The NSA can't recruit or retain hackers because the pay sucks and the Agency is a bureaucratic mess

The Washington Post reports that the NSA "is losing its top talent at a worrisome rate as highly skilled personnel" because of a mix of low-pay, uninspiring leaders, and a bureaucratic re-org that everyone hates.

There's a post-Snowden angle to all this, with people of good will walking away from the Agency, but the real story is that the NSA, like all US spy agencies, buys in billions of dollars worth of private service from outside contractors (both Snowden and Reality Winner were working for these contractors when they leaked internal documents in order to blow the whistle on illegal/immoral activity).

Anyone who doesn't like the NSA's hidebound rules, bumbling leaders and government pay-scales can go to work for a myriad of contractors, or set up shop on their own, and end up doing basically the same job they did for the NSA, for an order of magnitude more pay, and without any of those strictures.

What's more, those contractors aren't limited to working for the NSA, so if you're morally flexible enough, you get to do the same job for a different government, too, ensuring lots of glamorous travel and an bottomless fountain of cash.





NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, slumping morale and unpopular reorganization [Ellen Nakashima and Aaron Gregg/Washington Post]

(via Evacide)