10 ms·

New Campaign to Help Surveillance Agents Quit NSA or GCHQ

176 points by jobu 11y ago

SapphireSun 11y ago
I wonder if this has the potential to influence mass surveillance or will just accelerate evaporative cooling of the internal dynamics of the agencies. Cults become more extreme when their moderate members leave....
- aembleton 11y ago
  Agreed. We should have a campaign to get more rational people to join the intelligence agencies.
  - happyscrappy 11y ago
    Don't know why you are being downvoted. Spy agencies going away is a fantasy that brings into question the sanity of the believer. Better to have moral people there.
    - bcoates 11y ago
      They don't need to go away, they can just be neutered. There were two massive cutbacks in spy agencies in the last 50 years, having a third is not a fantasy. "I can make this organization by and for evil people marginally better by joining it and being less evil" isn't exactly a new idea either but hasn't aged well.
      - happyscrappy 11y ago
        The general mindset of comments on articles like these is they should not be spying on anyone and I said go away not a mere cutback.
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    As Drake explains in the linked video, just asking questions about what was going on - nevermind actual accusations - was enough to be excluded. We see similar behavior in police departments, where people have tried to join to add to the number of "good cops". Unfortunately, when this type of groupthink becomes so entrenched, anything resembling a contradictory idea has to be crushed, removed, or ignored immediately. It is a basic fight-or-flight response, because nobody wants to admit they've been doing the wrong thing for years. The solution is similar, and ideas like intelexit will help. Instead of wasting energy trying to push against groupthink, help people leave where they can form so they can form a different origination. For example, it would be nice if we had an actual agency focused on defense and the hard problem of securing computers that had even a tiny fraction of the NSA's budget.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- cryoshon 11y ago
  That's true, but the more moderates that leave, the more chances we have at a Snowden 2.0 who is going to throw the family jewels to the internet on his way out the door. Snowden is still an outlier in people's minds-- they don't know about Binney or Drake. More people from the inside joining these voices would really help.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    To be fair, it doesn't seem like many HN people know much about Binney and Drake either. Both supported another elaborate system of dragnet surveillance ("ThinThread"), which apparently attempted to use cryptography to mitigate privacy concerns. Both left the agency after ThinThread was jettisoned in favor of "Trailblazer", which had the virtue of being a darling of government contractors. I doubt many of us would have been happy with a full-scale deployment of ThinThread either.
    - jonlucc 11y ago
      According to them, ThinThread had the added benefit of completely disregarding domestic communications. Only after the agency gutted the protections did Binney and Drake come out.
      - tptacek 11y ago
        That is not how I understand ThinThread. Rather, ThinThread does bulk collection, and then applies "crypto" to the problem of keeping the wrong people from seeing domestic communications. The premise of ThinThread is, like other NSA programs, that NSA gets carte blanche access to the AT&T and Verizon firehose.
res0nat0r 11y ago
>SUPPORT GROUPS HELP cult and gang members break free of their former lives. Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous help addicts overcome their dependencies. And now one group of privacy campaigners wants to offer its target audience an escape route for what it sees as a equally insidious trap: Their jobs working for intelligence agencies like the NSA. I doubt most people working in this field think they need some kind of AA support group because they are brainwashed and need an escape plan. These people are perfectly sane, reasonable and content with what they are doing. I don't see how hard that is to understand, that some folks might hold a different worldview about surveillance than you do, and that in fact they are not idiots.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  Need of a support group or working for the surveillance apparatus does not imply idiocy, no more than you just implied being addicted to a substance implies the same. If someone is perfectly content with what they're doing, then this is not for them. Simple stuff. But it's a near certainty there are people in there who are not content with what they're doing, who think it's varying degrees of wrong but keep doing it anyways because job, family, patriotism, whatever. I would like to see our society stigmatize these kinds of jobs the same way an alcoholic is, FWIW. As in, if you're getting hired somewhere, having intelligence connections on your resumé is grounds for having it thrown in the trash. You need not be a moustache-twirling Saturday morning cartoon villain to be complicit in perpetrating a great wrong. And as far as brainwashing goes, you get wonderful things like this[1] being circulated in internal newsletters. It's bald-faced, pro surveillance propaganda designed to get those who it's intended for to stop thinking so hard about it. [1]: https://edwardsnowden.com/2015/08/25/the-sigint-philosopher-is-back-with-a-new-face/ https://edwardsnowden.com/2015/08/25/the-sigint-philosopher-...
  - pdabbadabba 11y ago
