If this was before 2015, there's a chance the person giving the talk about inclusivity was my father-in-law; I know in the last few years of his career there he got involved in the push for diversity. He always talked very fondly of his career at the NSA.

I think in a lot of ways the NSA is a better workplace than any silicon valley tech company; you don't really have to worry about profitability, there's an enormous breadth of interesting work to be done, and you get to work with a lot of really talented people (I think the NSA is the largest employer of mathematicians in the US). Of course there are downsides too, like the low pay (set by Congress) and the constant drug tests and polygraphs.

Based on my discussions with him, I believe that the organization has two conflicting goals; to improve the IT security of the US and its allies, and to weaken the IT security of everyone else. And there are historical examples of the NSA doing both. But internally apparently there is a lot of debate about what the NSA should be doing, especially post Snowden. So yeah, I can believe that plenty of people at the NSA are deservedly proud of their work. Not everyone there is a cynical government drone working to undermine IT security globally. But of course when the NSA starts contributing to your project, you don't know which of their two goals they're working towards...

As an aside, my father-in-law is a very passionate mathematician, and in his retirement he just published a book on some interesting and approachable topics in mathematics that much of the HN crowd would probably find interesting: https://bookstore.ams.org/mcl-22/