{"id":43205,"date":"2013-06-18T19:47:23","date_gmt":"2013-06-18T18:47:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-national-security-industrial-complex-and-nsa-spying-the-revolving-doors-between-state-agencies-and-private-contractors\/43205\/"},"modified":"2013-06-18T19:47:23","modified_gmt":"2013-06-18T18:47:23","slug":"the-national-security-industrial-complex-and-nsa-spying-the-revolving-doors-between-state-agencies-and-private-contractors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-national-security-industrial-complex-and-nsa-spying-the-revolving-doors-between-state-agencies-and-private-contractors\/","title":{"rendered":"The National Security Industrial Complex and NSA Spying: The Revolving Doors Between State Agencies and Private Contractors"},"content":{"rendered":"

When\u00a0Edward Snowden<\/a>, an employee of\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0Hamilton \u2014 a military contractor based in McLean, Virginia –\u00a0blew the whistle on the extent of U.S. global electronic surveillance<\/a>, he unexpectedly shone a light on the world of contractors that consume some 70 percent of the $52 billion U.S. intelligence budget<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Some commentators have pounced on Snowden\u2019s disclosures to denounce the role of private contractors in the world of government and national security, arguing that such work is best left to public servants. But their criticism misses the point.<\/p>\n

It is no longer possible to determine the difference between employees of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the employees of companies such as Booz Allen, who have integrated to the extent that they slip from one role in industry to another in government, cross-promoting each other and self-dealing in ways that make the fabled revolving door redundant, if not completely disorienting.<\/p>\n

Snowden, who was employed by\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0as a contract\u00a0systems administrator at the NSA\u2019s Threat Operations Centre in Hawaii for three months<\/a>, had worked for the CIA andDell<\/a>\u00a0before getting his most recent job. But his rather obscure role pales in comparison to those of others.<\/p>\n

Pushing for Expanded Surveillance<\/strong><\/p>\n

To best understand this tale, one must first turn to R. James Woolsey, a former director of CIA, who appeared before the U.S. Congress in the summer of 2004 to promote the idea of integrating U.S. domestic and foreign spying efforts to track \u201cterrorists\u201d.<\/p>\n

One month later, he appeared on MSNBC television, where he spoke of the urgent need to create a new U.S. intelligence czar to help expand the post-9\/11 national surveillance apparatus.<\/p>\n

On neither occasion did Woolsey mention that he was employed as senior vice president for global strategic security at Booz Allen, a job he held from 2002 to 2008.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe\u00a0source of information about vulnerabilities of and potential attacks on the homeland will not be dominated by foreign intelligence<\/a>, as was the case in the Cold War. The terrorists understood us well, and so they lived and planned where we did not spy (inside the U.S.),\u201d said Woolsey in prepared remarks before the U.S. House Select Committee on Homeland Security on June 24, 2004.<\/p>\n

In a prescient suggestion of what Snowden would later reveal, Woolsey went on to discuss expanding surveillance to cover domestic, as well as foreign sources.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne source will be our vulnerability assessments, based on our own judgments about weak links in our society\u2019s networks that can be exploited by terrorists,\u201d he said. \u201cA second source will be domestic intelligence. How to deal with such information is an extraordinarily difficult issue in our free society.\u201d<\/p>\n

In late July 2004, Woolsey appeared on MSNBC\u2019s \u201cHardball\u201d, a news-talk show hosted by Chris Matthews, and told Matthews that the federal government needed a new high-level office \u2014 a director of national intelligence \u2014 to straddle domestic and foreign intelligence. Until then, the director of the CIA served as the head of the entire U.S. intelligence community.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe\u00a0problem is that the intelligence community has grown so much since 1947<\/a>, when the position of director of central intelligence was created, that it\u2019s (become) impossible to do both jobs, running the CIA and managing the community,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Both these suggestions would lead to influential jobs and lucrative sources of income for Woolsey\u2019s employer and colleagues.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Director of National Intelligence<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fast forward to 2007. Vice Admiral Michael McConnell (retired), Booz Allen\u2019s then-senior vice president of policy, transformation, homeland security and intelligence analytics,\u00a0was hired as the second czar of the new \u201cOffice of the Director of National Intelligence\u201d<\/a>\u00a0which was coincidentally located just three kilometers from the company\u2019s corporate headquarters.<\/p>\n

