The NSA Is Hiring! And Following A Pittsburgh Car Dealership On Its Twitter Account?

from the i'll-make-every-effort-to-read-too-much-into-this dept

The hiring team for the NSA doesn’t have it easy these days. Their advance scouts got absolutely slammed by some college students during a meet-and-greet at a Wisconsin university. And just recently, the agency cut a ton of potential Snowdens loose by unceremoniously announcing plans to fire 90% of its systems administrators. With the agency swiftly being voted “least popular” by many Americans (and around the world), the HR division has its hands full keeping the agency staffed.

Fortunately (and somewhat bizarrely) the NSA’s hiring arm has a Twitter account, NSACareers. This account tweets new job listings and pro-NSA news into the void, gathering more derision than potential hires in its pursuit of people skilled in the art of data wrangling but completely devoid of a conscience or soul.

Here’s one of the many tweets, this one looking for someone whose skills fit the NSA’s entirely made-up word.

National Security Agency #IT #Job: SIGINT Informaticist ( #FortMeade , MD) http://t.co/iOVPXJ6HkE #Jobs #TweetMyJobs

— NSA (@NSACareers) August 13, 2013

Could this be you? Are you the sort of “informaticist” who can swiftly extract needles from haystacks to help prevent the next terrorist attack? Failing that, can you swiftly extract victory from the jaws of defeat and say, “Tough luck on the recent bombing, but we’ll get the next one, I promise?” If so, your country needs your informaticizing skills NOW.

Now, government Twitter accounts tend to “follow” other government accounts and the occasional news source, but the NSACareers account sports a very strange list of “Follows.” It follows only eight accounts, three of them being variations on Mashable (SocialMedia, Mobile and Tech). It also follows Carnegie Mellon, the Pittsburgh Tech Council, Michigan Engineering and the Society of Women Engineers. As a tech-heavy agency, following engineering accounts makes a bit of sense, although these seem oddly location-specific.

But by far the strangest “follow” is the top one on the list: #1 Cochran.

Yes, the NSA HR Twitter account follows a Pittsburgh car dealership, an account that only has 289 followers. Conspiracy theorists better than I can probably come up with a connection, but here goes nothing. (Read breathlessly fast for best results.)

Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran skipped the pre-Father’s Day NSA briefing along with several other senators. Why? Because he ALREADY KNEW all about the NSA’s inner workings. Cochran had an inside track. Problem is, Cochran is from Mississippi and is likely not connected at all to the Cochran car dealership.

On the other hand, Denny Scalese, former employee of #1 Cochran, resides in the Pittsburgh area and currently works for The Advantage Group, a “risk management company” comprised of former employees from the “CIA, FBI, SEC, ATF, NSA, and Special Forces.”

The Advantage Group is nothing more than a glorified collections agency, but they are “very high tech,” high tech enough to take advantage of its connected founders and their links to intelligence agencies. No one has more data on Americans than these intelligence agencies and bill collectors would be ecstatic to have this information to aid in their recovery efforts.

Pulling the tangled strings for both ends [dramatic pause, before resuming breathless reading] Scalese’s connection with the dealership gives The Advantage Group plenty of collectable accounts to work with. Because it’s a “team effort,” someone inside the NSA who still talks to former employees throws the dealership a “follow” in hopes of something synergistic happening.

Pulling the strings even harder gets you… nothing. The person running the account is probably from the Pittsburgh area and clicked “follow” on a fairly innocuous account as sort of a show of hometown solidarity. Or just to screw with amateur conspiracy theorists.

Filed Under: nsa, nsa jobs, twitter feed