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You'd have to be ok with doing a lot of f-ed up shit working for the NSA. Enough shit to cause someone like Snowden to Exile himself as a whistleblower. There

You'd have to be ok with doing a lot of f-ed up shit working for the NSA. Enough shit to cause someone like Snowden to Exile himself as a whistleblower. There is no-doubt in my mind a lot of those programs are still running and new ones have been initiated. Although The government protects whistleblowers, the government does not really protect whistleblowers that whistleblow government shit.

lokar 4y ago
Why go to the NSA when you can do just as much evil (for the same people) at palantir for twice the pay?
- kilgnad 4y ago
  Because palantir can lay you off. Also the scope of the NSA is much more broad and you'll also have the possibility to work on stuff that could be closer to ops stuff as well. For example I don't think palantir works on shit like stuxnet or deploying stuxnet. Last I read about palantir it was some boring ass search graph relationship thing.
  - gizmo686 4y ago
    > For example I don't think palantir works on shit like stuxnet or deploying stuxnet. You mean they don't help prevent a hostile state from developing nuclear weapons? All withou causing anything approaching the collateral damage (and risk of open war) that a traditional attack on infrastructure would cause? Setting aside the fact that the NSA work sounds a lot more interesting from a technical perspective [0], a lot of people would find the work far more fulfilling than convincing people to buy widgets they don't need. [0] Especially considering that the day to day work of working for a large government organization is far more boring, even without the extra headache that comes with working with classified materials.
    - filoleg 4y ago
      > You mean they don't help prevent a hostile state from developing nuclear weapons? All withou causing anything approaching the collateral damage (and risk of open war) that a traditional attack on infrastructure would cause? I think the parent comment fully agrees with you on this. Their whole reply is just saying that despite paying more, Palantir isn't nearly as layoff-proof as NSA, and you don't get to work on such a wide range of "cool" things (such as stuxnet) at Palantir either.
  - newsclues 4y ago
    > For example I don't think palantir works on shit like stuxnet or deploying stuxnet. Stuxnet was developed in a way that Palantir or other people outside the ultra secrete government cyber weapons labs, could have been contracted to work on parts of it, government may have merely assembled parts of code sourced from private industry to create the malware.
    - samdcbu 4y ago
      The NSA’s TAO (tailored access operations), the group that wrote Stuxnet and is known to the cybersecurity community as The Equation Group, is not known to work with outside contractors to develop malware. They’re more likely to collaborate with GCHQ and Israel’s Unit 8200, but not contractors. The NSA does some of the most advanced malware and vulnerability research internally, no contractor has the capabilities they do internally. They might buy some premade malware from contractors, but for a highly targeted piece of malware like Stuxnet it would be developed internally.
      - _2uwr 4y ago
        >no contractor has the capabilities they do internally. Thats where you are wrong! Capitalism enables the greatest number of (self/mon(k)ey token) motivated varieties, beit innovations, why do you think ESA just put out a request for idea's on the space suit to be used on the moon? The creativity of unrestricted thinking especially from kids, is massively untapped, they are natural operating-in-plain-site Dimenthyltryptamine users for a start, unconditioned by university's, culture and life in general! Saying that though, working for govt in any form comes with its own risks. https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:NSA_GCHQ_and_the_Death_of_Gareth_Williams https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:NSA_GCHQ_and_the_Death_... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6585263/Damning-new-evidence-Dr-Kelly-DIDNT-commit-suicide.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6585263/Damning-new... https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Chelsea_Manning https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Chelsea_Manning https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Julian_Assange https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Julian_Assange Sometimes being in the public spotlight is the less dangerous path, which these NSA jobs are not. https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Bill_Clinton https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Bill_Clinton Accidents happen. Prison happens. Intelligence gathering comes in all shapes and sizes, but one thing is for certain, it was previously thought being on the right side of the law was a psychological advantage, its not any more, it could be extremely risky. This is the era of psychological warfare, and the best candidates are those who volunteer for their trauma as any Emergency Response (Police/Fire/Ambulance) person knows. Psychological trauma is a life long condition with no visible scars. How you survive working for the state largely depends on your own intelligence, but you can bet your bottom dollar you will be experimented in ways that science dictates that subjects are not too be made aware of any said experiment.
luckylion 4y ago
Have you looked at Google Ads lately and the detail of categories they let you target people by? They do essentially the same, so I'm not sure how much different it would be. It's possibly easier to rationalize that you're doing this "for the security of the nation" and not "for Google's profit" when you add a way to find out whether someone is a woman who's about to be vulnerable to a certain kind of advertisement because the last child is moving out soon.
- kilgnad 4y ago
  Well Google doesn't write shit like stuxnet. I don't know for sure but I'm pretty sure Google employees can't directly look at user details? For the NSA I'm sure you'll literally be able to look up personal details on anyone. NSA is waaay worse then Google. Or waaay cooler. Depends on your perspective.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Or it's ... just different. I mean, I'm pretty sure most people agree that Iran not having nukes is a good thing. I'm also pretty sure that far fewer people agree that Google should have a far-reaching profile on every citizen who isn't aggressively blocking ads/tracking. The government does shady stuff, but would you really have more trust in a corporation?
    - kilgnad 4y ago
      Not necessarily more trust for a corporation by virtue of the corporation not being government. I have less trust for the NSA and CIA because of past infractions. For example how the CIA was selling coke to the US to fund their programs. That's next level shit that not even a corpo will do.
      - luckylion 4y ago
        Corporations wouldn't get people hooked on drugs and misinform/bribe doctors to over-prescribe opioids to make a nice stack of dollars? I guess the motives are different, the CIA does their stuff to fund guerilla troops to overthrow uncooperative governments or battle the Soviets, the corporations do it so their owners can buy another 400ft yacht. I think it's still easier to rationalize working for the CIA than Purdue, and easier to work on mass-surveillance for the NSA than for Google. National security vs private yachts. I mean, I'd understand if you say you wouldn't work for the CIA or NSA because you don't believe in their approaches to things, but I doubt you'd say "... but I have no problem writing software to push more oxy into rural communities and kill a few tens of thousands citizens a year as long as my bonus comes through".
