The Pentagon's New Army is a Convention of Hackers
This is a terrible idea, this notion that you have to hire hackers to be cutting edge or fight other hackers among non-state actors and state actors among our enemies.
Gen. Michael Hayden had the same bad idea talking about the need to hire hackers.
When are they going to figure out that if you hire hackers like Manning and Snowden, well, you get hacked, guys?
Why do grown men -- generals -- think that 19-year-old girls with nicknames like Solid are the answer to the challenges of our hostile environment?
These are like parents letting their 9-year-old set their VCR and set up their Internet connections -- learned helplessness and stupidity and letting the inmates run the asylum.
Are any of these people professionally asked to sign any ethics statements in professional societies in their industry? No. Do they sign oaths of loyalty upon employment? Yes, but it does little good with people like Snowden who think they are literally above the law.
The choices offered in this article are all ultimately false. The government can offer high-paid salaries for coders just as they do for certain other roles, and not to uneducated ethics-free 19-year-olds but to 35-year-old people in corporations with clean employment records.
They need to learn how to recruit and keep such people by invoking a sense of mission. Look, would you rather code G+ and put in features like dazzle on photos of people's cats? Or work on facial recognition in Facebook so people can tag photos of their frat buddies faster? Or would you rather work on identification of terrorists in crowds from videos and photos online? Your choice.
To be sure, there's a pause for why Solid won't take the job:
Even if DOD recruiters could hire a hacker like Solid into its ranks, Snowden’s long shadow could drive her out. She would be under constant scrutiny, not only while working for DOD or a DOD contractor, but if she left government work for private industry; she would be taking the government’s secrets with her.
A person with ethics and a sense of mission will not mind this scrutiny, however -- only an ethics-free hacker with a sense of themselves above the law on their own anarchist mission would mind.
So look for better people.
Then there's this:
One of the issues that the Snowden event raises and illustrates is the heavy reliance that the Defense Department has historically placed on private contractors in building its cyber army” Ferguson said. “There’s a practical reason for this; private industry can pay more than government pay scales often permit."
Well, change the pay scales then. Have a special act of Congress. Do whatever you have to do to fight this war. Don't be a bunch of little bitches.
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