growing antagonism toward the U.S. government, he had not given

Contractor | 29 growing antagonism toward the U.S. government, he had not given up on, if not becoming a secret agent, working in the netherworld of secret intelligence. There was still a back door through which he could reenter the spy world. Private corporations hired civilian technicians to work for spy agencies as independent contractors. By 2009, the CIA, the NSA, and other U.S. intelligence services had outsourced much of the job of maintaining and upgrading their computer systems to these private companies. They supplied the NSA with most of its system administrators and other information technology workers. This arrangement allowed the NSA to effectively bypass budget limits and other restrictions limiting how many NSA technicians it could recruit. Instead of being on the NSA’s own payroll, these people nominally worked for, and received their paychecks from, private employers. In fact, many of these outside contractors worked full-time for the NSA. Snowden applied in April 2009 to one of these private compa- nies, a subsidiary of the Dell computer company. To diversify out of © manufacturing computers, Dell had recently gone into the business © of managing government computer systems for the NSA and other intelligence services. As a leading specialist in the field of corporate cyber security, Dell had no problem obtaining sizable contracts from the NSA’s Technology Directorate. In 2008, the NSA had in effect outsourced to Dell the task of reorganizing the backup systems at its regional bases. Dell had to find thousands of independent contrac- tors to work at these bases. In 2009, it was seeking to fill positions at the NSA’s regional base in Japan, and Snowden applied. Relocat- ing would be no issue for him because he had a longtime interest in going to Japan. He had little problem obtaining the job. He had a single compel- ling qualification: like all other CIA officers, he had been given a top secret clearance. For an outside contractor such as Dell, such a security clearance was pure gold. If a potential recruit lacked it, Dell needed to wait for a time-consuming background check that would have to be conducted before it could deploy him or her at the NSA. Ifa recruit already had the clearance, as Snowden did, he could begin working immediately. | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 29 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019517