To get recruited by the NSA, there are several paths you can take:
Military experience: Many individuals join the NSA after serving in the military. They may work in roles such as network engineers and manage the NSA's network .
Cryptography and cryptanalysis: The NSA values individuals with expertise in cryptography. They have their own cryptologic school where you can take courses and gain knowledge in this field .
InfoSec and cybersecurity: Working in information security and cybersecurity can also be a pathway to the NSA. They have positions for intelligence analysts and exploit analysts .
Specialized skills: The NSA may recruit individuals with specialized skills, such as hacking and penetration testing. These skills are highly valued for specific projects and operations .
It's important to note that the NSA places a high emphasis on security clearance and background checks . The hiring process may involve aptitude and skills qualification tests .
Keep in mind that this information is based on personal accounts from podcast episodes that provide insights into the experiences of former NSA employees . For the most accurate and up-to-date information on recruiting and job opportunities, it is recommended to visit the official NSA website or contact their recruitment office directly.
(someone): And so I became a beast at Cisco stuff. So I ended up getting promoted to an engineering team of network engineers, and I got to manage the whole NSA's network. So I started off doing a crappy job at Fort Meade, and then the certifications allowed me to ascend to top teams there. And that was during my day job. My day job, I was Navy. At nighttime, I had a part-time job with a DOD contractor, so I was doing a night job since I had a clearance. I ended up helping build out the NSA SOC. It's called NSERC. I ended up helping build that out. I wrote stuff like Sims and all that stuff. So I started coding heavy as well. And I made as much on my nighttime job as I did with my Navy salary. And I was like, man, I got to get out. I got to get out of the Navy and make this money.
(someone): All right. So two words in there you may not know. NOC and SOC. This stands for Network Operations Center and Security Operations Center. This is a place where people watch the network for any kinds of problems. So there are typically multiple monitors on everyone's desks and even a big screen in front of the room which monitors all the networks. The NOC typically looks for network-related faults. A router that went down, a switch went down, some office lost internet connectivity, and that sort of thing. And a SOC watches out for security incidents and responds to threats.
(someone): And because of this, he decided to spend another four years in the Navy. It was good job security. So after eight years of being in the Navy, he then went to Fort Meade.
(someone): I didn't want to go to Fort Meade, but I ended up, you know, pretty much I had two options. I had Washington State and I was like, I don't want to go to Washington State. And they said, or Fort Meade, we got a couple of places, a couple of jobs at Fort Meade that you can do. And I was on a ship. So, and you had to be like, okay, you had to pick it right then and there. Military has these people called detailers that send you places.
(someone): So if you haven't guessed, Fort Meade is where the NSA headquarters are. Marcus went to work for the NSA, but he was still in the Navy and sort of on loan to the NSA. It's called augmented staff.
(someone): So initially there, I was doing communications. It was proprietary communication systems that the military and DOD used. But what's cool about that, I kind of worked at a knock. And Knock also had like all kind of other cool stuff, like they had a heavy Cisco, they had heavy Cisco stuff back then. And I learned, that's how I started getting to the CCNA. And so I became a beast at Cisco stuff. So I ended up getting promoted to an engineering team of network engineers, and I got to manage the whole NSA's network.
(someone): But this whole incident just took the wind out of the sails for the people in the pit. Their energy and passion was sapped, including Jeff's. At this point, Jeff was with the NSA for 12 years, and he had built up quite a lot of skills there, even getting his bachelor's degree in computer science. So he looked at the private sector for jobs, and sure enough, jobs for him were available, and paying a lot more. So he quit the NSA shortly after this incident, and after that, three more people from the pit quit too.
(someone): That I started a week later, that I think initially was a 50% pay increase. So from a strictly economic perspective, it wasn't a difficult decision to make. But if things hadn't have gone south like that, a lot of people ask me, why do people work at NSA? And so because they really are patriots and they really are loyalists and they really believe in the mission. And I probably would have been in that boat too. I probably would have stuck it out and stayed there and enjoyed whatever you know, notoriety, which certainly I wasn't seeking. Whatever professional career success, I would have stayed there.
(someone): The following year, in 1997, the NSA launched Operation Eligible Receiver. This was a no-notice training attack that the NSA would simulate on the US government and military. They were actively conducting DDoS attacks and using open-source intelligence to figure out ways to infiltrate different military bases and networks. The NSA had built a red team and were hacking into the US government networks.
