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NSA has its own datacenters. I believe about 1/3, or some huge amount of their staff is outsourced.

It’s much like any organization today.

A few years back, I worked at Verizon Wireless for a few months. Their Orangeburg, NY, datacenter was basically outsourced to Accenture (formerly Andersen).

There’s always an organizationa chart, and contractors are simply part of that chart.

As a contractor for many companies, I’ve always just been included in the org chart.

Most often, the contractors are the best key technical people. Very often, they really “run” things operationally, day to day.

The top level management that are employees are just that, top-level management.

I don’t know about NSA at all, but I can only assume it’s similar organizational structure.

As far as servers then, NSA (per their website, Booz, etc.) is pulling data from many sources and putting it into their servers. Homeland Security, same thing. Different databases for different original purposes. Each would have staff (contractor or not, no difference) assigned to manage it. Network and server administrator kind of people (as opposed to database administrators) manage the servers (machines) (and/or virtual servers) and the network routers, switches, etc. These type of administrators will have no real access restrictions on the servers and devices they are assigned, since they will have root/admin passwords, etc. There is no way to limit a root account by definition, it’s an all-powerful account. In unixland, it’s necessary due to the way unix is designed.

Agencies come up with nice names for their applications/databases and (if you look at their websites) then they sort of advertise to other agencies how great the thing they purchased/implemented is. All the agencies keep talking about how they can efficiently share data between each other to achieve goals.

Take a gander at Booze’s website, a nice 9-page article:

“Marshaling Data for Enterprise Insights”
“A 10-year Vision for the US Department of Homeland Security”.

This is about SALES TO THE GOVERNMENT.

People have NO CLUE.

SALES, CONSULTING, SALES, CONSULTING, SALES, CONSULTING, SALES, CONSULTING, SALES, CONSULTING, SALES, CONSULTING, SALES, CONSULTING, SALES, CONSULTING, SALES, CONSULTING, SALES, CONSULTING, SALES, CONSULTING.

Yes, as a unix sysadmin and DBA, I have root. I’ve been managing the servers and data myself for 20+ years. That was my entire point. The Guardian’s allegation that the NSA has direct access to Google’s (etc.) servers is bunk.

There is no way the NSA has direct access to the servers of private companies. The sysadmins and DBAs wouldn’t allow it. Sysadmins & DBAs are pulling data relative to FISA warrants and putting in on isolated servers where the NSA retrieves it and puts it on their own servers to analyze it.