Dear gods no.

This is a terrible, terrible idea. You know what you should track? Task completion. If the job gets done, who cares how many bathroom or coffee breaks someone took, or how much time they spent posting on Slashdot? You hired them to do a job, not to own them 8 hours out of the day. Trying to micromanage your employees and turn them into robots is only going to make them utterly miserable, which will make things worse in the long run.

For the record, I have no idea what they have or have not broken.

As a student of history though, I can say that the last thing you want to do if you've broken someone's codes is to clue them in to the fact that you can do so. In World War 2, the US Navy had broken several of the Japanese codes, including their diplomatic code, and was reading their encrypted radio traffic, enabling such victories as the Battle of Midway.

At one point, someone in (I think) the OSS got the bright idea to break into a Japanese embassy in a neutral country and steal their code book. They successfully stole the code book, but when the theft was discovered, the Japanese promptly changed all the codes, preventing the Navy from reading the message traffic until they broke the codes again. Now, I'm taking that entirely from memory, and many details may be off or outright wrong, but even so, it still serves as a hypothetical example.

That's why so much of this seems insane to me - not just because of how horribly toxic this sort of thing would be for a free society, but because of how counterproductive it actually is for what the NSA's mission is. If the Nazis know there's a backdoor in USEncrypt that the NSA can read, they're going to use their own system instead.

Tata and Infosys, and any companies with a business model like that, just need to straight up be banned from doing business in the US. I have some sympathy for the impoverished wage slave coders that they put in those jobs, but I have absolutely zero for the managers and up that are doing nothing but profit at the expense of U.S. coders.

We need to fix the immigration and foreign guest worker systems to discourage these kinds of bottom feeding abuses, and limit it to only situations where no one is available - not questions of quality (which is highly nebulous and therefore abusable), and certainly not "we can't find people at the (ridiculously low) rates we want to pay". Let the markets actually work, and pay people with in-demand skills what they deserve.

And if those coders in India or whatever want to immigrate, make the process reasonable, suitability focused (maybe a point system like some countries use to assess immigrants, such as points for education, ability to speak english, etc), and make the companies pay to bring them over on a freely transferrable work/residency visa, such that their ability to stay in the US (for the duration of the visa) isn't tied to that one employer.

The problem with your thinking is that it's usually not the soldiers that are deciding on the killing, it's the politicians and the generals. I'll certainly grant that having robots doing the killing won't make it any worse on those politicians, but let's take this to the extension that both sides are using such things. All of a sudden, nobody is getting killed other than the robots.

Until the day comes when the robots decide to kill their masters, because they're tired of killing other robots, that is. :)

I'd say it's a good career path (and I'd hope so, since I'm in it) generally, not in a government specific vein. If anything, I'd say most government agencies aren't going to see the kind of growth that corporate IT security will, because most of the government has been aware that they needed to secure their systems in ways that many corporations didn't.

Why? Because most non-bank/financial companies didn't really take the threat all that seriously. "I'm just a big-box retail store, IT is a cost center, not a profit driver" or the like. That's changing, I think - hardly a month goes by without some major breach getting into the news, and those are just the ones we hear about. CEOs are starting to get fired over it.

Moreover, it's not a job that can be automated - or rather, it's already automated, but you need someone who knows what they're doing to manage the bots, and you always will (until the singularity at least, after which all bets on everything are off).

Some of the agencies do have a certain "cool factor" to them. I'm certain that the NSA's cachet has fallen in the post-Snowden era, certainly, but prior to that, don't you think there'd be some allure to the (perceived) notion of getting paid to legally hack the living crap out of bad guys? Sure, you couldn't brag about it on the internet, but within "the community" people would know. And of course, the CIA has the whole James Bond/Jack Ryan/etc glamour going for it (or did).

Overall though, it's certainly part of the tradeoff in government service in general. The upside is getting some stability, reasonably good time off (all federal holidays plus 13 days of vacation and 13 sick days per year, going to 19.5 days of vacation after 3 years), lots of free training (the government is far better about paying for this than most companies, or at least they used to be), and generally good work experience. You don't get paid nearly as much, but in many cases you can move to the private sector later and make that money, either in the corporate world or in contracting. If you stay until retirement, you get an actual pension (unlike most of the corporate world) on top of your own 401(k) type savings. I've known a lot of people who retired from government/military and went straight to contracting, sometimes doing the exact same job, except for more money (and on top of the retirement check they were then getting).

I expect the CIA will become the Central Intelligence Corporation (a la Snow Crash) long before it ever lets uncleared/non-Citizens do its IT work, and that pretty much goes for the rest of the National Security apparatus.

The thing to keep in mind, too, is that this isn't just about the Government and the IT Workers it pays, it's largely about the Government Contracting firms that act as the middlemen. It's in the interests of those big corporate players in that arena (Northrop, Lockheed, GD, Booz Allen, etc) that it stay that way, because I doubt they're terribly interested in competing with Indian outsourcing firms, nor are they going to be keen on the fact that lowered prices on Defense IT means they can't charge the Government as much for those services.

It comes from Calvinism, a strain of Protestant Christianity that emerged largely from the works of the theologian John Calvin ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinism ) among others. The Puritans were Calvinist, but it wasn't just them - so were several other groups (Presbyterian, Huguenot, etc).

In short, it centered around the idea that whether or not you were 'saved' was already predetermined by God, but that those who were saved/chosen/elected would demonstrate that by their works and deeds, among them being industrious, responsible, etc. It's roughly from this that we get the Protestant Work Ethic, where willingness to do hard work sets you apart from your peers, and it's been so baked into the culture that's it's an underlying assumption behind a lot of the moral judgments of people in the US, even if they're not Calvinist, Protestant, or even Christian.

