An Open Letter to My Former NSA Colleagues

"If this is really what the agency stands for, I am sorry to have helped in whatever small way that I did."

Those who have served in the military or as civilians in the department of defense have given up a lot of their personal liberties in order to provide for the common defense. Service. It's not a concept I expect you to understand if you're reading this from a Starbucks while pitching your new startup idea to your friends. It entails willingly giving up the ability to talk to your friends and loved ones about anything you do -- you often end up telling people that you do some mundane job because you can't answer their followup questions. It means getting called into work or off of vacation because your small piece of the world has gone to shit, and not having anyone to vent to about it. It also means placing the very notion of where you live in the hands of the government, and sometimes being forced to be away from your family for years. It is all these things and more, but it is not ever something one should be made to feel ashamed of doing.

There are thousands of employees right now in the NSA who aren't even allowed to come to their own defense on the matter, because DoD has deemed that speaking about the situation is a security violation. They have to sit there and endure that the people around them who are very ignorant as to what it is NSA even does, just plain get it wrong. Well, as my NSA/CIA security clearance finally closed out yesterday, I have no qualms about speaking on their behalf.

The public is completely and utterly wrong about the motivations of the NSA and the information they were provided as "fact". Everything has been skewed to paint a picture that is damning and I would definitely be angry about if it were true, but it just isn't. There is a culture of protecting American civil liberties in the NSA. It's almost pathological -- anything that can potentially affect a US person is given extremely wide berth. There are major auditing and oversight mechanisms in place in case someone were to ever run a query that affected a US person. So the notion that in 2 years, the intelligent, passionate, and devoted people I came to know have somehow flipped around and violate rights willy-nilly now is a ludicrous idea. If this were true, we would be seeing a thousand whisteblowers (true whistleblowers, not Snowden) coming out of the woodwork trying to correct the system.

It is not true that the government doesn't care about the rights of individuals just because you want it to be true. Those that are employed are individuals too, and are not being magically compelled to carry terrible secrets against their individual moral codes and ethics. They are carrying out a mission of defense which extends into the technology of this century -- even cars have had 100 years for us to deliberate and come up with the current system of laws that govern that technology. While the legal framework for their actions are up for debate, their collective character is not.

The current public climate surrounding those who have been in the intelligence community hearkens back to days of activists yelling "Baby killer! Baby killer!" at passing by Vietnam vets. A few of you who are self-reflecting will at some point in your life when the intelligence practices becomes more public, regret your outrage and overreaction at this time. I feel like the rest will not, because it was a passing trend and never really affected you directly either way.

I would like to thank those that have served (including the author) and continue to serve for their part in upholding their oath. It may seem like no one gets you, but a few out here in the public sector do. In the cycle of the public raging against government powers, and then asking why the government didn't do more about x situation, the people in service get lost in the mix.

I hope that regardless of who you are reading this, that you have the ability to empathize with those who are outside of your personal story, with whom you will never have any interaction with. That I happen to know some of their faces doesn't change the fact that I don't assume the faceless ones are perpetrating a great conspiracy against the American people. I just assume that they're serving.