    > Need of a support group or working for the surveillance apparatus does not imply idiocy, no more than you just implied being addicted to a substance implies the same. This is not a fair reading of GP's comment. The reason he said that people working for the NSA are not idiots is because people tend to imply that the only reason they continue working at the NSA is that they are idiots. GP was pointing out that there are other possible reasons, including that they are of the considered opinion that what they are doing is not wrong. For addictive substances there is an obvious alternative reason why people might need a support group to help quit: addiction! But I don't think anyone argues that NSA employees are addicted to snooping, so one is compelled to search for an alternative explanation.
marricks 11y ago
I just donated to them, and you should too: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/intelexit-the-backdoor-to-democracy#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/intelexit-the-backdoor-to... This has to be one of the best way to spur change within the intelligence gathering community. Hit them where it hurts, their people power.
- strictnein 11y ago
  I didn't donate, and neither should you. See how weird that sounds?
- TearsInTheRain 11y ago
  sound like an easy way to get put on a list...
  - forgotpasswd3x 11y ago
    You're probably already on the list.
throwawaymaroon 11y ago
There's no point pretending tech as a whole is somehow holier than government here. If only there were a similar plan for Google or Facebook.
cryoshon 11y ago
This is great, I highly support this effort as well as any efforts to socially/emotionally/professionally/economically disrupt, shun, or humiliate people who participate in or are complicit with mass surveillance against the public. The sooner we start making the people who participate in mass surveillance filled with guilt or otherwise miserable, the sooner they will stop spying on us. Campaigns like this have the potential to send a strong message that oppressors and their proxies are not welcome in our society.
devit 11y ago
It might be much more effective to ask them to only take part in or start defense-related activities at NSA or GCHQ. Even if they only work at protecting the US and UK from foreign agencies, that will still result in mostly securing the whole world since hardware and software is used worldwide. It's also more realistic since it doesn't involve destruction of those intelligence agencies but merely retasking over time.
- caskance 11y ago
  The best defense is a good offense. Why secure the whole world when you could just secure yourself and your allies, and keep everyone else full of holes you already know about?
atria 11y ago
Do the agents get assigned Soviet handler on the first visit, or do you have to attend a few meetings first?
- Uhhrrr 11y ago
  It's a good question. Why isn't this org targeting other intelligence agencies as well, particularly the Chinese and Russians?
- cryoshon 11y ago
  You're jesting, but this is actually a very legitimate concern. It's not enough to poach people away from the intelligence agencies, they have to land somewhere that they won't continue doing the exact same thing for someone on the other side. Remember how much people howled about Snowden being an FSB mole? It wasn't entirely groundless. A public exit to a known competitor doesn't look good.
- solotronics 11y ago
  Either this or its a way for these orgs to identify individuals who may be at risk. Thats what I would do if I was NSA.
- e12e 11y ago
  Oh, I don't know. Now that Google et c are encrypting traffic, encouraging a few loyal people to apply in private companies sounds like just what NSA needs..
nitrogen 11y ago
In general this seems like a great idea (based solely on the headline). I wonder, though, could this be used as a system for placing assets in useful positions at targeted companies? In other words, even if someone wants out, will they actually be let out?
afarrell 11y ago
What prevents someone from leaving the NSA or GCHQ and going to work in private industry in a capacity that would give them access to user data. If nothing, what prevents them from staying on agency payroll?
- yeukhon 11y ago
  Isn't that the same question as what can these agents do with their resume? They shouldn't mention about being an agent, should they? Would you hire them?
- yeukhon 11y ago
  Isn't that the same question as what can these agents do with their resume? They shouldn't mention about being an agent, should they? Would you hire them? We are always about equal opportunity employment right?
flycaliguy 11y ago
Quit the NSA and skip the middle man by working directly for any number of the corporate benefactors of economic spying! Ideally bring your specific industry sleuthing expertise, right down to an intimate knowledge of office politics. Continuing with my unserious tone... if I was a single and overworked at the NSA I'd consider digging into the lives of future office co-workers and finding myself a wife after flipping through her 23andMe, any medical records, personality testing performed by a professional, dental hygiene, potential in-law difficulties and I guess bank account. That's how an intelligence worker makes an effective exit.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- lern_too_spel 11y ago
  Obtaining those records would be just as illegal if you worked for the NSA as it would be if you worked for McDonald's.
  - caskance 11y ago
    But probably the McDonald's employee would have a lot more difficulty committing this crime.
  - walshemj 11y ago
    And you'd get busted - you don't think the CIA NSA don't have internal controls.
    - beeboop 11y ago
      Didn't Snowden get his documents without leaving a trail? There are several other articles saying their internal controls are/were very poor.
      - walshemj 11y ago
        I suspect they are stricter now - and I though Snowden socially engineered his way around some of the bariers. And I suspect actual access to the live data might be more locked down. Snowden seems to have harvested a load of docs about the process but not that data.
cushychicken 11y ago
