Wanted: ambitious young computer programmers to crack code for government spy agency accused of creating largest surveillance state targeting US citizens in history. Desired qualifications: don’t question authority, blind loyalty to supervisors regardless of oath to constitution, willingness to break “laws” and user the cover of “national security” and “fighting terrorist threats” to create machine to control population.
Don’t send resume to HR
Don’t send a cover letter or CV to apply for this job. Head to the National Security Agency (NSA)’s Twitter account and solve a puzzle.
NSA’s puzzle on Twitter
The NSA posted a tweet made up of a series of letters and numbers that, to the naked eye, appeared not to have meaning. The tweet was followed by the hashtags #MissionMonday #NSA #News.
The challenge, should you choose to accept it, is decode the tweet.
“NSA is known as the code makers and code breakers,” an NSA spokeswoman told the Daily Dot. “As part of our recruitment efforts to attract the best and the brightest, we will post mission related coded Tweets on Mondays in the month of May.” The NSA said the tweet was part of a month-long campaign of coded tweets to “explore careers essential to protecting our nation.”
Code cracked in minutes
According to reports, the code was cracked within minutes, said to be a simple letter substitution puzzle it translated to read: “Want to know what it takes to work at NSA? Check back each Monday in May as we explore career essentials to protect our nation.” In other words, a puzzle created by marketing or HR, not the real code breakers.
The puzzles, however, are expected to get harder in the coming weeks, with those who crack the most complex codes being of interest to the NSA’s recruiters.
Britain’s intelligence services, MI5, is said to have placed cryptic advertisements in newspapers to recruit candidates. Last year, for instance, MI5 advertised for a health and safety officer without providing details about the job the successful candidate would be required to do.
Interesting to note, the NSA puzzle tweet was also posted in a Twitter stream that was looking for a vulnerability analyst just atop of a post looking for an intelligence analyst in Hawaii. They might have lost an employee from that region named Edward Snowden.
