The NSA thrives off of snapping up the young computer wizards that graduate from elite universities like Johns Hopkins every year—young whizzes that might remind you a lot of one Edward Snowden. And now they’re afraid that, like Snowden before them, those kids might be turning on them.
An NPR report cites unnamed “agency officials” who are worried about recruitment in the coming years. The NSA employs 35,000 people, and this year needs 1,600 new recruits to join its ranks. So far they haven’t run into major snags, but they don’t know how it will last.
NPR features, as their example, 22-year-old bachelor’s-master’s student Daniel Swann from Johns Hopkins, the picture of a typical NSA recruit. “When I was a senior in high school I thought I would end up working for a defense contractor or the NSA itself,” he told them. But since Snowden’s revelations, “I can’t see myself working there…partially because of these moral reasons.”
Most problematically, these students are a scarce resource—meaning just a few Swanns could hamper the NSA’s game:
“Well that’s kind of a tricky question,” says Ziring, the NSA computer scientist. Ziring also helps lead academic outreach for the agency. “When I’ve been out on campuses and talking to students,” he says, “there are some of them … that puts them off or they have doubts.” On the other hand, Ziring says, the Snowden leaks have sparked other students’ interest. “[They say], ‘I actually know some of what you do now, and that’s really cool and I want to come do that,” he says.
There’s also another reason the NSA is struggling to reel in young computer masters—Silicon Valley, which offers the glamorous lifestyle a government desk-job cannot. Cybersecurity is a booming industry, at least partly thanks to Snowden bringing cyber issues into the public eye.
At least one thing can give the NSA heart: they’re more popular among millennials than any other age group, and young people tend to not care very much about government spying.
