

Ask HN: Why are you still working for the NSA? - peterkelly

I&#x27;m sure there are quite a few NSA employees reading this and following the whole media discussion with great interest.<p>I&#x27;m genuinely curious - what keeps you there? Do you still believe in the &quot;mission&quot;? Are you comfortable with what is going on, and basing your livelihood on programs that so many people are against?<p>Let&#x27;s have the &quot;other side&quot; the story. If you&#x27;ve got a case to make, I&#x27;m sure we&#x27;d all love to hear it.<p>Feel free to register a throwaway account and discuss.
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phaus
Many people (not nearly all) on HN seem to live in some sort of bubble, where
all they have to do to find another job is open up their email and carefully
select the best option out of dozens of recruiting emails from the nation's
largest companies.

Finding a job isn't easy for everyone. One thing that often accompanies
technical ability is a distinct lack of social skills. Other people just suck
at writing resumes and no matter how many peers and professionals review their
resumes, they just don't seem to work. Some people excel in both areas yet
have disproportionate amounts of bad luck.

I spent close to a decade in the military in an industry closely related to
IT. I had also been playing around with computers for almost two decades. When
I got out of the military I lived close to DC, the largest market for
government contractors. I had a clearance, an outstanding performance record
and an abundance of relevant experience. I started working on my resume a year
from the time I was getting out of the military, and started applying for jobs
almost immediately. My problem wasn't that I failed during interviews, I just
simply couldn't get an interview to save my life. Throughout this entire time,
I kept having professionals and friends alike review my resume. I still
couldn't find a job in the one part of the world where it should be easy to
find a government job.

Eventually I moved to a new location, taking the first shitty job that was
offered to me, working for a government agency. That job eventually fell
through, but I now hold a position at a similar agency. Before I found the
job, I was days away from running out of the money that I had saved up while I
was still in the military. When I started at my second civilian position, I
was once again days away from running out of money. If I lost this job, I'd
probably be completely fucked. I have a wife and children, so I don't really
have the option to live on a friend's sofa eating ramen noodles every day, so
I have to work.

That's not to say I'm unhappy, I just find it laughable how often people act
like changing jobs is such a trivial affair on HN.

As far as the moral implications go, I believe in the underlying mission of my
organization (which is not the NSA). I don't always believe in the higher-
level policies or the programs that they implement to achieve those goals, but
I feel that we should strive to change those things through the political
process, even though its broken.

Hell, it's not like anyone should be surprised at everything that got leaked,
I've been reading in the news for over a year that the NSA has been building
one of the world's largest data centers in Utah. The suspected purpose has
always been claimed to be the warehousing of American communications, yet
suddenly everyone decides to pay attention.

It's also important to note that there is a distinct difference between
responsible disclosure and delivering sensitive information to
Assange/China/Russia/etc.

~~~
serf
The idea of considering your job trivial is a benefit, and computer
development has the succinct ability to share efforts amongst a huge area of
disciplines, and thus it is that a hackers career is largely 'hot-swappable'
around the world.

I'm the son of a man who stayed at an engineering job for 25 years. This is
his largest regret, as it pigeon-holed him into the mentality that he was
incapable of applying his vast talents elsewhere in the engineering field. As
such, the company that he pledged allegiance to made every effort to keep his
pay and benefits below the industry standard, and this was made possible by
the environment he hired himself into initially.

Computer development is one of the few jobs that you can seriously apply
yourself at no matter where you are in the world. Why not take advantage of
that fact?

Responsibilities are another problem. It's a personal issue if you've decided
to burden yourself financially with children, a mate, and things that are
generally seen as the normal routine of adulthood, but that, like I said, is a
personal issue that must be dealt with on a person to person basis.

As for those with technical ability being more likely to also have social
problems -- how is limiting the exposure to interviews and social interactions
exactly going to help improve the individual we're talking about? It's
important to be flexible. To defend a position by saying that person X is
deficient too much in this way to have the means to get job Y so he must do
job Z is a recipe for disaster. Social interactions are practiced, and the
assertion that we should dissuade those that lack in experience from practice
is wrong, in my opinion.

Of course , there are legitimate roadblocks in social psychology that could
prevent them from landing a job with no fault of the person, but if they got
that initial job it means someone saw something in them that they related to
value, and if that happens once it can happen again for them. No reason to
think that anyone, ever, is stuck.

