NSA Data Tiering Overview and Insider Threat Narrative

87 CHAPTER TEN Raider of the Inner Sanctum “They think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically.” —Edward Snowden in Moscow The nightmare of the NSA is a penetration. As the CIA, FBI and NSA found out in the 1990s, No intelligence service is invulnerable to it. Any employee of a large intelligence organization can turn, or be turned, against it. Among the more than 10,000 intelligence workers employed by the NSA, it is a near certainty that over time one or more of them will become dissatisfied with their work. He or she may have a personal grievance about their pay, lack of promotion or their treatment by their superiors. Disenchantment with the NSA may also proceed from idealistic objections. After all, the NSA is in the business of secretly intercepting messages, and an insider could find its spying activities at odds with his or her own beliefs about the violation of privacy. For any of these reasons, a disgruntled insider could go rogue. He or she then might attempt to right a perceived wrong by disclosing the NSA secrets to another party. That party might then induce or blackmail the rogue employee into disclosing further secrets. To guard against it, the NSA has developed a well-organized system for stratifying its data so that obtaining critical secrets would require a rogue employee to burrow into its heavily protected inner sanctum. As part of this system, the NSA divides its data into different tiers depending on the importance of the secrets to its operations. The first tier, Level 1, is mainly administrative material. This data would include FISA court orders and other directives it employees might need to check on to carry out their tasks. Level 2 contains data from which the secret sources have been removed. This tier, available to other intelligence services and policy-makers, includes reports and analysis that can be shared. The third tier, Levels 3, contains documents that cannot be shared outside of a small group of authorized individuals because they disclose the secret sources through which the NSA surreptitiously obtained the information. This third tier includes, for example, compiled list of the sources in China, Russia, Iran and other adversary countries. It also disclosed the exotic methods the NSA uses to get some of this data. Level 3 documents also include reports on HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020239