(someone): And with the Navy teaching him formally and his home lab, he became pretty good at packing. In fact, his specialty was not just getting in, but then pivoting around, moving laterally and finding what else is in that network. After about four months of doing that, he moved over to the NSA. Because David was an exploit analyst in the Navy, the NSA came and said, hey, why don't you come work for us? And recruited him over. So he started working for the NSA as an analyst there. And he worked at the NSA for a while.
(someone): I'd say August of 2011 to August of 2014. So about three years.
(someone): Then around that time, a new opportunity showed up.
(someone): You know, at that point, I had gotten married. Probably while I was up there, it would have been maybe two years, almost two years I'd been married. It was time for me to get out of the service. And I had gotten an offer to stay there on campus, which is at the NSA. Then a different organization or actually an individual recruiter reached out to me and said, hey,
(someone): There was this recruiter from a company called CyberPoint. This is a company that's contracted to do various types of hacking. Basically, if he were to work for this company, he would become a hacker for hire. The U.S. government actually grants certain companies extra permissions to conduct stuff like this. The details of this are foggy, but this company that was trying to recruit David was vetted by the U.S.
(someone): So I had to learn how to operate those. And I had to learn communications techniques that were specific to the Navy. And some of that stuff still classified like a mug, but you learn particular protocols and things that you, how to communicate from ship to ship, from ship to, you know, the White House even. So you learn how to do, you know, these communications protocols. And yeah, so like, it was, it was pretty cool. I mean, I went from wanting to work computers to be fully immersed with computers. And in a couple of weeks, it was crazy. Did you do much time on a ship?
(someone): Yeah, I did three years on a ship. And while you were on that ship, were you handling the communication aspect of it?
(someone): Yeah, on the ship, like my whole job in the military was you're pretty much an attache or an asset for NSA. So the whole time I was in, I was kind of like a spy. It was the craziest thing, man. And so, yeah, you do serious, you know, collection work and all that stuff. So you're tasked by NSA to do what you do. It was a crazy experience ever, man.
(someone): Hmm, secret missions, huh? This is fascinating to me because I thought the NSA was like their own separate group. But yeah, if there's a Navy ship positioned in a place the NSA has no eyes or ears on, then sure, utilizing the cryptographic capabilities of the ship and crew makes sense.
(someone): Yeah, so people don't realize that the NSA is a Department of Defense asset.
(someone): But this whole incident just took the wind out of the sails for the people in the pit. Their energy and passion was sapped, including Jeff's. At this point, Jeff was with the NSA for 12 years, and he had built up quite a lot of skills there, even getting his bachelor's degree in computer science. So he looked at the private sector for jobs, and sure enough, jobs for him were available, and paying a lot more. So he quit the NSA shortly after this incident, and after that, three more people from the pit quit too.
(someone): That I started a week later, that I think initially was a 50% pay increase. So from a strictly economic perspective, it wasn't a difficult decision to make. But if things hadn't have gone south like that, a lot of people ask me, why do people work at NSA? And so because they really are patriots and they really are loyalists and they really believe in the mission. And I probably would have been in that boat too. I probably would have stuck it out and stayed there and enjoyed whatever you know, notoriety, which certainly I wasn't seeking. Whatever professional career success, I would have stayed there.
(someone): The following year, in 1997, the NSA launched Operation Eligible Receiver. This was a no-notice training attack that the NSA would simulate on the US government and military. They were actively conducting DDoS attacks and using open-source intelligence to figure out ways to infiltrate different military bases and networks. The NSA had built a red team and were hacking into the US government networks.
(someone): And because of this, he decided to spend another four years in the Navy. It was good job security. So after eight years of being in the Navy, he then went to Fort Meade.
(someone): I didn't want to go to Fort Meade, but I ended up, you know, pretty much I had two options. I had Washington State and I was like, I don't want to go to Washington State. And they said, or Fort Meade, we got a couple of places, a couple of jobs at Fort Meade that you can do. And I was on a ship. So, and you had to be like, okay, you had to pick it right then and there. Military has these people called detailers that send you places.
(someone): So if you haven't guessed, Fort Meade is where the NSA headquarters are. Marcus went to work for the NSA, but he was still in the Navy and sort of on loan to the NSA. It's called augmented staff.
(someone): So initially there, I was doing communications. It was proprietary communication systems that the military and DOD used. But what's cool about that, I kind of worked at a knock. And Knock also had like all kind of other cool stuff, like they had a heavy Cisco, they had heavy Cisco stuff back then. And I learned, that's how I started getting to the CCNA. And so I became a beast at Cisco stuff. So I ended up getting promoted to an engineering team of network engineers, and I got to manage the whole NSA's network.
