>> That the NSA funnels funds to people who have both a megaphone and a compatible point of view? I don't think you even need to go that far. The underlying ph

>> That the NSA funnels funds to people who have both a megaphone and a compatible point of view? I don't think you even need to go that far. The underlying phenomenon here is the revolving door. Senior government officials retire into government contractors for their former agencies because that's by far the most lucrative positions open to them. The exception would be if you were completely disgruntled, Snowden isn't going to end up at Booz Allen. What that means is that we have a shared underlying cause for the two things we are seeing: former senior officials that remain supporters of their agency end up at government contractors and former senior officials that remain supporters of their agency are happy to defend them publicly. As for the solution to the revolving door, I'd say first we need to raise the salaries of senior government administrators. Every study I've seen shows that low skill government employees are over-compensated and high skill government employees are under-compensated (both as compared to the private sector). Second, we should probably cut down on government contracting. I don't a good reason for it to have grown so large.