<nettime> An Open (Of Course) Letter to My Friend, the NSA

[nettime's avid reader <nettime@kein.org>]

http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2013/06/12/an-open-of-course-letter-to-my-friend-the-nsa/

Dear NSA,

We need to have a chat, so I trust you’re reading this.

Of course you are; good. Now, let’s see … how should I put this? Look, 
you’ve done a great job cultivating that whole “spook” image for the 
past 60 years. Really, you’ve just been terrifyingly adept at creating 
an environment of ironclad secrecy, even more so than the CIA, who’ve 
bungled too many overseas jobs to be the omnipotent, untouchable agency 
they’d like us to think they are.

Times are changing, though. For the past several generations, you’ve 
been the rulers of all information, with no one to challenge you. 
Americans just had to trust that the good quiet folk at the NSA were 
looking out for them, because no one else could handle data on such a 
large scale. It was a simpler time, back when the Internet was young and 
the Web was just a seed of an idea, and our idea of “big data” was the 
Yellow Pages.

There are new kids in town, though; kids who grew up on data. They were 
raised to dish out and take in as much data as possible, and they do it 
for fun. To you, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and all the rest of it are 
the latest places from which to siphon information. To these new kids, 
it’s home. It’s where they grew up, which is why they’re much better at 
it, and why you hire so many of them.

Now, what happens when you raise a generation on a steady diet of data, 
and then try to keep naughty secrets? They’re going to ask questions. 
They grew up in a world where information was free, and they took 
advantage of that fact. They learned more about the world around them 
than could ever be learned in school, and they went online for the 
answers to the questions their parents and teachers wouldn’t answer. 
They grew up not just appreciating that information was free, but 
expecting information to be free.

It gets worse. Not only are you hiring millennials, for whom secrecy is 
anathema—you’re hiring millennial hackers. And hacking, as you well 
know, means finding ways of turning technology to serve a purpose other 
than its intended one. When information isn’t free, these people have 
the ability and the will to free it.

I know this because I’m one of them. I may not have top-secret clearance 
and make six figures working for one of your contractors, but Edward 
Snowden’s demographic profile still hits close to home. When I was a 
boy, I used to hack into my computer games to add fart sounds to them. I 
built my own computers. I made my sister’s Teddy Ruxpin say horrible, 
horrible things. When I get a new phone, its hackability is its 
number-one buying point.

When I get my hands on a new piece of technology, my first thought isn’t 
about what it can do—it’s about what it can’t do, and how can I force it 
to overcome its limitations to do what I want. I then wonder, “Why 
wasn’t I ‘allowed’ to do this in the first place?” See, we millennial 
hackers simply cannot take anything at face value. We’re a bit 
contrarian and stubborn by nature. It’s why we’re good at what we do. 
The more constraints you place on us (be they workplace, physical, 
technological, or copyright) the more we feel a need to disregard, 
challenge, or overcome those constraints.

To be a hacker is to be cynical about whatever “solid” information or 
limits you’re faced with, to remove layers of consumer sheen or 
government spin until raw components are laid bare to reconstruct at 
will. You reward people like me with fat salaries when we do this with 
technology, so there’s little sense in expecting us not do the same in 
the rest of our lives—with your policies, rules, information, even with 
our own personal lives. We tinker, probe, deconstruct, and reassemble 
for other purposes. One thing we don’t do is blindly put hand to heart 
and sing “God Bless, America” —unless we’re in a North Korean gulag and 
it’s a contrarian move.

Do you see the problem? You need my kind of people for our understanding 
of data, but we don’t necessarily want or need you. You are anathema to 
our values and expectations. Sure, you’ve got some very smart graybeards 
who can do some amazing things, but they’re not going to be the bulk of 
your army for long, if they even still are. You have no choice but to 
keep hiring these hackers who didn’t grow up having data hidden from 
them. It’s ironic that you’ve become so reliant on people who really 
have no business in a tight-lipped, hierarchical quasi-militarized 
institution. We are the ones you should be snooping on, if only you 
could snoop without us.

I feel your pain.

Edward Snowden smoked you, and it wasn’t even very hard for him. Now, I 
know what you’re going to say. “It won’t happen again! We’ll improve 
security!” Who is going to improve your security? Is it going to be the 
naval officers you used to hire, respectful of hierarchy and used to a 
military lifestyle? Or maybe, say, more young, technical 
lay-people—contractors with the information freedom ideals of the 
millennial hacker? Yeah, I thought so.

Let’s face it: This isn’t going to be the last time your secrets are 
aired to the public. It’s probably not even going to be the last time 
this year that your secrets are aired to the public by another Edward 
Snowden, because you’ve got countless Edward Snowdens on your payroll 
whose first—not last—instinct is to blow open your information 
infrastructure. I mean, you tried to recruit me years ago, for goodness 
sake. Those confidential recruitment materials that said “For Your Eyes 
Only” all over them? Yeah, I showed those to everyone I knew, mostly 
because you were so heavy-handed with all the confidential stuff.

The important thing now is not to panic. No tears. You’re a big, strong, 
spooky organization, right? You don’t have to clean out your desk. 
You’ve still got a big role to play in the cyber-warfare of the next 
several decades. You’re just learning a hard lesson here, and I realize 
you’re partly being demonized for implementing what the White House and 
Congress want. However, you have no choice but to keep hiring these 
young, entitled, informed, data-driven hackers, who pretty soon might 
not have any secrets to leak because the Snowdens in your midst will 
have forced you to turn into a fully transparent (but still efficient!) 
organization.

Now that I think of it, you really should have played up the six-figure 
salary and Hawaii angle in those recruiting materials you gave me. I 
would’ve kept your secrets. Really.

Cheers,
Cyrus





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