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Over Six Thousand NSA Workers Furloughed
First, the good news. During a Senate hearing earlier today, Gen. Keith Alexander (in charge of America's Secret Cyber Army) said: "We have over 960 Ph.D.s, over 4,000 computer scientists, over a thousand mathematicians. They are furloughed. Our nation needs people like this."
Now the bad news. While the number of NSA employees is officially classified, in 2012 the NSA said more than 30,000 employees work at Ft. Meade and other facilities. In 2012 John C. Inglis, the deputy director, said that the total number of NSA employees is "somewhere between 37,000 and one billion" as a joke, and stated that the agency is "probably the biggest employer of introverts." In 2013 Der Spiegel, likely using source data from Edward Snowden, said that the NSA had 40,000 employees.
More from The Hill:
A government official familiar with the military's plans told The Hill last week that the shutdown would be unlikely to affect "core" National Security Agency operations.
According to the Defense Department's shutdown plan, intelligence and surveillance activities necessary for national security are excepted from the shutdown. But the document notes that "general political and economic intelligence unrelated to ongoing or contingency military operations" are not excepted.
So, the bottom line, the NSA has publicly furloughed about 6,000 people. It has about 34,000 more. We wonder: are the "introverted" NSA workers that spy on Americans (not to mention on their significant others using every method known to man), aka the truly "essential" ones among the 6,000 currently playing Call of Duty or downloading porn at home, or more likely, still in the comfortable and ultra secret confines of their Fort Meade headquarters?
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Yes
US intelligence has been privatized over the past decades. 40,000 is nothing. Private intelligence firms do not have to shutdown and represent the bulk of the fascistic intelligence apparatus.
All that just to protect 300.000.000 maxed out credit cards from being pressure cooked. Insane.
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
Anything that a person can destroy can be controlled. If one (the loser), is willing to go from lose/win to lose/lose, then that person has essentially won. That said, do any of the democrats and NSA agents really think otherwise? What do the Tea Party members want? Smaller government and to able to pay one's way. What do the status-quo want? To borrow at someone else's expense and give it away to their "friends".
I am thinking this whole government shutdown thing might just have some really good consequences.
Get your own cursing fish logo: Google cursing fish cafepress
HOORAY!
MOAR!
"We have over 960 Ph.D.s, over 4,000 computer scientists, over a thousand mathematicians. They are furloughed. Our nation needs people like this to Stop Working For An Employer Who Is 16 Trillion in Debt”
16.
17.
60.
whatever.
he makes a compelling point.
I posted this in the Ron Paul Thread but it bears repeating here:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-02/ron-paul-country-bankrupt-people-are-being-bamboozled#comment-4016056
The Peoples Republic of Kalifornia did something positively alarming today!
They exercised a constitutional amendment, the 10th and nullified the detention clause in NDAA
http://california.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2013/10/02/nullifornia-ab351/
Amazing, absolutely amazing!!!!!
DaddyO
280 trillion actually. But who's counting anymore really?
280 trillion.
thanks.
had misplaced some of it.
‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might."
They Thought They Were Free - Milton Meyer
An excellent read.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
The datacenters never sleep. Not a single phone call or email will go unnoticed even if .fedgov is shutdown for a month.
Geez, Cougar, not a moment of happiness over reduced pain?
Love ya still. :)
Okay okay. Here ...
There is this one datacenter. In Iowa. In that datacenter is a machine in the rack with a buggy network card that causes it to drop connection twice a day. During that time, that one machine in that one datacenter in Iowa can collect no data on Americans whatsoever until a technician comes in, removes the CAT5 cable, and plug it back in.
That guy is gone during the .fedgov shutdown. So that one machine is offline.
Rejoice.
Because the network branch that machine listens on is mostly used by dairy farmers to remotely monitor dairy herds, the only information not being processed for the NSA are the GPS coordinates of dairy cows when they take a shit.
It ain't much, I know. It's what you get.
If they're so fucking intelligent they should have realized the risks and gotten a real job in the private sector. I can tell you one thing - if I see NSA on your resume I will never fucking hire you.
if I see NSA on your resume I will never fucking hire you.
Yes! Engineers are ACCOUNTABLE for the things they build!
Fuck you Alexander and all your little zombie Phd's. The best man you ever had in your department was Edward Snowden , not all those twerps and stooges you claim the country needs.
And yet with all that....15 billion dollars worth of coke, meth, pot, ex and all the gang member distributors to go with it just flows across the border every year. I for one think that the war on drugs is stupid and a huge waste but I have to wonder HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?? I forget...they're just looking for terrorists...yeah right.
