Fundamentally, if you work for the NSA, you either have very different morals to what the US is meant to be about, or none at all. This introduces a simple prob

Fundamentally, if you work for the NSA, you either have very different morals to what the US is meant to be about, or none at all. This introduces a simple problem for the NSA (and similar groups). The people working for you are inherently disloyal. You can rely on a member of (say) the military to be at least somewhat resistant to bribes, threats and flattery, because they generally do honestly believe in the ideals of the country they're defending. The same applied to intelligence services in the west during the later cold war after the USSR became hopelessly corrupt. That's why the west won so many intelligence victories. And the vast majority of the losses where when the opposite applied: people who honestly believed in communism in the early cold war. But in today's NSA, you cannot support freedom, democracy, the rule of law, basic honesty, or really anything except for "they pay well so I don't think about it". And when that's the case, there is always someone else willing to pay better...