[giancarlostoro]

> Why be one of the 100 people on ordinary salaries, forced to live in Maryland or Virginia, to toil on the mundane bureaucracy of a government agency, when you could be the 1 engineer at Google, paid 10x as much and who works 1h a day, that clicks the button to copy the access logs, emails and searches of the person of interest to the NSA instead?

What you wanna do is be the guy they hire to work at a FAANG to siphon data.

[more_corn]

They just tap the fiber that runs between data centers.

[giancarlostoro]

Probably both.

[doctorpangloss]

That’s what I’m saying, yes.

I guess another way of putting this is, is the one year of Math 55, some of whose 12 students per year do an internship at the NSA, really that vital to the mission? Venture capitalists go out of their way, bending over backwards for the same people too. And the Math 55 kids get pushed out, people don’t like working for Math 55 kids all the same.

The multi-billion dollar NSA budget is juicy, but without a better mission - without elevating the mission above, “Copy the data from a tech company to whom people willing hand over all their information” - the kids who might make good leaders will remain uninterested in the NSA. They could be persuaded by a podcast, but not one that pulls the same levers as Two Sigma and Stripe do, convincing people that they’re secret geniuses, talking about a storied but kind of meaningless past full of conveniently ignored failures, as opposed to making their purpose worthy.

[rockskon]

"willingly".

Just like you willingly walk to your car and willingly drive to work and willingly do your job.

Sure - you have the option of doing none of those things. No one is forcing you to do it.

But you won't make a meaningful living in society if you don't.