The most recent Audit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Implementation of Its Next Generation Cyber Initiative by Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice, dated July 2015, (archived) features several thought-provoking insights into the inner workings of the USG and the headwinds faced by the bureaucratic beast. In no particular order :

1. The protection of the United States against "cyber-based attacks" and "high-technology crimes" is ranked as the third-highest priority behind counterterrorism and counterintelligence.

2. Next Generation Cyber Initiative (Next Gen Cyber) received USD$ 400.6 mn in Treasury funding in 2014 alone, which was used to employ 1`333 full-time positions including 756 agents.

3. Private sectors businesses are reluctant to share information with the FBI due to lack of transparency, lack of feedback from the government agency and, quite tellingly, a "distrust of government created by the Edward Snowden leaks."¹

4. And the most telling piece is that, despite offering post-secondary education incentives to potential employees, notably including entrance into the Master's Degree program at New York University's Polytechnic School of Engineering, the FBI was unable to hire 52 of the 134 computer scientist positions for which was authorised to contract. As such, 5 of the 56 field offices operated by the FBI currently lack a computer scientist assigned to that office's Cyber Task Force.

From this audit, it's clear that the USG has neither carrots nor sticks large enough so as to attract competent people to work for it, even by its own necessarily flexible definition of "competent." How has this sorry state of affairs, particularly the grim employment picture, come to be ?

As is so often the case, Mircea Popescu has it :

Whether it's a geographically or intellectually isolated pocket within the physical space the USG tells itself it occupies or not, fact remains, any expert alive grew up outside of the USG.

Which makes the USG his enemy. Whether he has yet had that "moment of awareness" the soviet survivors talk of or not, whether he realises it or not, whether he's fighting the realisation or not, whatever his own contorted interior life may look like, nevertheless, the USG is all about destroying the very possibility of the world that he was born in. That's the very definition of the enemy. And now, ask yourself : how much does your enemy have to pay you to convince you to work for him ?

It can be done, right ? It's not that hard, really. Ah, but how much does your enemy have to pay you to be able to rely on you in his hour of need ? That one time when you can just drive a length of steel through his heart and walk away, how much ? How much would it have to pay you today so that when judgement finally comes, and it is sent to hell for being outright evil, how much would you take to go down with it then, for fellowship ? How much does your enemy have to pay you for you to love him ?

Different questions altogether. Evil can never be loved, and for this reason patriotism is such a sore word in the modern festering pustule occupying what was once the civilised world. Consequently, most people with any self awareness and self respect wouldn't work for the USG any more than they'd want two cocks probing their rectum, and when they do work for it they feel thus used. The minority without either self awareness or self respect isn't going to be very competent by the very implication of what these things mean : one can't ever get all that good at anything absent self awareness or self respect.

So there you have it : the USG can never afford to pay enough, and for this reason it is not long for this world. Or vice-versa. All it can afford are the social sciences postdocs, ie, the people with no self respect, and a bunch of mindless drones without any clear understanding of anything in particular, ie, the people with no self awareness.

That's all it can afford and that's all you're going to see.

1. It's also worth noting that these just aren't any private sector businesses that are distrustful of government, but ones that are formally part of the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force (NCIJTF), being the same collaborators who helped to take down Darkode. Members include Internet Service Providers, financial institutions, IT research companies, and software firms.

   Of further interest as to the effectiveness of this little cabal is that there are reports that Darkode was returned to service right after the FBI/NCIJTF's take-down and that Darkode intended to use Bitcoin addresses as authentication tools on the new site. However, at the time of publishing, darkode.cc, the hydra head in question, is offline and this report cannot be confirmed. ↩