~~~
phaus
>As for those with technical ability being more likely to also have social
problems -- how is limiting the exposure to interviews and social interactions
exactly going to help improve the individual we're talking about? It's
important to be flexible. To defend a position by saying that person X is
deficient too much in this way to have the means to get job Y so he must do
job Z is a recipe for disaster. Social interactions are practiced, and the
assertion that we should dissuade those that lack in experience from practice
is wrong, in my opinion.

I never suggested not trying or giving up. I was simply relating that for such
people its often extremely difficult to find a job. The fact that I keep
trying is the only reason I'm not living in my car right now.

------
throwaway918273
I don't work for the NSA, but I've worked at a contractor for several research
oriented things they've been involved in (unofficially - the money comes
through a non-DoD part of the government). Because what I worked on was geared
towards research in language technology and related fields, my view might be a
bit skewed, but here's my impression.

There's a fair number of people who do seem to believe that they're working to
help secure the country. Many seem to stay where they are because they get
paid well and work on what they're interested in (many PhDs who joined out of
grad school or shortly thereafter.

One thing I find interesting about all of this NSA spying stuff is how it
relates to the pervasive concern I've seen on the part of people working in
intelligence about potentially using data containing personally identifying
information, particularly of US persons. I do wonder if the scale, scope, and
invasiveness of the spying as reported is actually that great.

~~~
mjn
> get paid well and work on what they're interested in

This is a common reason in pure math and theoretical computer science. There
are not a whole lot of places that will give you a good job to do basic
research. Tenured professor is another one, but hard to come by, and has a
different set of tradeoffs.

If you do certain kinds of applied research (e.g. machine translation) you can
do it at Google, but Google is not tripping over itself to hire number
theorists to do actual number-theory work (maybe they would hire a number
theorist, but to do something else).

~~~
throwaway918273
The people I dealt with we're all in the language technology field. They
tended to be a bit on the older side, so maybe they wound up there before
there were the kinds of research opportunities you get in industry these days.

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eksith
If I may step into their shoes...

Simple answer would be, "to pay the bills". I'm sure the vast number of people
working for government agencies (engaged in espionage or not) are simply there
to stay fed, clothed and sheltered. The NSA, CIA, FBI etc... are all vast
megaliths with intricate internal structures, bureaucracies and buttload of
paperwork (digital and dead tree) that needs processing by humans.

Humans that need jobs. That's it. They may feel some sense of patriotism in
what they do, but I think most of them are just doing a job.

It's the tobacco farmer syndrome.

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bifrost
Having read (only) a few books on the history of the american intelligence
community, I suspect most people who work there believe in the work that they
do. While domestic spying is obviously a black mark in the history, I suspect
that the good work thats been done there is fairly substantial. We can
actually thank the NSA for some security technologies that are used regularly
(and are open source).

Also consider that the president OKed this happening and the public isn't
yelling for revolution nor impeachment.

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codeonfire
It will be an amazing day for the internet if an active NSA employee or
contractor risks their career to post here. A lot of the people working in
these roles love the thrill of being a part of the inside and also love the
idea that they are trampling people's rights because they are part of 'true
America.' They are put into much better living standards than almost everyone.
These living standards can be easily taken away.

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thesmileyone
Honestly if I worked for the NSA, and lets assume that the NSA was behind
Stuxnet etc, and I was involved; I would be very proud of my work, how many
people can genuinely say that they created a computer program that directly
slowed the nuclear program of another nation state?

Also to be fair, you never hear about the good, only the bad. How many
domestic terror cells has the NSA stopped by spying on its people? Who
knows... because these facts don't get disclosed. I think having time to think
about the revelations recently that the phrase "you have to be cruel to be
kind". What if the NSA did not spy on people in its own country, and then
America was nuked from the inside... they would be held accountable along with
many other alphabet soup organisations for not doing their jobs properly.

------
e3pi
Blinders: military personnel can't read The Guardian, gagged, `Need to Know'
sequestered. Why risk being a Chatty Kathy on HN when, this week, we read a
General is being investigated for opening his big fat mouth. At Fort Meade,
`Hackers' are criminals. I imagine any NSA or its contractors reading this are
tasked to identify the outliers.

