On Friday, Glenn Greenwald's new website, The Intercept, published a number of internal NSA documents that didn't necessarily reveal any great state secrets, but instead cast some light on the NSA's office culture. Those documents, leaked by former security contractor Edward Snowden, were actually from an advice column series, written by a 20-year veteran of NSA management under the pen name “Zelda.”
The “Ask Zelda” column was circulated on the NSA's intranet, and it offered lighthearted advice on how to deal with any number of interpersonal office situations. But as Intercept writer Peter Maass writes, the column featured one response in particular from September 2011 which might resonate with civil liberties advocates. In it, an NSA employee is concerned that his or her manager is listening in on the conversations of his employees to stay apprised of all the office gossip. The manager even designates “snitches” to fill him in on what employees are talking about, but the aim of his snooping is nebulous.
“Needless to say, this creates a certain amount of tension between team members who normally would get along well and adds stress in an already stressful atmosphere,” writes the NSA employee. “There is also an unspoken belief that [the manager] will move people to different desks to break up what he perceives as people becoming too 'chummy.'”
Zelda responds, “Wow, that takes 'intelligence collection' in a whole new—and inappropriate—direction!”
You and your co-workers could ask [the supervisor] for a team meeting and lay out the issue as you see it: “We feel like you don’t trust us and we aren’t comfortable making small talk anymore for fear of having our desks moved if we’re seen as being too chummy.” (Leave out the part about the snitches.) Tell him how this is hampering collaboration and affecting the work, ask him if he has a problem with the team’s behavior, and see what he says. Encourage him to come directly to the employee in question if he has a concern (rather than ask a third party to gather intel for him).
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Trust is hard to rebuild once it has been broken. Your work center may take time to heal after this deplorable practice has been discontinued, but give it time and hopefully the open cooperation you once enjoyed will return.
The parallels are striking: rather than involve the whole staff on spying on each other, why not just go to the problem employee? Rather than gather vast amounts of information on all Americans, why not narrow the search to only those who are suspects? Trust, it seems, is an issue on many levels with the NSA.
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