NSA Outsourced System Administrators Pose High Insider Threat, Potentially Targeted by Foreign Intelligence Services

163 The NSA’s system administrators were, as the threat officer pointed out, very different from the traditional military employees at the NSA. They were usually civilians, who effectively served as repair-men for complex computer systems at the NSA. Moreover, many of them had not been directly hired by the NSA. Instead, their recruitment had been privatized to outside contractors. This outsourcing had deep roots tracing back to the Second World War Ed Booz, the founder of Booz Allen Hamilton, obtained contracts to help manage ship construction from the US Navy. After the war ended he sought contracts for his firm in classified work. These contracts grew in size as the NSA needed more and more system administrators and other information technologists to manage the computer networks. These system administrators needed to be given special privileges to do their service job. One such privilege allowed them to bypass password protection. Another privilege allowed then to temporarily transfer data to an external storage device while they repaired computers. These two privileges greatly increased the risk of a massive breach. Seeing them as the weak link if the chain, the threat officer wrote in the report that “system administrators are likely to be increasingly targeted by foreign intelligence services because of their special access to information.” Before the computerization of the NSA, the threat officer noted that code clerks and other low- level NSA communicators had been the target of adversary intelligence services. But the increasing reliance on computer technicians presented foreign intelligence services with much richer targets. He predicted that they would adapt their recruiting to this new reality. Specifically, he argued that adversary intelligence services would now focus their attention on system administrators. “With system administrators,” he said, “the situation is potentially much worse than it has ever been with communicators.” The reason: “System administrators can so easily, and quickly, steal vast quantities of information.” He further suggested that since system administrators are often drawn from counterculture of hacking, they are more likely to be vulnerable to an adversary service using a fake identity for its approach, or a “false flag.” A “false flag” was a term originally applied to pirate ship that temporarily hoisted any flag that would allow it to gain close proximity to its intended prey but it modern times describes a technique employed by espionage service to surreptitiously lure a prospect. As will be more fully discussed in the next chapter, false flags were a staple used by the KGB in espionage recruitments during the Cold War. They were usually employed when a target for recruitment was not ideologically disposed to assisting the intelligence service. To overcome that problem, recruiters hide their true identities and adopt a more sympathetic bogus one. In 1973, for example, the KGB, working through one of its agents in the US Navy, used the false flag of Israel, to recruit Jerry Alfred Whitworth, who served as a communications officer with a top secret clearance for the Navy. Like many other KGB recruits, Whitworth came from a broken family, dropped out of a high school, took technical courses and got a job asa communications officer. He was not disposed to working for Russia. But he was willing to steal enciphered and plain text cables to help in the defense of Israel. After he was thoroughly compromised by his espionage work, he was told by the KGB recruiter that he was actually working for Russia, but, by this time, he was too deeply compromised to quit. He continued his HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020315