profits. Because the value of their contracts was largely limited by

214 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS profits. Because the value of their contracts was largely limited by competitive bidding, their business plans were predicated on their ability to minimize the costs of fulfilling these contracts. Their prin- cipal cost was the salaries they paid their independent contractors. Their business plans therefore depended on finding large numbers of computer technicians in the private realm willing to work at an NSA base at relatively low wages. This task became more difficult as many potential recruits could find higher-paying employment with more of a future in the burgeoning private sphere. But the compa- nies could also increase their revenue streams by getting additional contracts, which, in turn, meant recruiting even more workers. Such a business plan could hardly afford to give the highest pri- ority to the low probability of a security risk. In the private sector, there is usually an unambiguous external measure of failure. An automobile company such as General Motors can measure the per- formance of its executives by reckoning its change in net income. With secret intelligence work, the metrics for failure are far less clear. This curious aspect of secret work was part of the advice given © to a White House lawyer in the Obama administration seeking a © position with the NSA in 2012, who was told that among the advan- tages of working for a super-secret agency was that if one errs or has a failure, “it stays secret.” The Snowden case showed that not all failures stay secret. The NSA can certainly quantify the amount of data it is intercept- ing, but it obviously cannot count the intelligence that it misses. The a priori proposition in the intelligence game is that “what is success- fully hidden is never found.” But one failure that cannot be hidden is a security breach in which a perpetrator uses NSA data to publicly expose the NSA’s sources. Until the Snowden breach in 2013, the NSA had experienced only one such public failure. It was the capture by North Korea in 1968 of the USS Pueblo, which had been carrying out highly sensitive elec- tronic communications interception for the NSA. The Pueblo crew failed to destroy the NSA‘s encoding machines, which were flown to Russia several days later. It was a horrible, costly breach. The Snowden breach was much worse because, among the thousands of | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r.indd 214 ® 9/30/16 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019702