Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

I'd be willing to bet even 10% of people within NSA are against the current scale and scope of domestic operations of NSA. Certainly >30% of the rest of the IC, and probably >50% of DOD and non-security parts of government (random NASA guys, etc.)

To the extent that federal government employees tend to be more educated and informed (since they're professionals) than the public as a whole, employees of the federal government are quite possibly more against these programs, at least at their current scale and scope, than the general public (and certainly the voting population, who skew old and paranoid and white and rich).

View on HN

"...I additionally believed that one of our best defenses against the national security state was the perennial proclivity of clandestine organizations to piss off their own employees."

-J. Orlin Grabbe, 1995

http://peculium.net/2013/04/03/the-end-of-ordinary-money-by-...

That is why automation, cloud computing, drones, etc are terrifying. Once bad activities take only a very small number of read in personnel to accomplish, it is a lot easier for them to do worse stuff for longer.

You'd think any of them with a brain would have twigged that collecting all this data is completely stupid because it is so dangerous. Of course it will get in the wrong hands sooner or later. If they are collecting enough data to make files on everybody, organised crime would have a field day nobbling juries, and blackmailing businesses and law enforcement for a start (let alone the political ramifications of foreign services and bad actors being able to pressure those in positions of influence). When you think about it, this kind of data collection is completely antithetical to national security.

It seems safe to say that most of the tens of thousands of NSA employees, even technical ones, don't know the true scope of their agency's actions. (Our Congressmen apparently didn't know, so why would the worker bees be any better informed?)

This would be a huge problem for me if I were one of those employees. The Edward Snowdens that the NSA should be truly afraid of are the ones that still work for them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com