NSA is an enormous organization with many chartered activities, some small amount of which involve math, some of which is defensive and benign, some of which is offensive but understandable in the same sense our maintenance of a fleet of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and some of which is probably hard for anybody to get comfortable with (much of which should be halted). A lot of what NSA does is ultra-boring, and some of that should be halted too. Like every major federal government bureaucracy, NSA's most important charter is to secure more budget for NSA (which I maintain is actually an important fact to keep in mind when designing technical security countermeasures).

My point being: be wary of any attempt to characterize NSA in just a sentence or two.

Some of this puts me in mind of people's mental model of NIST as a hive of USG cryptologic activity when it is in reality like 3 very overworked cryptographers and a bunch of project managers. (Someone correct me on this, and then reach out about being on the podcast).

Have you been in Fort Meade? The Bamford books are much longer than a sentence.

> The Snowden stuff is extraordinarily excerpted to that which a contractor (Snowden) was seeing

I highly recommend you read his autobiography. The typical Beltway career in IT is getting clearance and then coming in as a contractor, there is nothing out of the ordinary here.

Adding to that, he was directly employed by the CIA from 2006 to 2009. The "contractor" line is a really sad attempt to discredit him.

The point is not discrediting but scoping what he was involved in, which for example does not intersect a different area I know personally.