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CHAPTER 8 Raider of the Inner Sanctum They think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically. —EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2014 HE NIGHTMARE OF THE NSA is a penetration. As the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA found out in the 1990s, no intelligence service is invulnerable to it. Any employee of a large intelligence organiza- tion can turn, or be turned, against it. Among the more than ten thousand intelligence workers employed by the NSA, it is a near certainty that over time more than one of them will become dis- satisfied with their work. A worker may have a personal grievance about salary, lack of promotion, or treatment by his or her superi- ors. Disenchantment with the NSA may also proceed from idealis- tic objections. The NSA is in the business of secretly intercepting messages, and an insider could come to find its spying activities at odds with his or her own beliefs about the violation of privacy. For any of these reasons, a disgruntled insider could go rogue. He or she then might attempt to right a perceived wrong by disclosing NSA secrets to another party. That party might then induce or blackmail the rogue employee into disclosing further secrets. | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 74 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019562