"if I see NSA on your resume I will never fucking hire you."
+1,000
"I see NSA on your resume I will never fucking hire you."
Guns don't kill people....
NSA Engineers don't steal secrets...
Of course they don't. They do sign that contract knowing full well that what they are building will likely be used against other human being in a malicious manner though.
best news i've heard all day
Hooray! Let them go get real jobs so they stop f***king spying on us. F them. Send em home. Let those PhDs go to Wal Mart to be greeters. They can teach the unwashed masses differential calculus, linear algebra or something. F them.
I don't think the "free shit" army could spell differential equations let alone learn it. That certainly would be a tortuous task for those prima Donna PhDs. However I think it would be more fun to have them scrub sewage in a waste treatment plant. Something about this group screams lily white hands used to hiring manual labor when needed. A bit of humbling couldn't hurt here.
Miffed;-)
It is a bit quiet and lonely in here.
But then it usually is.
Somehow I don't feel any less spied upon........
Maybe you should release your manifesto and then see if you feel spied upon!
When I did it I get all kinds of calls on my cell, hang-ups and such. I get my email account saying "You can't log in anymore because of some suspicious activity on your account". WTF?
And worst thing is that now my ears are ringing with some sort of ELF signal I think....
Don't worry, the data is all being stored for later analysis ... not at the CFTC though
How many are so "probably...introverts" that they'll use that idle and unpaid(?) time to hack the machine? Ahh, unintended consequences.
P.S. 5 Oct, if in DC, someone storm the Lincoln Memorial!! Put a flag in Abe's statue's hand ("break on through" the barriers, it's two fuckin' gates on a pathway for shitsakes!) yelling "You suck, Boner!"
The propaganda on the statist MSM is screaming bloody murder...
http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/02/20788300-top-official-warn...
Top official warns shutdown is 'dreamland' for foreign intel services By Katie Wall, NBC NewsWith 70 percent of National Security Agency employees currently furloughed because of the government shutdown, top intelligence officials warned Congress Wednesday that the ongoing funding lapse could be putting national security at risk.
"The damage will be insidious," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Each day that goes by, the jeopardy increases. This is a dreamland for foreign intelligence services to recruit."
Seems legit... NOT. Clapper, the same guy who said there was no NSA domestic spying? That guy? Yeah real fucking credible. Clapper, what about you DIAF? LITERALLY.
A comment from that article:
"The Tea Party is aiding our enemies ... The Tea Party insurgency threatens America's health, safety, and livelihood."
Note the language: "aiding our enemies" and "insurgency." As I said earlier, this is the new meme, to paint people who believe in limited government as seditious terrorists. This is intentional, and it's not something that just popped up out of nowhere within the last week.
Yup yup. The power of language. They do it that way because it works.
It works on the weak-minded. Unfortunately, we have no shortage of such people.
All the majority in Congress have to do is give up on Obama(Don't)Care, and it's back to business as usual.
The ball is in their court.
There's absolutely NOTHING new about using rhetoric to paint your adversaries/scapegoats as dangerous, evil types.
It's Divide and Conquer 101, for crying out loud!
Obviously the denizens of .gov don't view themselves as the invaders and usurpers of a once imperfectly great country that the motherfuckers are. We freedom fighters just want our country back.
WOLVERINES!
Clapper should be in jail for lying to Congress. F the NSA. Hopefully Snowden is having a beer or a vodka in Russia.
Unless they got better intel than Snowden, they ain't interested. Ironically enough.
They'd better have some REAL dirt on 9/11,on Obama, the Fed... or forget it.
.
"We have over 960 Ph.D.s, over 4,000 computer scientists, over a thousand mathematicians. They are furloughed. Our nation needs people like this."
Yes but not working at the 'effing NSA.
Yes, that represents major missallocation of intellectual capital, same as rocket scientists designing financial products used to defraud the public.
AFRL here in Albuquerque is working.....seems strange that the NSA is not considered critical...
BTW the post office just defaulted on $5.6 billion.
http://reason.com/24-7/2013/10/02/us-postal-service-defaults-on-56-billion
And Israel is having a little fun :
Iran's cyber warfare commander shot dead, according to Telegraph
I wish these guys luck, if they ever have to find honest work in the private sector.
I don't. Maybe they can relocate to India.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, all those KGB spooks took their trade-craft and connections onto the Free Market, and became the smartest and most organized crime syndicate outside the Fed.
