NSA and Surveillance: Do we still feel the same now?
I recently had a debate about the need for surveillance and the role of the NSA. Listen as Steve Doocy with Fox News- Fox and Friends - leads the debate.
By: Morgan Wright
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NSA and Surveillance: Do we still feel the same now? - Video
DOKU NG Inside Die NSA 2014 YouTube
By: Dokumentatoin 2015
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DOKU NG Inside Die NSA 2014 YouTube - Video
The National Security Agency has a recruiting problem.
Rocked by the Edward Snowden disclosures and facing stiff competition for top talent from high-paying Silicon Valley firms, the nation's cyber spy agency is looking to recruit a new generation of college hackers and tech experts. And through one new program, the agency is cultivating students as young as eighth grade.
The man the NSA has turned to for help solving its recruiting problem is an avuncular 32-year NSA veteran named Steven LaFountain, who has been tasked with building up a "cyber curriculum" for tech-savvy students at 20 to 25 American universitiesand making sure a steady flow of top minds continues to go to work for the nation's technical surveillance agency. Officially, its known as the Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations program.
Recently, CNBC sat down with LaFountain in a conference room at NSA's National Cryptologic Museum, next to the agency's sprawling headquarters in Ft. Meade, Maryland, to talk about recruiting in the post-Snowden era.
What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.
CNBC: So explain the impact of the Edward Snowden disclosures on your ability to recruit.
LaFountain: Actually, I don't think it's been damaging to our ability to recruit talent, in that many of the students that I talk to, anyway, that I interact with, they're interested in the tech. They're not bothered by, let's say, the politics of things like that. They're interested in the technology. They want to get into cybersecurity. They want to learn what we do here.
CNBC: How do you prevent yourself from being the guy who recruits the next Edward Snowden?
LaFountain: That's a good question. We have other processes security process that look into backgrounds and polygraphs and all that, and hopefully that will prevent that. You know, when I'm recruiting, I'm looking for the technical talent. I'm looking for the people that have the right mind-set, that question things. That don't just say, 'That's how it's supposed to work, so it works that way.' You've got to question: 'How can I get it to do things it's not supposed to do?' That's really what the whole cybersecurity business is about.
CNBC: Post-Snowden, the analysis was that part of the challenge for the NSA was that this generation of technologically-savvy students shares a different ideology than previous generations of boomers and Gen-Xers. These young folks today are much more libertarian, they're much more of the information-wants-to-be-free mind-set. Are you finding a different mind-set among the 20-somethings that you're recruiting now?
CNBC: So what you do at work stays at work?
LaFountain: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. A lot of our people still have their own home systems. They've got to keep it to what they're allowed to do on their home systems.
And actually, if I can, I'd also like to mention we've created a new program just this past summer. We've come to the realization that we need to reach back further than college to get kids interested in cybersecurity. A lot of studies show that by the eighth or ninth grade, kids are either turning to STEM or they're turning off from the STEM fields. And so we want to want to get more of them interested cyberspace. So just this summer, in partnership with the National Science Foundation, we created a program we're calling "Gen-cyber," sponsoring cyber-related summer camps for middle and high school students and teachers around the country. We call this our prototype year. We had six camps. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive. One of our camps had 172 high school students in it. I visited the camp; I talked to about 25 students. Every one of them said, 'This is great. It's better than I expected. Can't wait to come back next year.'
CNBC: What do they do in these camps?
LaFountain: What we ask the camps to do to start out is just to give students the fundamental awareness of cybersecurity so they understand the threats that are out there on the Internet and basic things that they should do to protect themselves. Some of the camps did some more technical things. Some did introduction to secure programming. Another program did an introduction to wireless networking and wireless security. And the students are really, really into it.
CNBC: Those were eighth-graders?
LaFountain: Those students were 10th-graders that did the wireless, but it was kind of cool. Because they had all this equipment, and they did a wireless scavenger hunt, so they had backpacks using the little antennas coming out of the backpack. They're going around this college campus trying to find these rogue access points that had been set up. So it really was just giving them a good introduction to that technology, which is an important technology today. So that's a program we hope to grow in the coming years. To eventually reach out to all 50 states, I hope.
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CNBC: How many students do you think you need to pull into the NSA in order to keep the pipeline flowing?
LaFountain: My estimate would be for the specific skill areas that I'm trying to build, it's in the small hundreds. And that's why you know in our program we intend to keep the number of schools fairly small. We're thinking maybe 20, 25 schools will be enough to provide the pipeline of students that we need.
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Meet the NSA's hacker recruiter
Israeli Intelligence Whistleblowers Expose Israel #39;s NSA Scandal (1/2)
James Bamford, author of The Shadow Factory, discusses the 43 refuseniks in Israel #39;s Unit 8200 (NSA equivalent) who object to spying on ordinary Palestinians...
By: VisionLiberty
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Israeli Intelligence Whistleblowers Expose Israel's NSA Scandal (1/2) - Video