[Spooky23]

Forget about NSA, allowing government officials with secret sauce information to cash in and come back peddling some other wares is a violation if the public trust and erodes public confidence in government. Government employees and military officers are compensated well and have generous job security that nobody else has... That's why they are supposed to be held to a higher ethical standard.

It's now almost an assumption that some General or Commissioner is spending the last years if their career sucking up to various third parties (at taxpayer expense) to ease the transition into private sector life. That wasn't the case decades ago.

The NSA case is more egregious because these folks are literally reading our mail. There can be no tolerance for even the appearance of ethical lapse of impropriety. Every aspect of these peoples professional lives are secret -- how can the public or US attorney be assured that the country isn't being sold out to enrich individual aspirations and wallets?