I have no opinion whether Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, is a big jerk or the best dude ever. The more important point (other than the focus on what the feds have been up to) is explained by Robert O’Harrow Jr., Dana Priest and Marjorie Censer in WaPo — that a humungous amount of intelligence is being gathered by outside contractors, who get paid a gazillion taxpayer bucks for it, and the actual federal government is not even supervising much of this.
Never before have so many U.S. intelligence workers been hired so quickly, or been given access to secret government information through networked computers. In recent years, about one in four intelligence workers has been a contractor, and 70 percent or more of the intelligence community’s secret budget has gone to private firms. …
… But in the rush to fill jobs, the government has relied on faulty procedures to vet intelligence workers, documents and interviews show. At the same time, intelligence agencies have not hired enough in-house government workers to manage and oversee the contractors, contracting specialists said.
The rush to fill jobs began right after 9/11, of course, and this whole behemoth private intelligence gathering operation was set up by the Bush Administration. But I can’t see that the Obama Administration has done much to change it.
By the mid-2000s, all of the intelligence agencies had become dependent on private contractors such as Snowden — who says he made $200,000 a year — to perform everything from information technology installation and maintenance to intelligence analysis and agent protection.
This article says Snowden never finished high school. There are plans to add another 10,000 employees to the behemoth, so get your resume in now.
Private contractors working for the CIA recruited spies, protected CIA directors, helped snatch suspected extremists off the streets of Italy and even interrogated suspected terrorists in secret prisons aboard.
The Defense Security Service, the agency that grants security clearances to many of the Defense Department’s intelligence agencies, became so overwhelmed with that task that on April 28, 2006, it shut down the clearance process altogether. Its backlog of pending cases had reached 700,000, and it had run out of money to process any more. The government’s solution was to hire more contractors to administer the security clearance reviews.
Are we feeling safer yet?
The McLean-based Booz Allen has almost 25,000 employees and recorded $5.8 billion in revenue for fiscal 2013, earning $219 million in profit. Its profits have been soaring in recent years. Nearly all of its revenue comes as a result of “strong and longstanding relationships with a diverse group of clients at all levels of the U.S. government,†the company said in a financial filing.
The largest shareholder of the firm is the Carlyle Group, which owns more than two thirds of the shares.
Oh, my dears, it has been years since I’ve thought of the Carlyle Group. Talk about a blast from the past. You’ll remember that the Carlyle Group connected the Bush and bin Laden families in business. I understand the bin Ladens liquidated their holdings in Carlyle after 9/11. But the point is that anybody from anywhere can buy into Carlyle, and it owns two-thirds of a private corporation running U.S. security operations.
This is stupid. Seriously.
I come down on the Big Jerk side, but, as you point out, what is going on with the lack of oversight and the general chaos amid subcontractors – who clearly can’t do the job. I hope Booz Allen gets stung big over this.
I’m starting to think I’d prefer having boozing space aliens, sifting through this stuff.
I’m at a complete loss of what we can do about this.
I suppose we could vote out the politicians that are in there now, but who’s to say their replacements would behave any better?
Idea’s, anyone?
Having said all of that, I might be okay with this, if we had another Church Commission, like we did in the mid-late 70’s, and legal versus illegal activity could be clearly defined, with legitimate warrants were issued, and we didn’t have courts just rubber-stamp any and every thing put before them, and, maybe, would it be too much to ask to keep the information within the government? Unlike now, WHEN WE “OUTSOURCE” THIS TO PRIVATE COMPANIES!!!
Because, not-always-dear US government, when it’s outsourced, you lose control over it.
Want proof?
“YOU’RE SOAKING IN IT NOW!!!”
And don’t get me started on how the common thread of all the bad sh*t that’s gone on in this country over the last 1/2 century, has a Bush’s name attached to it, somewhere.
Anybody who didn’t know this was going on hasn’t been paying attention. I have not made any effort to find out how much snooping the government was doing, and I have still been frequently gobsmacked by the brazen hugeness of it and of the lack of effort to keep it hidden. Just reading a few super-secret sources like the NYTimes has kept me fully informed. And of course my bookmarks under the News section of my browser are a spy’s dream of additional hard-to-find sources. You know, The Telegraph, The Guardian! I even listen to NPR in my constant effort to find secret information.
Is Snowden a bad guy? No, he just demonstrates how easily any of the 500 companies involved in this can be exposed by just one disgusted (not disgruntled) employee. He did nothing more than what has been exposed bit by bit (no pun intended) over the years.
