NSA Recruitment Drive Goes Horribly Wrong 530
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian is running a story about a recent recruitment session held by the NSA and attended by students from the University of Wisconsin which had an unexpected outcome for the recruiters. 'Attending the session was Madiha R Tahir, a journalist studying a language course at the university. She asked the squirming recruiters a few uncomfortable questions about the activities of NSA: which countries the agency considers to be 'adversaries', and if being a good liar is a qualification for getting a job at the NSA.' Following her, others students started to put NSA employees under fire too. A recording of the session is available on Tahir's blog."
Re:come on (Score:5, Interesting)
Obligatory Good Will Hunting (Score:5, Interesting)
Good Will Hunting [youtube.com]
Skimmed and didn't see anybody else posting it. Kinda surprising.
Re:look at the Guardian photo (Score:2, Interesting)
Not only is Obama fully responsible for the current NSA actions and keeping them secret, he lied during his campaign when he promised to end such abuses.
Obama is "fully responsible" for a program Dubya put in place [theregister.co.uk]? Partisan much?
Re:come on (Score:5, Interesting)
The Stasi weren't just doing their job, and they weren't just cops.
The Stasi secret police were in effect Communist activists suppressing speech, religion, political opposition, political organization, and anything else that was deemed opposition to the communist one-party regime. They were an instrument of totalitarian rule.
Which was their job.
Re:Dumbasses (Score:2, Interesting)
But if an NSA actually wants to protect America from very real threats, he gets his life destroyed. And NSA job works best if you have no morals or conscience.
Wow, brave girl (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Normally I don't reply to ACs (Score:5, Interesting)
That is a question to ask NSA public affairs, not HR recruiters.
What these HR recruiters were doing in this context constitutes public relations. If they do not have answers to these questions, perhaps they should not be placed in a position in which they might have to answer them. If the NSA does not want to field uncomfortable questions, perhaps they should terminate their wholesale lawbreaking operation.
Re:come on (Score:4, Interesting)
We are a nation of laws
Used to be. What use are those laws when the NSA simply breaks them? What use is congressional oversight when the NSA simply lies to them?
Welcome to 1968 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Normally I don't reply to ACs (Score:5, Interesting)
Your perspective is that of an adult who is able to deal with reality. Those complaining that it's somehow "not nice" to expect real answers from people who are our servants and routinely act against our interests have some serious growing up to do. If everything the NSA did were acceptable and beneficial, these wouldn't be "uncomfortable" questions. It just can't be that hard to understand.
We're being transformed into a nation of pussies who can't deal with reality unless it's brought down to a child's emotional level, dumbed down to about a 5th-grade reading level (not a joke - the media targets this), condensed into 10-second sound bites to suit the prevailing attention span, spoon-fed, and guaranteed never to offend the most irrational and overreactive among us.
You can blame Wall Street, megacorps, sociopaths in government, and the like, but those are opportunists who saw a weakness and ruthlessly exploited it. The truth is, the nation is losing its prosperity because it is no longer worthy of it. For all the people who like to put on a big show this time of year concerning how fashionably patriotic they are, so few are actually looking for the root of our problems.