Comment by scarmig
12 years ago
Breaking: most people, even most people in the tech community, don't look on the NSA with that level of contempt, if any at all.
This is unfortunate--in a just world everyone doing this would be imprisoned for many years and have all their ill-gotten gains stripped from them--but a real fact. And the typical NSA software developer is certainly highly qualified and very, very smart. Going purely by business concerns, if you have a need for someone with the skill set that'd come from working for the NSA, you can't afford to pass them up just because they worked with the NSA.
You can also be sure that, even if the NSA were disbanded fully and all its employees hated so much that they could not get domestic employment anywhere, many international actors would be extremely excited to pay top dollar for their talent. And by top dollar, we're not talking piddling six figure salaries.
Agreed. Skills would be irrelevant. A brain dump alone would be worth hundreds of millions. That is the scariest thing about all of this. Every time I hear someone bash on Snowden about how he was a dropout, etc, etc I just think "ok, so you gave this guy who you say is an irresponsible idiot the ability to blackmail anyone who has a google search history?"