(someone): They weren't entirely sure if this newfangled computer thing was the direction they wanted to go in yet. So that's why they were hesitant with this whole thing. And so we produced
(someone): what, to my knowledge, the best had been able to figure out the first software-based system that NSA produced. Now, years later, I'm a hacker. I've done all the hacking, pen-testing things. I look back and say, I hacked NSA. I did something that wasn't supposed to be able to be done. I didn't take no for an answer. I figured out a way to hack the system, hack the process, and I got through it. Not saying I would have been successful at any other time and certainly wouldn't have recommended this solution in a networking world, but for the time it worked and it was revolutionary in terms of being the first foray into software. My career at NSA was roughly three different tours of duty or three different assignments. This initial assignment where I did the work with the manual crypto systems, produced the first software-based manual crypto system, that ended and I became a cryptanalysis intern. And the intern programs were special programs that were designed to get you the training, the diversity of experience in higher education. to advance you to higher levels of your career field, in this case cryptanalysis. So what it meant was essentially that I jumped from InfoSec over to the operations side. So then I was actually on Fort Meade and a couple of my six-month tours as an intern were in one or more of those, there's actually two of those big black buildings.
(someone): They weren't entirely sure if this newfangled computer thing was the direction they wanted to go in yet. So that's why they were hesitant with this whole thing. And so we produced
(someone): what, to my knowledge, the best had been able to figure out the first software-based system that NSA produced. Now, years later, I'm a hacker. I've done all the hacking, pen-testing things. I look back and say, I hacked NSA. I did something that wasn't supposed to be able to be done. I didn't take no for an answer. I figured out a way to hack the system, hack the process, and I got through it. Not saying I would have been successful at any other time and certainly wouldn't have recommended this solution in a networking world, but for the time it worked and it was revolutionary in terms of being the first foray into software. My career at NSA was roughly three different tours of duty or three different assignments. This initial assignment where I did the work with the manual crypto systems, produced the first software-based manual crypto system, that ended and I became a cryptanalysis intern. And the intern programs were special programs that were designed to get you the training, the diversity of experience in higher education. to advance you to higher levels of your career field, in this case cryptanalysis. So what it meant was essentially that I jumped from InfoSec over to the operations side. So then I was actually on Fort Meade and a couple of my six-month tours as an intern were in one or more of those, there's actually two of those big black buildings.
(someone): So he looked around for such a standard, and he found one. It described how to secure a cryptographic device.
(someone): And this is where it started getting interesting, because it was written for hardware. And there was no concept of doing anything cryptographic in terms of software back in the late 80s and i say this i'm in contact with the fellow alumni from from the infosec organization and people that were there years before i was and i've asked And to the best that I have been able to figure out, what we ended up producing, which was half paper pad, half key on a floppy and a computer program that would do the encryption and decryption. That was the first foray into software based cryptography that NSA produced.
(someone): Now, hold on. It wasn't that easy. Any cryptographic-based hardware that was made had a strict review process. And so, he had to submit this software to a few departments to get it approved for use in the field. And they had some pushback and questions on the software.
(someone): So, I had to go through several iterations of presenting to senior management. They gave me the initial blessing, came back, you know, here's all the security concerns, go address them. I came back, addressed them. They ultimately said, all right, we'll let you do it, but don't do this again.
(someone): Like most government agencies, the NSA was resistant to change. They weren't entirely sure if this newfangled computer thing was the direction they wanted to go in yet. So that's why they were hesitant with this whole thing.
(someone): Back in those days, NSA was operations, which is what most people know NSA for, you know, intercepting communications, stealing all the secrets of the rest of the world, our enemies. And then there was also the defensive side, which was called Information Security, or InfoSec. I happened to, my first interview was on the InfoSec side. It was an office that was responsible for manual or paper cryptosystems. And they were looking for someone to do a cryptologic cryptographic review of all the manual paper cryptosystems that were currently deployed.
(someone): They needed a cryptographer and nobody at the NSA seemed to want to step into that role and help that particular office out.
(someone): So they thought, well, the next best thing is let's grow one. So let's hire somebody off the street. We can go to the pool of people that are out there and train somebody up and train them to be a cryptographer and then have them do the review.
(someone): So he took the job as a cryptographer.
