NSA leadership discusses post‑Snowden recovery and contractor‑related breach

161 intelligence. A former top intelligence official told me “The queen on our chessboard had been taken.” To be sure, even after the loss of its “queen,” the game was not lost. The NSA moved to mitigate the damage and find new ways of obtaining unexpected intelligence. In June 2014, the new NSA director Admiral Michael Rogers had to confront flagging morale that, according to former director Michael Hayden, was near-paralyzing the intelligence service. Admiral Rogers recognized that as a direct result of the Snowden breach “the nation has lost capabilities against adversaries right now who are attempting to actively undermine us." But even with that loss, he observed “the sky has not fallen.” As in the Chicken Little fable he cited, the world had not ended for the NSA. Nor had it ended for the multi-billion out-sourcing enterprise it superintended. The NSA may have lost many of its sources, or “capabilities,” but Rogers held out hope that new sources could be eventually found to replace them. Compromised codes, after all, could be changed. New technological methods could be devised. New vulnerabilities also could be targeted in enemy territories. Although repairing the damage might take many “decades.” according to Michael McConnell, the Vice Chairman of Booz Allen, the new director had to get on with that task. McConnell, a former NSA director himself, pointed out that the NSA Director’s “first responsibility is to be the chief cheerleader." Rebuilding the NSA capabilities assumed, however, that there would not be another Snowden-size breach. The question remained: how could the NSA’s vaunted secrecy have been so deeply penetrated by a mere analyst-in-training at a regional base in Oahu? The perpetrator himself could not be asked. He was in Moscow, supposedly employed by an unnamed Russian cyber security firm. He was also in his Moscow interviews pointing to the “incompetence” of the NSA. All that was known for certain about the young man who had taken the “queen” from the board was that he had gained entry to the NSA’s secret chambers through the back door, a portal opened to him by the NSA’s reliance on outside contractors. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020313