The 'Brain Drain' At The NSA Continues

Jason Reed/Reuters

Toronto Star/Washington Post: NSA is losing talent over low pay, flagging morale and reorganization

“The agency is losing an amazing amount of its strongest technical talent, and to lose your best and brightest staff is a huge hit,” a former senior researcher at the NSA said.

WASHINGTON—The National Security Agency is losing its top talent at a worrisome rate as highly skilled personnel, some disillusioned with the spy service’s leadership and an unpopular reorganization, take higher-paying, more flexible jobs in the private sector.

Since 2015, the NSA has lost several hundred hackers, engineers and data scientists, according to current and former U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter. The potential impact on national security is significant, they said.

Headquartered at Fort Meade in Maryland, the NSA employs a civilian workforce of about 21,000 there and is the largest producer of intelligence among the nation’s 17 spy agencies. The people who have left were responsible for collecting and analyzing the intelligence that goes into the president’s daily briefing. Their work also included monitoring a broad array of subjects including Daesh, also known as ISIS and ISIL, , Russian and North Korean hackers, and analyzing the intentions of foreign governments, and they were responsible for protecting the classified networks that carry such sensitive information.

Read more ....

Update: NSA losing top talent: report (The Hill)

WNU editor: This trend has been ongoing for a very long time, and money is probably the big reason why .... The NSA can't recruit or retain hackers because the pay sucks and the Agency is a bureaucratic mess (Boing Boing).