Upon retiring as DNI, McConnell returned to\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0in 2009, where he serves as vice chairman to this day. In August 2010, Lieutenant General James Clapper (retired),\u00a0\u00a0a former vice president for military intelligence at\u00a0<\/a>Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0from 1997 to 1998, was hired as the fourth intelligence czar, a job he has held ever since. Indeed, one-time\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>executives have filled the position five of the eight years of its existence.<\/p>\n

When these two men took charge of the national-security state, they helped expand and privatize it as never before.<\/p>\n

McConnell, for example, asked Congress to alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to allow the NSA to spy on foreigners without a warrant if they were using Internet technology that routed through the United States.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe resulting changes in both law and legal interpretations (\u2026 and the) new technologies created\u00a0a flood of new work for the intelligence agencies \u2014 and huge opportunities for companies like Booz Allen<\/a>,\u201d wrote David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in a profile of McConnell published in the New York Times this weekend.<\/p>\n

Last week, Snowden revealed to the Guardian\u2019s Glenn Greenwald that the\u00a0NSA had created a secret system called \u201cPrism\u201d that allowed the agency to spy on electronic data of ordinary citizens<\/a>\u00a0around the world, both within and outside the United States.<\/p>\n

Snowden\u2019s job at Booz Allen\u2019s offices in Hawaii was to maintain the NSA\u2019s information technology systems. While he did not specify his precise connection to Prism, he told the South China Morning Post newspaper that the NSA hacked \u201cnetwork backbones \u2014 like huge Internet routers, basically \u2014 that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one\u201d.<\/p>\n

Indeed Woolsey had argued in favor of such surveillance following the disclosure of the NSA\u2019s warrantless wiretapping by the New York Times in December 2005.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnlike the Cold War, our intelligence requirements are not just overseas<\/a>,\u201d he told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the NSA in February 2006. \u201cCourts are not designed to deal with fast-moving battlefield electronic mapping in which an al Qaeda or a Hezbollah computer might be captured which contains a large number of email addresses and phone numbers which would have to be checked out very promptly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Propaganda Puppets<\/strong><\/p>\n

Roger Cressey, a senior vice president for cybersecurity and counter-terrorism atBooz Allen<\/a>\u00a0who is also a paid commentator for NBC News, went on air multiple times to explain how the government would pursue the Boston Marathon case in April 2013. \u201cWe always need to understand there are priority targets the counter-terrorism community is always looking at,\u201d he told the TV station.<\/p>\n

Cressey took a position \u201con one of the most controversial aspects of the government response to Boston that completely reflects the views of the government agencies<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 such as the FBI and the CIA \u2014 that their companies ultimately serve,\u201d wrote Tim Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire, on Salon. \u201cTheir views, in turn, convinces NBC hosts of the wisdom of the policy, a stance which could easily sway an uncertain public about the legitimacy of the new face of state power that has emerged in the post-9\/11 period. That is influence, yet it is not fully disclosed by NBC.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was not the first time that Cressey had been caught at this when speaking to NBC News. Cressey failed to disclose that his former employer \u2014 Good Harbor Consulting \u2014 had been paid for advice by the government of Yemen, when he went on air to criticize democracy protests in Yemen in March 2011. (Cressey has just been hired by\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0at the time)<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is not disclosed about Cressey in this segment where\u00a0he scaremongers about a post-Saleh Yemen is that he has multiple conflicts of interest with the current regime there<\/a>,\u201d wrote Zaid Jilani of ThinkProgress at the time.<\/p>\n

