Defense subcontractor posted a job listing for XKEYSCORE 2 weeks ago

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/01/is-xkeyscore-still-active-defense-contractor-posted-a-job-listing-for-it-2-weeks-ago/

by steveklabnik • 13 years ago

132 99 13 years ago

washingtonpost.com

ToothlessJake3• 13 years ago

SAIC is also running domestic surveillance, currently having a facility in Oakland built[1]. The facility is currently being funded by the DHS, being built while no privacy controls or data retention policies are known.

This is an ongoing trend of the names most know as being involved in national level surveillance actively involved on the state and local level too. Another case is Booz Allen Hamilton's processing of digital forensics for local law enforcement via federal funds[2].

Yea, no chance for conflict of interests when firms granted immunity, having access to the world's data, are involved in 'petty' things like domestic surveillance/forensics to assist in prosecutions of the wire-tapped non-immunes.

This is an absolutely horrific trend that must be halted, as in halting literal construction.

[1] http://oaklandwiki.org/Domain_Awareness_Center [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6014168

beatpanda• 13 years ago

Is it legal to deny people employment based on their having worked on projects like this?

btilly• 13 years ago

What I have been told is that as long as it is not a protected status, you can discriminate on it.

Having worked for companies you don't like doing things you don't like is generally not protected, so I personally doubt that you would get into trouble in not hiring from people who were contractors.

However there may be exceptions. For example if you do contract work with the federal government then http://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/factsheets/vetright... applies and you would probably not be allowed to discriminate against veterans who had worked on these projects.

If in doubt, as always, hire a lawyer.

tptacek• 13 years ago

Yes, it absolutely is.

sneak4• 13 years ago

Not snark, but how do you figure? I'm curious.

bennyg3• 13 years ago

Meet Bob. Bob got a job working on a random system through an NSA subcontractor. After several weeks on the job, and having gone through rigorous training, Bob was starting to feel uneasy with the work requirements and amount of details he knew. Bob had a TopSecret clearance however, and couldn't tell anyone - not even his wife. After a few more weeks, he decided to try his luck at another employer. Bob was damn good too, one of the best in his field - he was guaranteed a job anywhere for competitive pay.

Except word got out about Bob's employer - and specifically the subsystems Bob was responsible for implementing. After the negative press, the NSA didn't renew Bob's company's contract which forced said company to let Bob go. That's okay, Bob thought, he had enough experience in the field, right? Everywhere Bob looked was disgusted at his previous job and the moral choices his superiors' superiors made. But they took it out on Bob. Bob was never offered a job anywhere for close to the amount of money and psychological income he had at his former job.

Must suck to be Bob.

crazygringo• 13 years ago

Great illustration of a great point.

iskander• 13 years ago

After several weeks on the job...Bob had a TopSecret clearance.

Top Secret clearance usually takes a few months. I'm comfortable with a world in which someone who worked for an NSA subcontractor for several months being stuck with menial employment for the rest of their days. Sometimes it pays to have ethics.

peterkelly4• 13 years ago

If I were interviewing Bob, and he told me that he left because he felt morally uncomfortable with the job, he would earn considerable respect from me. In this case, it would not be a barrier to hiring, and in fact I would be glad to have someone on staff who is principled in such a manner.

rmc3• 13 years ago

"You can't quit, No-one else will hire you, you're poisoned for good now, you might as well do all the grey-ethical stuff now" could be the new line for manipulative slimey NSA managers to use against their employees now.

bilbo0s• 13 years ago

[If it were ILLEGAL], the company doing the hiring would just give a different reason for declining you.

"We found a better qualified candidate."

"We decided to go with the internal candidate."

or, and this one is ironclad in the case of these sorts of contractors...

"We can't meet your salary expectations."

This type of government contractor generally makes FAR more than most companies would be willing to pay.

In any case, they don't need to tell you that it's because you worked for BAH for instance.

D9u2• 13 years ago

In the past I've been told that I'm "over qualified." (completely ridiculous)

rmc3• 13 years ago

Sure, they can claim that's the reason why they didn't hire you. But if you can show in court that that wasn't their actual reason, and the actual reason for not hiring you was illegal, then yes, you can win.

javert2• 13 years ago

All American technologists are supporting the surveillance state, indirectly but tangibly. Would you ask all of us to give up our careers and skills completely?

There is no point in sacrificing yourself when there is nothing to actually be gained by doing so.

If somebody could organize a general strike of enough of the civillian workforce (especially engineers) until the NSA is banned, that would be worthwile. If a few of us quit sporadically, there will be no gain; it will just be a loss.

