Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 547 posts

Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg

#531

Post by jessriedel »

dilyevsky wrote: post #526
jessriedel wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The agency also prides itself on an almost obscene reliance on Polygraphs, a technology no more accurate or scientifically sound than a babushka shuffling chicken bones and reading tea leaves. I can't find out why I see smart people repeating this all the time. It's not true. Polygraphs are very flawed, and they are especially vulnerable to preparatory countermeasures, but they have non-trivial predictive power. Wh…

"can't find", huh? well did you even try? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph#Validity has plenty of actual studies referenced.

Yes of course. Did you? The balance of evidence is strongly toward polygraphs having non-trivial predictive power. People frequently conflate unreliability with being fully random.

Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg

#532

Post by taejo »

jessaustin wrote: post #326
guelo wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not just a 'perception of gov't incompetence': it's a widespread phenomenon How do you know? I know a couple of talented, hard working statisticians that work for the census. They tell me a lot of good work gets done there. Well, at least until this year when they have suffered complete demoralization after a Trump political appointee crashed their china shop.

Lots of private sector employees manage to deal with the fact that their CEO is an asshole.

For some agencies, it's not so much that the CEO might be an asshole (whether or not the president is an asshole is a fairly minor detail, IMO, as long as he can do the job). This is more like a pharmacologist working at a company making a vaccines being taken over by an anti-vaxxer.

Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg

#533

Post by taejo »

krapp wrote: post #477
x14 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people value self-expression and would rather be judged by the quality of their work than their appearance.

Hoodies have become as much a standard of conformity as suits. You're just conforming to an unspoken requirement to appear sufficiently non-conformist. Show up in such an environment wearing a suit and see how much your self-expression is valued.

I've worked at one of the big Bay Area software companies with a guy who wore a suit every day. If I wore one at my current (non-US) company, people might ask me about it for a few days, but I'm pretty sure it'd become the new normal within a week.

Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg

#534

Post by TheArcane »

fineng123 wrote: post #342
bcruddy wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same one whose currency essentially powers the world economy via the petrodollar?

Petrodollar is pretty outdated, the current would be Eurodollar or dollar-denominated derivatives outside the U.S.

The Yuan.

Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg

#535

Post by ewjordan »

willstrafach wrote: post #349
ewjordan wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snowden let that cat out of the bag years ago in voluminous detail. You absolutely do not need to cite sources re: illegal NSA surveillance anymore.

If you believe that his claim was proven by a leak, I am not sure why it would be difficult to produce a citation. My understanding is that it is not a true claim.

His claim was the leak, and it was huge, and I'm not going to dig through it for you for quotes just because you're a contrarian. The NSA did a shit ton of surveillance that was not justified under known US law, and that's pretty well accepted at this point.

What claim don't you think is true? Was the NSA not indiscriminately scooping up and querying communications between US citizens?

Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg

#536

Post by mozumder »

throwaway990099 wrote: post #518
mozumder wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to believe fake news, that's your right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

Yes. From your link:

"Each of these agencies has slightly different protocols and safeguards to protect searches with a US person identifier."

Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg

#537

Post by dilyevsky »

jessriedel wrote: post #531
dilyevsky wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"can't find", huh? well did you even try? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph#Validity has plenty of actual studies referenced.

Yes of course. Did you? The balance of evidence is strongly toward polygraphs having non-trivial predictive power. People frequently conflate unreliability with being fully random.

Don't know what "fully random" is but 60% sounds like pretty close to a coin toss.

Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg

#538

Post by willstrafach »

ewjordan wrote: post #535
willstrafach wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe that his claim was proven by a leak, I am not sure why it would be difficult to produce a citation. My understanding is that it is not a true claim.

His claim was the leak, and it was huge, and I'm not going to dig through it for you for quotes just because you're a contrarian. The NSA did a shit ton of surveillance that was not justified under known US law, and that's pretty well accepted at this point. What claim don't you think is true? Was the NSA not indiscriminately scooping up and querying communications between US citizens?

> What claim don't you think is true? Was the NSA not indiscriminately scooping up and querying communications between US citizens?

Correct. That would be a very big deal in my opinion. After reading through the hundreds of source documents leaked by Snowden, I did not find evidence of any sort of mass collection on US persons. Only foreign collection, which is the job of a spy agency (Perhaps plenty of ethical arguments there of course, but that is besides the matter of USPI collection/reporting).

Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg

#539

Post by jessriedel »

dilyevsky wrote: post #537
jessriedel wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes of course. Did you? The balance of evidence is strongly toward polygraphs having non-trivial predictive power. People frequently conflate unreliability with being fully random.

Don't know what "fully random" is but 60% sounds like pretty close to a coin toss.

If you require applicants to pass five independent tests that have 60% accuracy (e.g., interview, polygraph, family/friend interviews, recommendations, criminal record), good applicants are more than 7 times more likely to pass than bad applicants. Indeed, most of our important decisions are made by combining many weak pieces of evidence. Even if some other tests are more accurate, additional less-accurate tests can easily be worth running if their costs are modest.

Again, this is not an argument that the information provided by the polygraph actually passes a cost-benefit analysis in any particular case, it's just a criticism of the "all or nothing" mindset regarding accuracy that many folks have on this topic.

Re: NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg

#540

Post by Chaebixi »

pc86 wrote: post #388
Chaebixi wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Private sector pensions are for the most part long gone. Why should public sector keep them. Because we don't want a race to the bottom?

What about getting rid of pensions in order to be financially solvent is a race to the bottom?

> What about getting rid of pensions in order to be financially solvent is a race to the bottom?

The idea that the little guy needs to be made more financially insecure so those at the top can benefit from something more "financially solvent." This applies to business (less pensions, more dividends and share buybacks) and government (less pensions, lower taxes [for the rich]).

Also, IIRC, private sector pensions are quite common for CEOs and executives. They're only less common for the little guys.

Post reply on HN