Yeah, everything I've been seeing seems to be that they seriously threw out everything about being competent in the 1990s, and then blew up into something huge (and incompetent) in the post-9/11. Hayden does not seem to have been a good director at all, at either NSA or CIA, and was responsible for the big push toward contractors as well.
Probably in the 1990s when they moved operational systems from timeshare/unix/etc. multiuser to a bunch of networked Windows desktops for all use, not just office automation (which is how they brought them in originally).
