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202 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS
he was too deeply compromised to quit. He continued his espionage
work for another eight 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
because 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 sys-
tem administrator working for U.S. 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 com-
puter networks for fun and profit. Until then, these hacktivists 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 recruit-
ers as fellow hacktivists. 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 weak link of system administrators became increasingly rel-
evant as the NSA moved further into the digital age. By the begin-
ning of this century, its growing networks of computers were largely
operated by civilian technicians, including system administrators,
infrastructure analysts, and information technologists, who were
needed to keep the system running. Despite the warning by the
threat officer, the NSA became more and more reliant on these out-
siders as it reorganized to meet its new mandates for surveillance of
the Internet in the war on terrorism.
The NSA had to compete with technology companies, such as
Google, Apple, and Facebook, for the services of experienced IT
workers. Though Booz Allen had been providing technically trained
specialists to the government since the 1940s and ’50s, congressio-
nally imposed salary caps put the NSA at a disadvantage to private
firms in its recruitment efforts. As a result, it increasingly contracted
with private firms to find talent, especially in the rush for data-based
intelligence following 9/11. Booz Allen, to meet increased demand,
recruited civilian technicians from many unconventional areas,
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