shadowgovt 4y ago
Snowden's exile has a lot more to do with Snowden than with the NSA. There are plenty of folks who think the NSA is actually doing meaningful defense work.
- n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
  “Meaningful defense work” is not orthogonal to violating the 4th amendment. I don’t think I’ve heard Snowden argue that the NSA’s work is not meaningful. He mainly objected because it was unconstitutional.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
[flagged]
- notinfuriated 4y ago
  > and now every computer literate person knows he's an idiot So if I don't "know" that he's an idiot, then I am computer illiterate. Great argument.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    Fair. I misspoke. Every computer literate person who looked at the documents Snowden leaked instead of just the batshit interpretation of the documents he gave to Greenwald knows he's an idiot.
    - notinfuriated 4y ago
      Fair correction. Your other linked comment describing why was helpful. Thank you.
- kilgnad 4y ago
  I don't think most people (programmers included) followed it in detail as closely as you. Care to elaborate on Snowden's misunderstanding or prism?
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34510696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34510696
  - samdcbu 4y ago
    During the first days of the Washington Post’s reporting on the Snowden documents, the outlet misreported the mechanism for how PRISM obtained it’s data. It was initially reported, seemingly based on Snowden’s misunderstanding of PRISM, that the NSA has a direct connection into the servers of Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. That wasn’t actually true, as the data for PRISM was obtained through Section 702 requests the FBI sent to tech companies which was a practice established in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
giantg2 4y ago
"Although The government protects whistleblowers, the government does not really protect whistleblowers that whistleblow government shit." Sort of true, but not exactly true. Thomas Drake was a whistleblower. Snowden might have started out as a whistleblower (without going through the proper process), but has released a lot of detailed information beyond what is necessary to be a whistleblower, which could even possiblt cause net harm. Edit: why disagree?
- kilgnad 4y ago
  I don't disagree. Not sure who is voting you down.
  - joxel 4y ago
    People who care about the rule of law and not having the most powerful bureaucracy in the history of the universe point their targets at our fellow citizens for basically no reason.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  If he hadn't released all the information proving that what he was saying was true, we'd be hearing about how he was just a disgruntled employee with personal issues who was making stuff up for the publicity so he could sell books, etc.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - nhchris 4y ago
      > sold out his country You mean his government.
      - Spooky23 4y ago
        No, I mean his country. Civil disobedience or w/e against a surveillance state culminating in fleeing to Moscow says all you need to know about Snowden’s commitment to freedom and opposition to surveillance.
gizmo686 4y ago
Shit like looking at the data that Big Tech has been collecting on American citizens? The NSA is incapable of building the type of mass surveillance infastructure we see today. That infrastructure is built and maintained by private tech companies. The NSA comes along repurposes that already collected data to their own ends. Further, the NSA's usage of said information has never been linked to any population wide mental health crises, unlike big tech. There is also a wide range of work the NSA does, and most people working there don't know much beyond their own need to know.
- soup10 4y ago
  >The NSA is incapable of building the type of mass surveillance infastructure we see today. That infrastructure is built and maintained by private tech companies. This is false, the snowden releases showed they have extensive infrastructure that aggregates data from many different sources.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Parent's point is that any NSA system falls far short (in comprehensiveness and freshness) of what Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple have (in addition to their analogs in other countries). At the end of the day, worldwide profit scales systems faster than even national security dollars.
    - soup10 4y ago
      And parent's point is wrong, because A) the NSA has broader legal powers to collect and use data, and B) the NSA's mission is literally signal intelligence. They aren't in the business of making phones or serving ads. Of course without inside knowledge of how companies are collecting and using data and what exactly the NSA is doing there's no way to know for sure. But the public revelations of what the NSA are doing go far beyond what we've heard tech companies are doing.
      - gizmo686 4y ago
        Yet it was private companies that managed to get almost everyone to carry around a microphone, video camera, accelerometer, gps device which they also use to store and transmit the majority of their personal conversations. Granted, they do not snoop on you to the maximum extent the hardware of these devices allow. But, take a look at [0]. Unless you are one of the few people who goes out of their way to limit tracking, do you think that the NSA would be able to get that detailed tracking of everyone's movements. And this is just the obvious part (which Google is nice enough to share with its users as a feature). Big tech companies have also built detailed models of most people's interests; which is simply not possible without the large amount of data that comes from people actually interacting with them. All of the NSA's dragnet surveillance is built on the back of private industry, and works because that private industry has convinced people to participate in it. [0] https://www.google.com/maps/timeline https://www.google.com/maps/timeline
ReptileMan 4y ago
>You'd have to be ok with doing a lot of f-ed up shit working for the NSA. If the paycheck is ok
- qualudeheart 4y ago
  Yeah. Same here. I need money for early retirement and I don’t care how many eggs have to be cracked to make that omelette.
newsclues 4y ago
Big Tech is just an extension of the government. Or maybe the government is an extension of Big Tech. But either way, it's the same thing.
neltnerb 4y ago
Seems nearly certain that they'll end up with employees that have a deeper understanding of how Twitter works and how it is vulnerable to attack than Twitter itself.
- factsarelolz 4y ago
  [dead]
sharkweek 4y ago
“Why shouldn’t I work for the NSA? chuckles It’s a tough one… but I’ll take a shot.” https://youtu.be/mJHvSp9AKYg https://youtu.be/mJHvSp9AKYg
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Didn't I see this guy hawking crypto a year ago?
anonuser123456 4y ago
[flagged]
jlarocco 4y ago
Seems like the type of people comfortable with secretly gobbling up other's private info would be right at home...

