The NSA‘s Back Door | 213

The NSA‘s Back Door | 213 including the hacking culture. Ex-hackers who lacked (or shunned) employment opportunities in the corporate sector were suitable candidates for the system administrator jobs that these firms had contracted to supply the NSA. In the rush to expand, little heed was paid to the 1996 warning that this hacking culture might provide a portal to anti-government hacktivist groups. The NSA became so enamored with this new computer technology that it neglected the security implications of employing outsiders to service it. “All of us just fell in love with the ease and convenience and scale [of electronic storage],” General Hayden, who headed the NSA at the time, said to The Wall Street Journal in 2015. “So we decided to take things we used to keep if not in a safe, at least in our desk drawer, and put it up here [in a computer network], where it’s by definition more vulnerable.” Making matters even worse, as has previously been discussed, the NSA stripped away much of the so-called stove- piping that insulated highly sensitive data from the NSA’s other computer networks. FBI Director Mueller, in his “Statement Before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental © Affairs,”described a decade of post—9/11 intelligence reorganization © thus: “One of the first steps was to centralize control and manage- ment of counterterrorism operations at headquarters to avoid the ‘stove-piping’ of information on terrorism cases in the 56 individual field offices across the country.” Here the NSA was merely following the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission to make their data more accessible to other agencies concerned with potential terrorist attacks, but as a result, the inner sanctum of the NSA became more open to its new army of civilian technicians. By 2013, much of the job of managing the NSA’s classified com- puters had been handed over to a handful of private companies: Booz Allen Hamilton, which handled the most highly secret work; Dell SecureWorks; Microsoft; Raytheon; and IBM. In many respects, these five companies acted less like management consultants and more like temporary employment agencies in finding for the NSA the computer specialists who had the necessary security clearances. The NSA found that the universe of independent contractors was governed by very different considerations from that of intelligence services. Unlike intelligence services, their fate depended on turning | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r.indd 213 ® 9/30/16 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019701