To be honest I'd be leery of hiring a former intelligence agent regardless of technical ability. I'm sure if they wanted to plant someone it wouldn't be someone with NSA on his/her resume, but the thought would be hard to shake.

Interesting perspective. For the record, I was doing radar signal processing for a contractor for the Navy. While there I bumped into plenty of people who were in the Order of Secret Squirrels, and got the definite impression that once you join you never really leave.

Thanks for the response. Did it end up working for you? Does it rely on getting a hiring manager who is willing to take a chance on you?

Well, I'm not completely out, just at a contractor that does predominantly unclassified work.

It was a combination of finding someone to take a chance on me and the classification of my last program easing. When I started, "I do stuff" was about the extent of what I was allowed to say. When I left the name and nature of the program had been declassified so I could at least talk about some concepts in detail, though still not specific problems.

I ended up in NLP, which is similar enough to signal processing that the company was willing to roll the dice. I did have to take a pay cut, though.