(someone): So I ended up going to work in InfoSec and working for what was known as the manual cryptosystems branch. And my job was to do cryptographic reviews of the systems that were being used at the time.
(someone): So at this point, he had to learn what cryptography was and get good at it.
(someone): NSA ran its own cryptologic school. They had 100, 200, 300, 400 courses, dozens of courses that you would take on various aspects of cryptography. So I basically went back to school and took a lot of these training courses. And what was interesting was I was learning a lot of classic manual cryptography on back
(someone): Back in those days, NSA was operations, which is what most people know NSA for, you know, intercepting communications, stealing all the secrets of the rest of the world, our enemies. And then there was also the defensive side, which was called Information Security, or InfoSec. I happened to, my first interview was on the InfoSec side. It was an office that was responsible for manual or paper cryptosystems. And they were looking for someone to do a cryptologic cryptographic review of all the manual paper cryptosystems that were currently deployed.
(someone): They needed a cryptographer and nobody at the NSA seemed to want to step into that role and help that particular office out.
(someone): So they thought, well, the next best thing is let's grow one. So let's hire somebody off the street. We can go to the pool of people that are out there and train somebody up and train them to be a cryptographer and then have them do the review.
(someone): So he took the job as a cryptographer.
(someone): So I ended up going to work in InfoSec and working for what was known as the manual cryptosystems branch. And my job was to do cryptographic reviews of the systems that were being used at the time.
(someone): So at this point, he had to learn what cryptography was and get good at it.
(someone): NSA ran its own cryptologic school. They had 100, 200, 300, 400 courses, dozens of courses that you would take on various aspects of cryptography. So I basically went back to school and took a lot of these training courses. And what was interesting was I was learning a lot of classic manual cryptography on back
(someone): They were actively conducting DDoS attacks and using open-source intelligence to figure out ways to infiltrate different military bases and networks. The NSA had built a red team and were hacking into the US government networks. I found an old video of a Navy captain who worked at the NSA and was part of this exercise.
(someone): Planning for eligible receiver at the National Security Agency began in 1996. A small handful of people who were appropriately cleared into the program at that time began laying the groundwork for the IW campaign in support of JCS objectives.
(someone): Jeff quit the NSA in 96. I believes that guy was taking notes from the team in the pit.
(someone): I'm like, I remember when they used to visit us all the time and a very congenial fellow And he always had a clipboard and he always was asking lots of questions and taking lots of notes and putting two and two together, looking back on it. I'm like, damn it. He was, he was asking his questions because he was working on putting together eligible receiver. But we were not, we were not ever planned to be part of eligible receiver because they didn't want to put the A team out on the, on, on the job. They, they were, they were recruiting people and training people up to be, lower level hackers, what they referred to as the B team to actually execute the exercise. Yep. So yes, I was involved. I didn't know it at the time.
(someone): So, Eligible Receiver, this exercise that the NSA was doing to hack into the US government, wanted to use the B team, because they didn't want the best, most elite hackers trying this.
(someone): I don't want to look at ones and zeros all day. But he didn't see any better option. Finally, I took a job as an intelligence analyst for the National Signals Intelligence Operations Center, which was known as NSOC, which is the only room that actually looks cool in NSA.
(someone): Part of this job was to decipher encrypted messages. This is called cryptanalysis. Here, within the walls of the NSA, he was learning about computer security. He was understanding what encryption is secure and what isn't. in a very real-world, hands-on way. And he taught himself how to program to do his job better.
(someone): But... Ironically, I hated cryptanalysis, I hated computers. My first technical computer job was programming supercomputers to do cryptanalysis, so that was bizarre.
(someone): He eventually moved to another department, this time doing research and development for Tactical Signals Intelligence.
(someone): It's where I was running around Europe helping people in little green trucks do stuff.
(someone): Do stuff. Ira is secretive about what he did at the NSA, because he has to be, but Signals Intelligence is collecting information from the enemy. And the enemies are everywhere. There's always a threat brooding somewhere. Possibly another country is planning an attack on us, or a terrorist group is meeting to discuss their next steps. Signals Intelligence is knowing what the enemy is up to. And you do this by finding where they are, and then figure out a way to intercept those conversations.
(someone): And heard back from them and they eventually invited me up to, to take a couple of days worth of various, uh, aptitude and skills qualification tests. And at the end of the day, I scored well enough that they offered me a job. And what was weird at the time, and I still think it's kind of weird was they kind of hired me because I had potential. I didn't actually have a job when I went to work for NSA.
