alt Hacker News>they're cops with too much access, it doesn't take a genius to outsmart a cop
the nsa has an unlimited budget and spend a good portion of that budget recruiting some of the smartest people in the country. while they dont have super powers, they also arent the town cop who took a 6 month course after high school then joined the force.
it does no good to hold them up as mythical figures. it also does no good to pretend they are bumbling idiots.
(every math phd i am acquainted with has been approached by nsa recruiters. none of them have been approached by police agencies.)
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I appreciate the balance here.
Some of the smartest people I know have worked on fighting NSA, but they had a drastically smaller budget than NSA itself, and the mental availability bias is skewed by the fact that the "fighting NSA" people talked about their work all the time, while the "being NSA" people generally didn't.
I do know one extremely smart person who went to work there, and I witnessed a failed recruitment of another extremely smart person.
> every math phd i am acquainted with has been approached by nsa recruiters.
how many of them took them up on the offer, and how many are in leadership roles?
it takes a very narrow range of personality to want to be a cop, which at the end of the day is a government job... the only people they make rich are contractors
I'm not saying there aren't smart people working there but it's ridiculous to assume they have an iron grasp on all communication from the top tech companies in the world, while also monitoring half the world's governments... they just don't
> the nsa has an unlimited budget
No they don't, and if you're going to try to argue something with that as your opener, it very easily casts large amounts of skepticism on whatever you are about to say.
Perhaps you're exaggerating for effect, but that also undermines your point.