Not many students have the cutting-edge cybersecurity skills the NSA needs, recruiters say. And these days industry is paying top dollar for talent. Brooks Kraft/Corbis hide caption

Not many students have the cutting-edge cybersecurity skills the NSA needs, recruiters say. And these days industry is paying top dollar for talent.

Daniel Swann is exactly the type of person the National Security Agency would love to have working for it. The 22-year-old is a fourth-year concurrent bachelor's-master's student at Johns Hopkins University with a bright future in cybersecurity.

And growing up in Annapolis, Md., not far from the NSA's headquarters, Swann thought he might work at the agency, which intercepts phone calls, emails and other so-called "signals intelligence" from U.S. adversaries.

"When I was a senior in high school I thought I would end up working for a defense contractor or the NSA itself," Swann says. Then, in 2013, NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked a treasure-trove of top-secret documents. They showed that the agency's programs to collect intelligence were far more sweeping than Americans realized.

After Snowden's revelations, Swann's thinking changed. The NSA's tactics, which include retaining data from American citizens, raise too many questions in his mind: "I can't see myself working there," he says, "partially because of these moral reasons."

This year, the NSA needs to find 1,600 recruits. Hundreds of them must come from highly specialized fields like computer science and mathematics. So far, it says, the agency has been successful. But with its popularity down, and pay from wealthy Silicon Valley companies way up, agency officials concede that recruitment is a worry. If enough students follow Daniel Swann, then one of the world's most powerful spy agencies could lose its edge.

People Power Makes The Difference

Contrary to popular belief, the NSA's black buildings aren't simply filled with code-cracking supercomputers.

"There's no such thing as a computer that can break any code," says Neal Ziring, a technical lead in the agency's information assurance directorate. "People like to think there's some magic bullet here, and there isn't. It's all hard work."

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After Snowden, The NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge

Edward Snowden Attorney Ben Wizner Speaks at UVA Law
ACLU attorney Ben Wizner spoke at the University of Virginia School of Law on March 25 about protecting privacy in an era in which government organizations and businesses wish to gather increasing ...

By: University of Virginia School of Law

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Edward Snowden Attorney Ben Wizner Speaks at UVA Law - Video

A new report by the Associated Press suggests that the National Security Agency mulled the possibility of abandoning its phone surveillance program just before the Edward Snowden's leaksthough ultimately the suggestion didn't progress fast enough.

The report explains that some officials at the NSA "believed the costs outweighed the meager counterterrorism benefits" that the program offered. Those internal critics pointed to ever-increasing costs of recording and storing information from phone calls which weren't successfully uncovering evidence of terrorism. Understandably, they also "worried about public outrage if the program ever was revealed," points out the AP.

Indeed, a proposal to scrap the system was apparently circualting within the NSA among "top managers" during 2013though it had yet to make it to the desk of the NSA director General Keith Alexander by the time that Snowden leaked its documents.

After the event, of course, the NSA strongly defended its practices over telephone surveillance, arguing that it was vital for routing out terrorist threats. This new report suggests that internal thinking may have been rather more conflicted.

Meanwhile, the NSA continues to collect and store phone call data under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Presumably, plenty of people at the NSA still think it's a bad idea. [AP on Huffington Post]

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NSA Considered Ending Phone Spying Before the Edward ...

STOCKHOLM Three Swedish lawmakers have met Edward Snowden in Moscow to discuss surveillance and privacy issues.

Friday's meeting was organized by the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, which gave its annual human rights prize to Snowden last year. The former National Security Agency systems analyst sought shelter in Russia after leaking details of the United States' once-secret surveillance programs.

In a statement from the foundation, Snowden said he discussed mass surveillance, privacy and transparency with the lawmakers and added "I hope to see them soon again in Sweden."

If he leaves Russia, Snowden would risk arrest and extradition to the U.S., where he's been charged under the Espionage Act.

The Swedish lawmakers were from the Green Party the junior member of Sweden's coalition government and the Moderate and Liberal parties.

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Snowden meets Swedish lawmakers in Moscow to talk about surveillance, privacy issues

Edward Snowden is heralded as both a hero and villain. A privacy vigilante and a traitor. It just depends who you ask. The revelations he made about the NSA's surveillance programs have completely changed the face of online security, and changed the way everyone looks at the internet and privacy.

But just before the whistle was blown, it seems that the NSA was considering bringing its telephone data collection program to an end. Intelligence officials were, behind the scenes, questioning whether the benefits of gathering counter-terrorism information justified the colossal costs involved. Then Snowden went public and essentially forced the agency's hand.

With a massive public backlash against what the NSA had been doing, the agency was obviously keen to defend what it had been doing. Whatever attacks were thrown by privacy advocates, individuals and civil liberties campaigners, the NSA had a trump card. Fighting terrorism. The agency would, of course, never admit that perhaps it was going too far, or that its operations were costing too many millions of dollars; it had to vigorously defend what it had been doing.

The NSA became so wrapped up in defending what it had already been doing, that it managed to convince itself of the worth of continuing its work. After all, if the activities had been justifiable before, do they not continue to be justifiable? The 'threat' of terror attacks is something that has become part of the media and governmental narrative, seared into the public consciousness.

We havent been told that terrorist threats had vanished or even diminished; if anything, the threat -- if we're to believe what we're told -- is greater than ever. Throw 'defense of America' into the equation, and you can get away with just about anything. Chuck in a few instances of the word 'terror' for good measure, and you're good to go.

The Associated Press makes the surprising suggestions about the NSA's doubts about what it was doing. The timing is interesting as we are approaching the deadline by which the law authorizes the collection of phone data (June 2015). The NSA has managed to persuade itself of the value of various surveillance programs over the years, and Congress will take quite some convincing if the law is to be changed such that the programs are outlawed.

This is not the first time that it has been suggested that Snowden's revelations had an unexpected side-effect. A data sharing agreement between the NSA and the UK's GCHQ was, essentially, made legal because of the fact that Snowden had made it public. Up until that point it had been illegal for the two intelligence agencies to share information in the way they had been but once the cover was blown it was rather a different story.

It would be very surprising to see the NSA back down now. Even if we were told that phone, email, and other data collection was coming to an end, how many would believe it to be true? It was happening in the background before, who's to say that would not just continue?

Photo credit: Maren Wulf / Shutterstock

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Snowden's leaks served only to strengthen the NSA's resolve