Security agency's chief outlines emerging role of tech firms

ORLANDO, Fla.-The National Security Agency (NSA) is looking to the technology industry for commercial solutions to monitor millions of pieces of data, as it begins to step from behind its highly secretive walls, the agency's director said on Monday.

Lt. General Michael Hayden told an audience of government and industry officials at the 2003 Information Processing Interagency Conference here that commercial technologies will be a key asset in his agency's "operational transformation" for collecting and managing information.

For decades, he said, NSA operated within the Cold War environment, where the communications the organization intercepted were transmitted in an independent space. But technology and the growth of the Internet have forever changed that paradigm, he said.

"We no longer live in a world in which adversaries' communications exist on one network and ... legally protected communications exist on another," Hayden said.

What's more, the sheer volume of data processed through global communications networks is multiplying. "In 2001, mankind spent 186 billion minutes on the telephone in international calls alone," he said.

Consequently, NSA must not only collect but also analyze more information. "We had to go to the outside for help," Hayden said, and the technology industry is playing a key role in that effort. NSA is now approaching commercial firms to purchase technologies and solutions to help it manage information.

"We're going to buy everything we possibly can and make only what we have to," Hayden said. But he supplied only vague descriptions of the kinds of solutions NSA is seeking as it advances efforts to recalibrate its workforce and internal communications systems.

"Operational transformation of the National Security Agency is far more about what happens after data is collected than it is about collection per se," he said. "We have generally succeeded in finding the needle in the haystack."

Yet the landscape is changing, he said; now "there appears to be infinite an number of haystacks." So NSA is looking to products that will help it "create actionable new information" from the "fact and pattern of the haystacks themselves."

The private sector also is helping NSA redevelop its workforce as it tries to lure new talent by outsourcing managerial positions. NSA hired its chief financial officer from the financial services company Legg Mason and its chief research officer from Walt Disney Corp.

The Sept. 11 attacks and the nation's focus on homeland security has enhanced that initiative. Just after Sept. 11, Hayden said, NSA alone received more than 70,000 resumes. "We have the absolute pick of the litter for people coming into this agency," he said.

Hayden added that privacy is still a concern in NSA's work, noting that NSA agents always have been tasked with protecting civilian information. NSA "has to work in that single information space, and it has to have the power to do its mission" while ensuring it does not violate rights of individuals, he said.