7 ms·

Facebook's Former Security Chief Now Works for the NSA

191 points by tippytop 13y ago

danso 13y ago
His security blog at Facebook: "Facebook Security: Fighting the Good Fight" https://www.facebook.com/blog/blog.php?post=25844207130 https://www.facebook.com/blog/blog.php?post=25844207130 edit: here's the obligatory "but this is blogspam" note...Kelly's employment with the NSA was first reported by the the Times here a few days ago (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/technology/silicon-valley-and-spy-agency-bound-by-strengthening-web.html?_r=2& http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/technology/silicon-valley-...)...but yeah, here's a classic case of newspaperism vs. sexy-SEO-headlines...I didn't read "Web's Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders" because it sounded no different than other recent stories...but a Facebook exec going to work for N.S.A. is definitely a headline-worthy fact. However, Kelly isn't the stereotypical young Bay Area millionaire ex-Facebooker...he previously worked as an FBI analyst before joining Facebook (https://twitter.com/wrox/status/1699420309 https://twitter.com/wrox/status/1699420309)...So going from FBI to Facebook to NSA isn't as strange as, well, going from college to Facebook to NSA, unless the catered lunch at NSA is classified and delicious. Not knowing why he left Facebook...but after doing so, it's not out of left field to go back into federal security, especially if he had a NDA with Facebook not to go to other competing services, such as Google.
- bennyg 13y ago
  Gets orders from FBI to set up something at Facebook. Goes to FB and sets it up. Goes to NSA to train a team to handle/store/query the data stream he set up.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    One wonders where he found the time to conceal the aliens at Area 51.
    - krapp 13y ago
      Don't be silly. They were buried years ago.
    - fiatmoney 13y ago
      Realizing that someone might have sympathies towards people they worked with in the past, and might look forward to future employment with them, and that this might affect their decisionmaking when they're asked to do something ethically borderline, is a far cry from "Area 51".
      - tptacek 13y ago
        Don't let me get in the way of you casting aspersions on people you've never met and know basically nothing about. I concede the high ground to you.
        _delirium 13y ago
        Are you at all worried about a revolving door between the defense/security bureaucracy and industry, the way someone like Eisenhower was? Or is that a non-issue? That's the kind of discussion I'd rather have anyway. I don't have any particular reason to believe any specific person is compromised or dishonest. But I am skeptical of the stability and reliability of an employment structure that has regular back-and-forth personnel moves between the private sector and the state-security sector. If I had to pick specific places to start, I'll admit, ex-Facebook staff would be much lower on my list than a whole host of private-sector (tempted to say "nominally private-sector") defense contractors.
        dfc 13y ago
        Whenever I read a discussion about "the revolving door problem" I never see any serious discussion of an alternative. Would you prefer an enormous monoculture inside of the government because they cannot hire people from the private sector? Any system that enforced a waiting period between government IT job to private sector IT job would essentially end someone's career.
  - tekacs 13y ago
    Co-operation between multiple government agencies you mean? The FBI and NSA getting along? Ha! :P
- bpatrianakos 13y ago
  I really appreciate your edits here and digging enough to put this story into proper context. It seemed like one of those stories meant to gin up outrage and get the conspiracy theories going and it pretty much ended up just like that. There are people from all walks of life from all sorts of industries who end up at the NSA. It doesn't mean they're all setting up systems and bringing back intel for spying. This is just a coincidence. So I'm glad you brought this up but still think everyone is still going to play right into this article's trap. After all, conspiracy theories are much more satisfying to our egos than mundane reality.
  - exodust 13y ago
    > "The article's trap" ? Just because readers join the dots to reveal a conspiracy picture, doesn't mean the picture isn't convincing or removed from reality or designed to satisfy egos. Just a coincidence you say? The fact is, Kelly said "There isn't enough information shared". Okay... so he clearly believes more information should be shared between Facebook and the NSA. Now he has gone to work for the NSA. 1 + 1 = 2. It's gone beyond "theory" and is now simply playing out like a documentary in real time. Grab yourself some popcorn.
  - trotsky 13y ago
    While I don't consider this a huge revelation or issue, dismissing the employment of the former cso of the greatest private intelligence source in history by the greatest intelligence consumer in history as coincidence without a second thought is hopelessly naive. If you dismiss anything vaguely conspiratorial as a "conspiracy theory" out of hand you'd dismiss pretty much every active intelligence program we have.
  - marshray 13y ago
    An executive of one of the US's largest private social graph repositories ends up working for the largest US spy agency known for maintaining their own "Big Ass Graph (BAG)" for many years longer* and it's "just a coincidence"?! Let me guess - NSA couldn't find anyone else who knew how to manage Hadoop. *Binney - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-3K3rkPRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-3K3rkPRE
  - 13y ago
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - mjn 13y ago
