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.
Any time I think about loyalty to organisations or countries I am reminded of what E.M. Forster wrote in his essay "What I believe" in 1938:
I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying
my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the
guts to betray my country. Such a choice may scandalize the
modern reader, and he may stretch out his patriotic hand to the
telephone at once and ring up the police. It would not have
shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the
lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their
friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome.
[NB It is also worth noting that Forster was an associate of the members of the infamous Soviet spy ring started at Cambridge - although this wouldn't become public until a long time after this essay was written.]
It is also worth noting between the world wars Germany and Japan operated such that the rule of law, "country" if you will, counted for a good deal less than other loyalties. No doubt Forster was thinking of someone much more like himself, rather than of the assassins of Erzberger or of assorted Japanese Army putschists. The Weimar Republic, though, is probably a far better representation of a world run by the rules he proposes than the England of the late 1930s was.
That's a great quote. I would hope that such a choice would not "scandalize" today's modern reader, as I don't think that nationalism is as strong today as it was in 1938. At least, not in the US. I hope.
Which is basically Charlie's point, although he went ahead & worked it up into a theory ... a theory I don't think this foundation can quite support, per my post below.
I like Charles Stross essays for the interesting points they bring up, but I think this one is missing something. There will continue to be enough loyal-to-country people to staff the major intelligence agencies (and their contractors) in the major Western powers as long as there is some meaningful difference in governance and individual civil liberties between the West and the regions from which the West gathers intelligence. And there is. And there will be for a while. If eventually few people in the civilized, democratic countries of the West feel the need to spy on other countries, that will be mostly because those countries have become more civilized and more democratic--that is, more like the West.
I have no desire for my daughter to live in a country where she can't obtain a full education, so there are at least a few countries in the world that have current policies that are absolutely opposed to my values, and, I think, the values of all civilized, rational persons. Over the years, there have also been national governments that have not flinched from exporting support to terrorist movements that seek to establish dictatorships where democracy is already established. (Yes, over the years, the United States itself has been in that category, but the United States seems largely to have learned from its comeuppance in some countries where it previously deposed elected leaders.) As long as there is fundamental international conflict based on core human values, there will still be people defending the best values by any means necessary.
Charles Stross is based in Britain, and he talks about generational differences, but he doesn't go back even enough generations in Britain to notice that cultures can change in the direction of MORE loyalty to country as well as to less. The famous 1933 debate at Oxford about whether that year's students at Oxford would defend "king and country"
(the answer that year was no) was followed up by a Britain that fought tenaciously for king and for country to defeat the Axis. I'm confident that there are plenty of Americans and will continue to be plenty of Americans who know enough history and understand enough about current world conditions to continue supporting United States governmental intelligence agencies and their contractors.
The famous 1933 debate at Oxford about whether that year's students at Oxford would defend "king and country"
I think you misunderstand the historic context of that debate. Students at Oxford in 1933 would have been born between 1912 and 1915. Around 10% of the adult male population of the UK died in war between 1914 and 1918, and another 10% were injured in battle; the casualty rate among junior officers was terrifying, higher than the average for enlisted soldiers. Because Oxford was the domain of the privileged back then, this was a generation largely consisting of war orphans or children of traumatized veterans.
Note that the students aged 18-21 in 1933 were aged 24-27 when war was subsequently declared in 1939. They weren't notably more reluctant (or eager) to fight than their fathers' generation.
The problem here is that "the West" is one of the regions "from which the West gathers intelligence". The NSA and GCHQ are both spying on even other Western countries like Germany, to say nothing of spying on their own citizens.
I appreciate Stross too, he always reminds me of The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz... "the writer's essential task – to look at the world from his own independent viewpoint, to tell the truth as he sees it, and so to keep watch and ward in the interest of society as a whole." I think this quotation applies to the article he was writing, and I found this both chilling and liberating.
>I like Charles Stross essays for the interesting points they bring up, but I think this one is missing something. There will continue to be enough loyal-to-country people to staff the major intelligence agencies (and their contractors) in the major Western powers as long as there is some meaningful difference in governance and individual civil liberties between the West and the regions from which the West gathers intelligence. And there is. And there will be for a while. If eventually few people in the civilized, democratic countries of the West feel the need to spy on other countries, that will be mostly because those countries have become more civilized and more democratic--that is, more like the West.
What a load of racist crap.
While there are degress of which countries are more or less democratic (and third world countries are lagging behind in some areas that -- others one can consider a cultural preference: some cultures put communal values over individual freedoms for example) calling other countries "less civilized" is pure racism.