A Flood of New Contracts<\/strong><\/p>\n

Exactly what\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0does for the NSA\u2019s electronic surveillance system revealed by Snowden is classified, but one can make an educated guess from similar contracts it has in this field \u2014 a\u00a0quarter of the company\u2019s $5.86 billion in annual income<\/a>comes from intelligence agencies.<\/p>\n

The NSA, for example, hired\u00a0Booz Allen in 2001 in an advisory role on the five-billion-dollar Project Groundbreaker<\/a>\u00a0to rebuild and operate the agency\u2019s \u201cnonmission-critical\u201d internal telephone and computer networking systems.<\/p>\n

Booz Allen also won a chunk of the Pentagon\u2019s infamous Total Information Awareness contract in 2001 to collect information on potential terrorists in America from phone records, credit card receipts and other databases \u2014 a controversial program defunded by Congress in 2003 but whose spirit survived in Prism and other initiatives disclosed by Snowden.<\/p>\n

The CIA pays a\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0team led by William Wansley, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, for \u201cstrategic and business planning\u201d for its National Clandestine Service, which conducts covert operations and recruits foreign spies.<\/p>\n

The company also provides a 120-person team, headed by a former U.S. Navy cryptology lieutenant commander and\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0senior executive adviser Pamela Lentz, to support the National Reconnaissance Organization, the Pentagon agency that manages the nation\u2019s military spy satellites.<\/p>\n

In January,\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0was one of 12 contractors to win\u00a0a five-year contract with the Defense Intelligence Agency that could be worth up to $5.6 billion<\/a>\u00a0to focus on \u201ccomputer network operations, emerging and disruptive technologies, and exercise and training activity\u201d.<\/p>\n

Last month, the U.S. Navy picked\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0as part of a consortium to work on yet another billion-dollar project for \u201ca new generation of intelligence, surveillance and combat operations\u201d.<\/p>\n

How does\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0wins these contracts? Well, in addition to its connections with the DNI, the company boasts that half of its 25,000 employees are cleared for \u201ctop secret-sensitive compartmented intelligence\u201d \u2014 one of the highest possible security ratings. (One third of the 1.4 million people with such clearances work for the private sector.)<\/p>\n

A key figure at\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0is Ralph Shrader, current chairman, CEO and president, who came to the company in 1974 after working at two telecommunications companies \u2014 RCA, where he served in the company\u2019s government communications system division and Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning.<\/p>\n

In the 1970s, RCA and Western Union both took part in a\u00a0secret surveillance program known as Minaret<\/a>, where they agreed to give the NSA all their clients\u2019 incoming and outgoing U.S. telephone calls and telegrams.<\/p>\n

In an interview with the Financial Times in 1998, Shrader noted that the most relevant background for his new position of chief executive at\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0was his experience working for telecommunications clients and doing classified military work for the US government.<\/p>\n

Caught for Shoddy Work<\/strong><\/p>\n

How much value for money is the government getting? A review of some of Booz Allen\u2019s public contracts suggests that much of this work has been of poor quality.
In February 2012, the U.S. Air Force\u00a0suspended Booz Allen from seeking government contracts<\/a>\u00a0after it discovered that Joselito Meneses, a former deputy chief of information technology for the air force,\u00a0had given\u00a0<\/a>Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0a hard drive with confidential information about a competitor\u2019s contracting on the first day that he went to work for the company in San Antonio, Texas.<\/p>\n

\u201cBooz Allen did not uncover indications and signals of broader systemic ethical issues within the firm,\u201d\u00a0wrote the U.S. Air Force legal counsel.<\/a>\u00a0\u201dThese events caused the Air Force to have serious concerns regarding the responsibility of Booz Allen, specifically, its San Antonio office, including its business integrity and honesty, compliance with government contracting requirements, and the adequacy of its ethics program.\u201d<\/p>\n

