In essence gone from convicting a bunch of non-violent criminals and activists (modulo a sting operation run by a corrupt agent to convince the silk road guy to hire a non-existent assassin) to a company that helps the tobacco industry.
But I bet in the private sector they won't have to answer any awkward questions about 'so how exactly did you acquire that IP and how could you lose the source code and logs?'
Interestingly, there is not a single open engineering position on their careers page. [0] Reading the job descriptions, it seems like an extremely corporate place filled with meaningless buzzspeak. Perfect for ex-FBI!
I'm confused... I remember this story appearing a few days ago. Now it's back on the front page. That's cool, but it also says I commented on it 5 hours ago, which is just not true... this is from multiple days ago
In my comment history, it says my comment was from 2 days ago
Moderators and a small number of reviewer users comb the depths of /newest looking for stories that got overlooked but which the community might find interesting. Those go into a second-chance pool from which stories are randomly selected and lobbed onto the bottom part of the front page. This guarantees them a few minutes of attention. If they don't interest the community they soon fall off, but if they do, they get upvoted and stay on the front page.
We want to turn this system into something that's open to all users who want to take time to review stories. We'll make it a form of community service that will be a new way to earn karma. However, it's still an open question how to pull this off without simply recreating the current upvoting system under another guise.
There's one glitch that occasionally confuses people. When the software lobs a story, it displays a rolled-back timestamp—not the original submission time, but a resubmission time relative to other items on the front page. If you see a timestamp inconsistency on HN, this is probably why. Edit: if this is the kind of detail that interests you, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774614 for a more recent explanation.
It has something to do with stories being given a second chance at attention on the front page. I'm guessing a mod decided that it was good content but that it didn't receive enough attention. A side effect of this that I've seen is comments having their timestamp altered as though we've gone back in time to when the article was submitted.
As several other people have implied, I'm skeptical that these people have any familiarity with technology besides the ability to interface with the terminology in their powerpoints. It would be far more informative to know where people go after they leave the various NSA directorates. Unfortunately that takes effort, since their work experience on LinkedIn will most likely be euphemism meant to be unmanageable for outsiders.
Why? Based on my own personal experience, people doing the real work at these agencies are contractors. The government employees are bureaucrats, nothing more.
Based on my understanding of LOAC, it seems like you'd need quite a few decently competent people who are necessarily uniformed for when it comes time to run operations at the ROC. And from spending time in internships at some contractors around the fort, it seemed to me that some of those guys were probably working in those development areas too. And the guys at the research labs are certainly doing some interesting stuff; I'm sure they have contractors come in, but surely the core of those offices must be actual NSA people.
