--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: ignition-point@majordomo.pobox.com X-Sender: believer@telepath.com Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 09:31:49 -0600 To: believer@telepath.com From: believer@telepath.com Subject: IP: Uncle Sam Wants Spooks. Mime-Version: 1.0 Sender: owner-ignition-point@majordomo.pobox.com Precedence: list Reply-To: believer@telepath.com Status: U Source: Wired http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/15816.html Uncle Sam Wants Spooks by Arik Hesseldahl 4:00 a.m.26.Oct.98.PST With the Cold War over and United States intelligence agencies in flux, both the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency have begun to struggle with an issue plaguing the private sector: how to hire and retain talented employees. In a world that increasingly uses computer networks to communicate and transfer information, the agencies are specifically looking for people who can navigate the Net and other networks. The CIA launched the most ambitious hiring program in the agency's history earlier this year, and it is expected to hire record numbers of case officers between now and 2005. Along with a new, Java-heavy recruiting section on the agency's home page, the agency is advertising widely in magazines like The Economist and recruiting on college campuses and within the military. "Our recruiting efforts are much more focused than they have been in recent years and we have a better idea of our target audience," said CIA spokeswoman Anya Gilsher. "We're facing increasingly difficult challenges like terrorism, mass destructive weapons, and narcotics. These are all very difficult targets, which require innovative approaches and a talented work force." Computer programmers and engineers are as in demand in the intelligence business as they are in any other industry, Gilsher said. "We're looking for people who can deal with different computer systems and software. Someone who is creative in their ability to handle and manipulate information technology and build programs that could be useful to us," she said. While Gilsher would not go into specifics, an article in The New York Times in June suggests that the proliferation of computer networks around the globe has, for example, complicated the ability of agents to slip in and out of countries covertly using fake passports. It's a different story for the National Security Agency, the country's super-secret signals intelligence agency. In an unusually candid series of answers to written questions, the NSA said it is struggling with one of the same issues plaguing the private sector: employee retention. A recent article in the magazine Government Executive said the agency is suffering a "brain drain," losing some of its best code-makers and code-breakers to the private sector. In a written statement, NSA spokesman Patrick Weadon confirmed that the agency is working harder than it has in the past to attract and keep its employees. "NSA, like most of the nation's IT community, has had significant challenges in hiring and retaining IT personnel," Weadon wrote. "Having said that, NSA has been successful attracting computer professionals with the stimulating nature of the work, student programs, and the total benefits package." The NSA also happens to be the country's single-biggest employer of mathematicians, and expects to hire more than 100 Ph.D.-level mathematicians in the next three years. Like the CIA, the NSA has launched a recruitment Web page, which has attracted 20 percent of its recent resumes. The NSA also posts its job openings on employment Web sites like Job Web and Career Mosaic. The agency has been aggressively marketing itself to students, offering several internship programs. One program gives college juniors 12 weeks of summer work experience, after which they return to school for their senior year with a job offer in hand. Another program allows college students to alternate working for the agency and going to school each semester. Some personnel also qualify for a fully funded graduate studies program, during which they can go to school full time for a year and still earn a salary, provided they commit to work for NSA for three years. NSA employees aren't likely to take jobs for the money, however. Computer science jobs at the NSA pay between US$35,000 and $70,000 a year, much less than in the private sector. "IT professionals seek out the NSA due to the unique nature of our work," Weadon wrote. "This has made us successful in attracting computer professionals over the past several years, and we believe this appeal will continue into the future." Not everyone agrees. Steve Aftergood, a research analyst for the Federation of American Scientists, said the allure of working in the intelligence community is wearing thin. "The intelligence agencies have an unattractive air about them," Aftergood said. "They have an aura of failure about them, especially in recent years. Rightfully or wrongly, they have been attacked as incompetent and even obsolete. Those charges may or may not be true, but they cast a long shadow over the agencies in the public mind." In recent years, the CIA has faced its share of problems within and criticisms from without. This year, for example, the agency was criticized for not having predicted nuclear weapons tests by India and Pakistan. In 1994, CIA employee Aldrich Ames was caught after revealing the identities of CIA operatives in the Soviet Union over the course of nine years. For its part, the NSA has been criticized for its efforts to keep strong encryption systems out of the hands of private citizens. Both the CIA and NSA still maintain a technological edge over the private sector, but Aftergood said that lead is shrinking. "The reality is that the private sector now competes in many areas that used to be the exclusive domain of the intelligence agencies," he said, citing encryption, computer software implementation, and analysis of foreign military and economic conditions as examples. The schools that train the spies and intelligence analysts of the future are placing a new importance on learning to use the Net and other online resources to get the job done. Robert Heibel, director of the Research/Intelligence Analyst Training Program at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania, said students get a thorough exposure to the Net and computers in general. The program trains students to "drink from the firehose," to glean important nuggets of information as tools for decision makers, Heibel said. Graduates of the program have gone on to become analysts for the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies swimming in the intelligence community's alphabet soup, he said. "We teach a concept called open source and public domain intelligence -- that is, taking what is in the public domain and creating new knowledge by analysis and interpretation," he said. "If you spend 20 percent of your intelligence budget on open source intelligence you'll be able to answer 70 percent of the boss's questions." Applying for a job with the CIA is easy: Send a resume. The CIA scans the resumes it gets using optical character recognition technology. An applicant for either agency must also submit to a thorough background investigation, a polygraph test, and medical and psychological examinations, said Gilsher, who went through the process herself. The process currently takes five to six months, but the agency is hoping to shorten that to three or four months, she said. Copyright © 1994-98 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved. ---------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- **************************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo@majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address or (un)subscribe ignition-point-digest email@address **************************************************** www.telepath.com/believer **************************************************** --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'