There are still lots of people willing to join the TAO and the like, but the NSA has been pretty open about struggling to recruit top talent. Not all of that is ethical stuff, they lose people for reasons from salary to drug and felony screens, but some of it is.
Bear in mind that the NSA only needs good talent to compromise systems, not elite talent. They have some elite talent (Stuxnet anyone?), but their domestic work is largely hacking theater. After all, you don't have to covery your tracks like a private hacker if you can just ship out an NSL to bury the matter. Hell, some of their projects involved a lawyer, a bunch of analysts, and no internal talent - they can just ask for what they want.
Tailored Access Operations. It's the "offense" branch of the NSA, responsible for gaining access to external computer systems: often technologically, sometimes legislatively when they're domestic. They did QUANTUM and FOXACID among other access tools.
It's a major part of the NSA, and generally considered to be where the bulk of the "serious hackers" work. The Equation Group is (probably) tied to TAO - they're the access group that was recently affected by the Shadow Brokers leak.
Plenty of HN posts laud people for working for the government, the entity which engages in war crimes, torture, and mass surveillance.