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The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google

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Re: The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google

#21

Post by hiddencost »

seiji wrote: post #15
curiousDog wrote: post #13

Wonder how and where they recruit their top-talent. Pretty much every top scorer in my school went to Facebook/Google/Msft/Amzn. The mediocre ones went to Northrop Grumman/Raytheon/Rockwell and the like.

The Company doesn't exactly encourage recruits to advertise their new position. You mostly see people just vanish for a while. Young recruitment is largely done through direct faculty recommendations at schools, so it's more of a "don't find us, we'll find you" proposition.

Yup. I had a friend who spent some time there. Easily the smartest kid in my major. Hired due to a direct referral from faculty. It gets scary, once you see how many math professors have security clearances.

Re: The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google

#22

Post by poof131 »

curiousDog wrote: post #13

Wonder how and where they recruit their top-talent. Pretty much every top scorer in my school went to Facebook/Google/Msft/Amzn. The mediocre ones went to Northrop Grumman/Raytheon/Rockwell and the like.

I think the bridge between math and programming is relatively small, so if you have the most mathematicians in the world, you probably have some pretty good programmers too.[1]

But for contractor, there are job boards for people with clearances.[2] Although you get a pay boost of at least 10-15k, I'm sure the bureaucracy is awful.

I also wouldn't assume that all the top people go to biz. Some very talented people work in gov and academia. Not everyone is guided primarily by money & scores.

[1] http://www.math.uh.edu/~tomforde/Web/Jobs.html [2] http://www.clearedconnections.com/

Re: The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google

#23

Post by scintill76 »

yen223 wrote: post #18
IBM wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glenn Greenwald got a treasure trove and it's time to cash in.

Glenn Greenwald has a lot of Powerpoint slides. Am I the only one who wants to see the source code for ICREACH, and all the other ALLCAPS projects?

I wonder if that's a line even Snowden wouldn't cross. It risks those tools falling into the "wrong hands", and is the most extreme way he could be said to be aiding terrorists by alerting them of our intelligence capabilities (which he is already accused of.)

Re: The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google

#24

Post by eric_h »

hiddencost wrote: post #21
seiji wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Company doesn't exactly encourage recruits to advertise their new position. You mostly see people just vanish for a while. Young recruitment is largely done through direct faculty recommendations at schools, so it's more of a "don't find us, we'll find you" proposition.

Yup. I had a friend who spent some time there. Easily the smartest kid in my major. Hired due to a direct referral from faculty. It gets scary, once you see how many math professors have security clearances.

> It gets scary, once you see how many math professors have security clearances.

Makes sense, though. The people who are the best at math are going to be the people who are the best at grokking and expanding upon the existing understanding of the math involved in cryptography.

Re: The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google

#25

Post by d1str0 »

MalcolmDiggs wrote: post #3

It's kind of remarkable that they kept the lid on this on long as they did. With so many local/loosely-related agencies involved, I'm surprised somebody didn't leak this much sooner.

It clearly says only a few intelligence officers from the different agencies had access. So it's not like any ol' police officer of FBI agent had access to this at all times.

Re: The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google

#26

Post by niels_olson »

seiji wrote: post #15
curiousDog wrote: post #13

Wonder how and where they recruit their top-talent. Pretty much every top scorer in my school went to Facebook/Google/Msft/Amzn. The mediocre ones went to Northrop Grumman/Raytheon/Rockwell and the like.

The Company doesn't exactly encourage recruits to advertise their new position. You mostly see people just vanish for a while. Young recruitment is largely done through direct faculty recommendations at schools, so it's more of a "don't find us, we'll find you" proposition.

Yeah, my mom majored in math and minored in Russian. She got the NSA offer in her last semester. But she wanted to teach, and thought the whole thing was more than a little spooky. And indeed, it was a faculty referral that prompted the interview offer.

Re: The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google

#28

Post by Twirrim »

I think I'm more surprised that this was a surprise to people.

Of course they built a search engine. Wouldn't you? Don't you have similar at your workplace? We use them all the time. Think about web interfaces built on top of ElasticSearch, for example. Is that not a 'search engine'?

Re: The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google

#29

Post by apsec112 »

seiji wrote: post #6
us0r wrote: post #2

Somewhat OT but its amazing out of 3 "FTEs" 1 was for design ("GUI") and this is what they came up with. [1] pg 22 https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/08/25/shari...

Also notice the entire screen shot. Netscape on Windows XP in, best we can tell, sometime after March 2006. Netscape. With an AIM launcher in the status bar. Accessing TOP SECRET//COMINT//NOFORN resources.

This looks like Netscape 7 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_(version_7)#mediaviewe...), which had its final release in August 2004, not the original Netscape.

Would it have been more secure if they used IE 6?

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