Really struggling with what to think of the NSA/phone story

Teufel said:
Here's my question. It seems this guy was a high school drop out, got his GED, unsuccessfully tried out for the Special Forces, and got a job doing information assurance (ironic) with the NSA. He was there for three months as a Booz Allen contractor and was given all sorts of access to stuff. Is anyone else bothered by how underqualified this guy seems for that job and how quickly this dick bag was given access to our nation's secrets? It seemed like it took an act of congress for me to get my clearance but this guy waltzes in off of a failed interview at McDonalds into a 200,000 dollar job as the IA manager (i.e. the guy who pesters everyone to turn in their Information Assurance online training certificates and maintains a roster of said certificates) for a top secret facility????
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A lot of federal IT jobs are on 'special pay rates', above locality pay. If you show up and work at it; you get along fairly well without a lot of formal IT training.
 
SOWT said:
I wonder if he actually made 200K/year; he's lied about the rest of his life.
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Database Admins with the FAA make above 100k with zero clearance and that's before locality pay. I once saw a posting for a janitor with a TS to work on one of the missile ranges in the south Pacific. 60k for 6 months' work.

200k for a stateside job that require a TS? Possible I guess, but then that puts them in line with the going rate for working overseas. Also, the IA guy isn't exactly a "high end" type IT job. Honestly, most IA types I've met were...well, I wouldn't allow them to work a Help Desk if I were their boss. I find them to have a lot of authority but generally lacking in real skill sets. Admin and regulation types, but not IT-oriented.
 
lindy said:
Watch out FF...I think your salary is showing. :p
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An IT/ electronics guy on the right contract OR with a ton of overtime OR who has been with his company for a long time can make over 200k in a year, but their salary range is less than that. My company does have a generator mechanic/ Power Pro guy who made 220k one year through a combination of the above. He managed to blow most of it on hookers and leading several different lives, but that's another story...
 
Since this went down, I haven't heard anything in the news about the IRS scandal...

Coincidence? :hmm:
 
Freefalling said:
An IT/ electronics guy on the right contract OR with a ton of overtime OR who has been with his company for a long time can make over 200k in a year, but their salary range is less than that. My company does have a generator mechanic/ Power Pro guy who made 220k one year through a combination of the above. He managed to blow most of it on hookers and leading several different lives, but that's another story...
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My "like" for your post was related to the above underlined. I've got to respect anyone that can waste that much money. Paris Hilton excluded...

EDIT: I'm not justifying pay rates, but a TS/SCI with poly can be hard to find sometimes. That may be some of the employer's justification for a "overly" high pay rate.
 
I think we can all agree that privatizing the federal work force probably isn't a money saver like it was promised. Contracting should never be a permanent employment solution.
 
Another mainstream media agency questioning the left wing (Guardian) bullshit:

Now that the dust has settled after the Edward Snowden affair, it’s time to ask some tough questions about The Guardian’s scoop of the week. Snowden’s story is that he dropped a $200,000 a year job and a (very attractive) girlfriend in Hawaii for a life in hiding in Hong Kong in order to expose the evils of the NSA's Prism programme. But bits of the story are now being questioned.

1. Why did he go to China? It was always an odd aspect of his plan that he should choose as his refuge from tyranny a totalitarian state that happily spies on its own people and imprisons dissenters. True, Hong Kong itself has a tradition of resistance to dictatorship, but it also has a treaty with the US that would make it relatively easy for America to extradite their guy back. Perhaps Snowden simply has the worst lawyers in history?

2. Snowden’s backstory is not entirely accurate. Booz Allen says that his salary was 40 per cent lower than thought and a real estate agent says that his house in Hawaii was empty for weeks before he vamoosed. Does the fact that he only worked for three months with Booz Allen and the NSA suggest he was planning a hit and run all along – that he took the job with the NSA with the intention of stealing the documents?

3. The administration is pushing back on the definition of what Prism actually is – that it’s not a snooping programme but a data management tool. The call logging accusations are pretty much beyond doubt (and reason enough to scream Big Brother) but the Prism angle is a little less clear. Extremetech points out that it is a programme that has hidden in public sight, that Prism is in fact, “the name of a web data management tool that is so boring that no one had ever bothered to report on its existence before now. It appears that the public Prism tool is simply a way to view and manage collected data, as well as correlate it with the source.” This is not to say that there isn’t a scandal to investigate here: “What is much more important is to pay attention to what data is being collected, and how.” But Prism might not be the smoking gun.

None of this debunks outright Snowden’s claims that the NSA is gathering data, that it has extraordinary power or that it has lied to Congress about it. But it does smack of a lack of fact checking on the part of The Guardian and it risks giving credibility to those who think this is a lot of fuss about nothing (and I'm not one of them). As Joshua Foust of Medium.com suggests, the problem probably rests with Snowden. He first approached the Washington Post via a freelancer and demanded that they publish everything without time for fact checking or government comment. The Post hesitated – so Snowden went to The Guardian instead. This forced the Post to speed up publication of its own story. Frost: “Both papers, in their rush, wound up printing misleading stories.” If so, they're in trouble.
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http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/t...y-the-guardians-scoop-is-looking-a-bit-dodgy/
 
Rapid said:
Another mainstream media agency questioning the left wing (Guardian) bullshit:




http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/t...y-the-guardians-scoop-is-looking-a-bit-dodgy/
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Sadly, we will never know.

Do I trust the administration (or the upcoming Clinto Administration) with my data? No.

Have or enemies (i.e. China) taken steps to reduce our data mining abilities? (me thinks yes).

Is this guy an idiot? (me thinks yes).

Will he come back to stand trial on his own? (me thinks yes, because his chosen amnesty location isn't as awesome as he thinks.)
 
0699 said:
EDIT: I'm not justifying pay rates, but a TS/SCI with poly can be hard to find sometimes. That may be some of the employer's justification for a "overly" high pay rate.
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Scotth said:
I think we can all agree that privatizing the federal work force probably isn't a money saver like it was promised. Contracting should never be a permanent employment solution.
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My understanding of the "A contractor is cheaper than a fulltime gov't employee": The cost estimates are predicated on hiring a contractor for a short amount of time. I don't think anyone ever envisioned keeping contractors in the same gigs for well over a decade and I know for a fact that some contracts have been around for that long. What I'm unsure of is where a contractor becomes more expensive than the equivalent gov't employee or servicemember.

Contractors were meant as a stopgap measure but the system has become a beast with its own life.
 
Freefalling said:
My understanding of the "A contractor is cheaper than a fulltime gov't employee": The cost estimates are predicated on hiring a contractor for a short amount of time. I don't think anyone ever envisioned keeping contractors in the same gigs for well over a decade and I know for a fact that some contracts have been around for that long. What I'm unsure of is where a contractor becomes more expensive than the equivalent gov't employee or servicemember.

Contractors were meant as a stopgap measure but the system has become a beast with its own life.
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Contractors cost the same (per year) as the GS equivilant. Like FF said, the thought was hire a bunch of contractors, win the war, fire said contractors.

Rummey (The Strategic thinker that he is) never envisioned a long conflict. Iraq/Ass-crackistan were scheduled for 5 years (at most).
 
I'm positive anyone that isn't working with this program doesn't know what it's really doing. I am also positive that Mr. Snowden broke his word and should be held accountable, despite his intentions. If there is/was something going on that needed to be taken care of, fine, push it up the channels. If that doesn't work, keep going until you are at the top. When you break a promise not to talk about something, you should expect a punishment, and face it. I feel like he was the kid who ran from his parents after doing something wrong because he didn't want to get spanked (if he got punished at all)
 

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