--New York Times
The National Security Agency, exposed with its hand wedged tightly into the cookie jar, is struggling to figure out how this could have happened. Not how its hand got into the jar, as we might hope, but how someone managed to take a photo of it.
The New York Times carries a front page story today describing "Civil Libertarian Hero" and/or "Despicable Traitor" Edward J. Snowden's professional and personal background. In large part, the article discusses how Snowden was able to circumvent whatever security protocols the Agency had in place to prevent theft and revelation of its domestic and foreign surveillance activities. A former N.S.A. official states that the Agency's background investigation of Snowden was "clearly flawed."
"For years, N.S.A. and now the Cyber Command have struggled with how to relate to the hacker community," he added. "It's obvious that some sort of arrangement to allow hackers to work for N.S.A. and the intelligence community in a systematic way is needed."
Lots of luck.
The N.S.A probably has no problem in obtaining reliable employees, graduates with good grades from good schools, who can handle most of its routine computer network activities. But for its most critical work -- both defensive and offensive -- the Agency needs "hackers" who are highly creative, whose every instinct is to think "outside the box." These hackers are the very experts least likely to follow orders blindly and ignore their own, personal sense of right and wrong.
Hackers -- young people in general, but hackers in particular -- have little sympathy with secrets or, for that matter, with government. They are willing to work for government because of the interesting challenges and the access to complex network security issues that such work provides. They are valuable to government so long as their interests and the interests of government coincide. Hackers are essentially mercenary soldiers. They'll accept pay to fight loyally -- until a compelling reason to stop doing so comes along.
Scan the social media. The sympathy for Snowden among people under 40 or so is overwhelming. Even those who question Snowden's motives, integrity and judgment feel that he has helped the country by shining light into dangerously dark corners of American government. Snowden has the sympathy of the libertarians, the anti-government enthusiasts, the civil liberties advocates, those supporting a free and unregulated internet, and perhaps most liberals in general. Not many young people who are interested in computer technology and programming fall outside all of those categories.
The government has always found a conflict between security and loyalty on the one hand and creativity on the other. I'm reminded of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, who probably did more than any other single person to save America from the need for a horrendously costly invasion of Japan. But once we had the bomb, once we had the fruit of his creative and unorthodox mind, his sort was no longer needed.
After the war came the legendary security hearings — what a government lawyer reviewing the case later called “a punitive, personal abuse of the judicial system.” No evidence came out that he had engaged in espionage. An Atomic Energy Commission personnel board concluded he was a loyal citizen. But he was not above suspicion. That was enough for them to strip him of his security clearance.
--George Johnson, NY Times (June 28, 2013)
Dr. Oppenheimer did what he was asked to do, despite his moral qualms. ("Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.") But young Snowden didn't just express qualms, as did Oppenheimer -- he acted on them. The American government merely destroyed the remainder of Oppenheimer's career as a physicist. I'm nervous about what's in store for Snowden.
But our government should be concerned as well. What wildly creative young hacker -- the prime target of the N.S.A.'s recruitment efforts -- will want to work for a government so willing, as he or she will view it, to crush dissent and conscience?
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