Actually I've had that situation several times in technology jobs. It's not so much the job itself as it is the company. I had a great gig at a company in Marin County (read: north of the Golden Gate, laid-back, hippies) where I was able to learn Perl, the WWW, and Unix. Find a non-critical role in a company that isn't audited heavily (non-public company, smaller division of a large company) and hack away.

One option to stay under the radar: use virtual machine to do your coding in. It's not that you have to hide what you're doing, but you might not want to keep answering questions or might otherwise just rather stay underground.