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I don't work for the NSA, but I've worked at a contractor for several research oriented things they've been involved in (unofficially - the money comes through

I don't work for the NSA, but I've worked at a contractor for several research oriented things they've been involved in (unofficially - the money comes through a non-DoD part of the government). Because what I worked on was geared towards research in language technology and related fields, my view might be a bit skewed, but here's my impression. There's a fair number of people who do seem to believe that they're working to help secure the country. Many seem to stay where they are because they get paid well and work on what they're interested in (many PhDs who joined out of grad school or shortly thereafter. One thing I find interesting about all of this NSA spying stuff is how it relates to the pervasive concern I've seen on the part of people working in intelligence about potentially using data containing personally identifying information, particularly of US persons. I do wonder if the scale, scope, and invasiveness of the spying as reported is actually that great.

mjn 13y ago
> get paid well and work on what they're interested in This is a common reason in pure math and theoretical computer science. There are not a whole lot of places that will give you a good job to do basic research. Tenured professor is another one, but hard to come by, and has a different set of tradeoffs. If you do certain kinds of applied research (e.g. machine translation) you can do it at Google, but Google is not tripping over itself to hire number theorists to do actual number-theory work (maybe they would hire a number theorist, but to do something else).
- throwaway918273 13y ago
  The people I dealt with we're all in the language technology field. They tended to be a bit on the older side, so maybe they wound up there before there were the kinds of research opportunities you get in industry these days.

mjn 13y ago

> get paid well and work on what they're interested in This is a common reason in pure math and theoretical computer science. There are not a whole lot of places that will give you a good job to do basic research. Tenured professor is another one, but hard to come by, and has a different set of tradeoffs. If you do certain kinds of applied research (e.g. machine translation) you can do it at Google, but Google is not tripping over itself to hire number theorists to do actual number-theory work (maybe they would hire a number theorist, but to do something else).

throwaway918273 13y ago
The people I dealt with we're all in the language technology field. They tended to be a bit on the older side, so maybe they wound up there before there were the kinds of research opportunities you get in industry these days.