'were', I think, may be more operative. I first heard that statistic about a long time ago, more like the '70s. Mathematicians don't seem to be very useful to the NSA's current hacker paradigm. (Note what we haven't gotten from the Snowden leaks so far: any sort of major mathematical or theoretical advance. Amazing hacking infrastructure, though.)
NLP's foundation is in statistics, so calling it "not maths" seems rather short-sighted. Mathematics, especially statistics, play a crucial role in all data interpretation when you get to any kind of scale and they seem to be the biggest of them all.....