164 espionage work for another 8 years. (Whitworth, who was arrested by the FBI in 1985, was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 365 years in prison.) The Internet provided an almost ideal environment for false flags since its users commonly adopt aliases, screen names, and other avatars. The threat officer explained how easy it would be for the KGB to adapt such a false flag when dealing with a dissident system administrator working for US intelligence. As the threat officer pointed out in his report, the KGB had used false flags in the late 1980s to surreptitiously recruit members of the “German Hanover Hackers,” a community of anarchistic hackers who breached computer networks for fun and profit. Up until then, these hacktavists stole corporate and private passwords, credit card information, and other privileged documents as a form of freelance espionage. Because of their fervent anti- authority ideology, the KGB disguised its recruiters as fellow hacktavists. The KGB succeeded in getting the Hanover hackers to steal log-in account identifications, source codes and other information from U.S. government computer networks. The precise vulnerability that this threat officer pointed out in 1996 was system administrators. This weak link became increasingly relevant as the NSA moved further into the digital age. By the beginning of the 21* century, its growing networks of computers were largely run by civilian technicians, including system administrators, infrastructure analysts, and information technologists, who were need to keep the system running. Despite the warning by the threat officer, the NSA became more reliant on these outsiders as it reorganized to meet its new mandates for surveillance of the Internet in the war on terrorism. Since the NSA had to compete with technology companies, such as Google, Apple and Facebook, for the services of experienced IT workers, it used private contractors to find them. They, in turn, recruited civilian technicians fro