    This is a problem I've had submitting some academic papers as well. Usually if I was tempted to submit at all, there is a specific angle I think might be interesting to HN, which may not be the same one in the title. Maybe I'm wrong sometimes, but I think it would at least make more sense to give me 5-10 words to explain what I think is interesting about a particular submission from an HN perspective, essentially, "why are you submitting this?". But since HN is hostile towards "custom" titles, the explanation of why you're submitting has to be contained entirely in the original title text. That results in implicitly favoring articles from sources that start without an impedance mismatch, so to speak: places where the titles are already pre-targeted specifically to appeal to our demographic, maybe even to HN specifically, and often written with that SEO purpose in mind. That results in a fairly narrow range of sources, and at least partly explains the success of HN-targeted media like TechCrunch here. The end result, as you note, is that a policy against sensationalizing titles actually ends up rewarding sources that sensationalize their titles.
    - aptwebapps 13y ago
      This a very good point. I wish the policy were more to fix bad titles rather than ones that are merely different from the source's. It would be a lot harder to do, and there would be differences of opinion most of the time, but the current policy (at least in implementation) is just taking the lazy way out.
- samstave 13y ago
  The issue is that FB has many ex.gov employees - they are showing a long history of this, with what appears to also be a revolving door policy between both parties. At this point, as has long been suspected, the word of FB cannot be believed in any respect with relation to any users' personal privacy. Even seeing the supposed interface between FB and the USG - the station of the employees within/without are highly in question. The relationship between these groups is very obvious.
tptacek 13y ago
Conversely, "current NSA employee no longer works for Facebook". But not as clickworthy.
- danso 13y ago
  Yes...just as "NATION MAKES PREPARATIONS TO TRANSITION FROM STATE OF PEACE" is less clickworthy than "WAR" :) (yes, I know I just invoked Godwin's law by comparing the NSA controversy with WW2, but it was tongue-in-cheek) His reasons for leaving Facebook and joining NSA may be completely orthogonal to each other...but in terms of likeliness, I think it's safe to argue that Kelly was wanted for his experience in security implementations in modern day networks, rather than him having a mid-life crisis and deciding to quit tech management work to try his hand at code cracking. That said, this doesn't mean he joined out of nefarious motives. His work at the FBI could mean that he honestly believes he is doing God's work in helping government and private tech companies become partners for the good of all. His use at the NSA may be as someone who smooths out any hurdles that are encountered during perfectly legal processes between the two institutions...it doesn't have to be that he's Chief-Backdoor-Installer at the NSA. On the other hand, just because you have great intentions doesn't mean the result is ideal...many government officials who become lobbyists may sincerely believe in their cause, but their access and power leads to unintended consequences. In other words, the job transition could be entirely good natured, but it still could result in some people's worst fears being realized. So more transparency in this example would be nice...though I wonder how much Kelly can say without encroaching upon what the government thinks of as being top-secret-classified.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Touche. :)
qwertzlcoatl 13y ago
This is a brilliant move on his part. He knows the FB architecture and security apparatus, and he is going to contributing immensely to NSA's endeavors on how to effectively data-mine social media aggregates. Not to mention the relationship he's already built with the FB alumni. He'll have enough clout to influence decisions over there.
- flyinRyan 13y ago
  Well, it will probably make him more money and power but working on something immoral and evil makes you immoral and evil. Fuck this guy.
qwertzlcoatl 13y ago
Given that the first $500 million of Facebook investment came from In-Q-Tel, a CIA company that invests in deep data mining systems, it isn't hard to wonder whether Facebook's security officer could have been an employee of the NSA all along.
- prostoalex 13y ago
  In-Q-Tel never invested in Facebook.
  - qwertzlcoatl 13y ago
    Please ignore what I said, I was posting something I grabbed of somewhere without verifying first. In-Q-Tel never made any public investment in Facebook. The only connections that exist are the following: Facebook received $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel, whose manager, James Breyer, now sits on the In-Q-Tel board. He was formerly the chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, whose board included Gilman Louie, then the CEO of In-Q-Tel. One of the main managers of the facebook investors "Greylock partners", Howard Cox, sits also in the management board of In-Q-Tel. The offices of Greylock and In-Q-Tel are direclty next to each other at Sandhill Road in Menlo Park.
    - prostoalex 13y ago
      For context you should mention that total historical portfolio of Accel and Greylock includes hundreds of companies. So the conspiracy theory would have to map to Diapers.com or Rovio.
- mh- 13y ago
  source..?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mirkules 13y ago
When you start to look back, things like this start making a lot more sense in the present context: http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2011/02/obama_meets_with_facebook_founder_mark_zuckerberg_headed_to_oregon_next.html http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2... Maybe there isn't a plan to infiltrate existing big-data companies, but it seems like an awful coincidence that we see things like the above link and the headlines of today.
smsm42 13y ago
Makes sense. Facebook's leadership publicized belief is that privacy is outdated. NSA's position is the same, only they have more tools to make it so.

