The secretive intelligence agency has planned to replace the position of System Administrators by computer systems to avoid security breaches in future. This was made public by the Director of NASA in the wake of security breaches made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, an ex-employee of the Booz Allen Hamilton.
Eric Chiu, president of the computer security company Hytrust,” The scariest threat is the systems administrator,” The system administrator has godlike access to systems they manage.”
On Thursday, Gen. Keith Alexander said in a cyber -security conference held in New York City that National Security Agency schemes to significantly reduce the number of people manning the post of systems administrators.
Snowden worked for the NSA for more than a year before he was appointed as systems administrator. During his tenure as the systems administrator he disclosed classified details about until that time private and security surveillance programs to the media in open.
Alexander said that the NSA has currently about 1,000 systems administrators, and they plan to reduce the number by 90 per cent. He further added that the machines would probably do better, secure and defensible job in transferring data, securing networks and doing things than human-beings.
But, Snowden told The Guardian that his job was actually to work as an “infrastructure analyst, not the system administrator.
Alexander also defended the NSA’s conduct, and claimed that the plan to eliminate the systems administrator position was in place before Snowden leaks. The consequent media blaze has furthered the process rapidly.
In June, Alexander told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the NSA was put into operation a “two-person” system to stop any leakages of classified information in future.
Dale Meyerrose ,the director of national intelligence, told The New York Times that a two-man rule existed ever since US had nuclear weapons. He reiterated that primary concern was to prevent leakage and offer a leak-proof system.