If money was what Shannon was primarily interested in, he wouldn't be in academia. This is true of almost all types of narrow domain experts. There are more par

If money was what Shannon was primarily interested in, he wouldn't be in academia. This is true of almost all types of narrow domain experts. There are more parties than government that can offer them money, too. For most academics (and more, the better they are), not being allowed to talk about what you're working on to the vast majority your peers, would be too high a price for money to make up for. NSA circumvented this for many years by employing an obscene number of math graduates, effectively creating their own parallel academia. We can only imagine how expensive that was. Still, they were surpassed by the "open" world even in the narrow fields they were interested in, such as cryptography, by the late 90s at the latest. It's not just sad being cut off from the free world, it stunts you.