191 points by tippytop 13y ago

danso 13y ago

His security blog at Facebook: "Facebook Security: Fighting the Good Fight" https://www.facebook.com/blog/blog.php?post=25844207130 https://www.facebook.com/blog/blog.php?post=25844207130 edit: here's the obligatory "but this is blogspam" note...Kelly's employment with the NSA was first reported by the the Times here a few days ago (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/technology/silicon-valley-and-spy-agency-bound-by-strengthening-web.html?_r=2& http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/technology/silicon-valley-...)...but yeah, here's a classic case of newspaperism vs. sexy-SEO-headlines...I didn't read "Web's Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders" because it sounded no different than other recent stories...but a Facebook exec going to work for N.S.A. is definitely a headline-worthy fact. However, Kelly isn't the stereotypical young Bay Area millionaire ex-Facebooker...he previously worked as an FBI analyst before joining Facebook (https://twitter.com/wrox/status/1699420309 https://twitter.com/wrox/status/1699420309)...So going from FBI to Facebook to NSA isn't as strange as, well, going from college to Facebook to NSA, unless the catered lunch at NSA is classified and delicious. Not knowing why he left Facebook...but after doing so, it's not out of left field to go back into federal security, especially if he had a NDA with Facebook not to go to other competing services, such as Google.

bennyg 13y ago
Gets orders from FBI to set up something at Facebook. Goes to FB and sets it up. Goes to NSA to train a team to handle/store/query the data stream he set up.
- tptacek 13y ago
  One wonders where he found the time to conceal the aliens at Area 51.
  - krapp 13y ago
    Don't be silly. They were buried years ago.
  - fiatmoney 13y ago
    Realizing that someone might have sympathies towards people they worked with in the past, and might look forward to future employment with them, and that this might affect their decisionmaking when they're asked to do something ethically borderline, is a far cry from "Area 51".
    - tptacek 13y ago
      Don't let me get in the way of you casting aspersions on people you've never met and know basically nothing about. I concede the high ground to you.
      - _delirium 13y ago
        Are you at all worried about a revolving door between the defense/security bureaucracy and industry, the way someone like Eisenhower was? Or is that a non-issue? That's the kind of discussion I'd rather have anyway. I don't have any particular reason to believe any specific person is compromised or dishonest. But I am skeptical of the stability and reliability of an employment structure that has regular back-and-forth personnel moves between the private sector and the state-security sector. If I had to pick specific places to start, I'll admit, ex-Facebook staff would be much lower on my list than a whole host of private-sector (tempted to say "nominally private-sector") defense contractors.
        dfc 13y ago
        Whenever I read a discussion about "the revolving door problem" I never see any serious discussion of an alternative. Would you prefer an enormous monoculture inside of the government because they cannot hire people from the private sector? Any system that enforced a waiting period between government IT job to private sector IT job would essentially end someone's career.
- tekacs 13y ago
  Co-operation between multiple government agencies you mean? The FBI and NSA getting along? Ha! :P
bpatrianakos 13y ago
