I don't know for certain, but when I was an undergrad I was helping a PhD student with his thesis around text classification, mostly grunt work, speeding up som

I don't know for certain, but when I was an undergrad I was helping a PhD student with his thesis around text classification, mostly grunt work, speeding up some hastily thrown together algorithms, etc. He said it was for his company, which was good enough for me; I was getting experience, he was friendly and polite and we enjoyed each other's company and mutual learning. I found out years later (this was in the mid 1980's), that his company was "The Company"; the US CIA. So I don't think my shitty little pieces of C code written on a Windows box ever made it into any US Gov't system parsing Internet mails/chats/etc, but it could have.