This isn't a technical issue, but I think that it's important: working for the government comes with less pay, but there was always the idea that you were putting in effort for the benefit of the country. In my opinion the NSA has squandered that and they have somehow ended up in the same category as Palantir and Facebook.

I'm not sure how they can fix this, but I do think it will need to be addressed if they want to hire and retain top talent. They have interesting problems but no one will work on them if they feel they are, in the end, hurting their fellow country-people.

In fairness, Snowden himself was at the NSA, so that's at least one data point that they were getting what I would call more "patriotic" people. Not necessarily the "best and brightest". I've been to MS Research. Some of my best friends work at Google. I've worked with Carnegie Mellon and MIT post docs. There is a big objective leap in capability between someone like Snowden, and the guys at MS Research.

We can only hope that NSA actually has some of these types of guys and we just don't know about it. But I'd argue that if the NSA was getting any of those types of guys, they weren't getting very many.

Another thing to think about is the athletics analogy. Schools like Stanford and Northwestern can't get the athletes that a place like Alabama can get. However, they do a good job of training up the athletes they can get to the point where these schools have actually been respectable from time to time. It would be interesting to consider the realistic feasibility of hiring "2 stars" or "no stars", so to speak, and then training them up. (Of course, this doesn't always work. Most schools have teams that suck. That's kind of the danger with the "train them up" idea.)

There were plenty of objectors before Snowden and also a huge group of folks who would choose to work for the nsa anyway. The impact isn't that great.

I remember at DefCon 20 Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA at the time, gave the keynote speech (largely about how we all share the same internet space so we should work together to keep things good for everyone) and the NSA had a recruitment booth set up showing off an enigma engine. Between DefCon 20 and 21 Snowden happened and the NSA was disinvited from future events because of it (of course they come anyway, but people need to earn 'Spot the FED' tshirts somehow). Some thought it put back trust and relations between hacker communities and the NSA by more than 10 years.

Orthogonality thesis 101: intelligence is orthogonal to values. I don't think the NSA has any trouble getting the "best and brightest" in terms of skill.

So first things first: NSA needs to stop abusing its powers so that people can actually be proud to work for it?

Stop spying on and collecting all of "Random Joe's" emails and chats, and start targeting people who are actual threats to national security (and don't misinterpret any random petty crime as "national security issue" to give you an excuse to abuse those powers either).

Economic espionage or to help corporate friends should never happen either. No, it doesn't matter that "China does it, too".