So, I wouldn't blame the individual engineers that work in the defense industry and end up contributing to these projects more directly. Nor do I blame the poor folk who end up getting a job screening me at the TSA checkpoint (violating the 4th Amendment is literally their job), though I used to be mad at them. We are all victims. Collective action could accomplish something, but individually, we only each have one life to live; we can't just throw it away for nothing in return.

MrMan2• 13 years ago

"GIVE ME LIBERTY, OR, well whatever you've got, I am fine with whatever."

sneak4• 13 years ago

All American technologists are supporting the surveillance state, indirectly but tangibly.

Technically, all American taxpayers are.

kintamanimatt• 13 years ago

Legalities aside, the way you drain the pro-surveillance companies' talent pool dry is to be more welcoming and enticing than they are. If private businesses started discriminating based on whom qualified candidates worked for before, a whole bunch of people would effectively be forced to return to or stay with the surveillance industry.

Your idea has superficial appeal but would backfire in the real world.

antoinec• 13 years ago

Am I the only thinking that working on a project like this would be awesome ? From an engineering point of view, they offer an incredible technical challenge.

fnordfnordfnord• 13 years ago

Yeah, fascinating, stimulating, also potentially very selfish.

wavefunction• 13 years ago

There's a whole world of problems like that though, that don't involve questionable ethical practices (depending on your own personal beliefs).

Math is the language of reality, it's applicable to anything so I don't know why getting involved with these sorts of projects over just about anything else is so alluring from a technical standpoint.

frou_dh• 13 years ago

You never know, upon entering the inner sanctum, you might be the one set to work on a Microsoft Excel macro.

peterkelly4• 13 years ago

There's plenty of awesome projects out there you can work on that don't involve selling your soul to the devil.

It doesn't matter how cool a project is. If it's wrong, you have an ethical responsibility to not get involved with it.

jacquesm• 13 years ago

Am I the only thinking that working on a project like this would be awesome ?

I would hope so, but you likely are not.

The usual reasons are the mortgage and childrens education funds. Thank you for not smoking.

The defence (what a misnomer that is) industry has lots of very clever people working for it as well.

mutagen• 13 years ago

Also interesting in that the job description 'leaks' another name for a system, SKIDROWE. Some quick searches only turn up the same or similar positions for open for XKEYSCORE.

Cryptome is already on it: http://cryptome.org/2013/08/nsa-xkeyscore-saic.htm

subsystem• 13 years ago

It's pretty easy to collect large lists of these types of code names from places like linkedin. Search for code name, find new code names, repeat.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Alinkedin.com%2Fpub%2F...

8ig8• 13 years ago

These codenames are great for speculating... FOXTRAIL, TREASUREMAP, WhichHunt, HOBGOBLIN, GLOBALVIEW

iblaine• 13 years ago

Ah, I like the guy who lists his databases knowledge to include Excel & XKeyScore. Either XKeyScore is so slick that it is indistinguishable from Excel or this particular person doesn't know what a database is. Either way, that cannot be good.

cavilling_elite• 13 years ago

The irony of the Internet, just as easy to make an NSA profile as it is for a person tracking.

batbomb• 13 years ago

The cool thing is you can just [A-Z]+ most of these for your regex.

hendzen• 13 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6138205

noname1233• 13 years ago

I've been thinking about making a switch over to working for a defense contractor over start-up.

The pay seems to be better in lower cost of living area's (Washington DC metro vs. SF); job security better in BigCo like Mitre, SAIC and Booze and less competition from H1B visa holders that cannot obtain security clearance easily.

Get to work on cool technology with big scaling and parallel processing over web CRUD frameworks. Anyone has experience making the switch?

falk3• 13 years ago

Why would you want to work for a defense contractor after seeing all the awful things they do on behalf of the U.S. government? Is a little extra cash in your pocket and a little more job security worth your selling your soul to the devil?

darien• 13 years ago

maybe he wants to leak. Don't judge.

ToothlessJake3• 13 years ago

The changing of national defense to a for-profit venture that also included protecting corporations within said nation has resulted in a magnificent shift in the quality of staffing.

No longer do you have idealists willing to drive their vision of a great United States by taking a job with marginal income but great reward. You have folks like those above, who see headlines of rights abuses and think "I would like to profit off that."

Sure the quality of life is better in the locality the work is in, but only because it is built upon the lessening of quality of life for others at the expensive of said others.

Others who do not want their tax monies being driven to immunity shielded corporations who work to kill others via drones under the guise of freedom and liberty. Yes, that is SAIC[1].

