publish EVERYTHING. And there really is nothing you can do about
that. They'll be born into that environment and they will be like that from
birth. So none of the generation Z ppl would be happy with the "abandon your
internet-self for all eternity!" clause of the ToS of intelligence agencies.

------
asdfre43
I know if I applied my chances of being hired would probably be <1%. But at
the same time if they were desperate enough to hire my lot, well I'd know it's
certainly more than a matter of being appealing or enthused with patriotism.
And that scares me a lot more than anything I've been reading about. I don't
want to be thinking about this stuff 24/7 for the rest of my life; who would
compared to the vapid monetizing opportunities we see around here? But if we
are at that point in time well perhaps that level of lifelong dedicated
thinking is more than just a career option.

------
cynusx
There are interesting thoughts in this article but talent is something that
money can buy, ask the banks.

~~~
hollerith
The OP is about _loyal_ talent, not talent alone, and banks do not acutely
need loyalty in their employees to the degree that spy agencies do.

For instance, they do not try to keep billion-dollar programs secret from the
public.

~~~
tonyg
Perhaps that's a matter of perspective:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal)

~~~
hollerith
OK, but we're getting away from the subject of employee loyalty: the bank
employees involved in the Libor scandal were probably motivated by personal
enrichment, not by loyalty to their employer. It so happens that the
employees' personal enrichment was aligned with the banks' corporate
enrichment, which often happens (usually by design) in fields like finance or
sales, but in a spy agency, it is not possible to align employee's personal
interests with the interests of the organization broadly enough to get a
similar effect.

And I still maintain my larger point (implied in grandparent), that whether or
not banks can find enough talent does not shed light on whether spy agencies
can find enough loyal talent.

~~~
tonyg
I was speaking narrowly to your point claiming that banks don't need loyalty
like spy agencies do because they're not trying to hide billion-dollar
programs.

I'm suggesting they are in fact trying to hide billion-dollar programs, and
need a kind of loyalty to facilitate this.

Paying someone obscenely well seems like a nice way of buying a kind of
loyalty. Certainly the upshot is behaviour equivalent to loyalty from the
bank's perspective.

~~~
hollerith
There are always going to be cases where the interests of the employee and the
organization are aligned. I do not think it is illuminating to call that "a
kind of loyalty". When I am loyal to something or someone, I will defend their
interests even when doing so goes against my (other) personal interests.

Also, you're ignoring my point that certain organizations have the option of
intentionally causing (via e.g. paying commissions on sales) a broad alignment
of personal and organizational interests, but spy agencies (and police
departments and court systems) do not.

And just because paying someone obscenely well succeeds in getting them to
increase whatever source of organizational profits was increased in the Libor
scandal does not mean that paying Snowden obscenely well would have succeeded
in getting him to ignore the broad public-policy implications of Prism and
such (or paying a cop obscenely well would succeed in stopping him from
brutalizing people under his power or stopping him from doing other things
against the long-term interests of his department).

Finally, since Hacker News (measured in the scores of my previous comments of
this nature) does not value long series of back-and-forths, this will probably
be my last response in this thread.

------
randomstring
This article reads like something out of Asimov's The Foundation series.

The author seems to suggest that secrets will be impossible in the future
because no one will have any loyalty to one organization.

Oh, and we can blame the Economy, the Internet, and Facebook for that.

~~~
shabble
The obvious solution is _more_ technology!

Neural Implants with TPM/DRM. Maybe we have it already, but your hippocampus
doesn't think you have Need To Know.

I know it's been written about, but I can't remember where.

------
terranstyler
"Dog eat dog liberalism" is something quite different to what we have
nowadays. I understand liberalism as something close to a free market. Now,
western countries have everything but free markets. Here in Europe, social
insurance and pension plans are state controlled and therefore monopolistic.
Banks all over the world have legal privileges that wouldn't exist in free
markets. Central banks are "calibrating" the interest rates everywhere in the
world with India and Argentina already on the brink of hyperinflation.

Yet we call the current system liberal (or capitalist) and we don't like the
current system, therefore we call it dog-eat-dog liberalism and want to end
capitalism.

I wholeheartedly disagree with the author's point of view on this.

~~~
Apocryphon
He meant economically liberal, like neoliberal or even classical liberal.
Laissez-faire.

~~~
terranstyler
That is what I think he meant.

My point was that we don't have "3 generations of economic liberalism" (last
paragraph) nor do we have anything even remotely close, see my first comment.

------
67726e
If you get hit with a pay wall to read this article, just Google
"spy_kids_nsa_surveillance_next_generation" and you should get the article as
the first result. Then you can read it from there.

~~~
cstross
It's a development and expansion of my original argument, expressed here:

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2013/08/snowden-...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2013/08/snowden-leaks-the-real-take-ho.html)

~~~
DanI-S
Thanks, Charles - for what is both an interesting take on the NSA's coming
recruitment crisis and the best short range forecast of the evolution of
Western culture I have yet to read.

------
rdtsc
> The public perception of America [...] is diametrically opposed to the
> secretive practices of the surveillance state. [...] And when that happens,
> we see public servants who remain loyal to the abstract ideals conclude that
> the institution itself is committing treason.

How amateurish and infantile of them. Yes finally Stross gets to the point but
notice that the institution is not really committing treason, it only those
misbehaved idealistic young morons who conclude that. I guess I shouldn't
expect anything more from FP

------
ChuckMcM
One can only hope Charlie, one can only hope.

------
nakedrobot2
if you stop the page loading before it's finished, you can bypass that awful
splash screen barrier.

