Former US Official: Edward Snowden Was Too Brilliant To Work For The NSA
from the well,-that's-comforting dept
As the leaks and stories about the NSA's massive surveillance programs continue to breach the levees, the responses garnered by the government are perhaps as instructive as the leaks themselves. For instance, when the NSA itself comments are so fallaciously dismissive of public concern, we know that they're equal parts liars and demagogues. Also, when our public representatives have the kind of relationship with the NSA normally reserved for abused spouses, we learn how ignorant and codependent so much of Washington is. And, when President Obama's administration puts sympathetic insiders on the board set to review all of these programs and their abuses, it teaches us that the man holding the highest office in our land thinks we're all very, very stupid.But what of Snowden himself? How do those experienced in government view him. Well, according to this fascinating report that details how Snowden got his hands on those documents, some think he was absolutely brilliant and that being so smart should have disqualified him for the job.
“Every day, they are learning how brilliant [Snowden] was,” said a former U.S. official with knowledge of the case. “This is why you don’t hire brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble.”My, how comforting. Here's the deal: if you are going to run a data-collection program on most of the known world, including on your own people, you damn well better have the smartest, most brilliant people you can find involved. The wrong-headed thinking that there are people too smart to work for your organization is tipping the scales towards epic. Perhaps brilliant people lock security down better so that thousands of system administrators can't get their hands on roughly all the documents. Maybe brilliant people devise better ways to get the intelligence so greedily sought after without running afoul of our commanding national legal document. And, hey, just maybe enough brilliant people in the room would have resulted in a program that wasn't so foul, wasn't so ripe for abuse, and wasn't using what is commonly considered to be decades-old technology and procedures.
Jason Healey, a former cyber-security official in the Bush Administration, said the Defense Department and the NSA have “frittered away years” trying to catch up to the security technology and practices used in private industry. “The DoD and especially NSA are known for awesome cyber security, but this seems somewhat misplaced,” said Healey, now a cyber expert at the Atlantic Council. “They are great at some sophisticated tasks but oddly bad at many of the simplest.”Look, it brings me back to something I've said about my government before: lie better. That's your job now. Sure, it would be nice if you simply represented the people as your mandate requires, but nobody alive is gullible enough to believe that's going to happen any longer, so your new job is to at least secure all the nefarious bullshit you pull. You've got my data and you're housing it on technology that predates the iPhone? You know who might be able to help get your house in order?
Brilliant people. Too bad you don't want to hire them.
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Filed Under: ed snowden, employment, nsa, nsa surveillance, smart
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Anti-intellectualism reveals its ugly head again...
And such a policy would so bite them in the ass.
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Re: Anti-intellectualism reveals its ugly head again...
It is not generally fallacious logic, but disciplin cannot allow people asking too many questions since not answering is kind of enforcing a belief that something can be improved. That it can be improved a lot should be a given, but shut up and take the good with the bad. Then, at least, nothing will get worse.
- oldschool army philosophy
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Re: Anti-intellectualism reveals its ugly head again...
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Re: Anti-intellectualism reveals its ugly head again...
They are verbally saying brilliant people are not good but in their words I read they don't want people with morals and ethics.
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Obama thinks everyone is stupid
No, he thinks he is smarter than everyone else.
He is wrong.
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Re: Obama thinks everyone is stupid
No, he thinks he is smarter than everyone else.
I'm pretty sure these are both ways of saying the same thing.
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Re: Obama thinks everyone is stupid
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Over qualified...
Shit, even "smart people" might be overqualified for the NSA.
Perhaps they should just stick with "people who want to get paid to do what they're told and not ask questions" - that's probably the right type of people for this job.
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Re: Over qualified...
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Re: Over qualified...
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forgive the cliche
Who do third-class people hire?
Government bureaucrats.
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Wrong. The reality is this: Snowden was a systems administrator. He had privileged access to many machines. The fault for what he managed to "steal" lies solely in the NSA as an organization for failing to compartmentalize the access to sensitive information in such a way that a single user (friend or foe) could not have access to most (or all) of it and to have proper checks in place to ensure that users were not abusing their privileges. The NSA failed at basic computer security, which, to me, seems somewhat ironic given that they have "Security" right there in their name.
This story only shows a massive failure in the implementation of proper security procedures and a highlights the complete lack of internal auditing on the NSA's part.
Snowden was not a genius. He was good system administrator, though. Luckily for the NSA he didn't decide to sabotage it from within because I am sure that he could do it without anyone noticing until it was too late. They should thank Snowden for that.
