SurveillanceNSA’s recruitment effort challenged by Snowden leaks, private sector competition
The NSA employs roughly 35,000 people nationwide and anticipates on recruiting at least 1,000 workers each year. For 2015, the agency needs to find 1,600 recruits, hundreds of whom must come from highly specialized fields like computer science and mathematics. The agency has been successful so far, but still faces recruitment challenges in the aftermath of the Edward Snowden revelations and competition from private sector firms who offer recruits much higher salaries.
The NSA employs roughly 35,000 people nationwide and anticipates on recruiting at least 1,000 workers each year. For 2015, the agency needs to find 1,600 recruits, hundreds of whom must come from highly specialized fields like computer science and mathematics. The agency has been successful so far, but still faces recruitment challenges in the aftermath of the Edward Snowden revelations and competition from private sector firms who offer recruits much higher salaries.
Daniel Swann is a 22-year old fourth-year concurrent bachelor’s-master’s student at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). As a student in the school’s Information Security Institute and having grown up in Annapolis, Maryland, not far from the NSA’s headquarters, Swann has considered working at the agency. “When I was a senior in high school I thought I would end up working for a defense contractor or the NSA itself,” Swann told the National Public Radio. After the 2013 Snowden leaked documents revealed the NSA’s domestic spying programs, many potential NSA recruits, including Swann, had to reevaluate their interest in working for the agency. “I can’t see myself working there,” he said, “partially because of these moral reasons.”
Matthew Green, assistant research professor, at JHU’s Department of Computer Science, says the number of students the school produces to work in highly sophisticated intelligence gathering roles at the NSA can vary each year. “Sometimes it’s a half-a-dozen,” he says. “Sometimes it’s just one or two.”
JHU’s Information Security Institute will produce just thirty-one master’s this year. Only five of those are U.S. citizens — a requirement to work at the NSA. Of those five, and many like them at schools across the nation, fewer are looking to work with the NSA. The Snowden leaks have also changed academia’s view of the NSA. “Before the Snowden leaks we looked at the NSA as being a spy agency, and they did what they were supposed to do,” Green says. “But we’ve learned that they’re been collecting this incredible amount of information. And they’re not shy about doing whatever they have to do to get access to that information.”
If enough students begin to follow Swann, the NSA could lose its edge in intelligence gathering. Neal Ziring, a technical lead in the agency’s information assurance directorate, says the NSA relies more heavily on people and not computers as some would believe. “There’s no such thing as a computer that can break any code,” he says. “People like to think there’s some magic bullet here, and there isn’t. It’s all hard work.” When recruiting graduates, the NSA not only has to affirm the positive work that the agency does, but it has to compete with private sector firms. “I was at a Dartmouth career fair a few months ago,” Ziring says, “and our table was right across from Facebook. And we are looking for some of the same things that they are.”
Since the Snowden leaks, tech firms have been stepping up their cybersecurity and they are willing to pay top dollar to recruit the best graduates, many of whom may have the option to work with the NSA. Swann, last summer, received $7,000 a month to work as an intern with Microsoft. Ziring says the NSA can not compete on money, so he tries to promote the agency in other ways. “You know we have good health benefits, and we’re government, right? So we have a huge scope of insurance to choose from,” he says.