I really appreciate your edits here and digging enough to put this story into proper context. It seemed like one of those stories meant to gin up outrage and get the conspiracy theories going and it pretty much ended up just like that. There are people from all walks of life from all sorts of industries who end up at the NSA. It doesn't mean they're all setting up systems and bringing back intel for spying. This is just a coincidence. So I'm glad you brought this up but still think everyone is still going to play right into this article's trap. After all, conspiracy theories are much more satisfying to our egos than mundane reality.
- exodust 13y ago
  > "The article's trap" ? Just because readers join the dots to reveal a conspiracy picture, doesn't mean the picture isn't convincing or removed from reality or designed to satisfy egos. Just a coincidence you say? The fact is, Kelly said "There isn't enough information shared". Okay... so he clearly believes more information should be shared between Facebook and the NSA. Now he has gone to work for the NSA. 1 + 1 = 2. It's gone beyond "theory" and is now simply playing out like a documentary in real time. Grab yourself some popcorn.
- trotsky 13y ago
  While I don't consider this a huge revelation or issue, dismissing the employment of the former cso of the greatest private intelligence source in history by the greatest intelligence consumer in history as coincidence without a second thought is hopelessly naive. If you dismiss anything vaguely conspiratorial as a "conspiracy theory" out of hand you'd dismiss pretty much every active intelligence program we have.
- marshray 13y ago
  An executive of one of the US's largest private social graph repositories ends up working for the largest US spy agency known for maintaining their own "Big Ass Graph (BAG)" for many years longer* and it's "just a coincidence"?! Let me guess - NSA couldn't find anyone else who knew how to manage Hadoop. *Binney - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-3K3rkPRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-3K3rkPRE
- 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- mjn 13y ago
  This is a problem I've had submitting some academic papers as well. Usually if I was tempted to submit at all, there is a specific angle I think might be interesting to HN, which may not be the same one in the title. Maybe I'm wrong sometimes, but I think it would at least make more sense to give me 5-10 words to explain what I think is interesting about a particular submission from an HN perspective, essentially, "why are you submitting this?". But since HN is hostile towards "custom" titles, the explanation of why you're submitting has to be contained entirely in the original title text. That results in implicitly favoring articles from sources that start without an impedance mismatch, so to speak: places where the titles are already pre-targeted specifically to appeal to our demographic, maybe even to HN specifically, and often written with that SEO purpose in mind. That results in a fairly narrow range of sources, and at least partly explains the success of HN-targeted media like TechCrunch here. The end result, as you note, is that a policy against sensationalizing titles actually ends up rewarding sources that sensationalize their titles.
  - aptwebapps 13y ago
    This a very good point. I wish the policy were more to fix bad titles rather than ones that are merely different from the source's. It would be a lot harder to do, and there would be differences of opinion most of the time, but the current policy (at least in implementation) is just taking the lazy way out.
samstave 13y ago
The issue is that FB has many ex.gov employees - they are showing a long history of this, with what appears to also be a revolving door policy between both parties. At this point, as has long been suspected, the word of FB cannot be believed in any respect with relation to any users' personal privacy. Even seeing the supposed interface between FB and the USG - the station of the employees within/without are highly in question. The relationship between these groups is very obvious.

