NSA IS ON A GROUNDBREAKING MISSION - [The Washington Post, F15.] Sometime next spring, according to the plan, as many as 1,000 employees of the National Security Agency in Fort Meade will begin exchanging their government dog tags for new IDs from AT&T, Computer Sciences or other technology contractors chosen to handle the NSA's conventional telecommunications and computer needs. The transfer would open a major new chapter in federal outsourcing: the turnover of full responsibility for an entire agency's "noncritical" telephone, Web and desktop computing operations to outside contractors, says Ray Bjorklund, vice president of Federal Sources. The fact that the client is the super-secretive NSA, whose headquarters was once dubbed "the Taj Mahal of eavesdropping," makes the move even more groundbreaking (although the transfer won't include NSA's code-breaking and other intelligence work). Indeed, the project's code name is Groundbreaker. It's expected to be worth at least $2 billion for the winning contracting team over the next decade, industry officials say. The figure could grow to $5 billion if the mission is expanded. NSA has chosen three teams to compete for the Groundbreaker contract, most of them among the region's biggest IT contractors. Leading the teams are AT&T's federal division, Computer Sciences and OAO. AT&T and CSC are among the nation's half-dozen largest federal IT contractors, with more than $1 billion in annual contracts. OAO had $137 million in federal IT work last year, according to Washington Technology magazine.