U.S. spy agencies face big layoffs in government shutdown | Hacker News Reader

U.S. spy agencies face big layoffs in government shutdown

reuters.com

43 pointsr0h1n39 comments

AFAIK, from my super super secret source (I joke), is that all of the HUMINT and SIGINT will still occur but the analysis will be effected, mainly because the essential analysts won't have their typical support staff. For instance, maybe they need a particular piece of hardware. Procurement of that hardware will suffer because that dept. will be staffed by a "skeleton crew".

A lot of those workers are contractors and will be placed on the bench, some paid some not, depending on who they work for.

The Federal workers seem outraged in the DC area, but most civilian workers are used to the instability of markets and have little pity, from what I hear. That's public info, not private. No super secret source for that one, just callers on WTOP.

If I was a spy agency, years ago I would have started coming up with alternate streams of income to be less dependent on the economy and the U.S. Congress. I dunno- maybe sell drugs, guns, information...

The CIA has been accused of drug trafficking on a number of occasions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_traffic...

They were also accused of creating the "superdollar" aka the "supernote": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar

But you can see it's all speculation, based on things they have not said, etc.

I wonder if they combine this with the new "90% of admins will be replaced by magic" credo to create an actual internal infrastructure meltdown.

All it takes is somebody with some say in the matter to decide that it would all work out if they just "hurried up" with the admin automation part.

More than 70 percent of the civilians working for U.S. spy agencies have been deemed "non-essential" employees

...due to great effectiveness of the recently deployed digital surveillance systems like PRISM and the help of big technology companies like Google and Facebook :)

It just means they will automate the spying more. Clapper already said he intends to use 90 percent fewer system admins.

I wouldn't take this as meaning there's going to be significantly less spying or anything like that.

This fills me with signifiant unease.

So we have all this data here, ready for mining from corporate or foreign interests (ok, well the ones not already in bed with the USG) and all they have to do is attack the weakened infrastructure.

If I was a such an outside entity, a few million spent in forcing the shutdown sounds like a well-spent investment so I can swoop in and pick up the pieces.

What a clusterfuck.

I would actually think that on the whole this reduces the risk exposure for the data trove. The reason this fills /me/ with unease is rather that it's all to compatible with cleaning out people from the organisations who might have conscientious objections what comes next.

Can someone from the US explain this whole "Government Shutdown" thing for outsiders please. I think I can speak for a lot of people when I say that this is not what we had expected to occur.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdown

It has actually happened several times in the last forty years.

That sort of confuses me even more. It isn't the sort of thing you would want to develop into a tactic, it just seems risky as hell.

Risky politically?

In practical terms, it isn't that risky. As has been pointed out, this has happened before. The U.S. hasn't defaulted on its treasury bills. The Secret Service doesn't stop protecting the President. Federally-funded highways are still operating.

Meanwhile Curiosity, the Mars Rover, isn't moving. Thankfully, there aren't any spacecraft scheduled for mission-critical operations (orbital insertion, for example), or those would go unsupervised, too.

Most all NASA is on furlough, as if people didn't need the money.

A colleague is waiting for word on his grant application from the NIH. Ordinarily his panel (~ 20 people) would converge on Washington this Friday and decide on who gets funded. That is going to be postponed, and it's hard to settle on a date when all 20 are available. Everyone has bought their plane tickets already and cannot use them now; they will have to buy new tickets- again on Federal funds.

Since the application is in already he cannot submit the same to the NSF, as he would have done in case it got turned down.

The immediate cost, and the knock-on cost is immense.

I don't think it is that risky to do once or twice maybe, but I don't think the risk substantially decreases through repetition. It is sabotage of civil services as an allowed political tactic, which is pretty unstable. All you need is bad timing.

The U.S. hasn't defaulted on its treasury bills.

Err, what? That's like the head of a mint justifying taking a holiday because they haven't stopped printing the money used at the resort.

Annual budgets are debated as legislation, and that particular piece of legislation did not pass. As such, non-essential employees will not be paid so they're being given time off.

I get that bit, I am just amazed that you can sabotage your own civil legislature that easily.

This is the legislature sabotaging themselves. They set a deadline for themselves, and then as the deadline approaches they try to use it as political leverage and go through standard varieties of political posturing, e.g. "The other party would rather let the government shut down than pass our bill!"

That and Congress hasn't passed a budget in years.

It's not supposed to happen, but the trend in America seems to be leaning towards hyper-majorities where bipartisan cooperation is the exception rather than the rule.

Gerrymandering is used to effectively destroy any semblance of political competition -- congressional representatives can safely rely on a guaranteed re-election which results in them never having to work with "the other side."

This results in political platforms built on hatred and fear, "See! We hate them as much as you do!" and so forth. Obstructionism and other forms of political football are the basis of our legislature. It's really sad because we end up measuring our success by how much we're destroying the other party's accomplishments rather than celebrating our own.

Good point, but I believe the long-tail forces at work here are bigger than gerrymandering.

I also believe weakening federalism also contributes to polarization. The stakes are much higher across the board when you can't just move to Texas or Massachusetts depending on what you're fed up with.

Did you mean "strengthening federalism"?

