Unhappy at how a government agency works? Apply for a job and change it from within. Agencies are made of people.
I saw a story a while ago about how the CIA was having trouble finding people to hire, because of Snowden.
This is backwards! People should be jumping to work there and make the place better.
For example, Zoos used to be quite different from how they are run today. What changed? People who loved animals figured it would be a neat place to work. Over time zoos have changed to conservation and public education oriented places, instead of public exhibition places.
> People should be jumping to work there and make the place better.
You don't just get to sign up to work for the CIA and make things better - you'll spend years doing damn distateful things before you're ever in a position to affect positive change, assuming you haven't been properly corrupted by then. If you refuse to toe the line, then you'll find yourself fired or pressed with criminal charges.
Selling your soul for a small chance to change the CIA seems quite the price to pay.
For the past 2 administrations the CIA has had a terrible record of trying to punish whistleblowers. I agree that people inside the CIA need to speak up, but at the highest levels, people who have tried just that have had their careers ruined.
The organisation will not change without external pressure. External pressure cannot be applied without knowing what it is doing. Knowing what it is doing is illegal. The organisation will not change.
Exactly. The government is going to be receptive to an activist asking them to stop bulk data collection and mass surveillance because they're trying to change from within.
You should not be facing charges for refusing to take part in a criminal conspiracy and doing your best to cause the appropriate legal action to be taken to mitigate that criminal conspiracy. That statement should be completely uncontroversial.
Activism can very frequently involve being fired from your job (which is why many activists end up forming organizations and getting paid specifically for their activism) and being threatened with charges pressed.
Having to deal with this inside the organization you're trying to change rather than outside of it isn't actually different. It's a different psychological experience (namely, it's far more hostile), but the threats don't change.
That's not at all how I read what happened. Rather, I read that the two worked back and forth until they came to this present arrangement, and he was hired specifically for the purpose of making an organizational change. There has to be a culture there that is open to change or you will just make yourself an outcast by entering such an endeavor on your own. Unless you have some highly exceptional leadership and people skills, and likely connections in congress and the upper echelons of defense, this will go exactly nowhere at a place like the CIA.
This case is news precisely because it is so rare for a government agency to be open to change. It takes a very unusual mindset for a police department to hire an activist rather than sue him, shoot him, arrest him, ignore him, or do any of a thousand other things that the police is known to do to gadflies. Kudos to Seattle PD, and shame to everyone else.
Instead of blindly attacking or cooperating with government agencies, activists need to take a twin-track approach. Those who are open to change will get help. Those who aren't will be, uh, "disrupted".
Politics loves to devour those who approach it with a naive, one-size-fits-all ideal. As in business, you need to carefully determine which ones you want to cooperate with, which ones to merely tolerate, and which ones to drive out of the market asap.
I've tried to work at places to try to change them, but it simply doesn't work. If it's an incredible uphill battle to try to get a group of people who don't want to unit test their code to unit test their code, I can't imagine it's easy to change, say, a police department.
EDIT: And to clarify, I'm not saying unit testing is always necessary, but here it was. Their code was (and apparently still is) buggy and needlessly convoluted with no clear documentation.
That is a nice thought, but it doesn't really work that way. Most organizations don't have the flexibility required to make that a possibility (due to constraints of mission and efficiency in general).
An extreme example:
It is not possible to infiltrate the mafia and convert it from within to a girlscouts-like force of good. Such a transformation, were it possible, would conflict with the organization's goals and culture - it would no longer be the mafia. The same can be said about an insider attempting to reverse the NSA's efforts to spy on everybody.
Institutions protect themselves culturally. Bureaucracies have momentum. It's just the effect of self-interest and incentives (carrot and stick).
If you really want to change something like the CIA, the government has to impose meaningful and powerful oversight. Legal avenues have to be opened up for confrontation and change to be possible.
And of course to start it all off you usually need a true believer turned whistleblower. How else would the whistleblower have been shown all the damning evidence?
"This"? This story does not at all involve someone who applied for a job and tried to change it from within. It is about a guy who was external to the group, hassled them with FoI requests enough to make news and be noticed up higher, and then they offered him a job.
I was stopped for essentially walking with books at 12:30 p.m. I was questioned for at least 15 minutes. He asked the weirdest questions. He looked through my books, and questioned why I had a old magazine on knitting. I actually told him why because I was kind of in shock over the nature of questions. I thought maybe he thought I was stealing mail?