tptacek 13y ago

Conversely, "current NSA employee no longer works for Facebook". But not as clickworthy.

danso 13y ago
Yes...just as "NATION MAKES PREPARATIONS TO TRANSITION FROM STATE OF PEACE" is less clickworthy than "WAR" :) (yes, I know I just invoked Godwin's law by comparing the NSA controversy with WW2, but it was tongue-in-cheek) His reasons for leaving Facebook and joining NSA may be completely orthogonal to each other...but in terms of likeliness, I think it's safe to argue that Kelly was wanted for his experience in security implementations in modern day networks, rather than him having a mid-life crisis and deciding to quit tech management work to try his hand at code cracking. That said, this doesn't mean he joined out of nefarious motives. His work at the FBI could mean that he honestly believes he is doing God's work in helping government and private tech companies become partners for the good of all. His use at the NSA may be as someone who smooths out any hurdles that are encountered during perfectly legal processes between the two institutions...it doesn't have to be that he's Chief-Backdoor-Installer at the NSA. On the other hand, just because you have great intentions doesn't mean the result is ideal...many government officials who become lobbyists may sincerely believe in their cause, but their access and power leads to unintended consequences. In other words, the job transition could be entirely good natured, but it still could result in some people's worst fears being realized. So more transparency in this example would be nice...though I wonder how much Kelly can say without encroaching upon what the government thinks of as being top-secret-classified.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Touche. :)

qwertzlcoatl 13y ago

This is a brilliant move on his part. He knows the FB architecture and security apparatus, and he is going to contributing immensely to NSA's endeavors on how to effectively data-mine social media aggregates. Not to mention the relationship he's already built with the FB alumni. He'll have enough clout to influence decisions over there.

flyinRyan 13y ago
Well, it will probably make him more money and power but working on something immoral and evil makes you immoral and evil. Fuck this guy.

qwertzlcoatl 13y ago

Given that the first $500 million of Facebook investment came from In-Q-Tel, a CIA company that invests in deep data mining systems, it isn't hard to wonder whether Facebook's security officer could have been an employee of the NSA all along.

prostoalex 13y ago
In-Q-Tel never invested in Facebook.
- qwertzlcoatl 13y ago
  Please ignore what I said, I was posting something I grabbed of somewhere without verifying first. In-Q-Tel never made any public investment in Facebook. The only connections that exist are the following: Facebook received $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel, whose manager, James Breyer, now sits on the In-Q-Tel board. He was formerly the chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, whose board included Gilman Louie, then the CEO of In-Q-Tel. One of the main managers of the facebook investors "Greylock partners", Howard Cox, sits also in the management board of In-Q-Tel. The offices of Greylock and In-Q-Tel are direclty next to each other at Sandhill Road in Menlo Park.
  - prostoalex 13y ago
    For context you should mention that total historical portfolio of Accel and Greylock includes hundreds of companies. So the conspiracy theory would have to map to Diapers.com or Rovio.
mh- 13y ago
source..?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

mirkules 13y ago

When you start to look back, things like this start making a lot more sense in the present context: http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2011/02/obama_meets_with_facebook_founder_mark_zuckerberg_headed_to_oregon_next.html http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2... Maybe there isn't a plan to infiltrate existing big-data companies, but it seems like an awful coincidence that we see things like the above link and the headlines of today.

smsm42 13y ago

Makes sense. Facebook's leadership publicized belief is that privacy is outdated. NSA's position is the same, only they have more tools to make it so.