meh.
This is about as threatening as building any other data center. In other words, it's not. Folks like to focus on the Jason Bourne or James Bond factor. All the big flashy stuff. Trust me, the most annoying stuff is very publicly available and no one cares. I whined about it in the other thread, about the renewal EO of a 50, 60 year old law.
That said, in the network diagram is kinda cool. Helped run some of that network back in the day.
I always loved and feared working with the NSA folks. Only another government employee would truly understand. Every single NSA employee I met was intelligence, efficient, competent and polite. Let me repeat that. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. It used to creep me out, severely. I once accused one of the cooler NSA guys of being lizard people, because there's no way they could be government employees. I still honestly suspect that to be the case... Completely unnatural. Even with the (completely accurate, IMHO) lizard people belief, there's this NCIS agent I need to beat up. Dude failed to slip me a number for a very attractive crypto lady geek I met in Vegas. Dude KNEW I had a soft spot for ultra hawt geek ladies with similar clearances. Dude tried to bribe me with an extremely nice knife. Hmph! Last I heard, she was off the market in short order, found a nice boyfriend. Gee, like THAT was a surprise.
He laughed and said because technically, they were a "black" agency on paper, they had a lot easier HR process. Basically, no unions and 90% of the normal government HR red tape can be ignored. They tend to promote from within and rarely put outsiders into anything but the highest political slots. You don't have USDA poultry senior executive admins transferring to head of say, Central Asian signal intelligence, so incompetent folks can't just hop ship. There's alsoa culture of merit (and geek cred competition) that lingers even as you climb the office hierarchy. Ultra-nerds do not like office politics and tend not to like administrative folks that are dumb and experts of office politics.
Of all the fed agencies, I trust their professionalism the most. Aside from their uhh, really really black side, they tend to be a lot more passive than any other agency, but they work very hard to project an ultracompetent and all-knowing institutional persona. Even other agencies get creeped out by them.