That article says the NSA is a bit worried about recruitment problems, but hasn't seen any yet. It also says that increasing salaries at SV companies is a far greater challenge in recruiting than reputation.

Many of us have always had that mindset about the NSA.

However, it takes a special type of odd personality to work there (doing amazingly cool stuff but not being able to talk about lots of it). The personalities that fit there well don't fit elsewhere very well.

Just to play the devil's advocate, one might just as easily argue that the self-selecting of you and your like-minded peers actually made the NSA's recruiting tasks easier. If you have some moral / ethical / rational belief systems that are inherently incompatible with their organizational DNA, a perfectly efficient recruiting machine would have sorted you into the "NO" pile anyway. Likewise, people more well-suited (for the sake of making ourselves feel better, we'll call them morally challenged) - might now be more inclined to sort themselves "in." So, they might have merely saved themselves some additional interview analysis and (assuming a less than perfect screening process) perhaps even prevented another Snowden Affair. To be clear, I am not asserting that any of this is true, but I suspect that my unfounded speculation using incomplete data is no less reasonable than yours.

There's a smaller pool of candidates, but the ones that remain are more likely to be okay with what the NSA does.