(someone): Right. So Jeff started working at the NSA in the fall of 1986. And oh, how different the world of technology was in 1986. And to actually start working at the NSA, he had to pass a fairly rigorous background check.
(someone): They focus on several different areas. They want to know where you lived in the past 10 or 15 years. You had to list neighbors of all the different places you lived. friends, people you had contact with, you know, social and beyond, you know, which when you're a young kid is pretty much your whole life. They wanted, they asked all sorts of questions about your political affiliations, your political leanings. They were trying to find out things about you that had been used against people. uh, in terms of like blackmail or were motivations of people that they had encountered that had basically, basically, uh, had committed espionage and become traitors. So, you know, lifestyle questions back in the day, you know, if you happen to be a homosexual or have, you know, some sort of alternative lifestyle, it wasn't so much an issue. They wouldn't hire, hire you if you were like that.
(someone): And because of this, he decided to spend another four years in the Navy. It was good job security. So after eight years of being in the Navy, he then went to Fort Meade.
(someone): I didn't want to go to Fort Meade, but I ended up, you know, pretty much I had two options. I had Washington State and I was like, I don't want to go to Washington State. And they said, or Fort Meade, we got a couple of places, a couple of jobs at Fort Meade that you can do. And I was on a ship. So, and you had to be like, okay, you had to pick it right then and there. Military has these people called detailers that send you places.
(someone): So if you haven't guessed, Fort Meade is where the NSA headquarters are. Marcus went to work for the NSA, but he was still in the Navy and sort of on loan to the NSA. It's called augmented staff.
(someone): So initially there, I was doing communications. It was proprietary communication systems that the military and DOD used. But what's cool about that, I kind of worked at a knock. And Knock also had like all kind of other cool stuff, like they had a heavy Cisco, they had heavy Cisco stuff back then. And I learned, that's how I started getting to the CCNA. And so I became a beast at Cisco stuff. So I ended up getting promoted to an engineering team of network engineers, and I got to manage the whole NSA's network.
(someone): They weren't entirely sure if this newfangled computer thing was the direction they wanted to go in yet. So that's why they were hesitant with this whole thing. And so we produced
(someone): what, to my knowledge, the best had been able to figure out the first software-based system that NSA produced. Now, years later, I'm a hacker. I've done all the hacking, pen-testing things. I look back and say, I hacked NSA. I did something that wasn't supposed to be able to be done. I didn't take no for an answer. I figured out a way to hack the system, hack the process, and I got through it. Not saying I would have been successful at any other time and certainly wouldn't have recommended this solution in a networking world, but for the time it worked and it was revolutionary in terms of being the first foray into software. My career at NSA was roughly three different tours of duty or three different assignments. This initial assignment where I did the work with the manual crypto systems, produced the first software-based manual crypto system, that ended and I became a cryptanalysis intern. And the intern programs were special programs that were designed to get you the training, the diversity of experience in higher education. to advance you to higher levels of your career field, in this case cryptanalysis. So what it meant was essentially that I jumped from InfoSec over to the operations side. So then I was actually on Fort Meade and a couple of my six-month tours as an intern were in one or more of those, there's actually two of those big black buildings.
(someone): His dad was a physicist, worked for the DOD.
(someone): He was in the Pacific on a ship and got to witness the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb. So I went through college and I went through five majors when I went to college and I was basically looking for the major where I had to do the least amount of bookwork.
(someone): He ended up graduating with a business major.
(someone): So I was working for a, a, a naval organization, uh, naval surface warfare center, because my mom was in HR there and she was able to get me a job. So it was a low level clerk typist type position. And it was a way to earn some money while I was looking for what I wanted to do with my life. And she had a friend within HR whose daughter I think had gotten. a job at NSA and this was in the mid-80s now so she thought well you should you should apply and I was born and raised in Maryland which is where NSA is located Fort Meade, Maryland. I'd never heard of NSA you know in back in the day NSA was no such agency it was a Super big ultra-secret that the organization even existed. Unmarked, fenced buildings off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in Central Maryland, a little bit between Baltimore and D.C. Built out the government applications, sent it in. And heard back from them and they eventually invited me up to, to take a couple of days worth of various, uh, aptitude and skills qualification tests. And at the end of the day, I scored well enough that they offered me a job.
(someone): His dad was a physicist, worked for the DOD.
(someone): He was in the Pacific on a ship and got to witness the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb. So I went through college and I went through five majors when I went to college and I was basically looking for the major where I had to do the least amount of bookwork.
