> If we’ve learned anything in the past few days it’s that the NSA does precious little of its own spying, relying instead on companies like Palantir and Booz Allen Hamilton.
Do we actually know, or is the writer just assuming that because they use some outside contractors, outside contractors do most of the work?
It is common for government agencies to farm out much of the work. At NASA, for example, the government employees do almost no engineering work. It's all private contractors. I never worked at NSA, but I would imagine it is similar.
The ideal is for things that are clearly a "common business function" to be outsourced to contractors where possible. E.g. things like janitorial services, there's nothing inherently governmental about wiping the commodes down.
Then you have "inherently governmental functions" such as setting and determining policy, obligating expenditure of funds from the Treasury, supervising other civil servants, etc. That has to be done by a Federal employee.
Then you have stuff in-between, which typically was also done by a government employee, except perhaps for highly specialized skills where it made sense simply to pay someone smart to do it for you and then make decisions based on that. E.g. how the Pentagon paid think tanks to do geopolitical analyses, and then evaluated and used those inputs in the decision-making process.
Personally I was surprised to hear that contractors were as embedded as they were in the NSA. Sysadmin is a common-enough function, but has to be considered inherently governmental in the context of the NSA for crying out loud. But then we've been on a long slide toward more and more contractor entrenchment within the halls of government for awhile now, unfortunately.
I'm hoping that if nothing else happens, at least these leaks will arrest or even reverse that trend.
Things are different for agencies tied to defense or intelligence gathering. I would imagine the NSA tries to do as much in-house as they can. NASA design secrets leaking aren't nearly as potentially damaging as internal NSA plans or techniques leaking.
Of course, Snowden was a contractor so that shows they do allow contractors with TS clearances to work on their projects, but 1) it's usually only specific firms that they trust and 2) the contractors may help build the systems but probably will be told little or nothing about the exact end usage and results.
Do we actually know, or is the writer just assuming that because they use some outside contractors, outside contractors do most of the work?