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This command would have caused a panic : ( As SuperUser)
rm -Rf /
All he would have had to do was shell script it ( Bash ) and propagate to all machines. The 'cron' service would serve as the trigger.
That would also solve their "too much data" problem ...
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Much more useful would be jobs with innocuous names like "lpd" that sporadically wrote random bytes into random locations in random files, then exec'd new instances of themselves with other innocuous names and continued.
Source: finding this very thing running at a client's site when they reported odd file corruption that they could never quite seem to track down. Regrettably, they waited six months to do so.
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Exactly right. This is just another attempt to change the subject and control the narrative. For the first few weeks they stuck with the usual tactic of denial and fear mongering. When that didn't work they tried to get in front of the story by giving their side before releasing documents of their own. Now they're just trying to soften up the public to accept the kangaroo court they've got planned for Snowden.
Really this is all about panic. They know there's a lot worse coming and they have no idea what to do about it. Which reminds me, I need to stock up on popcorn. I don't want to miss any of the show.
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Missing the point?
Edward Snowden does not fit that mold though. As a go-getter, he was brilliant, but the bar is set so low in government that I'm not sure he would actually qualify as brilliant in private industry.
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Re: Missing the point?
This just demonstrates how utter unqualified "journalists" are to report about just about anything.
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Re: Re: Missing the point?
But if you don't use your accounts to conspire against your sysadmin's people you can probably trust them to that extent.
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So, Snowden committed yet more crimes...figures.
It makes sense that if you are going to violate one law, and your goal is something other than whistle blowing, that you will violate laws at will. I bet he did not use his turn signals either.
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Re: So, Snowden committed yet more crimes...figures.
What keeps things honest is that most software and DBA guys are actually honest and altruistic, which keeps them on the side of their company. Put your company against them (as the NSA did to Snowden here by violating the Constitution) and all bets are off, although typically they just go to another job that they agree with more.
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Re: So, Snowden committed yet more crimes...figures.
He was a sysadmin, which as earlier articles note, enabled him to do exactly that, not through "hacking and fraud" but because that can be useful as a sysadmin in determining where a problem is (i.e., user Z is having such-and-such a problem, log-in as user Z and see if you can replicate...).
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"You don't hire people smart enough to recognize how dumb your policies are."
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Why when I had plumbing problems last year I hired a plumber who had zero experience and training. He flooded my whole basement with water when he screwed up and made the problem worse. But I still felt good knowing he didn't think he was better then me!
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The NSA has already identified several instances where Snowden borrowed someone else’s user profile to access documents, said the official.
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Haven't you been paying attention? Snowden is a lying, hacking, puppy stomping, kitten drowning, goldfish swallowing traitor!!! We know it was him.
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I think the "party line" has changed
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Will they make up their minds on how they want to denigrate him already?
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The reason the NSA spying is a bad thing isn't just because of the gross privacy violations, it's because there is no reason to believe that the NSA is even secure. Your bank probably has higher safeguards for your information than the NSA does on the merit that they have to be certified, the NSA doesn't, and they don't even have to follow their own laws about what is or isn't secure practice.
Of course no one seems to care about that, no one seems to think that the NSA could ever have leaks or be compromised by someone who seriously wants to harm or exploit American's identity. Despite all the evidence to the contrary.
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My point is, i dont believe snowden did anything brilliant, but i am 100% sure that NSA had there network setup incompetently.
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I must be brilliant too!!
[root@server] # sudo su - jclapper
[jclapper@server] $ wget http://docs.nsa.gov/presentations/goodones/ > /dev/thumbdrive
[jclapper@server] $ exit
[root@server] # > .bash_profile
[root@server] # exit
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Great ending line, Tim.
I'm not here to talk about the article. I just want to say that last line game me a laugh.
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To express dismay that an employee is "too smart" is to admit that management is incompetent.
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Bet the NSA is thankful
Very easy to do in that kind of position, as you know all the codes, you know the way the system is triggered, and all it takes is a few very well placed pieces of code and watch it come flaming down.
That's brilliant. What Snowden did was routine and not brilliant, by their standards: he stole documents.
They got off lightly this time. Next time I'm not so sure that the next 'brilliant' person who has this kind of access would resist the temptation to not do just that.
Then the NSA will find out what true brilliance is.
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I say he's off the mark on ALL counts, as this article so rightly points out.
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They are afraid of intelligent people.
This is a big part of how we have ended up where we are, as a society.
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