One thing that springs to mind is that, while being very technical in nature, NSA work is even more secretive. I would imagine that more than a few of these folks have a hard time leaving based on the fact that many of them can't disclose their previous experience, prima facie. Is that a problem? Is it surmountable? Sorry to muse in the comments, but that seems like it might be a more real problem here. The other possibility is, as res0nat0r mentioned, that the employees there just don't share the viewpoint that their work is immoral.
- nmrm2 11y ago
  I've heard first hand from academics who have this problem. It's less of a problem if a) you're doing something more applied/normal, like software development, where you can just have a conversation or work some problems to demonstrate ability; or b) you're happy with working for gov't contractors (and don't want to e.g. return to academia).
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    > It's less of a problem if ... you're doing something more applied/normal, like software development, where you can just have a conversation or work some problems to demonstrate ability My experience trying to get a job with highly-classified non-intel software experience (distributed real-time, to boot) is that this is still extremely difficult. The conversation couldn't include anything really interesting. Hell, my resume couldn't contain anything really interesting so I rarely got the conversation in the first place. I have been gone for 3.5 years, but I still have that problem because the work I did then is what I want to do, and the work I'm doing now (Java-based NLP) was the escape. I can only given detailed information about what I do now, though, which skews everyone into thinking I'm a Java or ML developer. :/
    - nmrm2 11y ago
      Ah, I stand corrected. Sorry to hear that :-( This is one concrete way that something like Intelexit could actually make a difference -- find companies who are willing to hire people with intel backgrounds.
mindslight 11y ago
Is there a plan to drive the van out to Silicon Valley? It seems like surveillance workers there are more conflicted.
Zenst 11y ago
So why just those two agencies, many countries have such agencies for spying. So to single out those two based upon nothing that the others have not done and do albeit even less open about or leaked about; Seems somewhat curious to me. As it does somewhat presume other spy agencies are not listening in to private conversations and even the hacking=groups leaks showed that is not so in equal ways than Snowden leaks. Hence my curiosity and I'll admit, questioning the motivation of this.
ck2 11y ago
Oh yeah, give them a website to visit, the NSA most certainly won't know what websites their employees visit. (99% of dns queries aren't encrypted at all)
- theoh 11y ago
  You can use an anonymous internet access point, say fo example in a library. The target audience are "spies", I'm sure they can figure it out.
phkahler 11y ago
Wouldn't this have the effect of draining dissent from those agencies? Isnt objecting from within better than quitting, even if they don't seem to respond?
etjossem 11y ago
I don't know if I want the most ethical, privacy-conscious employees of the NSA to be encouraged to leave.
pjc50 11y ago
I know a number of people who used to work for UK secret organizations and quit. Invariably they cited pay and mismanagement, along with the social difficulty of not being able to talk about your work and the rubbishness of living in Cheltenham. They recruit from the civil service entry stream, and of course Cambridge since the days of Turing and Philby. If you want to disrupt the organisation through its staff, you should run a counter-recruitment operation among students. They have enough difficulty persuading mathematicians to come work for a quarter of the pay they'd otherwise get in the city.
zabuni 11y ago
It is quite strange that a Berlin based group would be targeting the NSA and GCHQ, and have absolutely no mention of the BND. It might be easier for Germans to convince other Germans to leave.
- pluma 11y ago
  The BND is a joke. The NSA and GCHQ do most of the actual spying and pass it on to the BND. It's also a great way to get data you can't easily collect yourself for legal reasons (e.g. surveillance of German citizens in Germany).
rndn 11y ago
I'm not sure whether evaporative cooling [1] could be a result of that, i.e. that if the sane quit, you are left with the insane. If that's the case, such a campaign would make things worse. [1]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beliefs/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...
owenversteeg 11y ago
Firstly: I'm 100% in favor of people leaving the NSA Snowden-style. I don't think any of the people involved in this campaign have anywhere near the resources required to actually help anyone leave the intelligence community. The lengths Snowden went to and the things he had to do to remain safe from the US government were insane, and anyone leaving now will have ten times as much to escape from, given how much the US government is presumably watching for any Snowden copiers. If anyone is actually considering exiting the intelligence community, I truly hope they don't look at a website set up by German hobbyists. Even if someone was simply planning a normal exit, sending a premade resignation letter (!) based off three different checkboxes (really?) is simply ridiculous. If anyone working there is stupid enough to send a pre-formed resignation letter that would burn bridges with most all of their colleagues, by all means do so, but I really doubt a single person in the intelligence community will use this site seriously. Finally - imagine if someone came up to you and said "working at your job is comparable to being an alcoholic or a crack addict, break free and come with me" - I'd literally laugh in their faces. This site is the opposite of productive.
walshemj 11y ago
Ah so a way for BAE system BT, Halliburton and Booz Ma kidney to recruit DV/TS cleared staff :-) This actually Happened when unions where banned at GCHQ - they lost a huge proportion of staff to the private sector.

176 points by jobu 11y ago

I wonder if this has the potential to influence mass surveillance or will just accelerate evaporative cooling of the internal dynamics of the agencies. Cults become more extreme when their moderate members leave....

aembleton 11y ago
Agreed. We should have a campaign to get more rational people to join the intelligence agencies.
- happyscrappy 11y ago
  Don't know why you are being downvoted. Spy agencies going away is a fantasy that brings into question the sanity of the believer. Better to have moral people there.
  - bcoates 11y ago
    They don't need to go away, they can just be neutered. There were two massive cutbacks in spy agencies in the last 50 years, having a third is not a fantasy. "I can make this organization by and for evil people marginally better by joining it and being less evil" isn't exactly a new idea either but hasn't aged well.
    - happyscrappy 11y ago
      The general mindset of comments on articles like these is they should not be spying on anyone and I said go away not a mere cutback.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  As Drake explains in the linked video, just asking questions about what was going on - nevermind actual accusations - was enough to be excluded. We see similar behavior in police departments, where people have tried to join to add to the number of "good cops". Unfortunately, when this type of groupthink becomes so entrenched, anything resembling a contradictory idea has to be crushed, removed, or ignored immediately. It is a basic fight-or-flight response, because nobody wants to admit they've been doing the wrong thing for years. The solution is similar, and ideas like intelexit will help. Instead of wasting energy trying to push against groupthink, help people leave where they can form so they can form a different origination. For example, it would be nice if we had an actual agency focused on defense and the hard problem of securing computers that had even a tiny fraction of the NSA's budget.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
cryoshon 11y ago
That's true, but the more moderates that leave, the more chances we have at a Snowden 2.0 who is going to throw the family jewels to the internet on his way out the door. Snowden is still an outlier in people's minds-- they don't know about Binney or Drake. More people from the inside joining these voices would really help.
- tptacek 11y ago
  To be fair, it doesn't seem like many HN people know much about Binney and Drake either. Both supported another elaborate system of dragnet surveillance ("ThinThread"), which apparently attempted to use cryptography to mitigate privacy concerns. Both left the agency after ThinThread was jettisoned in favor of "Trailblazer", which had the virtue of being a darling of government contractors. I doubt many of us would have been happy with a full-scale deployment of ThinThread either.
  - jonlucc 11y ago
    According to them, ThinThread had the added benefit of completely disregarding domestic communications. Only after the agency gutted the protections did Binney and Drake come out.
    - tptacek 11y ago
      That is not how I understand ThinThread. Rather, ThinThread does bulk collection, and then applies "crypto" to the problem of keeping the wrong people from seeing domestic communications. The premise of ThinThread is, like other NSA programs, that NSA gets carte blanche access to the AT&T and Verizon firehose.

