Fred Burton describes the NCTC when he was with it (up until 2000) as having 1 employee in 1981, 3 employees in 1982, and 6 employees until 2000. It used to belong to State. From the Munich games through the first WTC bombing, it had fewer employees than you could count on one hand. That's all changed now. This would be why Snowden and Manning both point out that decent OPSEC will protect you from the NSA more than cryptography - they have to know to listen.the intelligence community has] just become a great jobs program. Particularly an agency like the National Counter Terrorist Center. I mean, we didn't set up a National Soviet Communist Center…NCTC was set up to deal with terrorism which is still a very inconsequential threat - it's very rare.
During the course of the day, I'd get another 600 to 700 messages. So 20-plus years ago, I'm dealing with 1,000 pages - at least - a day, to read and stay on top of. Today, the average analyst is dealing with an excess of maybe 2,000 or 3,000 pages a day…part of it’s the technology, there's more collection.