[1] http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/06/14/news-saic-wins-95-mil...

eshvk• 13 years ago

What is the alternative again? Working for Facebook, Google and twitter ?

bennyg3• 13 years ago

God damn. Not all defense contractors work on the NSA spying technologies. Personally, I think it'd be cool to work on anti-missile guidance systems or fighter jet avionics.

dekz• 13 years ago

Well if the devil is the government, doing crypto for the government is surely a lot less heinous then implementing NSA bridged backdoors into Facebook backends. At least the former is more morally and legally correct.

dictum• 13 years ago

Get to work on cool technology with big scaling and parallel processing over web CRUD frameworks

It's your right to work on whatever you want, but even though I work with technology, I prefer to focus on what I'm building and its implications instead of what cool implementation details go into it.

Working on mass surveilance systems because the tools are technically exciting is akin to using molecular gastronomy to produce a portion of human feces.

eclipxe• 13 years ago

Hey, Soylent is solving a real problem, it isn't feces...

dllthomas• 13 years ago

http://www.angryflower.com/jirodr.html

bane6• 13 years ago

Yes.

I've bounced back and forth between startups in and out of the Fed space and for Fed contractor mega corps in the lean times.

Short answer: if I had the opportunity to pick up my family and move to NYC or the Bay Area and have a similar standard of living I'd probably do it tomorrow.

Long answer: job security in Fed contractor mega corps generally sucks. You can expect to have a job with the mega corp for up-to-a-year, 2 if you're lucky. Resumes in the DC area frequently go to 3 or 4 pages just listing past jobs and a couple of bullet points each let alone education or any of the other interesting things.

When the contract ends or goes elsewhere, you either get let go or are given a couple of weeks to hunt around internally for another job then are let go. Longevity in any of those companies relies heavily on cronyism and brown nosing so you might stay on the good side of management and get "offered" your next contract job in the same company. With the end of the Iraq and Afghan wars funding is getting massively cut and the sequester has had a very large impact. The same people, working in the same position, but on a new contract, from last year to this year can expect a 30-40% pay cut. I know of dozens of personal contacts who've gotten pink-slipped from the Mitres, Lockheeds, SAICs and Boozes in the last few months. There's also hundreds of smaller 10-300 person companies that sub-contract to those mega corps that might treat you a bit better.

Also, the defense contractor career progression is a mirror of military service. If you left the military as an enlisted, you probably won't ever make a senior management position. If you left in the officer ranks, you can expect to find yourself similarly positioned in senior management beneath and above people who left as officers in almost the same respective positions - it's almost farcical how bad this is.

Most contractors I know are desperate to take a pay cut and get a very stable government job at this point.

Competitive is a generous description for the work market in the DC area. It's more Machiavellian combined with Italian mobster backstabbery and unbelievably political.

The technology is also a bit behind the times (to be generous). Imagine making the kind of tech that's in the leaks, but with the state of software and hardware 5-10 years ago. It's an interesting challenge, but really takes you out of the reverse market, moving from the Fed space to the West Coast startup world is very hard.

A good compromise might be to work for a West Coast defense contractor like Palantir or Thetus...the technology is much cooler to work on in general and you get the benefits of recognition in two major employer markets. Here's a nice list of similar companies http://www.iqt.org/portfolio/ict.html

noname1233• 13 years ago

Thanks Bane for your detailed and informative reply. What you say makes a lot of sense.

It seems to be that contracting comes with a lot of job security risk due to funding variability and getting a full-time role in one of these MegaCorps or with the Feds directly comes with lots of politicking and competition since everybody wants to live off the largess of the US taxpayers.

I wish you the best in your endeavor whether that may be living off the US tax-payers or otherwise.

tcoppi• 13 years ago

For a slightly different perspective on this, I work for a very small (<25 people) defense contractor in the MD/DC area, and coming from a civilian government position, it is a breath of fresh air. The management has cultivated relationships with people in the prime contractors and government leadership that recognize that people are not commodities and that the work we do is valuable. The sequester has had very little/no effect on our work, if anything our projects and budgets are expanding.

I also have met many people that work at or formerly worked at places like SAIC, Booz etc. that hated every minute of it and described it exactly as you did, so YMMV. Also, the line of work I and my company are in is slightly "unique", so we may be somewhat insulated from the problems facing contracting at the moment. Regardless, it isn't all horrible out there, and I would much sooner switch to another contracting position or move somewhere completely different than ever take a government position again.

quantumpotato_2• 13 years ago

Ending of wars?