lokar 4y ago

Why go to the NSA when you can do just as much evil (for the same people) at palantir for twice the pay?

kilgnad 4y ago
Because palantir can lay you off. Also the scope of the NSA is much more broad and you'll also have the possibility to work on stuff that could be closer to ops stuff as well. For example I don't think palantir works on shit like stuxnet or deploying stuxnet. Last I read about palantir it was some boring ass search graph relationship thing.
- gizmo686 4y ago
  > For example I don't think palantir works on shit like stuxnet or deploying stuxnet. You mean they don't help prevent a hostile state from developing nuclear weapons? All withou causing anything approaching the collateral damage (and risk of open war) that a traditional attack on infrastructure would cause? Setting aside the fact that the NSA work sounds a lot more interesting from a technical perspective [0], a lot of people would find the work far more fulfilling than convincing people to buy widgets they don't need. [0] Especially considering that the day to day work of working for a large government organization is far more boring, even without the extra headache that comes with working with classified materials.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    > You mean they don't help prevent a hostile state from developing nuclear weapons? All withou causing anything approaching the collateral damage (and risk of open war) that a traditional attack on infrastructure would cause? I think the parent comment fully agrees with you on this. Their whole reply is just saying that despite paying more, Palantir isn't nearly as layoff-proof as NSA, and you don't get to work on such a wide range of "cool" things (such as stuxnet) at Palantir either.
- newsclues 4y ago
  > For example I don't think palantir works on shit like stuxnet or deploying stuxnet. Stuxnet was developed in a way that Palantir or other people outside the ultra secrete government cyber weapons labs, could have been contracted to work on parts of it, government may have merely assembled parts of code sourced from private industry to create the malware.
  - samdcbu 4y ago
    The NSA’s TAO (tailored access operations), the group that wrote Stuxnet and is known to the cybersecurity community as The Equation Group, is not known to work with outside contractors to develop malware. They’re more likely to collaborate with GCHQ and Israel’s Unit 8200, but not contractors. The NSA does some of the most advanced malware and vulnerability research internally, no contractor has the capabilities they do internally. They might buy some premade malware from contractors, but for a highly targeted piece of malware like Stuxnet it would be developed internally.
    - _2uwr 4y ago
      >no contractor has the capabilities they do internally. Thats where you are wrong! Capitalism enables the greatest number of (self/mon(k)ey token) motivated varieties, beit innovations, why do you think ESA just put out a request for idea's on the space suit to be used on the moon? The creativity of unrestricted thinking especially from kids, is massively untapped, they are natural operating-in-plain-site Dimenthyltryptamine users for a start, unconditioned by university's, culture and life in general! Saying that though, working for govt in any form comes with its own risks. https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:NSA_GCHQ_and_the_Death_of_Gareth_Williams https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:NSA_GCHQ_and_the_Death_... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6585263/Damning-new-evidence-Dr-Kelly-DIDNT-commit-suicide.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6585263/Damning-new... https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Chelsea_Manning https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Chelsea_Manning https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Julian_Assange https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Julian_Assange Sometimes being in the public spotlight is the less dangerous path, which these NSA jobs are not. https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Bill_Clinton https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Bill_Clinton Accidents happen. Prison happens. Intelligence gathering comes in all shapes and sizes, but one thing is for certain, it was previously thought being on the right side of the law was a psychological advantage, its not any more, it could be extremely risky. This is the era of psychological warfare, and the best candidates are those who volunteer for their trauma as any Emergency Response (Police/Fire/Ambulance) person knows. Psychological trauma is a life long condition with no visible scars. How you survive working for the state largely depends on your own intelligence, but you can bet your bottom dollar you will be experimented in ways that science dictates that subjects are not too be made aware of any said experiment.

