edit: here's the obligatory "but this is blogspam" note...Kelly's employment with the NSA was first reported by the the Times here a few days ago (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/technology/silicon-valley-...)...but yeah, here's a classic case of newspaperism vs. sexy-SEO-headlines...I didn't read "Web's Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders" because it sounded no different than other recent stories...but a Facebook exec going to work for N.S.A. is definitely a headline-worthy fact.
However, Kelly isn't the stereotypical young Bay Area millionaire ex-Facebooker...he previously worked as an FBI analyst before joining Facebook (https://twitter.com/wrox/status/1699420309)...So going from FBI to Facebook to NSA isn't as strange as, well, going from college to Facebook to NSA, unless the catered lunch at NSA is classified and delicious. Not knowing why he left Facebook...but after doing so, it's not out of left field to go back into federal security, especially if he had a NDA with Facebook not to go to other competing services, such as Google.
This is a problem I've had submitting some academic papers as well. Usually if I was tempted to submit at all, there is a specific angle I think might be interesting to HN, which may not be the same one in the title. Maybe I'm wrong sometimes, but I think it would at least make more sense to give me 5-10 words to explain what I think is interesting about a particular submission from an HN perspective, essentially, "why are you submitting this?".
But since HN is hostile towards "custom" titles, the explanation of why you're submitting has to be contained entirely in the original title text. That results in implicitly favoring articles from sources that start without an impedance mismatch, so to speak: places where the titles are already pre-targeted specifically to appeal to our demographic, maybe even to HN specifically, and often written with that SEO purpose in mind. That results in a fairly narrow range of sources, and at least partly explains the success of HN-targeted media like TechCrunch here.
The end result, as you note, is that a policy against sensationalizing titles actually ends up rewarding sources that sensationalize their titles.
This a very good point. I wish the policy were more to fix bad titles rather than ones that are merely different from the source's. It would be a lot harder to do, and there would be differences of opinion most of the time, but the current policy (at least in implementation) is just taking the lazy way out.
I really appreciate your edits here and digging enough to put this story into proper context. It seemed like one of those stories meant to gin up outrage and get the conspiracy theories going and it pretty much ended up just like that.
There are people from all walks of life from all sorts of industries who end up at the NSA. It doesn't mean they're all setting up systems and bringing back intel for spying. This is just a coincidence.
So I'm glad you brought this up but still think everyone is still going to play right into this article's trap. After all, conspiracy theories are much more satisfying to our egos than mundane reality.
While I don't consider this a huge revelation or issue, dismissing the employment of the former cso of the greatest private intelligence source in history by the greatest intelligence consumer in history as coincidence without a second thought is hopelessly naive. If you dismiss anything vaguely conspiratorial as a "conspiracy theory" out of hand you'd dismiss pretty much every active intelligence program we have.
An executive of one of the US's largest private social graph repositories ends up working for the largest US spy agency known for maintaining their own "Big Ass Graph (BAG)" for many years longer* and it's "just a coincidence"?!
Let me guess - NSA couldn't find anyone else who knew how to manage Hadoop.
Just because readers join the dots to reveal a conspiracy picture, doesn't mean the picture isn't convincing or removed from reality or designed to satisfy egos.
Just a coincidence you say?
The fact is, Kelly said "There isn't enough information shared". Okay... so he clearly believes more information should be shared between Facebook and the NSA. Now he has gone to work for the NSA. 1 + 1 = 2.
It's gone beyond "theory" and is now simply playing out like a documentary in real time.
It's not really a coincidence that political influence in the security department at FaceBook is going to be seen as an asset by an organization interested in gaining access to FaceBook's data.
The issue is that FB has many ex.gov employees - they are showing a long history of this, with what appears to also be a revolving door policy between both parties.
At this point, as has long been suspected, the word of FB cannot be believed in any respect with relation to any users' personal privacy.
Even seeing the supposed interface between FB and the USG - the station of the employees within/without are highly in question.
The relationship between these groups is very obvious.
Gets orders from FBI to set up something at Facebook. Goes to FB and sets it up. Goes to NSA to train a team to handle/store/query the data stream he set up.
One of the problems with all this crap is being able to draw clear lines between conspiracy and bureaucracy.
