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On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 10:24:45PM +0000, Simon Avery wrote: > Consider what we might guess about how they choose the best and brightest > minds to recruit, and there is strong evidence to suggest they have some > /very/ clever people working for them. There was an NBC 60 Minutes documenentary on the NSA, which was an insult to the profession of journalism, that showed how clever NSA employees were by letting them solve a Rubik's cube within one minute. They did, though they had to bend the rules to redefine minute. :-) Silly documentaries aside, the NSA does have some very clever people working from them, there's no doubt about that. (Though they can't do magic either and they do make mistakes.) > A hacker gets caught. He's offered a choice between jail time, or showing > the government how they did something. Or even if it's known, ears get > tuned, interest sparked, and pressure put "here" and "there" and the police > charges disappear on the guarantee of cooperation. Suddenly your poacher is > a gamekeeper. That threat would probably be in abeyance forever, it would > be silly for the employer to drop it as soon as they'd hooked the fish; > these people are in it for the long game. I believe that's what been happening for centuries when spies get caught by the enemy: they get a change to work for them rather than face jail or wose. But most potential NSA employees aren't 'hackers' in the law-breaking sense of the word. And someone who has been working against you in the past is also a real liability. > And then there's the outright blackmail route. Joe looks useful, oh, if > only we knew some way of finding uncomfortable information about Joe to > encourage him to work for us, some secret of his - maybe his browsing > habits, maybe an acquaintance or affaire or sexual preference. Oh, hang > on! Bingo. Joe now works for the agency. His family, friends and current > employer might not even know about this arrangement. If Joe works for a > major software or hardware developer then it's not a major leap to assume > he could be steered towards making a tweak or two. To me this sounds like a recruitment strategy that doesn't scale. For soon you'll have Joes who think: sod it, I'll tell Glenn Greenwald about this blackmailing. I don't think it'd be in the NSA's long-term interest to hire many people who wouldn't really want to work for them either. It might work to hire one or two key players - or make them do the odd job - but it won't help them fill all their vacancies. So yes, I do think making noise will help in the long run. And that's what will really matter. Martijn. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq