For more than a decade I have regarded Booz Allen Hamilton as indistinguishable from the Central Intelligence Agency. However, I did not realize the degree to which they were flourishing.
The company employs about 25,000 people, almost half of whom hold top secret security clearances, providing “access to information that would cause ‘exceptionally grave damage’ to national security if disclosed to the public,” according to a company securities filing.
In January, Booz Allen announced that it was starting work on a new contract worth perhaps as much as $5.6 billion over five years to provide intelligence analysis services to the Defense Department. Under the deal, Booz Allen employees are being assigned to help military and national security policy makers, the company said…
The company, based in Virginia, is primarily a technology contractor. It reported revenues of $5.76 billion for the fiscal year ended in March and was No. 436 on Fortune’s list of the 500 largest public companies. The government provided 98 percent of that revenue, the company said.
We could save a lot of money by reverting to the old system of paying government employees to do intelligence work. It’s a lie that it’s cheaper to farm this work out to the private sector. It’s also clear that privatizing intelligence work is a security risk.
In the end, I’d rather deal with public employee unions than independent contractor lobbyists, too. In my mind, the best result of the recent NSA revelations would be if Booz Allen Hamilton and its investors went bankrupt.
Someone said that if this Snowden guy was earning $200k a year (doubtful) then the govt was actually paying $400k. Pretty insane what we pay contractors–when the highest govt salary is $174k. Yet a 29 year old high school drop out earns 200k? This makes me incredibly depressed.
If only we had the will to turn Booz Allen into the right’s ACORN…
Impossible, because B-H is too well connected. It has all the right friends. Whereas ACORN didn’t.
What does it matter if the man dropped out of high school? I assume he has highly specific skills which qualified him for his work. If not, this company is even more terrifying than I thought. Let’s just steer clear of the personality game: you know, like Assange is not likable, and all that stuff. Or do we even need to know how his feet smell?
He probably was making $200K. Why? He’s a computer guy, and if you read any of the docs released, how do you think we can go tit-for-tat re: cyber warfare?
Speculating parenthetically that Snowden’s claimed salary is doubtful s unwarranted. Glenn Greenwald interviewed Snowden for months and obtained his social security number, among other things. His career and Snowden’s life rest on their credibility. Do you think that they’d risk all that for an easily refuted and essentially irrelevant statement of fact?
Lots of college drop-outs in the billionaire boys club.
Wouldn’t you like to see the contract. Who gave or evaluated him for clearance to work with extremely sensitive info? How often was his clearance updated? Are we leasing this data mining software or do we own it. If its just leased, is that why the leaker went to China…to line up their next customer?
TS clearances are updated every 5 years. DISCO gave him the clearance; if he had no drug, alcohol, traffic, mental issues or arrests, and hadn’t traveled outside the US, it gets greenlighted almost immediately.
How long do you reckon it’ll be before we start outsourcing our prisons, too? We’ve already got CCA staff in some of our public schools doing drug sweeps and essentially making arrests.
I realize this is tangential at best to the topic under discussion, but it was the first thing that leapt to mind when I ran across this story earlier today.
we outsourced prisons a long time ago, at least on the state and local level. The lobbyists for that system sustain the Drug War.
I meant outsourcing to foreign countries by physically sending our prisoners abroad for detention. We could have a prison pipeline to Bangladesh one of these days if we keep on like we have been up to now.
That’s half-joking, of course–but only half.
We do that. It’s called Special Rendition.
Scahill’s movie Dirty Wars (and his book of the same title) shed some light on that.
Booz Allen Hamilton is controlled by the Carlyle Group through its directors. Is the Bush family still deep in the Carlyle Group?
I raise this because of the elder Bush’s habit of meddling in Democratic administrations through his contacts in the intelligence community.
BAH designed an expansive system primarily because it would bring a large revenue stream for construction and a continuing large revenue stream for providing the operating personnel. They got the contract because of the revolving door with government employees. Clapper, for one, is a BAH alumni.
We’ve crossed the bridge. There’s no going back. Booz-Allen has access to all of our secrets. They are as “systemically important” to our intelligence apparatus as HSBC is to the global financial system.