No. The as the national government becomes stronger, the separation of powers among the national, state, and local governments (federalism) becomes less pronounced.

So when a big national laws change (maybe nation-wide healthcare reform passes or a new ruling on campaign financing is handed down), you don't have the option of moving to another city or state if you don't like the law. This means that the stakes are necessarily higher and conflicts will be more pronounced.

In other words, good fences make good neighbors, and our fences aren't as wide or tall as they used to be.

The founding fathers were very keen on keeping all three branches under control using each other. It can get messy. But this idea comes from the UK, back when Parliament was a means of balancing the power of the King:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_the_purse

In the case of the US it's put into place so the Executive Branch cannot wield too much power. Sometimes a lot of power is good. But quite often throughout history, too much power makes it ripe for abuse.

Usually what happens is they come to an agreement but this time, like a few times in the past, they didn't come to one before the government would furlough non-essential staff members.

It's ugly, but it's a work in progress. Since we have a purely representative form of democracy the best the American citizen can do is vote for new Representatives, Senators, Judges (sometimes), and Presidents. Oh and of course YELL FROM THE ROOFTOPS :D

Most of us can't really affect it by voting, though. This current shutdown is precipitated by a hyper-partisan group of legislators who think "compromise" is a dirty word who are generally elected from districts full of like-minded people.

We are being hijacked by a relatively small minority. If the House properly represented the people, it would have a majority that would pass the Senate bill. If the House had its current makeup but could actually vote on the Senate bill, rather than only voting on bills approved by a majority of the majority party, the Senate bill would pass. Instead, because the rules conspire to make it so that you have to please at least half of the legislators from a party that got a minority of the vote, we get jerked around by people who mostly do not represent us, both in terms of sharing our values, and in the more direct term of being someone we voted for or against.

This is not a consequence of representative democracy, it is a failure of it.

I'd rather not talk about politics here.

Edit: Wait, so I can't even avoid a topic without being down voted? Thanks guys.

What I mean by that, since I can't reply below, is that I don't want to get partisan. I don't want to assign blame. I'd rather talk about the structure and how it could be improved. Politics and government can be talked about separately.

I'm confused. What exactly is this entire thread, an your previous comment in particular, about?

My post was about government and its structure. How the three branches balance each other and why Congress votes on the budget. The way the system works, I was trying to point it out. That's all.

And this thread is about how intelligence agencies will be impacted. I posted on that under the main thread.

Well, there's how the government is supposed to work, and then there's how it actually does work. Unfortunately, this shutdown cannot be explained solely in terms of the former, and the latter is inextricably tied up with politics and partisanship. I would argue that addressing it all is implicitly political, and you stepped into it explicitly when saying that voting is the best we can do.

So what do you propose we do exactly? What is your solution to this problem? I'd like to hear how we can do more than vote.

First, I'd like to say that I reject the premise of the question, both in that I must necessarily have a solution to usefully discuss the problem, and the implication in "how we can do more than vote" that voting actually helps for this. I'm not one of those people who goes around saying both parties are the same and voting is pointless, but in this particular instance, where the entire government is being held up by a small group of legislators elected by a small minority of voters in particular geographic areas, I think it's true.

I'm not sure there is a solution. We may simply be doomed. If there is, then I think it comes down to educating the voting public and convincing them to be more realistic about how politics should work. Beyond that, it would be good to reform the system somewhat so that a small number of people can't bring everything down. The filibuster needs to be made more difficult in the Senate, and the "majority of the majority" rule in the House ought to go away. However, that's a chicken-and-egg problem, since it's hard to get reforms through with the current state of things.

Nice retort. I like a lot of what you said there. One thing I would love to see the US government implement is a referendum system that would allow the public to vote on deadlocked issues like this. Congress would be behooved to work together more because if they didn't it would lead to a referendum and take the power of the vote out of their hands for the issue. It would have to be framed very narrowly and only happen when Congress is incapable of deciding as a whole on what to do.

There's some holes in that of course but I think we could make it work.

You don't have to talk about politics here, though you have so far. The rest of us might though as the subject of the thread is fairly political.

I talked about government structure. What I should've said is I don't want to talk abut partisanship. That's a no win situation and gets to religious levels of debate, if you want to call it that.

Yes, but surely there are ways of achieving the same thing without laying off the people who write the army wage checks, for example. Whatever your views on the use of armed force, I think we can all agree that paying the people with the guns on time is generally considered a good move. And shutting down a large section of their own economy in the middle of a financial crisis is just beyond insane. Why can't they sign the budgets 6 months ahead, or something.

The military will get paid during this particular shutdown, and the military will continue to function as it always does. A lot of essential workers, determined by the government, will still come to work and get paid.

Because signing a budget six months ahead of time would require compromise and forward thinking, both things that the current Congress lacks.

A lot of legislators are basically forbidden to compromise, either due to their principles, or because they will lose their next election if they do because they come from a district full of extremists. Or, generally, both. (The one tends to cause the other, of course.)

If you can't compromise, it doesn't matter when you start talking. You'll never work out a deal until you're forced to.

Well, that explains today's 'Show HN: "Who is hiring"'

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