I don't believe there is a secret group trying to build the IT infrastructure to subvert democracy and throw us into re-education camps a la Pol Pot version 2013.
However, the bureaucracy is essentially building that very same system regardless of which administration is "in charge".
Very good point. Bureaucracy does tend to lead us down certain roads not originally intended by those who set up the bureaucratic systems.
Conspiracy is a way to draw attention to those bureaucratic failings, otherwise ignored as too hard, or too boring to think about. Which might mean "conspiracy" itself is an important process deserving more respect if it's the only way to shine a light on imperfect bureaucracy.
Realizing that someone might have sympathies towards people they worked with in the past, and might look forward to future employment with them, and that this might affect their decisionmaking when they're asked to do something ethically borderline, is a far cry from "Area 51".
Are you at all worried about a revolving door between the defense/security bureaucracy and industry, the way someone like Eisenhower was? Or is that a non-issue?
That's the kind of discussion I'd rather have anyway. I don't have any particular reason to believe any specific person is compromised or dishonest. But I am skeptical of the stability and reliability of an employment structure that has regular back-and-forth personnel moves between the private sector and the state-security sector.
If I had to pick specific places to start, I'll admit, ex-Facebook staff would be much lower on my list than a whole host of private-sector (tempted to say "nominally private-sector") defense contractors.
Whenever I read a discussion about "the revolving door problem" I never see any serious discussion of an alternative. Would you prefer an enormous monoculture inside of the government because they cannot hire people from the private sector? Any system that enforced a waiting period between government IT job to private sector IT job would essentially end someone's career.
I think it would be more honest and open to have the government working via people actually in the government, yes. That would be more amenable to developing some kind of oversight and some policies. When someone spends their whole career in the NSA, at least you can plan for that. When someone is moving back and forth between the NSA and Booz Allen Hamilton, I think you only complicate any accountability.
Perhaps it does raise the likelihood of defections, as this case indicates, which is one possible safety valve. But those are not supposed to be part of the planned-for strategy.
I have a similar viewpoint on using private military contractors like Blackwater, rather than regular career military staff. I think once you start outsourcing these kinds of security jobs, you are just weakening oversight, both formal oversight and any attempt to develop a culture of rule-following. Not to mention the ethical problems that come from having people who are literally mercenaries working for your armed forces.
There is actually already a lot of law and regulation that deals with what types of functions contractors working for government are allowed to do.
IMHO the government far overstepped those lines during Bush and have failed to come back under Obama, as that would mean taking on civil servant headcount to replace the contractors leaving, which is politically a hot potato.
Unfortunately the people only rarely expect and demand less service from the government; instead they want the government to stop all the stuff that they don't personally use. So of course this means that the government rarely stops with a given function entirely.
The military ended up with the same problem. The draft would not be politically feasible and you only get to go to war with "the Army you've got, not the Army you'd wished you had". What the Army did have was money, and so they farmed out everything they could make even a half-hearted case as being a "generic business function" (e.g. building security) off on private contractors.
And that's even with the Navy drawing down on its already-undermanned force to send sailors to Iraq and Afghanistan to free up even more soldiers to do Army-type things.
I am confused, I thought we were discussing "the revolving door problem." From the outset your comment seems to be concerned with the government's use of private contractors.
In the grand scheme of things, you've got three crappy choices:
1) No regulation. I.e. the moneyed corporations do whatever they want.
2) Regulation, staffed by professional bureaucrats. Less conflict of interest, but that results in a bureaucracy that has no idea what industry needs. This describes a lot of European countries before the liberalizations of the 1980's and 1990's.
3) Regulation, staffed by people from industry. Creates conflicts of interest, but you have people who actually know what they're doing.
I guess I don't really buy the characterization of #2/#3. Where I live (Denmark) is mostly still staffed by professional bureaucrats, and they are generally quite far-sighted. So I don't get the view that they are somehow out of touch. Their job is to organize a bureaucracy to serve the public needs, which includes balancing several competing interests. The system should serve everyone equally and fairly: it should enable business; it should protect the poor; it should advance science and knowledge; and it should maintain social stability. That's not easy, but one can make a go of it.