res0nat0r 11y ago

>SUPPORT GROUPS HELP cult and gang members break free of their former lives. Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous help addicts overcome their dependencies. And now one group of privacy campaigners wants to offer its target audience an escape route for what it sees as a equally insidious trap: Their jobs working for intelligence agencies like the NSA. I doubt most people working in this field think they need some kind of AA support group because they are brainwashed and need an escape plan. These people are perfectly sane, reasonable and content with what they are doing. I don't see how hard that is to understand, that some folks might hold a different worldview about surveillance than you do, and that in fact they are not idiots.

Karunamon 11y ago
Need of a support group or working for the surveillance apparatus does not imply idiocy, no more than you just implied being addicted to a substance implies the same. If someone is perfectly content with what they're doing, then this is not for them. Simple stuff. But it's a near certainty there are people in there who are not content with what they're doing, who think it's varying degrees of wrong but keep doing it anyways because job, family, patriotism, whatever. I would like to see our society stigmatize these kinds of jobs the same way an alcoholic is, FWIW. As in, if you're getting hired somewhere, having intelligence connections on your resumé is grounds for having it thrown in the trash. You need not be a moustache-twirling Saturday morning cartoon villain to be complicit in perpetrating a great wrong. And as far as brainwashing goes, you get wonderful things like this[1] being circulated in internal newsletters. It's bald-faced, pro surveillance propaganda designed to get those who it's intended for to stop thinking so hard about it. [1]: https://edwardsnowden.com/2015/08/25/the-sigint-philosopher-is-back-with-a-new-face/ https://edwardsnowden.com/2015/08/25/the-sigint-philosopher-...
- pdabbadabba 11y ago
  > Need of a support group or working for the surveillance apparatus does not imply idiocy, no more than you just implied being addicted to a substance implies the same. This is not a fair reading of GP's comment. The reason he said that people working for the NSA are not idiots is because people tend to imply that the only reason they continue working at the NSA is that they are idiots. GP was pointing out that there are other possible reasons, including that they are of the considered opinion that what they are doing is not wrong. For addictive substances there is an obvious alternative reason why people might need a support group to help quit: addiction! But I don't think anyone argues that NSA employees are addicted to snooping, so one is compelled to search for an alternative explanation.

marricks 11y ago

I just donated to them, and you should too: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/intelexit-the-backdoor-to-democracy#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/intelexit-the-backdoor-to... This has to be one of the best way to spur change within the intelligence gathering community. Hit them where it hurts, their people power.

strictnein 11y ago
I didn't donate, and neither should you. See how weird that sounds?
TearsInTheRain 11y ago
sound like an easy way to get put on a list...
- forgotpasswd3x 11y ago
  You're probably already on the list.

throwawaymaroon 11y ago

There's no point pretending tech as a whole is somehow holier than government here. If only there were a similar plan for Google or Facebook.

cryoshon 11y ago

This is great, I highly support this effort as well as any efforts to socially/emotionally/professionally/economically disrupt, shun, or humiliate people who participate in or are complicit with mass surveillance against the public. The sooner we start making the people who participate in mass surveillance filled with guilt or otherwise miserable, the sooner they will stop spying on us. Campaigns like this have the potential to send a strong message that oppressors and their proxies are not welcome in our society.

devit 11y ago

It might be much more effective to ask them to only take part in or start defense-related activities at NSA or GCHQ. Even if they only work at protecting the US and UK from foreign agencies, that will still result in mostly securing the whole world since hardware and software is used worldwide. It's also more realistic since it doesn't involve destruction of those intelligence agencies but merely retasking over time.

caskance 11y ago
The best defense is a good offense. Why secure the whole world when you could just secure yourself and your allies, and keep everyone else full of holes you already know about?

atria 11y ago

Do the agents get assigned Soviet handler on the first visit, or do you have to attend a few meetings first?