TPTB are too scared to furlough real spook talent for too long, lest they too become 'Free Market Capitalists'. They like to put them out to nice green pastures instead. QE has to be good for something, right?
This shut down is/has hit us HARD. My store is in the middle of .gov workers (shipyard/naval bases etc.) last 2 days lost probably 1500.00 from no one coming in.
Paper anounced 1000's furloughed. But fuck it this .gov is out of hand!! keep it shut down. even if it means my own demise.. FUCKING MOTHER FUCKERS!!...To bad they're not at work to read this!
Fear not citizen. HAL 9000 and Skynet is on the case.
Yup. No worries NSA and SkyNet. Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple can pick up the slack on illegally spying on Americans.
I hope they keep this f*cker closed for good.
From "Scrooged"
I Care!
Send every last one of the 40,000 to the Fukishima front for clean up duty ASAP
Keith Alexander is a liar. No way they shut down anything at the NSA. Not the food court either.
Should I continue to send my stool samples to Ft Meade or Utah???..........Im so confused
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Better to divide them in half and send them to both places, just to make sure.
Moar Stool Samples!!!!!
Send them to Jamie Dimon, he can bring them to Obama
Joke? "somewhere between 37,000 and one billion" How many people use Facebook currently?
FUCK THE NSA! Fuck CLAPPER! Fuck Alexander! Those two bastards should be hung from lamp posts.
Zzzzzzzzzzzz... back to polishing the brass on the Titanic.
Eh.
Yea well now that they are gone we can spy on each other to keep the terrrrorists a-fucking-way!
Worst case scenario for the NSA. We can authorize section 8 housing on all NSA vacant cubicles and double dip taxpayer revenue streams by calling it affordable housing. RE/MAX /Zillow can start listing all of our prime retail eco-living housing facilities as bargain bottom investment property.
With the new facilities in Utah and all the social networking platforms do we really need any of these people any more? The majority have outlived their usefulness to sky net.
Just point me to the line in the budget that funds all of this.
What do you mean there isn't one?
Now that is sneaky...those guys are invisible and their money comes out of thin air.
good start
Message to NSA: 848%--P543MJH))@FRABPOLQ--XCZ#I\DK~+--!
hint: non-critical
Re: "We have over 960 Ph.D.s, over 4,000 computer scientists, over a thousand mathematicians. They are furloughed. Our nation needs people like this."
And, apparantly, only 1 real patriot who has left their employment.
I guess REAL Conservatives and Liberals don't work at the NSA, only ones with "quotes" do.
That many folks toiling away to build the surveillance state. Is the money that good, boys?
Understanding that quite obviously the US and entire world would be much better off if the NSA was completely shut down and the 40,000 smart introverts were retasked to solving the NEEDs of humanity instead of spying on them, ... 6000 is not nearly enough.
Just shut down the entire fuxking NSA and give the US people and the world a break for a change. What a complete waste of talent and lives.
New commenter here, after reading for at least a year. HI. This is my first post.
I got a thought about this. If anybody's watched "The Lives of Others" the movie about Stasi eavesdropping in East Germany, or even read between the lines in "Brave New World" or looked at what's going on in the CCP or what happened in the CCCP towards the end:
Communist and totalitarian systems tend to fail from the inside out. At some point, when only one party has power, elements in that party do things unexpectedly, and internal conflict arises, and the party itself has to retreat from the damage. It's easy to make a case that's what Snowden did to the NSA. But more interesting is what will happen when 15% of NSA workers find themselves at home with nothing to do.
Will they just blackmail people and screw with political campaigns? That would probably be good for the country, because we can expose the ease with which they can use that information gathered in the name of security to cause us harm on an individual level. Or will some of them decide to pull a Snowden and come clean about it? If even one of them does, it could bring the whole monster down.
I'm looking forward to the internal disintegration of the beast; every member is a liability and they know it. Unwieldy conspiracies never last long.
Welcome to the fightclub. Nice to see that you took the first plunge in posting.
Hi. I'm sure yer all gonna hate me once you get to know me, but I hope I can get one or two people to think before they lay the hammer down.
we need people working on our infrastructure not the NSA spying on the world. Get rid if the entire NSA and the CIA too - where was the CIA/NSA 9/10/01????????? Maybe Aunt Jemima Condasleeza put them off "Oh, we never expected anyone to fly PLANES into buildings!"
Finally some positive news!
No Alexander......the US needs those people fucking dead. We don't need them or your sorry fucking ass.
Did anybody do some calculations on how much money is saved with the gov. shut down?