Meanwhile, I have absolutely no confidence that the people from industry "actually know what they're doing", especially in a broad sense of knowing how to balance all those interests, rather than just maximize profits. The purpose of government is not just to make Maersk or Carlsberg richer, but to make the country as a whole prosper, which includes thinking about things like income inequality and scientific progress. Do the people in industry think about those? Usually, no. I tend to think of them (perhaps unfairly) as mostly being comprised of opportunists trying to line their pockets, while telling us all that they're acting in "our" interests (i.e. the stock-market's interests). I have much more confidence in the civil service than in the idea that we should just put all the Maersk managers in charge of the country.
FYO: Ridicule does not constitute a counter-argument. It's now useless to suppose that Fed spooks and SV corps have not had a long and cozy relationship. (Which it is not necessary to suppose for anyone who's followed the news for a few years.)
Just to be clear, you're mocking someone as a tin foil hat type conspiracy theorist for implying the government and facebook have employees who work together to share information...
This is a brilliant move on his part. He knows the FB architecture and security apparatus, and he is going to contributing immensely to NSA's endeavors on how to effectively data-mine social media aggregates. Not to mention the relationship he's already built with the FB alumni. He'll have enough clout to influence decisions over there.
Yes...just as "NATION MAKES PREPARATIONS TO TRANSITION FROM STATE OF PEACE" is less clickworthy than "WAR" :)
(yes, I know I just invoked Godwin's law by comparing the NSA controversy with WW2, but it was tongue-in-cheek)
His reasons for leaving Facebook and joining NSA may be completely orthogonal to each other...but in terms of likeliness, I think it's safe to argue that Kelly was wanted for his experience in security implementations in modern day networks, rather than him having a mid-life crisis and deciding to quit tech management work to try his hand at code cracking.
That said, this doesn't mean he joined out of nefarious motives. His work at the FBI could mean that he honestly believes he is doing God's work in helping government and private tech companies become partners for the good of all. His use at the NSA may be as someone who smooths out any hurdles that are encountered during perfectly legal processes between the two institutions...it doesn't have to be that he's Chief-Backdoor-Installer at the NSA.
On the other hand, just because you have great intentions doesn't mean the result is ideal...many government officials who become lobbyists may sincerely believe in their cause, but their access and power leads to unintended consequences.
In other words, the job transition could be entirely good natured, but it still could result in some people's worst fears being realized. So more transparency in this example would be nice...though I wonder how much Kelly can say without encroaching upon what the government thinks of as being top-secret-classified.
Maybe there isn't a plan to infiltrate existing big-data companies, but it seems like an awful coincidence that we see things like the above link and the headlines of today.
Given that the first $500 million of Facebook investment came from In-Q-Tel, a CIA company that invests in deep data mining systems, it isn't hard to wonder whether Facebook's security officer could have been an employee of the NSA all along.
Please ignore what I said, I was posting something I grabbed of somewhere without verifying first. In-Q-Tel never made any public investment in Facebook. The only connections that exist are the following:
Facebook received $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel, whose manager, James Breyer, now sits on the In-Q-Tel board. He was formerly the chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, whose board included Gilman Louie, then the CEO of In-Q-Tel.
One of the main managers of the facebook investors "Greylock partners", Howard Cox, sits also in the management board of In-Q-Tel. The offices of Greylock and In-Q-Tel are direclty next to each other at Sandhill Road in Menlo Park.
For context you should mention that total historical portfolio of Accel and Greylock includes hundreds of companies. So the conspiracy theory would have to map to Diapers.com or Rovio.
edit: here's the obligatory "but this is blogspam" note...Kelly's employment with the NSA was first reported by the the Times here a few days ago (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/technology/silicon-valley-...)...but yeah, here's a classic case of newspaperism vs. sexy-SEO-headlines...I didn't read "Web's Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders" because it sounded no different than other recent stories...but a Facebook exec going to work for N.S.A. is definitely a headline-worthy fact.
However, Kelly isn't the stereotypical young Bay Area millionaire ex-Facebooker...he previously worked as an FBI analyst before joining Facebook (https://twitter.com/wrox/status/1699420309)...So going from FBI to Facebook to NSA isn't as strange as, well, going from college to Facebook to NSA, unless the catered lunch at NSA is classified and delicious. Not knowing why he left Facebook...but after doing so, it's not out of left field to go back into federal security, especially if he had a NDA with Facebook not to go to other competing services, such as Google.