As far as the “I knew nothing” crowd in the legislative bodies, I suggest they use their excellent free health care for glasses and hearing aids, because they certainly have some kind of problem if they didn’t know. The Carlyle Group: same as it ever was.
There is $$$$$ to be made!
Yes, divulging info when you were hired to find it, then hopping to China and living in a $500 hotel room while continuing to accept your pay from the company you betrayed is doing nothing wrong. Nothing at all.
I know a little HTML and I’m an ace with Windows 3.1. I even completed the tutorial for building a data base… See. You think I could get one of those $200,000 dollar a year jobs as a NSA security contractor? And I know how to keep a secret.. Like I say.. They can cut out my tongue and I still wouldn’t talk.
There are plans to add another 10,000 employees to the behemoth, so get your resume in now.
I think we’ve already submitted our resumes by default or more appropriately the NSA has collected all they need to know about us already.
I want to know more about his military career. So far it is reported the he did four months and never completed any training or received any awards? I was in the army way back when, in the first three months you completed basic training and AIT (advanced individual training). In order to get out of both you would have to receive at minimum a marksman award and a general service award. So I’d like to know how he spent four months and received nothing. He claims he was kicked out for a broken leg he got during training that sounds like bullshit. I broke my collar bone while on leave in a drunken softball incident; I returned to base and was put on light duty for two months. Something doesn’t add up about his military story.
uncledad…Well, he did more time than John Boehner did.. I think instead of getting caught polishing his boots after lights outs Boehner got caught polishing somebody’s knob. No, not really.. Actually I think he was just a crybaby. One of those guys who cried every night in their bunk because they couldn’t handle being yelled at. I’d bet that Boehner got an unadaptability discharge that could be upgraded to a general discharge after six months of separation from service.
I can’t be certain about Snowden’s claim of being discharged because of a broken leg, but when I was in service if you required surgery for a medical condition the military could not force you to have surgery to correct it.. They could only give you a medical discharge if your condition made you unfit for service.
Outsourcing jobs that could have been done by Federal Government workers became the rage when Reagan was President. This also seems to go hand in hand with the loss of all that money in Iraq. Wasn’t it something like 9 billion? Whatever George and Dick did to the Federal Government was only to make their friends richer–never to make it better. After all, how could they continue to castigate Fed workers and keep their “republican” moniker. And, don’t forget what they did to Valerie Plame.
The hire a consultant because GSA pay schedules don’t match private pay explanation for Snowden’s salary fits my experience. A long time ago (late 80s) I did work as a subcontractor for a CSC contract with the Navy. I was paid about what a GS-13 was paid; positions directly with the Navy doing similar work were GS-9 or lower.
Federal jobs do still offer defined benefit pensions, and civil service jobs at the time were seen as unlikely candidates for layoffs.
Assange said that his strategy against the security state is to force them to either restrict internal communications, and thus become stupider, or else open up and thus leak to him. A lose-lose from their POV.
Snowden proves that the NSA was loose and leaky; and it must now become tighter and stupider. The NSA was already pretty stupid, for letting a 29-year-old dropout see data that hot. Now they propose to hire 10,000 more loose cannons. What could possibly go wrong?
Wasn’t it something like 9 billion?
Bonnie… I assume you’re referring to the pallets of freshly printed 100 dollar bills that that were flown in as pin money for government contractors. I’m not sure if it was 9 billion, but I’d guess that two C-130’s fully loaded with cash would probably be in the neighborhood of 9 billion dollars.
I am shocked, SHOCKED that the Bush Assministration managed a project in a slapdash manner that just happened to stuff tons of money in their corporate cronies’ pockets. That is so unlike them.
The NYT did a huge piece on the growth of the security industry on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 along with a frontline piece called, “are we safer”? If you thought the military ind.complex was tough to monitor and curb the spending, get a load of these guys. There’s no product produced and the only way we can prove that the money is well spent is if we haven’t been hit again. Pretty low bar. Bush’s increase in military spending, nearly two-fold, was because of the rise of the security industry. The two wars he fought were off budget. But, as I commented before, where were these guys who are freaking out when the Patriot Act was passed? Anyone with the brains god gave a male-Bush-baby has known what has been going on for the better part of a decade. I’ve taught this in my government classes for at least five years. Why the freak-out now? Oh, that’s right. Sorry, I forgot.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/are-we-safer/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/sept-11-reckoning/viewer.html?_r=0
Links if anyone’s interested. The NYT piece has a lot more on 9/11 but also looks specifically at how our liberties have been curbed.