Uhhrrr 11y ago
It's a good question. Why isn't this org targeting other intelligence agencies as well, particularly the Chinese and Russians?
cryoshon 11y ago
You're jesting, but this is actually a very legitimate concern. It's not enough to poach people away from the intelligence agencies, they have to land somewhere that they won't continue doing the exact same thing for someone on the other side. Remember how much people howled about Snowden being an FSB mole? It wasn't entirely groundless. A public exit to a known competitor doesn't look good.
solotronics 11y ago
Either this or its a way for these orgs to identify individuals who may be at risk. Thats what I would do if I was NSA.
e12e 11y ago
Oh, I don't know. Now that Google et c are encrypting traffic, encouraging a few loyal people to apply in private companies sounds like just what NSA needs..

nitrogen 11y ago

In general this seems like a great idea (based solely on the headline). I wonder, though, could this be used as a system for placing assets in useful positions at targeted companies? In other words, even if someone wants out, will they actually be let out?

afarrell 11y ago

What prevents someone from leaving the NSA or GCHQ and going to work in private industry in a capacity that would give them access to user data. If nothing, what prevents them from staying on agency payroll?

yeukhon 11y ago
Isn't that the same question as what can these agents do with their resume? They shouldn't mention about being an agent, should they? Would you hire them?
yeukhon 11y ago
Isn't that the same question as what can these agents do with their resume? They shouldn't mention about being an agent, should they? Would you hire them? We are always about equal opportunity employment right?

flycaliguy 11y ago

Quit the NSA and skip the middle man by working directly for any number of the corporate benefactors of economic spying! Ideally bring your specific industry sleuthing expertise, right down to an intimate knowledge of office politics. Continuing with my unserious tone... if I was a single and overworked at the NSA I'd consider digging into the lives of future office co-workers and finding myself a wife after flipping through her 23andMe, any medical records, personality testing performed by a professional, dental hygiene, potential in-law difficulties and I guess bank account. That's how an intelligence worker makes an effective exit.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
lern_too_spel 11y ago
Obtaining those records would be just as illegal if you worked for the NSA as it would be if you worked for McDonald's.
- caskance 11y ago
  But probably the McDonald's employee would have a lot more difficulty committing this crime.
- walshemj 11y ago
  And you'd get busted - you don't think the CIA NSA don't have internal controls.
  - beeboop 11y ago
    Didn't Snowden get his documents without leaving a trail? There are several other articles saying their internal controls are/were very poor.
    - walshemj 11y ago
      I suspect they are stricter now - and I though Snowden socially engineered his way around some of the bariers. And I suspect actual access to the live data might be more locked down. Snowden seems to have harvested a load of docs about the process but not that data.

cushychicken 11y ago

One thing that springs to mind is that, while being very technical in nature, NSA work is even more secretive. I would imagine that more than a few of these folks have a hard time leaving based on the fact that many of them can't disclose their previous experience, prima facie. Is that a problem? Is it surmountable? Sorry to muse in the comments, but that seems like it might be a more real problem here. The other possibility is, as res0nat0r mentioned, that the employees there just don't share the viewpoint that their work is immoral.

