In the wake of the credit crunch, public service--once an unlikely option for Wall Streeters--seemed like a good idea. The opportunity was not lost in the intelligence community. Last year, the CIA turned up its recruiting efforts, running a host of Web, print and radio ads. "Economics, finance, and business professionals: If the quest for the bottom line is just not enough for you, the Central Intelligence Agency has a mission like no other," said one recent radio advertisement. "Make a difference in your career and for your nation."

The effort paid off, as thousands of resumes poured in. At the technical level, there is clearly a lot of synergy between Wall Street and the intelligence community.

Consider high-frequency trading (high-frequency trading news). Wall Street firms and the vendors that sell to them have made enormous strides when it comes to processing transaction at mind-boggling speeds. That raw speed is of critical interest to the intelligence community. So we're getting a sort of reverse spillover effect. Government technology advances in the past filtered over to civilian products and services; the best example is the Internet, originally a creation of DARPA. Now high frequency-oriented firms are finding their technology in demand by government agencies. At the same time, firms that were stated to serve the government are branching into Wall Street applications.

In some cases, the same technology powering high-speed trading is also powering super-fast scans of Internet messages. The Wall Street Journal notes that Mercury Computer Systems is one "of the vendors that equips the Air Force's Predator drones with embedded computer systems that power the vehicle's image-taking sensors. The defense-oriented company's computer system crunches real-time data similarly to systems developed by Redline Trading Solutions, a financial-technology firm spun off by former Mercury employees in June 2008." Exegy started in government security and then introduced its trading product in 2007.

StreamBase Systems went the other route. It started with a data-processing platform widely used on Wall Street and then moved into intelligence work. So there's a lot of traffic both ways, it would appear. The more lucrative work at the rank-and-file level, of course, is on Wall Street. To maintain technical talent in some areas, the CIA has actually been forced to allow employees to moonlight on Wall Street. - Jim