Furthermore, it has nothing to do with Western powers spying on them. Not to mention that Western powers have been spying on them for centuries, and often in order to put their pals in power and make them LESS democratic (like toppling the legitimate elected president of Iran in the '50s, or supporting tons of dictatorship "allies" in fucking their people). I'm not even going into colonialism and post-colonialism, where the "civilized" countries did horrible attrocities and kept 1+ billion people as slaves or subordinates for their own economic benefit.
Not only that, but western powers also spy one another, whether they are the same or even more "democratic" and "civilized" than themselves. Like Germany spying Sweden for example.
If a country is backwards in some issues, that does not give an excuse in another country to do anything to it. Those things are solved by sovereign people themselves. Like, you know, a certain country is the king of incancerations (totally uncivilized), had seggregation till the 60's (totally uncivilized) and has tons of people and places still treating black people as second class citizens (totally uncivilized), has the death penalty (totally uncivilized), uses SWAT teams extensively (totally uncivillized), has some of the most trigger happy cops in the world (totally uncivilized) and has a huge numbers of bible yielding populace (totally uncivilized), stolen lands from natives (totally uncivilized), a dismal public health coverage for its poor (totally uncivilized) etc. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I also fail to see how some third world country that never harmed any other country, is say, less "civilized" than Germany, who, 7 decades ago, burned millions in furncaces, invaded, killed and executed people all over the world.
Let's put it in very simple terms: they spy on those "less civilized" countries, only in order to intervene, steal their resources, and control and secure whole areas for their economic benefit. The bigger the player, the more he spies. They could not care less about how "civilized" those countries are or not. Just that they are much less powerful, and with tons of natural resources, or in important strategic areas.
>(Yes, over the years, the United States itself has been in that category, but the United States seems largely to have learned from its comeuppance in some countries where it previously deposed elected leaders.)
The don't care about elected vs dictatorships. They merely care about their interests. If dethrowning a dictatorship helps them, they'll do that, even if it means fucking over a stable region, and turning it over to chaos and civil war (actually that's for the better, because it assures it will never recover from that). Plus, nowadays, "to bring democracy" sounds as a better excuse to meddle into another country than "for our interests" did.
As Ghandi said when asked "What do you think about Western civilization?": "I think it's a good idea".
The USA, and by extension the three-letter agencies the implement it's policy has often been viewed as the World's policeman. If that's the case (and here we are about to stick our nose in Syria where it doesn't really belong), then it's time we started acting like real police.
There's a whole bunch of rules for how police are supposed to act, how they determine suspects, how the collect evidence, and so on. It is well past time for the national agencies like the NSA to operate within clear (and public) guidelines similar to that.
Then, if the NSA hires people who are loyal to the rules and the ideals of the work (rather than because of nationality or institutional loyalty), then it can operate effectively, without much fear of leakers like Snowden and Manning.
I have no idea what it would take to reform these big institutions though. And I fear for the damage they (and those who oppose them) will cause before they are replaced by more effective agencies who are based around the old ideals of "Truth, Justice, and the American Way".
Ah yes, "dog eat dog economic liberalism." And then people say Ayn Rand wrote caricatures. Infact, this phrase has been in decline, as it was used to buttress the industrial monopolization of the National Industrial Recovery Act in the New Deal as competition was considered harmful back in the 1930s.
Many countries have lost more secrets to money than to split or shifting loyalties. John Walker, Aldrich Ames, and Robert Hanson were in it for the cash (and in Hanson's case thrills). But there have always been cases of competing loyalties, sometimes sectional (think how much of the Old Army went over to the Confederacy), sometimes international--in the 20th Century commonly either communism or fascism.
The main difference I see now is the ease of copying and publication.
In light of these predictions, I am more curious as to how governments will address this problem. I find it difficult that governments will easily give up on their surveillance goals.
The question then becomes how will they work around the shifting generational trend that Charlie has identified? For example, will they leverage new analytical technology that enables them to employ a smaller number of people by automating tasks?
For those of you who have read his Laundry Files novels, the SCORPION STARE network grants panopticon surveillance combined with lethal line-of-sight gorgonism emulation, which hypothetically enables automated control of a wide network of remote controlled camera weaponry to a few pilots instead of employing large numbers of people with guns.
Maybe Charlie has predictions as to how governments will automate their surveillance systems or other new ways of maintaining their control in their supposed mission to protect the people in the face of less loyal prospective workers?
Is it just me, or is everyone just focusing on the "declining loyalty to state" trend? What about the observation that future kids are totally NOT the "spy material" ?? They aren't exactly anonymous beings. They'll ALL have a HUGE internet presence and a compulsive habit to photograph and document/publish EVERYTHING. And there really is nothing you can do about that. They'll be born into that environment and they will be like that from birth. So none of the generation Z ppl would be happy with the "abandon your internet-self for all eternity!" clause of the ToS of intelligence agencies.
