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