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

16 points by peterkelly 13y ago

I'm sure there are quite a few NSA employees reading this and following the whole media discussion with great interest. I'm genuinely curious - what keeps you there? Do you still believe in the "mission"? Are you comfortable with what is going on, and basing your livelihood on programs that so many people are against? Let's have the "other side" the story. If you've got a case to make, I'm sure we'd all love to hear it. Feel free to register a throwaway account and discuss.

eksith 13y ago
If I may step into their shoes... Simple answer would be, "to pay the bills". I'm sure the vast number of people working for government agencies (engaged in espionage or not) are simply there to stay fed, clothed and sheltered. The NSA, CIA, FBI etc... are all vast megaliths with intricate internal structures, bureaucracies and buttload of paperwork (digital and dead tree) that needs processing by humans. Humans that need jobs. That's it. They may feel some sense of patriotism in what they do, but I think most of them are just doing a job. It's the tobacco farmer syndrome.
deleted 13y ago
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bifrost 13y ago
Having read (only) a few books on the history of the american intelligence community, I suspect most people who work there believe in the work that they do. While domestic spying is obviously a black mark in the history, I suspect that the good work thats been done there is fairly substantial. We can actually thank the NSA for some security technologies that are used regularly (and are open source). Also consider that the president OKed this happening and the public isn't yelling for revolution nor impeachment.
e3pi 13y ago
Blinders: military personnel can't read The Guardian, gagged, `Need to Know' sequestered. Why risk being a Chatty Kathy on HN when, this week, we read a General is being investigated for opening his big fat mouth. At Fort Meade, `Hackers' are criminals. I imagine any NSA or its contractors reading this are tasked to identify the outliers.
codeonfire 13y ago
It will be an amazing day for the internet if an active NSA employee or contractor risks their career to post here. A lot of the people working in these roles love the thrill of being a part of the inside and also love the idea that they are trampling people's rights because they are part of 'true America.' They are put into much better living standards than almost everyone. These living standards can be easily taken away.
phaus 13y ago
Many people (not nearly all) on HN seem to live in some sort of bubble, where all they have to do to find another job is open up their email and carefully select the best option out of dozens of recruiting emails from the nation's largest companies. Finding a job isn't easy for everyone. One thing that often accompanies technical ability is a distinct lack of social skills. Other people just suck at writing resumes and no matter how many peers and professionals review their resumes, they just don't seem to work. Some people excel in both areas yet have disproportionate amounts of bad luck. I spent close to a decade in the military in an industry closely related to IT. I had also been playing around with computers for almost two decades. When I got out of the military I lived close to DC, the largest market for government contractors. I had a clearance, an outstanding performance record and an abundance of relevant experience. I started working on my resume a year from the time I was getting out of the military, and started applying for jobs almost immediately. My problem wasn't that I failed during interviews, I just simply couldn't get an interview to save my life. Throughout this entire time, I kept having professionals and friends alike review my resume. I still couldn't find a job in the one part of the world where it should be easy to find a government job. Eventually I moved to a new location, taking the first shitty job that was offered to me, working for a government agency. That job eventually fell through, but I now hold a position at a similar agency. Before I found the job, I was days away from running out of the money that I had saved up while I was still in the military. When I started at my second civilian position, I was once again days away from running out of money. If I lost this job, I'd probably be completely fucked. I have a wife and children, so I don't really have the option to live on a friend's sofa eating ramen noodles every day, so I have to work. That's not to say I'm unhappy, I just find it laughable how often people act like changing jobs is such a trivial affair on HN. As far as the moral implications go, I believe in the underlying mission of my organization (which is not the NSA). I don't always believe in the higher-level policies or the programs that they implement to achieve those goals, but I feel that we should strive to change those things through the political process, even though its broken. Hell, it's not like anyone should be surprised at everything that got leaked, I've been reading in the news for over a year that the NSA has been building one of the world's largest data centers in Utah. The suspected purpose has always been claimed to be the warehousing of American communications, yet suddenly everyone decides to pay attention. It's also important to note that there is a distinct difference between responsible disclosure and delivering sensitive information to Assange/China/Russia/etc.
throwaway918273 13y ago
I don't work for the NSA, but I've worked at a contractor for several research oriented things they've been involved in (unofficially - the money comes through a non-DoD part of the government). Because what I worked on was geared towards research in language technology and related fields, my view might be a bit skewed, but here's my impression. There's a fair number of people who do seem to believe that they're working to help secure the country. Many seem to stay where they are because they get paid well and work on what they're interested in (many PhDs who joined out of grad school or shortly thereafter. One thing I find interesting about all of this NSA spying stuff is how it relates to the pervasive concern I've seen on the part of people working in intelligence about potentially using data containing personally identifying information, particularly of US persons. I do wonder if the scale, scope, and invasiveness of the spying as reported is actually that great.
- mjn 13y ago
  > get paid well and work on what they're interested in This is a common reason in pure math and theoretical computer science. There are not a whole lot of places that will give you a good job to do basic research. Tenured professor is another one, but hard to come by, and has a different set of tradeoffs. If you do certain kinds of applied research (e.g. machine translation) you can do it at Google, but Google is not tripping over itself to hire number theorists to do actual number-theory work (maybe they would hire a number theorist, but to do something else).
  - throwaway918273 13y ago
    The people I dealt with we're all in the language technology field. They tended to be a bit on the older side, so maybe they wound up there before there were the kinds of research opportunities you get in industry these days.
thesmileyone 13y ago
Honestly if I worked for the NSA, and lets assume that the NSA was behind Stuxnet etc, and I was involved; I would be very proud of my work, how many people can genuinely say that they created a computer program that directly slowed the nuclear program of another nation state? Also to be fair, you never hear about the good, only the bad. How many domestic terror cells has the NSA stopped by spying on its people? Who knows... because these facts don't get disclosed. I think having time to think about the revelations recently that the phrase "you have to be cruel to be kind". What if the NSA did not spy on people in its own country, and then America was nuked from the inside... they would be held accountable along with many other alphabet soup organisations for not doing their jobs properly.

