I live in DC, and work intel-community adjacent in the infosec industry. I'll stipulate up front that I've never worked as a government employee, and despite do

I live in DC, and work intel-community adjacent in the infosec industry. I'll stipulate up front that I've never worked as a government employee, and despite doing some assessment work (like being hired to break into the Department of the Interior without their knowledge, or breaking hardware/software that was being deployed in far away places) everywhere I've worked has tried very hard to steer clear of government work (not for any ethical reasons, it just pays much worse than equivalent commercial work, and is almost always boring). In fact, the last two places I worked had distinct government and commercial divisions (where I ran the commercial divisions). That said, I've built and run several security consulting practices in the DC area, and consequently have done hiring interviews for dozens of people who were NSA employees (1 of which we ended up hiring). Absolutely none of them have even the slightest apprehension about the nature of the work they were doing (so much as they were able to comment about it during interviews). In fact, prior to the Snowden leaks, the NSA was pretty much at the bottom of my list for government agencies doing shit I disliked. They have a pretty clear scope and charter (which we've come to learn has been muddied). But no one I've talked to, either who works there or works at a contractor in the DIB, thinks they've done anything wrong. Did you read those batshit NSA talking points that came out yesterday from Al Jazeera's FOIA request? They believe those things. They think they're doing important, valuable work to protect the country. I can only imagine that internally within NSA there has been dissent about some of the stuff that's come out. Maybe people have resigned over it, maybe they've sent strongly-worded emails to their bosses. I really hope there was a great deal of dissent about the "intentionally fuck up crypto standards that we push to other branches of the government", but I doubt we'll ever hear much about it. Your questions could just as easily refer to people who work on SEO spam, or targeted advertisements (I'm not saying those things are equivalent, but they're also jobs I've heard people on here posturing morally about).