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American federal investigators are having a hard time hiring computer-savvy staff, according to a memo from the Inspector General for the US Department of Justice.
"Even as it works to expand the ranks of its cybersecurity team, the department continues to face challenges recruiting and retaining highly qualified candidates to do this work," the memo [PDF] states.
Last year the FBI got the authorization and budget to hire 134 computer scientists for online investigations. We're told the agency could only find 82 people interested in working for Uncle Sam. As a result, five of the FBI's regional 56 Cyber Task Force teams don't have a computer specialist on hand.
Why are they having so much trouble?
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US Govt Just Can't Hire Enough Cyber-Sherlocks
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Nadia Comaneci, simple perfection.
-- '76 Olympics
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2015, @08:30PM
1. Because the pay sucks and the benefits will disappear with the next Republican president?
2. Because the people who really know anything about this stuff are WAY too smart and moral to work for a 3 letter agency?
3. "The question isn't why should I work for the NSA/FBI/DNI/XXX, but rather why would I?"
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Thursday November 19 2015, @08:37PM
That and that the drudgery of working in one of their offices probably sucks worse than a regular one for people with a computer security background. I have the most inane conversations daily about people doing stupid shit because they just don't want to deal with security, and that is in a building filled CS and EE people.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2015, @08:47PM
I work with MS and Phd's and have the same experience.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday November 19 2015, @11:35PM
That's the least of it. The biggest problem is the chronic suspicion from the political hacks who manage the agencies. They're always worried you're going to rat them out, be the next Edward Snowden. They're also chronically suspicious of your competence. They are wont to demand the impossible, and when you tell them it can't be done, they don't know if you're giving it to them straight or you "could do it if you really wanted to" but you're just lazy, or maybe someone is paying you off, or you're one of those bullshit artists trying to cover up your incompetence.
And those are the good days. Where it gets really ugly is when they are trying to cover up their own incompetence. Much the same crap as above, but with additional bullying urgency, to keep you off balance. They love, love, love to slap "classified" on everything, even elementary school knowledge. "What's 2 + 2? Classified. Who was the 1st President of the United States? Classified." They will totally hamstring projects by keeping the members in the dark about things they should have been told, and cause failure. Not only does the right hand not know what the left is doing, none of the fingers know what any other finger is doing. They aren't interested in protecting national secrets near as much as covering up their mistakes and frauds, and they don't hesitate to abuse the hell out of the classification system for that end.
At least, that's what it was like working under a Republican administration. Rumsfeld's pushing for impossibly grand results from understaffed and overworked military agencies was pervasive. Many times, SEC employees turned up blatant insider trading and other criminal activities in the market, and just as they were about ready to take the offenders to court, the crony at the top would order them to stand down. Sit on it, and watch the statute of limitations run out. Any SEC employee who bucked that got fired. I heard moral was pretty low in the waning days of the Bush Administration. Presumably, things improved under Obama. But evidently the agencies still can't find people? What's the unemployment rate, still pretty high? Yeah.
You're never just an employee, you're an employee and a suspect.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday November 20 2015, @02:47AM
Just a particular case of "You're not a citizen, you are a suspect" then?
Otherwise, seems like institutionalized paranoia built on top of a cover-my-ass-is-top-priority bureaucracy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday November 19 2015, @09:21PM
- "You fall in love with the bureau, but it doesn't fall in love with you"
- The pay sucks for what you do
- A staff composed almost entirely of Catholics and Mormons (so, anger and control issues from being raised by iron-fisted patriarchs in ultra-strict households)
- The FBI is now just an army of bureaucrats, lawyers, and accountants anyway.
- Harasses political dissidents
- Need to be goody-goody two-shoes to get in
It pays much better to be an informant (some are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars), at least until the FBI decides they no longer need your services and they send you to prison for something they paid you to do. That's probably why they're so hard-up for specialists, paying all of those informants probably got too expensive and their legal department is probably wising up a bit as well. Or perhaps they're less effective at catching snitch punks like Adrian Lamo who they can turn under legal threats and plea-bargains.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Thexalon on Thursday November 19 2015, @09:23PM
Or, as Matt Damon put it in Good Will Hunting:
"Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at the N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people that I never met and that I never had no problem with get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Send in the marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number was called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes home to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's walking to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks 'cause the schrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorroids. And meanwhile he's starvin' 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure, fuck it, while I'm at it, why not just shoot my buddy, take his job and give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president."
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.