The director of the National Security Agency (NSA) said Thursday that the agency has found a way to prevent further leaks by replacing almost all of its system administrators with machines.
At a cybersecurity conference, General Keith B. Alexander told the audience that the intelligence community plans to reduce the number of people working as system administrators by 90%. Edward Snowden worked as a system administrator for the NSA before exposing the agency's spying programs.
The NSA employs about 1,000 system administrators on contract, Alexander said.
As an additional security measure, Alexander said that intelligence agencies now require system administrators not to work alone. That is, once someone has access to sensitive data, they must always have someone with them.
The recent leaks from Snowden and their publication by the Guardian, in addition to the uproar they caused in Washington, have once again brought the discussion to the intelligence community table about how much access employees should have to government secrets.
Before Snowden, it was Bradley Manning, who was charged with providing thousands of government documents to WikiLeaks. The 25-year-old soldier was sentenced to 90 years in prison.
