<story><title>After Snowden, the NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge</title><url>http://www.npr.org/2015/03/31/395829446/after-snowden-the-nsa-faces-recruitment-challenge</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bazillion</author><text>The article doesn&amp;#x27;t truly address such a large claim -- it basically could be titled &amp;quot;After Snowden, the NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge from 3 College Students&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The NSA has nearly unlimited hiring potential with just the pool of military folks alone that work there.  There are constant hiring freezes for a year at a time, because a lot of buildings are over capacity.&lt;p&gt;If one of these college students were to apply to the NSA through NSA.gov (mandated as the only way someone is allowed into the agency), they would have to apply a minimum of 2-4 times, because the application stays good for about 90 days, and the average applicant waits 6 months to a year to get accepted.  This is assuming they&amp;#x27;re applying straight through without having someone with hiring power pull their application from the queue.  After that, the process to get a clearance could take anywhere from another 6 months to 2 years (possibly more in some exceptional cases) and costs the agency about 250k.&lt;p&gt;So, it goes without saying that bringing onboard a fresh college student who isn&amp;#x27;t going to even get to walk through the door at least a year after applying, can pale in comparison to bringing on someone who already has a clearance and training.  The article assumes that the NSA relies heavily on its external recruitment, but the vast majority of folks working there just change out of a uniform into jeans and a shirt.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HillRat</author><text>I do think the real issue is not whether the NSA can fill cubes, but whether they can stay ahead of the threat curve. NSA competes with, but not for, the employees of foreign intelligence services; likewise, they used to compete for the same talent pool as top tech companies, but not &lt;i&gt;against&lt;/i&gt; those companies.&lt;p&gt;Then they decided to turn the Big Ear inwards and go to war with US tech companies. Now firms like Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. are building active defenses against the NSA, which means that they&amp;#x27;re hiring for the same problem domain, with better salaries and benefits, no security checks or polys, and no stigma (and a lot of prestige) attached to the position. As a result, NSA is threatened with losing precisely those talents necessary to keep ahead of foreign adversaries.&lt;p&gt;The savage irony of this is that both the NSA and tech companies are at a Nash equilibrium that is non-Pareto optimal; NSA loses top-tier candidates, and tech companies have to expend resources to protect themselves from NSA and other threats. An ideal scenario would be for a trusted NSA to work &lt;i&gt;with&lt;/i&gt; tech companies to support strong crypto and security, but that&amp;#x27;s a nonstarter in the political and bureaucratic climate.&lt;p&gt;Personally, I&amp;#x27;d like to see the defensive aspects of the NSA broken out into a separate agency, preferably either cabinet-level or independent, with the singular mission of protecting the security and privacy of all Americans, covering everything from crypto to vulnerability discovery to privacy recommendations and (where applicable) rulemaking. You would assume that NSA would still be in competition with a hypothetical Information Security Assurance Agency for discovering vulnerabilities, but the ISAA would not have the balancing test of &amp;quot;does this vulnerability threaten Americans more than it helps us listen on our adversaries?&amp;quot; Think of it as a FEMA for the cybersecurity age.</text></comment>
<story><title>After Snowden, the NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge</title><url>http://www.npr.org/2015/03/31/395829446/after-snowden-the-nsa-faces-recruitment-challenge</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bazillion</author><text>The article doesn&amp;#x27;t truly address such a large claim -- it basically could be titled &amp;quot;After Snowden, the NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge from 3 College Students&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The NSA has nearly unlimited hiring potential with just the pool of military folks alone that work there.  There are constant hiring freezes for a year at a time, because a lot of buildings are over capacity.&lt;p&gt;If one of these college students were to apply to the NSA through NSA.gov (mandated as the only way someone is allowed into the agency), they would have to apply a minimum of 2-4 times, because the application stays good for about 90 days, and the average applicant waits 6 months to a year to get accepted.  This is assuming they&amp;#x27;re applying straight through without having someone with hiring power pull their application from the queue.  After that, the process to get a clearance could take anywhere from another 6 months to 2 years (possibly more in some exceptional cases) and costs the agency about 250k.&lt;p&gt;So, it goes without saying that bringing onboard a fresh college student who isn&amp;#x27;t going to even get to walk through the door at least a year after applying, can pale in comparison to bringing on someone who already has a clearance and training.  The article assumes that the NSA relies heavily on its external recruitment, but the vast majority of folks working there just change out of a uniform into jeans and a shirt.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drzaiusapelord</author><text>Salaries and pensions are no joke either. I was reading about how recruitment works. It seems they have a relationship with many CS and Math professors who recommend bright students directly to NSA headhunters. I imagine working on some of the problems they do can be very exciting. Not everyone feels this need to publish publicly.&lt;p&gt;I find it hard to believe there&amp;#x27;s any sort of recruitment shortage. The NSA does today what it did 5, 10, 15, etc years ago. People interviewing for those positions know exactly what they&amp;#x27;re getting into then the same way they know what they&amp;#x27;re getting into today. The whole &amp;quot;OMGZ SPYING ON MY MAY-MAYS&amp;quot; sells on here on reddit, but apparantly lots of people don&amp;#x27;t take that view and instead see sigint as a legitimate need, like having a standing military with nuclear weapons or intervening into foreign countries.  Arguably, good sigint means less conflicts and more wins.  Hitler&amp;#x27;s Germany was damaged greatly by sigint hero Alan Turing.  Funny how we celebrate Turing, but a modern Turing today would be vilified instantly. The world, if anything, is much more dangerous today than in the 30s considering how many nations have nuclear weapons. Honestly, if I had the choice I&amp;#x27;d rather work there than find new ways to deliver annoying click-bait ads at a place like Facebook or get kids hooked on some milquetoast WoW-clone.&lt;p&gt;The Chinese, Iranian, and Russian sigint guys aren&amp;#x27;t taking some moral stand either. They&amp;#x27;re just getting their assess to work the same way we do.</text></comment>