> so we probably don't have much to worry about.

While you had me nodding my head until this point, I think your conclusion is ultimately wrong. We have lots to worry about because of those very reasons you list. When you can’t recruit good talent, you get at best partial incompetence, at worst bad actors. When things are dysfunctional, you don’t have proper checks and balances. When an organization is corrupt, very bad things tend to happen as nobody cares.

I'm partly in agreement with you, but my point of view is that the 'good guys', so to speak, are working at Google, Apple, Facebook, etc, and are incentivized to protect their customers rather than assist the government (except, y'know, in cases where they got caught working with the gov).

If most of the talented folks are working in the private sector, it seems logical to conclude that no corrupt organization can 'hack' the privacy protections that are in place. Or at the very least, they're a lot less capable of doing so.

The pen is mightier than the sword, and corrupt political organizations will be left with nothing but a sword in the end. And that may eventually become useless, too.

Any objective source for your claims? If your basis is the attitude for such agencies here on hacker news, it’s understandable why you might believe those to be true, but they aren’t.

unable to recruit talent seems true at least

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16057449

Thomas Drake, Edward Snowden, Wikileaks, etc

Snowden & Wikileads have revealed themselves as operations run by the NSA's rightful targets.

Change your news sources. Fast.

I've worked directly with people in the IC, and I have friends who've worked (or currently work) at various government agencies.

Did they convey those summaries to you? If so, is it accurate to say that shtf post-Snowden, and hasn’t recovered?

You could be right, so I take it back, but I’ve heard there is some degree of strife and paranoia, but not general chaos as may be perceived.

It's mostly anecdotes and personal experience. I think that data on salaries, etc, is mostly public too, so you can probably see for yourself that they aren't competitive with SV or Wall St.

Discussed here recently, there’s a path from public to private sector that does serve the need to retain talent, to some degree.

Also, to say they are mostly corrupt or incompetent seems possibly too much of a broad stroke that is based on anecdotes. I don’t believe Snowden, for instance, ever suggested either of those are true — did he?

Finally, if this is your assessment, your standard may be unusually high. Maybe your peers, many not quite as good as you, are actually quite skilled? Just a hunch, could be wrong.