Charlie's argument is that the vast majority of people growing up today will not have sufficient loyalty to "the state" to fill the ranks of the state's spy apparatus.
While I find it persuasive that people's loyalty to institutions may be in decline, that population-wide generalization is not dispositive for the hiring ability of spy agencies.
You don't need an entire generation of loyalists to fill out the NSA. You just need a couple percent, tops.
And those people will always exist, helped along by talk-radio fear mongers who continually generate a stream of xenophobic, america-fuck-yeah types who will happily spy on their countrymen in exchange for that ever-elusive "secure job".
"A" hires "A"; "B" hires "C". And Generation Z's "A" players will not work for the NSA.
You don't just need loyalists. You need loyalists who are good enough to operate your systems, who are also conscience-free enough to dissociatively split what they're doing from how they do it, day to day. And you have to have 100% accuracy to avoid the next Snowden.
Speaking as an engineer hiring for software, we are desperate for good people. It is a seller's market out to the horizon. "A" engineers will be picking among many options for at least the next decade, another generation of change.
I am at the head end of Generation Y. I have a nice computer job. And in my personal life story I have already voted with my feet against working for similar institutions. I can pick my post, more or less, and I picked one that doesn't offend my personal convictions about privacy and power.
Computer science does force you to think hard about bullshit. You can't bullshit a compiler. I remember thinking in an early experience with C, my code is right, there must a be a bug in the compiler. You get chastened in a hurry with that kind of attitude.
I guess I'm just saying there is a negative correlation between the anti-knowledge you get from Fox News and the sense of mastery you get from making a computer do what you need it to. So the future of the NSA is decay.
The thing is, if you were a baby boomer you'd probably not have worked for government intelligence institutions either. And a similar article concluding nobody would ever be fool enough to work for the government again could equally have written in the 1960s, when smart young people relentlessly consumed the new anti-war mass media, knew the government violated the civil rights of some of its citizens, and even joined counterculture movements with ideologies far more sympathetic to the Communist enemy than Big Capitalism....
And for all the draft avoiders and dilettantes, there was no dearth of candidates for jobs in the military-industrial complex or shortage of Cold War spooks in the following decades
If you believe that A players won't work for the NSA, you'd have to wonder why so many of them sign up to work for contractors like Palantir or Lockheed Martin which are very obviously building systems to monitor or kill people.
I read your entire argument. With its logic statements and your rambling about compilers and such. There are some assumptions you are making here:
1. Everyone who is "good at Computer Science" is automatically a logical person and is perfectly rational when it comes to everything they do in life. I am just going to point out the famous mathematician Ramanujan who was also intensely religious. Let us face it: Pure math is way harder than any computer science problem you are going to solve.
2. You are assuming that every single person who works for the NSA or has a sense of patriotism is necessarily a person whose ideology is influenced by Fox News.
Re: 1, I guess I use myself as an example of a technologist who is aware of the moral implications of his work. I don't deny that there are sellouts and such. A technologist in the next decade is free to choose the work that catches their fancy, and free to have moral objections to their work and leave for more satisfying work. I also believe that wholesale surveillance is on the wrong side of history, and in the long run, people who are free to choose will not support the surveillance state. Thus the surveillance state will get the dregs, plus or minus.
Re: 2, I'm actually responding to this point in the parent, which says the source of the next generation of NSA recruitment pool is: talk-radio fear mongers who continually generate a stream of xenophobic, america-fuck-yeah types who will happily spy on their countrymen. You may be able to see how I connected the dots to Fox News.
I will connect them further. Fox News has an aging viewership for many reasons. Watching talking heads, as a model of receiving information about the world, is on the way out. Fox has committed to ideologies that, for one reason or another, are not believed by young people. In parallel to the changes to work noted by Stross, there are changes to media consumption that are also driving younger generations farther from the baby boom culture.
>have to have 100% accuracy to avoid the next Snowden
That's the classic security problem; you've gotta defend every attack but only need one attack to work.
But there have been spies that have sold information before, instead of publishing it. Spy agencies have had this problem for a long time. At least with Snowden, they know he's out. With other long-time double agents, they had to deal with leaks over many years.
