“There’s definitely a feeling of responsibility that comes with it,” says Simon.

He calls getting top secret clearance a “golden key” that opens up all sorts of doors in the future. “It can be scary,” she adds, “because you know what’s out there.”īalancing school and work was easy for Simon, who as a senior had enough credits to only need to take two morning classes, then he headed to work in the afternoon. “Before that you don’t really understand and then when you get it you realize how much you have access to,” Summer says. No small feat to get ( just ask Jared Kushner) and a weighty responsibility for anyone, let alone teenagers from a generation that shares everything. For that they need TS/SCI, more commonly known as Top Secret security clearance, as high as clearances go. The trio – who are all 18 and just graduated from high schools in Maryland - are among the more than 150 high schoolers in a work study program at the agency which gives them access and exposure to some of the country’s most sensitive information and secret efforts. US intelligence warns China is using student spies to steal secrets Their last names are being withheld for security reasons. There, she works “somewhat in cyber,” she responds cryptically when asked what someone in their teens would be asked to do for the NSA, which leads the American intelligence community’s electronic signals intelligence gathering and code-breaking efforts.Įqually cagey on that front are Brianna and Simon, two other high school seniors who interned at the NSA, who said over the past year they worked in language translation and cyber, respectively. But her friends might be forgiven because when the 18-year-old wasn’t in class at her Maryland high school this past school year, she was at her job in the sprawling National Security Agency complex at Fort Meade in Maryland. “They like to have fun with it,” Summer says. They speculate about the “wild things” she does at work and jokingly accuse her of being a spy. Summer’s high school friends think she’s monitoring their phones and listening in on their conversations.

Girl secret agents