NSA released today on its Web site two reports on its reorganization, one by an external team of 27 page, another of 76 pages by an internal team. Both are big PDF files. We have converted the first to HTML: http://cryptome.org/nsa-reorg-et.htm (77KB) Here is an excerpt: "We interviewed about one hundred people in the Agency, including most senior leaders, and asked very specific questions about the way people operate and the embedded culture. We learned the Agency is a very bureaucratic government organization, and that most of the behavior patterns were established during the 1970s and 1980s when there was plenty of money to execute its mission. NSA appears to operate like an entitlement program. Most people in the Agency are highly motivated and work very hard, but a portion does not. We also found a leadership culture that appears most interested in focusing on their positions and protecting their people's jobs at the expense of accomplishing the mission. Most of the people at NSA are hired night out of college and spend their entire lives in the Agency. Regardless of their work performance and their job responsibility, the Agency promotes people roughly at the same rate. The institution encouraged people to get deeply involved in the promotion process, to the point that civilian personnel wrote their own promotion reports, and supervisors endorsed the reports even if they did not agree, mostly to prevent animosity. However, the most critical aspect of the people and culture in the institution was the mindset related to lack of empowerment and accountability. NSA's present culture overemphasizes loyalty to a particular function and its associated senior leadership, instead of full and frank discussions of problems, issues and concerns. This has created a culture that discourages sending bad news up the chain of command. The staff knows NSA is falling behind and is not properly addressing the inherent problems of the emerging global network, and the present management infrastructure does not appear to be supporting the required changes. In addition, we are concerned the present mindset fostered a society where people were afraid to express their own thoughts. Even though people spoke to us with true candor, they always wanted to avoid attribution because of the perception that the information was going to be used against them." From: External Team Report: a Management Review for the Director, NSA, October 22, 2000 http://www.nsa.gov/releases/nsa_external_team_report.pdf (2.7MB) Second report: http://www.nsa.gov/releases/nsa_new_enterprise_team_recommendations.pdf (6.4MB)