Also, it's just silly to think that an org with unlimited money will have problems hiring technical talent.
The essence of the argument is "tell me that you want the kind of thing that money just can't buy". The hypothesis is that the next generations will feel similar convictions, only more so.
The counterargument that the NSA has just not found the right dollar amount to clear the market of conscientious objectors assumes a lot about what people want out of life. It might be "rational" to take 500 million dollars not to do your life's work. On the average, you will not be that productive in your lifetime, so the 500 million in the hand is more than worth the 5 million in the bush.
But if you are filled with a sense that you are the one person who can accomplish a unique purpose in the limited time you have alive, then I think no amount of money is going to turn you aside.
Again the cynical counterargument is that just like time is fungible for money, your life is fungible for the next wild eyed visionary. But I think we all have a few heroes about whom we can say: "Never again will such a person walk the earth." They may be successful, but they're not the sellouts.
I have not heard of NSA offering f-you money to engineers so it may be a moot point.
Well, to some extent the systems are already written. And there will always be private companies that manage to hire top talent while still selling shady shit to govt. (palantir, anyone?).
Finally, it is absolutely the case that intelligence and morals do not go hand in hand. The history of the world is filled with counterexamples.
From what I've read it seems that both Manning and Snowden were gung-ho patriots when they signed up. When they signed up.
It seems in this end game the HR departments are better off picking the cynical, venal and power-hungry. At least they don't have the "disillusioned idealist" failure mode. But you may end up with a kakistocracy.
Well originally mi5 and sis didn't recruit from university they preferred more experienced men - also because the salary was so low having a pension already helped.
The point is not that you can't find them, but that you are less likely to be able to reliably filter and hire only people that are loyalists and will remain loyalists in the face of learning what the agencies actually do, including when you're placed in situations where you might incite reduced loyalty such as when firing people.
Not only might they be facing a less loyal generation as your pool to hire from, but they can also expect to hire much more than they did a generation or two ago:
These services have grown, and the average time people will stay employed there has nosedived, and the usage of short term contractors have skyrocketed
Given that, it is not unreasonable to believe that the odds of slipping up and hiring the wrong people is rapidly rising, and also that the number of events that are high risk to maintaining loyalty, such as people feeling they are passed over for promotions or raises, or firings or other personell issues will go through the roof simply due to the increased number of people involved.
And those people will always exist, helped along by talk-radio fear mongers who continually generate a stream of xenophobic, america-fuck-yeah types who will happily spy on their countrymen in exchange for that ever-elusive "secure job".
I pity the fool who tries to build an effective agency out of those guys though. It will be a giant waste of money, and produce little of value to anyone. That's not to say that people won't try, however...
> helped along by talk-radio fear mongers who continually generate a stream of xenophobic, america-fuck-yeah types who will happily spy on their countrymen in exchange for that ever-elusive "secure job".
If you think this is who works at NSA, or for defense contractors, then you have no idea what you are talking about.
Fort Meade is located in Maryland, one of the bluest states in the nation. The defense-intelligence complex is in northern virginia ("NoVa"), another region that is exceedingly liberal. Add to that the fact that NSA disproportionately employs highly educated people, then it is clear the majority of their workers and civil servants are not the conservative "xenophobic, america-fuck-yeah type" bugbears you make them out to be.
> And those people will always exist, helped along by talk-radio fear mongers who continually generate a stream of xenophobic, america-fuck-yeah types who will happily spy on their countrymen in exchange for that ever-elusive "secure job".
The loyalists will be recruited from credit card companies and water treatment plants, who daily watch vandals and foreign powers attack infrastructure. Security agencies can and should be staffed for pedestrian reasons. They can and should be seen as intellectual janitors, not as hotbeds of raving nationalism.
While I find it persuasive that people's loyalty to institutions may be in decline, that population-wide generalization is not dispositive for the hiring ability of spy agencies.
You don't need an entire generation of loyalists to fill out the NSA. You just need a couple percent, tops.
And those people will always exist, helped along by talk-radio fear mongers who continually generate a stream of xenophobic, america-fuck-yeah types who will happily spy on their countrymen in exchange for that ever-elusive "secure job".