I told him the magazine is from the 80's, and didn't even have postage on it. Officer, "No--I was just wondering why a guy would be interested in knitting?" (The magazine was for a friend, and bought in a used book store)
I thought about pulling out my iPhone and tapeing the encounter.
I then realized the cop had his holster unbuckled, and no one was around, and he explicitly told me to keep my hands visable at all times.
I'm not anti law enforcement. I'm just tired of being pulled over for no reason. Tired of expensive, dubious tickets, and courts that always side with the Officer.
This has forced me to buy two dash cams(one in truck as backup--they are $15.00/unit from China, so I ordered two.) and I'm working on an app that turns on the smartphone video when ever the word "Officer" is mentioned.
The scenerio I envision is I am walking down the street with the smartphone in my shirt pocket/jacket pocket(near enough to pick up my command of voicing "Officer" to wake up dormant phone, and turn on the video/audio app.
If there is already an app out there, could someone point me in the right direction?
I didn't realize until now, but phones are currently always passively listening for "okay Google" or "hey Siri." Look into whether you can tap into that.
Interesting idea. Being in your pocket the audio/video would kinda suck I would imagine. People have those headphones with mics though which would probably work.
You can set custom commands on Android then say "OK Google <command>"
That is definitely not "routine" pay for high school kids writing HTML in any year. Sounds like you hit a clueless marketeer who had been huffing the dot-com bubble.
Hacker News has a disproportionate population of people who work in fields and locations where you can easily expect to make six figures straight out of college, and as a result HN has some seriously skewed ideas about how much money is "real" money. When I got my first programming job (in the mid-'00s, in a town with a population of ~250,000) I made $15 an hour. I was absolutely delighted to get it, and it was enough to live well and save some money besides.
Of course, $22.60 in modern Seattle is less impressive, depending on whether he lives in the city proper or in the suburbs. But you can't expect tax-funded jobs to have the same kind of ridiculous salaries that Amazon and Google can afford to pay. And the guy's an activist. This has got to be a dream job for him--a chance to make a difference in something he's passionate about. Some things are worth more than money.
Yet, he developed a fair bit of software for this free already. Sometimes people do things for the public good. Plus you know he's going to be hired somewhere else after this if he wants to, and if he owns the software he develops, he can make bank.
I know Tim personally, since he contributed for years to the SageMath software project while he was in high school here in Seattle. He is an extremely sincere person, who care intensely about things (like open source software), and has little interest or motivation related to money. The potential that he could have any impact that could improve the terrible police/people interactions even a little in Seattle is I'm sure all he cares about. I very much wish him the best.
Whether or not he cares about his bank balance doesn't change what fair compensation is. If you frame this as "you can donate $10 to your favorite cause, or $50", the rate might seem more meaningful.
Still, people make far less per hour doing far more than basic front-end work today.
Don't get me wrong, I think he should make as much as he can get away with making, but 22.00 an hour really isn't scraping the bottom of the barrel for programming work in a lot of places, not even in the US.
$22 an hour for programming is definitely scrapping the bottom of the barrel in the US (unless you're an intern or trainee).
I live in a pretty cheap area of the US, and the only place I've seen jobs paying that poorly is on odesk (and most of these jobs are taken by people in low cost of living countries).
If you're working for $22 an hour, you're selling yourself short.
This is nigh Sun_Tzu/genius of Seattle's creative (female) chief of police: if there is a capable pest working against you, invite them in, and have them work for you.
Disclosure will progress towards real-time: gathered not only by officers, but by any other person as well. Props to Seattle for being slightly ahead of the curve.
Seattle PD is under a DOJ consent decree because of a pattern of excessive force and discriminatory policing. She is perceived to be an outsider brought in to disrupt the good old boys' club. Her status as an outsider is very relevant in this context, and female police officers have a MUCH better track record on use of excessive force.
How many female chiefs of police are there in the states? I was just including it to support your deeply insightful observation that Seattle (generally) tends to be "slightly ahead of the curve".
It's kind of an odd juxtaposition of thoughts but I get the impression GP was just pointing that the chief of police is female (which I'd naively imagine bucks the general trend).
Unhappy at how a government agency works? Apply for a job and change it from within. Agencies are made of people.
I saw a story a while ago about how the CIA was having trouble finding people to hire, because of Snowden.
This is backwards! People should be jumping to work there and make the place better.
For example, Zoos used to be quite different from how they are run today. What changed? People who loved animals figured it would be a neat place to work. Over time zoos have changed to conservation and public education oriented places, instead of public exhibition places.