nmrm2 11y ago
I've heard first hand from academics who have this problem. It's less of a problem if a) you're doing something more applied/normal, like software development, where you can just have a conversation or work some problems to demonstrate ability; or b) you're happy with working for gov't contractors (and don't want to e.g. return to academia).
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > It's less of a problem if ... you're doing something more applied/normal, like software development, where you can just have a conversation or work some problems to demonstrate ability My experience trying to get a job with highly-classified non-intel software experience (distributed real-time, to boot) is that this is still extremely difficult. The conversation couldn't include anything really interesting. Hell, my resume couldn't contain anything really interesting so I rarely got the conversation in the first place. I have been gone for 3.5 years, but I still have that problem because the work I did then is what I want to do, and the work I'm doing now (Java-based NLP) was the escape. I can only given detailed information about what I do now, though, which skews everyone into thinking I'm a Java or ML developer. :/
  - nmrm2 11y ago
    Ah, I stand corrected. Sorry to hear that :-( This is one concrete way that something like Intelexit could actually make a difference -- find companies who are willing to hire people with intel backgrounds.

mindslight 11y ago

Is there a plan to drive the van out to Silicon Valley? It seems like surveillance workers there are more conflicted.

Zenst 11y ago

So why just those two agencies, many countries have such agencies for spying. So to single out those two based upon nothing that the others have not done and do albeit even less open about or leaked about; Seems somewhat curious to me. As it does somewhat presume other spy agencies are not listening in to private conversations and even the hacking=groups leaks showed that is not so in equal ways than Snowden leaks. Hence my curiosity and I'll admit, questioning the motivation of this.

ck2 11y ago

Oh yeah, give them a website to visit, the NSA most certainly won't know what websites their employees visit. (99% of dns queries aren't encrypted at all)

theoh 11y ago
You can use an anonymous internet access point, say fo example in a library. The target audience are "spies", I'm sure they can figure it out.

phkahler 11y ago

Wouldn't this have the effect of draining dissent from those agencies? Isnt objecting from within better than quitting, even if they don't seem to respond?

etjossem 11y ago

I don't know if I want the most ethical, privacy-conscious employees of the NSA to be encouraged to leave.

pjc50 11y ago

I know a number of people who used to work for UK secret organizations and quit. Invariably they cited pay and mismanagement, along with the social difficulty of not being able to talk about your work and the rubbishness of living in Cheltenham. They recruit from the civil service entry stream, and of course Cambridge since the days of Turing and Philby. If you want to disrupt the organisation through its staff, you should run a counter-recruitment operation among students. They have enough difficulty persuading mathematicians to come work for a quarter of the pay they'd otherwise get in the city.

zabuni 11y ago

It is quite strange that a Berlin based group would be targeting the NSA and GCHQ, and have absolutely no mention of the BND. It might be easier for Germans to convince other Germans to leave.

pluma 11y ago
The BND is a joke. The NSA and GCHQ do most of the actual spying and pass it on to the BND. It's also a great way to get data you can't easily collect yourself for legal reasons (e.g. surveillance of German citizens in Germany).

rndn 11y ago

I'm not sure whether evaporative cooling [1] could be a result of that, i.e. that if the sane quit, you are left with the insane. If that's the case, such a campaign would make things worse. [1]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beliefs/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...

owenversteeg 11y ago

Firstly: I'm 100% in favor of people leaving the NSA Snowden-style. I don't think any of the people involved in this campaign have anywhere near the resources required to actually help anyone leave the intelligence community. The lengths Snowden went to and the things he had to do to remain safe from the US government were insane, and anyone leaving now will have ten times as much to escape from, given how much the US government is presumably watching for any Snowden copiers. If anyone is actually considering exiting the intelligence community, I truly hope they don't look at a website set up by German hobbyists. Even if someone was simply planning a normal exit, sending a premade resignation letter (!) based off three different checkboxes (really?) is simply ridiculous. If anyone working there is stupid enough to send a pre-formed resignation letter that would burn bridges with most all of their colleagues, by all means do so, but I really doubt a single person in the intelligence community will use this site seriously. Finally - imagine if someone came up to you and said "working at your job is comparable to being an alcoholic or a crack addict, break free and come with me" - I'd literally laugh in their faces. This site is the opposite of productive.

walshemj 11y ago

Ah so a way for BAE system BT, Halliburton and Booz Ma kidney to recruit DV/TS cleared staff :-) This actually Happened when unions where banned at GCHQ - they lost a huge proportion of staff to the private sector.