In fairness, Snowden himself was at the NSA, so that's at least one data point that they were getting what I would call more "patriotic" people. Not necessarily

In fairness, Snowden himself was at the NSA, so that's at least one data point that they were getting what I would call more "patriotic" people. Not necessarily the "best and brightest". I've been to MS Research. Some of my best friends work at Google. I've worked with Carnegie Mellon and MIT post docs. There is a big objective leap in capability between someone like Snowden, and the guys at MS Research. We can only hope that NSA actually has some of these types of guys and we just don't know about it. But I'd argue that if the NSA was getting any of those types of guys, they weren't getting very many. Another thing to think about is the athletics analogy. Schools like Stanford and Northwestern can't get the athletes that a place like Alabama can get. However, they do a good job of training up the athletes they can get to the point where these schools have actually been respectable from time to time. It would be interesting to consider the realistic feasibility of hiring "2 stars" or "no stars", so to speak, and then training them up. (Of course, this doesn't always work. Most schools have teams that suck. That's kind of the danger with the "train them up" idea.)