ZanyProgrammer• 13 years ago

I had an MI MOS in the Army, and I don't miss the invasive ness of background checks one bit. Do you want to have your past pried open to get a TS clearance? Are you ok with lie detectors and random urine tests? Do you do any illicit drugs? Are you trans? For the right kind of person, sure, but some people can't/won't subject themselves to that.

danenania• 13 years ago

Question to you and other people working or considering working for defense contractors involved in morally controversial stuff: where's the line for you? Would you help design logistics systems for a concentration camp? Is there anything you wouldn't do for a nice salary and interesting technical challenges?

northwest4• 13 years ago

That's one hell of an opportunity!

Anybody with a conscience in here? Please apply and report back!

Let's penetrate the Borg.

mindcrime• 13 years ago

I'd apply just for an opportunity to be another leaker, but there's no f%!#ng way in Hades that the feds would ever hire me. I've been WAY too outspoken in my radical anti-government / libertarian / anarcho-capitalist viewpoints and have said way too many things that would - I'm pretty sure - automatically disqualify me.

Them: "Have you ever advocated for the overthrow of the US government?"

Me: "Well... ah, I mean, errm... aah... define 'overthrow', please?"

Them: "GTFO out here."

northwest4• 13 years ago

I also guess that their recruiting methods will have been adjusted since the leaks. So if you give it a shot, be well prepared.

You might also want to try and have a friend waterboard you over a weekend, so you'll be able to answer with a very frank and firm "Absolutely NOT!" when they ask you if you would object to the next part of the recruiting process.

Balgair2• 13 years ago

My brother has a TS. He said they mostly hire Mormons. They have a clean living background and can speak the languages due to their missions. Also he said they asked a lot about being a member of the Communist Party.

gcb02• 13 years ago

And we learn the importance of commas

Defense subcontractor posted a job listing for XKEYSCORE, 2 weeks ago

Defense subcontractor posted a job listing for XKEYSCORE 2, weeks ago

D9u2• 13 years ago

When I saw the ads in my state for Booz-Allen-Hamilton jobs requiring clearance a few months ago I knew that it was spook work, but thought nothing of it at the time... (I refuse to relocate, it's telecommute or I go freelance) I wonder if Ed Snowden responded to those same advertisements?

bazillion• 13 years ago

XKEYSCORE is just a Java front-end GUI, not servers/backend databases.

jonknee2• 13 years ago

The first thing I did yesterday after seeing Snowden's leaked Powerpoint was search for mentions of XKeyscore in the past and I came across these same job postings (and copied them down since I doubted they would last).

I started compiling a database of the different programs, what's known about them, what you can do to stay off their radar, etc. Sound interesting to anyone?

Programs/tools I came across include: AGILITY, ANCHORY/MAUI, AUTOSOURCE, CONTRAOCTAVE, WISE, INFOSHARE, TREASUREMAP, TUNINGFORK, SCORPIOFORE, TAPERLAY, MAINWAY, PINWALE, Tripwire Analytic Capability, Combating Terrorism Knowledge Base (CTKB), etc. Quite a few and some of those names are Hollywood quality.

Tools that HN readers would know about that were mentioned: ArcGIS, Wireshark, IDA Pro, OLLY Dbg, Snort, Analyst Notebook.

fsck--off• 13 years ago

This article [1] also mentions finding lists of program names from LinkedIn profiles, especially this one [2].

[2] mentions:

  ANCHORY, AMHS, NUCLEON, TRAFFICTHIEF, ARCMAP, SIGNAV,
  COASTLINE, DISHFIRE, FASTSCOPE, OCTAVE/CONTRAOCTAVE,
  PINWALE, UTT, WEBCANDID, MICHIGAN, PLUS, ASSOCIATION,
  MAINWAY, FASCIA, OCTSKYWARD, INTELINK, METRICS, BANYAN,
  MARINA

The names of the programs aren't classified; if they were they would not show up on LinkedIn. What the programs actually do is classified information.

[1] http://front.kinja.com/job-networking-site-linkedin-filled-w...

[2] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jason-miller/39/741/a49

jonknee2• 13 years ago

Names are the first step though. You can collect a decent amount from them, like when things started, if they are currently in use, which companies deal with which programs, etc.

aswanson• 13 years ago

A script combing linkedin for skill solicitations that regex match ALLCAPS could probably uncover all NSA job postings. For supposed mastery of encryption/deception these fucks sure seem hamfisted in looking for employees.

zby• 13 years ago

So - do you guys apply to these jobs? We need more Snowdens!

By the way - have you guys noticed the text RMS adds to his emails recently:

  [ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider
  [ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,
  [ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example.

Defense subcontractor posted a job listing for XKEYSCORE 2 weeks ago

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