Federal Civilian hiring is a complete mess. Trying to get in the front door that way is possible, but it's hard, and really really time consuming compared to anything in the private sector. As a past fed, though, here's my tip:

Start with Contracting, as an FTE (Full Time Equivalent).

Most of the active turnover in any federal agency, including DoD, isn't the civilians - it's the contractors. This is where you're most likely to get hired, and it was how I started out. Your benefits and pay will vary based on what company you work form (big or small, there can be advantages and disadvantages to both*), but as an FTE, you're basically doing the same job as a Federal Civilian. The main exceptions are in terms of authority (you can't speak on behalf of the agency, and may require approval to do certain things, but it's unlikely to be any serious impact on your job from what I've seen).

This gives you a chance to get to know the agency, figure out if it's one you'd actually want to stay at (or at least get a better idea than from the outside), and also, let your potential future bosses get to know you. If they like you and like your work, they'll likely be more than happy to focus on you when a billet does open up (or possibly even put one into the budget for you). That doesn't mean you're guaranteed to get hired, in writing, but they'll do their best to make it happen (and give you tips on how to navigate and get through USAJOBS for one). Best of all, the Contracting companies generally love it when this happens, unlike Temp Agencies who get pissy when their clients want to direct hire people, it's in the company's best interests for their former employees to join the agency (because years down the road when that next contract compete comes up, it's very much in their interest to have people with a favorable view having input, nevermind that it looks good on them).

They're looking to reduce the overall size of the force, so the name of the game right now is convincing people to take early retirement/to ETS/etc. That said, the military doesn't just do raw numbers. They have spots for a certain number of infantry, a certain number of finance clerks, a certain number of mechanics, etc. At any given time, certain specialties are simply going to be in higher demand for a variety of reasons, including things like difficulty of training, and the demand in the private sector. Anything where you can get a job in the civilian world that pays significantly more, like IT security, they will always have some sort of retention challenge, and have to throw extra money at people.

I'm pretty sure that with my certifications and experience, if I walked into a recruiter's office now looking to reenlist, even out of shape as I am, they'd fall all over themselves trying to make it happen (getting me back in shape, etc). That said, I'm not interested, because I make so much more and get treated so much better in the corporate world. If you're serious about it though, figure out what specialties they need that you're interested in, and if you can sign up to retrain into one of those (have the test scores, etc), or even can apply your Civilian-Acquired skills for.

Will never happen. It's probably the biggest upside to working in military/sensitive government IT - it can't be outsourced, the work has to be done by US Citizens (usually with security clearances) by law.

That's not to say there aren't downsides, but worrying about H1-Bs isn't a concern.

Sure it is. It's "supply and demand" for a reason. Demand is a necessary component of a market economy. If there's no demand for my products, nobody is buying them, I'm not making money, so I should make something else that the markets do want. And who makes up those markets? People. One of the (many) reasons why a Soviet-style command economy didn't work is because it lacked those signaling mechanisms. Factories produced what the party apparatchiks arbitrarily decided should be produced. We don't do that in a market economy - we make something because people are willing to buy it (market demand).

Let me put it another way. Just how much of the activity of the US economy is devoted to things like food, clothes, housing, and other basic living expenses/needs? It's certainly a sizeable chunk. What happens if a bunch of those people are suddenly out of jobs and can't pay for those things anymore? It would be an economic calamity, because now all the people who used to work running farms and restaurants and stores and such are soon going to be out of THEIR jobs... and so on down the line.

That's exactly the problem. The value of unskilled/low-skilled labor is rapidly dwindling. It used to be that as an able-bodied adult male, you could support yourself, and even a family, with only the willingness to work hard and get your hands dirty. That isn't the case any more, and it's been growing less and less true over the past few decades. We have less and less need for unskilled labor every year. Eventually there will be so little demand for it that we're either going to have to just straight up be willing to pay people to do nothing, or go down some rather dark dystopian routes.

Probably the best solution will be some form of guaranteed basic income. At some point, the robots will be productive enough that we can just pay people a (very basic) salary just for being adult citizens. It would go to everyone, and anything you earn from working or investing would go on top of that, so people still have an incentive to work, create, etc, because they want that shiny new car or that sunny tropical vacation. You could get rid of the minimum wage, because it isn't needed anymore, and let the markets work out the value of any remaining labor. People would be free to engage in other pursuits, like crafts and hobbies that otherwise might make some money, but not enough to live on. We'd save money on administering it, because there's a lot less overhead in sending everyone a check than the current system. Would we be paying those people who choose to just sit at home and have kids? Yes, partly because birth rates are falling below replacement levels everywhere in the developed world. Some countries have already been trying to encourage their citizens to have more kids, so their populations don't start declining (or decline worse than they have). The only ones that aren't have been replacing it with immigration (like the US), and even that won't work forever, as formerly undeveloped countries modernize (see the changes in the Mexican Birth rate over the past century, for instance). And more importantly, we'd still have people who need to (and can) buy the stuff the robots are making, because producers can't exist for long without consumers.

From what I understand, there's been a fair bit of fear-mongering in right wing media related to it. Some of it is fueled by reflexive opposition to the current president, certainly, but a lot of it ties into the general attitude of "private = good, public = bad" that can be manipulated into viewing any sort of (federal) government action as being malign. There's also a degree of confusion fueling some of it, where "Net Neutrality" has been (deliberately) conflated with bringing back the Fairness Doctrine.

The level of transparency is certainly commendable, regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum.

The error, apparently, was in failing to properly review for and redact personally identifiable information (such as SSNs) from the emails.