Ask HN: How would I convince my friends to not apply for the NSA? Two of my friends are interested in working for the NSA after graduating college. Does anyone on HN have a good framework / facts I could use that would help me convince the two of them that their skills would be better used elsewhere? |
Be prepared to discover that people of good will can have sharply different values than you do, for example believing that "'service to our nation' is a key priority for me", or might have sharply different estimates of the utility of joining the NSA in effecting values such as "I desire a future in which Americans continue to be afforded privacy in accordance with the intentions of the framers of the Constitution."
Do your friends value earning lots of money and not having to run their dates past their bosses for approval? If so, getting a job at Google strictly dominates working for the NSA. etc.
Maybe one of your friends feels the same way about the NSA as you do and intends to do something about it.
1) The moral/ethical/etc. concerns. I might be different from a lot of HN people, and maybe similar to your friends, in that I'm pro the foreign military/intelligence spying, but I'm anti the normal-people and service-provider spying (US or domestic). Everyone has to make their own decision there, and I personally think this is the worst argument to make, since people will either fully agree or won't ever agree.
2) Practical/personal concerns. NSA is a closed community. If you work there, there's some sharing internally, but you can't participate in the outside community. Back when NSA was the only game in town for crypto, sure, but they're certainly not the only game in computing, development, or even in exploits. Ghettoes suck. It's not good for your professional development.
3) Negative-sum/emotional. Basically, NSA is preventing bad stuff from happening by doing bad things. Working with that for your whole career is kind of shitty and depressing, and you end up locked into that forever due to #1 and #2.
I've done DOD/USG work, and actually wanted to go ROTC and NSA in college, but ended up not doing so because of these reasons (and that under Clinton, and post-cold-war, NSA/USM/USG seemed to be moving toward irrelevancy; they were technically incompetent, too. I couldn't predict 9/11.)
Some people think that's important, some people don't, some people don't view the NSA's values and behavior the same way that I do.
I think the most important thing is for your friends to think about whether or not the NSA is compatible with their ideas about the rule of law and about decent human behavior. If they can look clearly at what the NSA has done (directly, and what they've supported such as secret torture, secret prisons, indefinite secret detention without due process, drone strikes against children, etc) and say they want to help do that some more, I'm not sure anything can be done for your friends. If they were my friends, I'd tell them "goodbye", just as I would if someone I was close to wanted to join the KKK or become rapists. Once they're inside the national security system, they're unlikely to voluntarily associate with people who don't share those values, both because of the personal discomfort and because of the risk to their security clearance.