I know if I applied my chances of being hired would probably be <1%. But at the same time if they were desperate enough to hire my lot, well I'd know it's certainly more than a matter of being appealing or enthused with patriotism. And that scares me a lot more than anything I've been reading about. I don't want to be thinking about this stuff 24/7 for the rest of my life; who would compared to the vapid monetizing opportunities we see around here? But if we are at that point in time well perhaps that level of lifelong dedicated thinking is more than just a career option.
OK, but we're getting away from the subject of employee loyalty: the bank employees involved in the Libor scandal were probably motivated by personal enrichment, not by loyalty to their employer. It so happens that the employees' personal enrichment was aligned with the banks' corporate enrichment, which often happens (usually by design) in fields like finance or sales,
but in a spy agency, it is not possible to align employee's personal interests with the interests of the organization broadly enough to get a similar effect.
And I still maintain my larger point (implied in grandparent), that whether or not banks can find enough talent does not shed light on whether spy agencies can find enough loyal talent.
I was speaking narrowly to your point claiming that banks don't need loyalty like spy agencies do because they're not trying to hide billion-dollar programs.
I'm suggesting they are in fact trying to hide billion-dollar programs, and need a kind of loyalty to facilitate this.
Paying someone obscenely well seems like a nice way of buying a kind of loyalty. Certainly the upshot is behaviour equivalent to loyalty from the bank's perspective.
There are always going to be cases where the interests of the employee and the organization are aligned. I do not think it is illuminating to call that "a kind of loyalty". When I am loyal to something or someone, I will defend their interests even when doing so goes against my (other) personal interests.
Also, you're ignoring my point that certain organizations have the option of intentionally causing (via e.g. paying commissions on sales) a broad alignment of personal and organizational interests, but spy agencies (and police departments and court systems) do not.
And just because paying someone obscenely well succeeds in getting them to increase whatever source of organizational profits was increased in the Libor scandal does not mean that paying Snowden obscenely well would have succeeded in getting him to ignore the broad public-policy implications of Prism and such (or paying a cop obscenely well would succeed in stopping him from brutalizing people under his power or stopping him from doing other things against the long-term interests of his department).
Finally, since Hacker News (measured in the scores of my previous comments of this nature) does not value long series of back-and-forths, this will probably be my last response in this thread.
"Dog eat dog liberalism" is something quite different to what we have nowadays. I understand liberalism as something close to a free market.
Now, western countries have everything but free markets. Here in Europe, social insurance and pension plans are state controlled and therefore monopolistic.
Banks all over the world have legal privileges that wouldn't exist in free markets.
Central banks are "calibrating" the interest rates everywhere in the world with India and Argentina already on the brink of hyperinflation.
Yet we call the current system liberal (or capitalist) and we don't like the current system, therefore we call it dog-eat-dog liberalism and want to end capitalism.
I wholeheartedly disagree with the author's point of view on this.
My point was that we don't have "3 generations of economic liberalism" (last paragraph) nor do we have anything even remotely close, see my first comment.
If you get hit with a pay wall to read this article, just Google "spy_kids_nsa_surveillance_next_generation" and you should get the article as the first result. Then you can read it from there.
Thanks, Charles - for what is both an interesting take on the NSA's coming recruitment crisis and the best short range forecast of the evolution of Western culture I have yet to read.
As I noted on Reddit, at the very least you nailed your description of Gen Y. I was listening to featured-in-anime German-Japanese metal music just this morning ;-)!
We have HN whitelisted from the paywall, so if you click through from the link on this page you shouldn't see the paywall as long as you don't have any extensions that hide your referrer.
If that's not the case, would you mind dropping me an email with your browser/version? tim.showers@foreignpolicy.com
My mistake, the large subscription popup that appears on page load appeared to be a paywall to me. It does allow you to exit from it, though it had me a bit confused.
Ah, I can see how that would be confusing. That's a one time thing (cookie based, so if you clear or use private browsing you'll see it more often).
Thanks for the update, HN traffic is valuable to us and often generates interesting discussion, so I want to ensure that the paywal is disabled for it =).
I got the modal subscribe/login window also, though I don't immediately see anything to click to make it go away (without messing around in Firebug).
The current browser I'm using is Firefox 23.0.1 on OS X. My UA string is Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:23.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/23.0
Thanks for speaking up. That's one of the great things about HN - primary sources standing by!
> The public perception of America [...] is diametrically opposed to the secretive practices of the surveillance state. [...] And when that happens, we see public servants who remain loyal to the abstract ideals conclude that the institution itself is committing treason.
How amateurish and infantile of them. Yes finally Stross gets to the point but notice that the institution is not really committing treason, it only those misbehaved idealistic young morons who conclude that. I guess I shouldn't expect anything more from FP
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".