It should be noted that\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0reacted swiftly to the government investigation of the conflict of interest. In April that year, the\u00a0Air Force lifted the suspension<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 but only after\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0had accepted responsibility for the incident and\u00a0fired Meneses<\/a>, as well as agreeing to pay the air force $65,000 and reinforce the firm\u2019s ethics policy.<\/p>\n

Not everybody was convinced about the new regime. \u201cUnethical behavior brought on by the revolving door created problems for Booz Allen, but now the revolving door may have come to the rescue,\u201d\u00a0wrote Scott Amey\u00a0of the Project on Government Oversight<\/a>, noting that noting that Del Eulberg, vice-president of the Booz Allen\u2019s San Antonio office had served as chief engineer in the Air Force.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt couldn\u2019t hurt having (former Air Force people). Booz is likely exhaling a sigh of relief as it has received billions of dollars in air force contracts over the years.\u201d<\/p>\n

That very month,\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0was hired to build a $10 million \u201cEnhanced Secured Network\u201d (ESN) for the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. An audit of the project released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office this past February showed that it was full of holes.<\/p>\n

The ESN \u201cleft software and systems put in place misconfigured\u2013even\u00a0failing to take advantage of all the features of the malware protection the commission had selected, leaving its workstations still vulnerable to attack<\/a>,\u201d wrote Sean Gallagher, a computer reporter at ArsTechnica.<\/p>\n

Booz Allen has\u00a0also\u00a0admitted to overbilling<\/a>\u00a0the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) \u201cemployees at higher job categories than would have been justified by their experience, inflating their monthly hours and submitting excessive billing at their off-site rate.\u201d The\u00a0company repaid the government $325,000 in May 2009 to settle the charges<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nor was this the first time\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0had been caught overbilling. In 2006, the company was one of four consulting firms that settled with the U.S. Department of Justice for fiddling expenses on an industrial scale. Booz Allen\u2019s share of the $15 million settlement of a\u00a0lawsuit under the False Claims Act was more than $3.3 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, both the NASA and the Air Force incidents were brought to light by a company whistleblower who informed the government.<\/p>\n

Investigate Booz Allen, Not Edward Snowden<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Snowden revealed the extent of the U.S. national surveillance program earlier this month, he was denounced immediately by\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0and their former associates who called for an investigation of his leaks.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, it is literally \u2014 not figuratively \u2014 literally gut-wrenching to see this happen because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities,\u201d Clapper toldNBC News\u2019s Andrea Mitchell<\/a>. \u201cThis is someone who, for whatever reason, has chosen to violate a sacred trust for this country. I think we all feel profoundly offended by that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNews reports that this individual has claimed to have leaked classified information are shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm,\u201d\u00a0Booz Allen<\/a>\u00a0said in a\u00a0press statement.<\/p>\n

Yet instead of shooting the messenger, Edward Snowden, it might be worth investigating Shrader and his company\u2019s core values in the same way that the CIA and NSA were scrutinized for Minaret in the 1970s by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Frank Church of Idaho in 1975.<\/p>\n

Congress would also do well to investigate Clapper, Booz Allen\u2019s other famous former employee, for possible perjury\u00a0when he replied: \u201cNo, sir\u201d<\/a>\u00a0to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in March, when asked: \u201cDoes the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?\u201d<\/p>\n

*\u00a0Excerpts of this piece appeared on the\u00a0Guardian\u2019s Comment is Free<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Inter Press Service.<\/a>\u00a0Jim Lobe contributed research.<\/em><\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on: Global Research<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When\u00a0Edward Snowden, an employee of\u00a0Booz Allen\u00a0Hamilton \u2014 a military contractor based in McLean, Virginia –\u00a0blew the whistle on the extent of U.S. global electronic surveillance, he unexpectedly shone a light on the world of contractors that consume some 70 percent of the $52 billion U.S. intelligence budget. Some commentators have pounced on Snowden\u2019s disclosures to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-43205","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43205\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}