serf 13y ago
The idea of considering your job trivial is a benefit, and computer development has the succinct ability to share efforts amongst a huge area of disciplines, and thus it is that a hackers career is largely 'hot-swappable' around the world. I'm the son of a man who stayed at an engineering job for 25 years. This is his largest regret, as it pigeon-holed him into the mentality that he was incapable of applying his vast talents elsewhere in the engineering field. As such, the company that he pledged allegiance to made every effort to keep his pay and benefits below the industry standard, and this was made possible by the environment he hired himself into initially. Computer development is one of the few jobs that you can seriously apply yourself at no matter where you are in the world. Why not take advantage of that fact? Responsibilities are another problem. It's a personal issue if you've decided to burden yourself financially with children, a mate, and things that are generally seen as the normal routine of adulthood, but that, like I said, is a personal issue that must be dealt with on a person to person basis. As for those with technical ability being more likely to also have social problems -- how is limiting the exposure to interviews and social interactions exactly going to help improve the individual we're talking about? It's important to be flexible. To defend a position by saying that person X is deficient too much in this way to have the means to get job Y so he must do job Z is a recipe for disaster. Social interactions are practiced, and the assertion that we should dissuade those that lack in experience from practice is wrong, in my opinion. Of course , there are legitimate roadblocks in social psychology that could prevent them from landing a job with no fault of the person, but if they got that initial job it means someone saw something in them that they related to value, and if that happens once it can happen again for them. No reason to think that anyone, ever, is stuck.
- phaus 13y ago
  >As for those with technical ability being more likely to also have social problems -- how is limiting the exposure to interviews and social interactions exactly going to help improve the individual we're talking about? It's important to be flexible. To defend a position by saying that person X is deficient too much in this way to have the means to get job Y so he must do job Z is a recipe for disaster. Social interactions are practiced, and the assertion that we should dissuade those that lack in experience from practice is wrong, in my opinion. I never suggested not trying or giving up. I was simply relating that for such people its often extremely difficult to find a job. The fact that I keep trying is the only reason I'm not living in my car right now.