| ® || The NSA’s Back Door | 219 pensions, paid medical leave, and other benefits. It was a system that effectively replaced military careerists with freelancers. The irony of the situation was that the NSA had surrounded its front doors with rings of barbed wire, closed-circuit cameras, and armed guards, but for reasons of economy, bureaucratic restrictions, and convenience it had left the back door of outsourcing open to temporary employees of private companies, even though it might take some time for them to gain entry to its inner sanctum. “Tt was not a question of if but when one of the contractors would go rogue,” the former NSA executive who wrote the 2015 memoran- dum told me. Snowden answered that question in 2013. Even more extraordinary than the theft itself was the reaction to it by the NSA. It turned out that there was no cost of failure levied against the out- side contractor Booz Allen, which had employed Snowden when he bypassed its security regime to steal the keys to the kingdom. Even though the counterintelligence investigation showed Snowden stole documents from compartments to which he did not have access, the NSA did not penalize Booz Allen. Instead, its revenues and profits © from government contracts markedly increased between 2013 and ® 2015. Nor did the NSA alter its reliance on private contractors. The back door to the NSA remained wide open. Outsourcing to private com- panies has become an all but irreplaceable part of the intelligence system in America, Snowden’s actions, and the risk of future similar actions, notwithstanding. | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.indd 219 © 9/30/16 8:13 AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019707