NSA chief Keith Alexander told a conference in New York that the NSA was in the process of automating much of its data collection and would cut the number of people who had access to sensitive information by 90%. Reuters: "What we're in the process of doing - not fast enough - is reducing our system administrators by about 90 percent," he said. The remarks came as the agency is facing scrutiny after Snowden, who had been one of about 1,000 system administrators who help run the agency's networks, leaked classified details about surveillance programs to the press. Before the change, "what we've done is we've put people in the loop of transferring data, securing networks and doing things that machines are probably better at doing," Alexander said. Using technology to automate much of the work now done by employees and contractors would make the NSA's networks "more defensible and more secure," as well as faster, he said at the conference, in which he did not mention...(Read Full Post)