4 ms·

The US government isn't in need of a thousand high-skilled hackers. They are in need of a million normal employees with some basic security awareness. Anyone

The US government isn't in need of a thousand high-skilled hackers. They are in need of a million normal employees with some basic security awareness. Anyone with a modicum of skill can find thousands of areas to improve. The issue is that almost nobody is in a position to get anything changed. Even basic software choices are a multi-year epic.

whatshisface 3y ago
The NSA isn't actually supposed to be a massive Statsi-like bureaucracy, it's meant to crack codes used in wartime so that our troops know what the enemy will do next.
- eikenberry 3y ago
  You're thinking of the CIA. The NSA's job is to spy on citizens.
  - hollerith 3y ago
    >The NSA's job is to spy on [US] citizens They're not supposed to (according to for example the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978). If a US citizen needs to be spied on by the US government, the FBI is supposed to do that.
    - rokkitmensch 3y ago
      What the spook box says and what's inside are two completely different things, by design.
    - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      > If a US citizen needs to be spied on by the US government, the FBI is supposed to do that. Semi-autonomous collections systems generally aren't capable of determining citizenship. Once the data is at rest, much of it is made available to a surprisingly large number of federal and state agencies - and even local agencies via fusion centers, etc. The system is built for dissemination. Within that, some checks on citizenship could be possible for some data. But even then, once a foreign person is part of the data/comms transaction, all the related data is available - citizenship of the other participants is no barrier.
- sandworm101 3y ago
  And provide the standards to be used within US systems ... Which is basically a definition for bureaucracy.
qaq 3y ago
Well I obviously have no clue what the numbers are on the offensive side doubt they are smaller than a thousand. But there are def thousands of cyber security professionals working for government through myriad of contractors purely because of caps.

whatshisface 3y ago

The NSA isn't actually supposed to be a massive Statsi-like bureaucracy, it's meant to crack codes used in wartime so that our troops know what the enemy will do next.

eikenberry 3y ago
You're thinking of the CIA. The NSA's job is to spy on citizens.
- hollerith 3y ago
  >The NSA's job is to spy on [US] citizens They're not supposed to (according to for example the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978). If a US citizen needs to be spied on by the US government, the FBI is supposed to do that.
  - rokkitmensch 3y ago
    What the spook box says and what's inside are two completely different things, by design.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > If a US citizen needs to be spied on by the US government, the FBI is supposed to do that. Semi-autonomous collections systems generally aren't capable of determining citizenship. Once the data is at rest, much of it is made available to a surprisingly large number of federal and state agencies - and even local agencies via fusion centers, etc. The system is built for dissemination. Within that, some checks on citizenship could be possible for some data. But even then, once a foreign person is part of the data/comms transaction, all the related data is available - citizenship of the other participants is no barrier.
sandworm101 3y ago
And provide the standards to be used within US systems ... Which is basically a definition for bureaucracy.

qaq 3y ago

Well I obviously have no clue what the numbers are on the offensive side doubt they are smaller than a thousand. But there are def thousands of cyber security professionals working for government through myriad of contractors purely because of caps.