> While I've never seen it spelled out this way, I've always been under the assumption that the reason the NSA had so many outside contractors doing particularl

> While I've never seen it spelled out this way, I've always been under the assumption that the reason the NSA had so many outside contractors doing particularly dirty work was perhaps because they knew it was illegal and unconstitutional, and wanted it to happen outside the agency itself. It has nothing to do with "doing the dirty work" as the contractors are still working as agents of the government and are therefore held to the same limitations. Rather there's a ton of seemingly-good reasons. HR because you can't hire enough of the types of geniuses you need from the free market on government pay (it's hard, though not impossible, to justify paying a civil servant gobs and gobs of extra cash). Additionally though there's the political reason: NSA can seem "smaller" by shifting headcount from government employees to contractors. It's not true, of course, but it doesn't have to be true for most of the people who would care. Plus, it's just hard to scale government org. structure up and down as needed. Where you need to be flexible and the mission is not "inherently governmental" then turning to contractors is a popular way to adapt to changing situations. But in no case are contractors held to more lax rules. In fact it's the opposite: they legally must comply with all restrictions on government action since they are (contractual) agents of the government, but they also have to comply with government ethics rules pertaining to the fact that they are not civil servants. These rules are often annoying in their own right (e.g. a contractor is technically required to include the fact that they are a contractor and their company in any email signatures, must announce on the phone that they are a contractor and don't speak for the government, on and on).