(someone): He ended up graduating with a business major.
(someone): So I was working for a, a, a naval organization, uh, naval surface warfare center, because my mom was in HR there and she was able to get me a job. So it was a low level clerk typist type position. And it was a way to earn some money while I was looking for what I wanted to do with my life. And she had a friend within HR whose daughter I think had gotten. a job at NSA and this was in the mid-80s now so she thought well you should you should apply and I was born and raised in Maryland which is where NSA is located Fort Meade, Maryland. I'd never heard of NSA you know in back in the day NSA was no such agency it was a Super big ultra-secret that the organization even existed. Unmarked, fenced buildings off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in Central Maryland, a little bit between Baltimore and D.C. Built out the government applications, sent it in. And heard back from them and they eventually invited me up to, to take a couple of days worth of various, uh, aptitude and skills qualification tests. And at the end of the day, I scored well enough that they offered me a job.
(someone): Back in those days, NSA was operations, which is what most people know NSA for, you know, intercepting communications, stealing all the secrets of the rest of the world, our enemies. And then there was also the defensive side, which was called Information Security, or InfoSec. I happened to, my first interview was on the InfoSec side. It was an office that was responsible for manual or paper cryptosystems. And they were looking for someone to do a cryptologic cryptographic review of all the manual paper cryptosystems that were currently deployed.
(someone): They needed a cryptographer and nobody at the NSA seemed to want to step into that role and help that particular office out.
(someone): So they thought, well, the next best thing is let's grow one. So let's hire somebody off the street. We can go to the pool of people that are out there and train somebody up and train them to be a cryptographer and then have them do the review.
(someone): So he took the job as a cryptographer.
(someone): So I ended up going to work in InfoSec and working for what was known as the manual cryptosystems branch. And my job was to do cryptographic reviews of the systems that were being used at the time.
(someone): So at this point, he had to learn what cryptography was and get good at it.
(someone): NSA ran its own cryptologic school. They had 100, 200, 300, 400 courses, dozens of courses that you would take on various aspects of cryptography. So I basically went back to school and took a lot of these training courses. And what was interesting was I was learning a lot of classic manual cryptography on back
(someone): And with the Navy teaching him formally and his home lab, he became pretty good at packing. In fact, his specialty was not just getting in, but then pivoting around, moving laterally and finding what else is in that network. After about four months of doing that, he moved over to the NSA. Because David was an exploit analyst in the Navy, the NSA came and said, hey, why don't you come work for us? And recruited him over. So he started working for the NSA as an analyst there. And he worked at the NSA for a while.
(someone): I'd say August of 2011 to August of 2014. So about three years.
(someone): Then around that time, a new opportunity showed up.
(someone): You know, at that point, I had gotten married. Probably while I was up there, it would have been maybe two years, almost two years I'd been married. It was time for me to get out of the service. And I had gotten an offer to stay there on campus, which is at the NSA. Then a different organization or actually an individual recruiter reached out to me and said, hey,
(someone): There was this recruiter from a company called CyberPoint. This is a company that's contracted to do various types of hacking. Basically, if he were to work for this company, he would become a hacker for hire. The U.S. government actually grants certain companies extra permissions to conduct stuff like this. The details of this are foggy, but this company that was trying to recruit David was vetted by the U.S.
(someone): And so I became a beast at Cisco stuff. So I ended up getting promoted to an engineering team of network engineers, and I got to manage the whole NSA's network. So I started off doing a crappy job at Fort Meade, and then the certifications allowed me to ascend to top teams there. And that was during my day job. My day job, I was Navy. At nighttime, I had a part-time job with a DOD contractor, so I was doing a night job since I had a clearance. I ended up helping build out the NSA SOC. It's called NSERC. I ended up helping build that out. I wrote stuff like Sims and all that stuff. So I started coding heavy as well. And I made as much on my nighttime job as I did with my Navy salary. And I was like, man, I got to get out. I got to get out of the Navy and make this money.
(someone): All right. So two words in there you may not know. NOC and SOC. This stands for Network Operations Center and Security Operations Center. This is a place where people watch the network for any kinds of problems. So there are typically multiple monitors on everyone's desks and even a big screen in front of the room which monitors all the networks. The NOC typically looks for network-related faults. A router that went down, a switch went down, some office lost internet connectivity, and that sort of thing. And a SOC watches out for security incidents and responds to threats.