luckylion 4y ago

Have you looked at Google Ads lately and the detail of categories they let you target people by? They do essentially the same, so I'm not sure how much different it would be. It's possibly easier to rationalize that you're doing this "for the security of the nation" and not "for Google's profit" when you add a way to find out whether someone is a woman who's about to be vulnerable to a certain kind of advertisement because the last child is moving out soon.

kilgnad 4y ago
Well Google doesn't write shit like stuxnet. I don't know for sure but I'm pretty sure Google employees can't directly look at user details? For the NSA I'm sure you'll literally be able to look up personal details on anyone. NSA is waaay worse then Google. Or waaay cooler. Depends on your perspective.
- luckylion 4y ago
  Or it's ... just different. I mean, I'm pretty sure most people agree that Iran not having nukes is a good thing. I'm also pretty sure that far fewer people agree that Google should have a far-reaching profile on every citizen who isn't aggressively blocking ads/tracking. The government does shady stuff, but would you really have more trust in a corporation?
  - kilgnad 4y ago
    Not necessarily more trust for a corporation by virtue of the corporation not being government. I have less trust for the NSA and CIA because of past infractions. For example how the CIA was selling coke to the US to fund their programs. That's next level shit that not even a corpo will do.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      Corporations wouldn't get people hooked on drugs and misinform/bribe doctors to over-prescribe opioids to make a nice stack of dollars? I guess the motives are different, the CIA does their stuff to fund guerilla troops to overthrow uncooperative governments or battle the Soviets, the corporations do it so their owners can buy another 400ft yacht. I think it's still easier to rationalize working for the CIA than Purdue, and easier to work on mass-surveillance for the NSA than for Google. National security vs private yachts. I mean, I'd understand if you say you wouldn't work for the CIA or NSA because you don't believe in their approaches to things, but I doubt you'd say "... but I have no problem writing software to push more oxy into rural communities and kill a few tens of thousands citizens a year as long as my bonus comes through".

shadowgovt 4y ago

Snowden's exile has a lot more to do with Snowden than with the NSA. There are plenty of folks who think the NSA is actually doing meaningful defense work.

n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
“Meaningful defense work” is not orthogonal to violating the 4th amendment. I don’t think I’ve heard Snowden argue that the NSA’s work is not meaningful. He mainly objected because it was unconstitutional.

