Being hired by the NSA requires a good deal of work. Providing that you have a college degree in one of their fields and can pass the NSA's exams, you then need to pass their background check that can be tougher to get through then the scholarly requirements. The NSA contacts friends, family, teachers, bosses, co workers - everyone you know it seems. They check criminal and court records, financials, memberships in groups - once again, everything in your life it seems. If you do get the job, you can look forward to a good salary, nice vacations, difficult problems, and being fired at any time without given a cause or reason. A civil rights-forgetful congress granted the NSA the ability to fire anyone at anytime for any reason (without it being given to the employee) in 1964. Just one of the perks there.

Of course working at the NSA does give one access to some of the most advanced technology available. The NSA owns the second (in Fort Meade, Maryland) and third (Dallas) most powerful computer systems in the world, owns its own microprocessor plant, and perhaps holds countless other technological breakthroughs in its vast facilities. Among others, the NSA controls the third largest building in Washington (after the gigantic Pentagon and State Dept. Building), eight satellite monitoring stations across the globe, from Japan to Germany to Sugar Grove, West Virginia.

In 1977, the NSA made what has been called a 'fatal mistake' by endorsing a 56 bit digital encryption system proposed by I.B.M as the Digital Encryption Standard, or D.E.S.. Although many thought, and some even think, that the NSA endorsed it for general use because the NSA knew they could break it, many believe that in fact they endorsed it because it was secure. D.E.S. held up admirably to numerous attacks throughout the years -- until 1998 when it was finally broken by a large scale effort across the net using the processing power of several thousand idle computers running a screen saver. However, the fact that D.E.S. held up for 22 years from amateur cryptanalysis makes one wonder if the NSA could possibly have been able to crack D.E.S. during its original implementation in 1977 when computers were still in their toddler years. The question remains, and will probably not be answered for many years, but did the NSA approve of a system that they could not break, thereby creating the largest threat to national security in the history of the nation?