U.S. spy agency to privatize some operations

The U.S. National Security Agency, the organization responsible for spying on foreign communications and analyzing military data, is considering upgrading its information network by hiring private industry, it announced on Wednesday. "Explosive growth in the global network and new technologies makes our partnership with industry more vital to the NSA's success than ever before," said USAF Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, Director of the NSA, in a statement. These four areas of information technology will be analyzed to see whether they would benefit from privatization: distributed computing, enterprise/security management, networks, and telephony. A final decision will be made in the spring of 2001. -- Robert Lemos, ZDNet News