> But the lion’s share of the directorate’s work is envisioning the technologies that are generations ahead of what we have today. It operates almost like a small, elite technical college, organized around five academic departments—math, physics, cyber, computer science, and electrical engineering—each staffed with 100 to 200 people.

> The physics department, which Herrera once directed, runs dozens of laboratories that conduct most of the work on quantum information sciences, but it has a much wider remit than that.

> Military competition is accelerating, but there is also dissemination of other technologies, like synthetic biologies, that are frankly alarming. The role of research is to help the NSA understand what the impact of those technologies will be.

> Everyone thinks their data is the messiest in the world, and mine maybe is because it’s taken from people who don’t want us to have it, frankly.