Cyber Spy High: Meet the NSA's Hacker Recruiter

The National Security Agency has a recruiting problem.

Rocked by the Edward Snowden disclosures and facing stiff competition for top talent from high-paying Silicon Valley firms, the nation's cyber spy agency is looking to recruit a new generation of college hackers and tech experts. And through one new program, the agency is cultivating students as young as eighth grade.

The man the NSA has turned to for help solving its recruiting problem is an avuncular 32-year NSA veteran named Steven LaFountain, who has been tasked with building up a "cyber curriculum" for tech-savvy students at 20 to 25 American universitiesand making sure a steady flow of top minds continues to go to work for the nation's technical surveillance agency. Officially, its known as the Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations program.

Recently, CNBC sat down with LaFountain in a conference room at NSA's National Cryptologic Museum, next to the agency's sprawling headquarters in Ft. Meade, Maryland, to talk about recruiting in the post-Snowden era.

What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

CNBC: So explain the impact of the Edward Snowden disclosures on your ability to recruit.

LaFountain: Actually, I don't think it's been damaging to our ability to recruit talent, in that many of the students that I talk to, anyway, that I interact with, they're interested in the tech. They're not bothered by, let's say, the politics of things like that. They're interested in the technology. They want to get into cybersecurity. They want to learn what we do here.

CNBC: How do you prevent yourself from being the guy who recruits the next Edward Snowden?

LaFountain: That's a good question. We have other processes security process that look into backgrounds and polygraphs and all that, and hopefully that will prevent that. You know, when I'm recruiting, I'm looking for the technical talent. I'm looking for the people that have the right mind-set, that question things. That don't just say, 'That's how it's supposed to work, so it works that way.' You've got to question: 'How can I get it to do things it's not supposed to do?' That's really what the whole cybersecurity business is about.

CNBC: Post-Snowden, the analysis was that part of the challenge for the NSA was that this generation of technologically-savvy students shares a different ideology than previous generations of boomers and Gen-Xers. These young folks today are much more libertarian, they're much more of the information-wants-to-be-free mind-set. Are you finding a different mind-set among the 20-somethings that you're recruiting now?

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Cyber Spy High: Meet the NSA's Hacker Recruiter