lern_too_spel 4y ago

[flagged]

notinfuriated 4y ago
> and now every computer literate person knows he's an idiot So if I don't "know" that he's an idiot, then I am computer illiterate. Great argument.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  Fair. I misspoke. Every computer literate person who looked at the documents Snowden leaked instead of just the batshit interpretation of the documents he gave to Greenwald knows he's an idiot.
  - notinfuriated 4y ago
    Fair correction. Your other linked comment describing why was helpful. Thank you.
kilgnad 4y ago
I don't think most people (programmers included) followed it in detail as closely as you. Care to elaborate on Snowden's misunderstanding or prism?
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34510696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34510696
- samdcbu 4y ago
  During the first days of the Washington Post’s reporting on the Snowden documents, the outlet misreported the mechanism for how PRISM obtained it’s data. It was initially reported, seemingly based on Snowden’s misunderstanding of PRISM, that the NSA has a direct connection into the servers of Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. That wasn’t actually true, as the data for PRISM was obtained through Section 702 requests the FBI sent to tech companies which was a practice established in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

giantg2 4y ago

"Although The government protects whistleblowers, the government does not really protect whistleblowers that whistleblow government shit." Sort of true, but not exactly true. Thomas Drake was a whistleblower. Snowden might have started out as a whistleblower (without going through the proper process), but has released a lot of detailed information beyond what is necessary to be a whistleblower, which could even possiblt cause net harm. Edit: why disagree?

kilgnad 4y ago
I don't disagree. Not sure who is voting you down.
- joxel 4y ago
  People who care about the rule of law and not having the most powerful bureaucracy in the history of the universe point their targets at our fellow citizens for basically no reason.
photochemsyn 4y ago
If he hadn't released all the information proving that what he was saying was true, we'd be hearing about how he was just a disgruntled employee with personal issues who was making stuff up for the publicity so he could sell books, etc.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - nhchris 4y ago
    > sold out his country You mean his government.
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      No, I mean his country. Civil disobedience or w/e against a surveillance state culminating in fleeing to Moscow says all you need to know about Snowden’s commitment to freedom and opposition to surveillance.

gizmo686 4y ago

Shit like looking at the data that Big Tech has been collecting on American citizens? The NSA is incapable of building the type of mass surveillance infastructure we see today. That infrastructure is built and maintained by private tech companies. The NSA comes along repurposes that already collected data to their own ends. Further, the NSA's usage of said information has never been linked to any population wide mental health crises, unlike big tech. There is also a wide range of work the NSA does, and most people working there don't know much beyond their own need to know.

soup10 4y ago
>The NSA is incapable of building the type of mass surveillance infastructure we see today. That infrastructure is built and maintained by private tech companies. This is false, the snowden releases showed they have extensive infrastructure that aggregates data from many different sources.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Parent's point is that any NSA system falls far short (in comprehensiveness and freshness) of what Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple have (in addition to their analogs in other countries). At the end of the day, worldwide profit scales systems faster than even national security dollars.
  - soup10 4y ago
    And parent's point is wrong, because A) the NSA has broader legal powers to collect and use data, and B) the NSA's mission is literally signal intelligence. They aren't in the business of making phones or serving ads. Of course without inside knowledge of how companies are collecting and using data and what exactly the NSA is doing there's no way to know for sure. But the public revelations of what the NSA are doing go far beyond what we've heard tech companies are doing.
    - gizmo686 4y ago
      Yet it was private companies that managed to get almost everyone to carry around a microphone, video camera, accelerometer, gps device which they also use to store and transmit the majority of their personal conversations. Granted, they do not snoop on you to the maximum extent the hardware of these devices allow. But, take a look at [0]. Unless you are one of the few people who goes out of their way to limit tracking, do you think that the NSA would be able to get that detailed tracking of everyone's movements. And this is just the obvious part (which Google is nice enough to share with its users as a feature). Big tech companies have also built detailed models of most people's interests; which is simply not possible without the large amount of data that comes from people actually interacting with them. All of the NSA's dragnet surveillance is built on the back of private industry, and works because that private industry has convinced people to participate in it. [0] https://www.google.com/maps/timeline https://www.google.com/maps/timeline

ReptileMan 4y ago

>You'd have to be ok with doing a lot of f-ed up shit working for the NSA. If the paycheck is ok

qualudeheart 4y ago
Yeah. Same here. I need money for early retirement and I don’t care how many eggs have to be cracked to make that omelette.

newsclues 4y ago

Big Tech is just an extension of the government. Or maybe the government is an extension of Big Tech. But either way, it's the same thing.

neltnerb 4y ago

Seems nearly certain that they'll end up with employees that have a deeper understanding of how Twitter works and how it is vulnerable to attack than Twitter itself.

factsarelolz 4y ago
[dead]

sharkweek 4y ago

“Why shouldn’t I work for the NSA? chuckles It’s a tough one… but I’ll take a shot.” https://youtu.be/mJHvSp9AKYg https://youtu.be/mJHvSp9AKYg

dehrmann 4y ago
Didn't I see this guy hawking crypto a year ago?

anonuser123456 4y ago

[flagged]

jlarocco 4y ago

Seems like the type of people comfortable with secretly gobbling up other's private info would be right at home...