{"id":43956,"date":"2013-06-21T08:27:28","date_gmt":"2013-06-21T07:27:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/corporate-spooks-are-watching-you-the-dangerous-rise-of-the-industrial-surveillance-complex\/43956\/"},"modified":"2013-06-21T08:27:28","modified_gmt":"2013-06-21T07:27:28","slug":"corporate-spooks-are-watching-you-the-dangerous-rise-of-the-industrial-surveillance-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/corporate-spooks-are-watching-you-the-dangerous-rise-of-the-industrial-surveillance-complex\/","title":{"rendered":"Corporate Spooks Are Watching You: The Dangerous Rise of the Industrial-Surveillance Complex"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

June 19, 2013<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
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Whether one views Edward Snowden as a hero or a villain, perhaps we could all agree that if the government is to keep secrets, a 29-year-old private contractor with a soft spot for Ron Paul shouldn’t have access to a treasure trove of its most sensitive information. <\/p>\n

Of course, that assumes that there still exists a bright line between government and the private sector. But that’s become an antiquated notion after two decades of ideologically driven outsourcing of what were once considered core government functions. As a result of that effort, there are now a million potential Edward Snowdons \u2014 or, more precisely, 483,263 contractors with top-secret clearances, according to James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence <\/a>\u2014 any of whom could slip out with sensitive data on a thumb drive<\/a> if they have a personal or ideological axe to grind. <\/p>\n

More troubling is the fact that we’re being constantly monitored by private spy companies with virtually no oversight or accountability. According to journalist Tim Shorrock, around 70 percent of our national security spending now goes to private firms. Michael Hayden, \u201cwho oversaw the privatization effort as NSA director from 1999 to 2005,\u201d told Shorrock that \u201cthe largest concentration of cyber power on the planet is the intersection of the Baltimore Parkway and Maryland Route 32,\u201d where the NSA’s top contractors are located. Hayden coined the term, \u201cDigital Blackwater\u201d to describe the privatization of American cyber security agencies. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think it’s extraordinarily frightening because the oversight by Congress is so minimal to begin with,\u201d says Robert McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois and author of Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy<\/a>. <\/i>\u201cFrom what we know, the oversight of spying, intelligence and surveillance is really rock-bottom, with members of Congress often knowing little or nothing\u201d about the details of these programs. \u201cSo, they’re going off the books [with private firms] to avoid even the minimal oversight they do have.\u201d <\/p>\n

Reinventing Government<\/b><\/p>\n

How did we get here? Ironically, while a lot of Americans are convinced that Democrats hold an unwavering fealty to \u201cbig government,\u201d during the 1990s, a central tenet of Bill Clinton’s agenda was shrinking down the size of the federal government. The administration’s \u201cReinventing Government\u201d initiative \u2014 which took place in two phases, known as REGO I and II \u2014 resulted in a whopping 17 percent reduction in the federal workforce. <\/p>\n

Ed Kilgore, former vice president for policy at the Democratic Leadership Council and now a journalist with the Washington Monthly <\/i>, said REGO, \u201creflected not just a serious determination by the Clinton administration to rethink how government works, but also a much broader trend on the center-left \u2014 at think tanks and magazines really for years \u2014 that suggested that the future of liberalism depended on sorting out ends and means.\u201d <\/p>\n

Liberals, the administration believed, had become too eager to identify progressivism with government programs. \u201cSo a lot of the neoliberal movement and the whole New Democrat thing was very explicitly focused on making the efficient achievement of progressive goals the definition of being a liberal rather than just defending programs and how they were administered.\u201d <\/p>\n

The initiative resulted in some decent innovations, like government data being made available in easily accessible form over the Internet. But 20 years later, Donald Kettl, dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, told the industry magazine Government Executive <\/i>\u00a0that the elimination of over 425,000 federal jobs had caused serious problems. \u201cThe reduction didn\u2019t happen in a way that matched workforce needs because they used a strategy for downsizing to hit a target,\u201d he said. \u201cThe effort got in the way of the \u2018making government work better\u2019 piece. Many with special skills left, and people who stayed might have been those we\u2019d have wanted to leave.\u201d <\/p>\n

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

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com June 19, 2013 \u00a0| Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Whether one views Edward Snowden as a hero or a villain, perhaps we could all agree that if the government is to keep secrets, a 29-year-old private contractor with a soft […]<\/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-43956","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\/43956","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=43956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43956\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}