We are in big, big trouble….
http://gloverman.blogspot.com/2013/06/whats-really-scary-about-snowden-affair.html
Private. So upon entry one swears allegiance to the Board of Directors, the Mission, the bottom line, a non compete contract and fidelity towards one’s own country is a moot point.
Wonder what the exit interview of a private security firm looks like?
Tim Shorrock, Salon: Meet the contractors analyzing your private data
How many members of Congress have gotten out of their abstraction about the balance between freedoms and national security enough to realize the implications–private contractors and self-interest managers at NSA have the capability of monitoring every member of Congress’s every communication. And not only theirs but every judge’s communication and the communication of the President himself.
There have been a lot of sanguine comments by members of Congress to the effect that they already knew this. Is this authentic or from knowledge that they themselves are watched? Are they aware when they have been lied to?
The lack of vision about the technological advances made over the last 30 years is a real problem with almost everyone in the current judiciary and our Congressional representatives.
They don’t understand it – “a series of tubes!?” – and rather than question and learn (or retire), they’ve decided to give way too much deference to CEOs’ untested claims whether it’s about the benefits of privatization or anti-trust enforcement stifling innovation. It’s the same dynamic on display when they’re dealing with the financial criminals who call themselves the “Masters of the Universe.”
The young “libertarian” computer specialists worship the ‘free market” and detest government. And are too hypocritical or naive not to notice that all those private companies they work thrive not on the “free market” but government subsidies. They’re like Peter Thiel (although he may be more extreme or perhaps only more public about his extremism).
Their idea of social responsibility is similar to that of royalty, the church, and landed gentry during feudalism. They dole out alms to those they consider worthy or advance the giver’s pet projects.
Ugh there are few private citizens I hate more than Peter “we should get rid of democracy” Thiel. And yes he has said this, many times, thinking it gets in the way of the Smartest People in the Room to enact What We Know Must Be Done.
And of course who could forget Scott McNealy who said in the era of the Internet “you have no privacy, get over it.” Apparently he forgets himself, because the NYT tells me he’s having a stroke over NSA.
Thiel not all that different from the other tax avoiding, LiberPub, internet and computer multi-millionaires and billionaires. The New Deal Grand Bargain was that government would fund and/or do primary research for the benefit of all. Those that monetized that public knowledge paid for that privilege through a progressive taxation system.
They aren’t libertarians, they’re narcissists that have deluded themselves that they’re uniquely qualified to rule the world. When in a true “libertarian” paradise, they would quickly wither and die.
Kieran Healy: Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere
That’s a fantastic article. Thanks.
I would also like it if private companies were prohibited by law from obtaining certain information from the public.
The government is the biggest problem since they have the most resource. But the private sector is troublesome too. It’s not right or fair to force us to fork over information to participate in society, not to the level this has happened. And it shuts up the people who bleat “Oh you’ve already given this data to Google or Apple!”
I am one such bleater, so I would like to clarify my own position. I don’t claim to speak for anyone else, but I really think people have some misconceptions about internet privacy/security. One basic fact about the internet is that it’s full of holes. It has to be full of holes, or it doesn’t work. The whole point, after all, is to share information, not to hide it. If you’re serious about keeping your information private, you don’t hook your computer up to a protocol through which it can communicate with any other computer on the planet.
So it’s not even a question of fairness, you simply cannot participate in the internet without forking over information. You can achieve an acceptable degree of security, but there are always costs and there are always countermeasures. So it’s an ongoing arms race, since one of the basic operating principles of hackers is that there is always a way.
On the other hand, I think there are misconceptions about what it means to have tens of millions of people’s telephone records. California has tens of millions of people, so let’s say I have three months of records for everybody in California. Great. Now what? First imagine you’ve got paper copies–maybe 100 million phone statements. You could catalog them and cross reference them in various ways, so that you could get some useful information out of them, but obviously it’s a huge task. Computers make a lot easier of course, but it’s still a monumental task, and isn’t just a question of having enough processing power.
So personally I feel about as violated as if I’d been photographed by a satellite. Which I never have, of course, because I’ve never given anyone permission to do that.
For one thing, the ability to visualize data has grown tremendously in just the past few years. More can be done with all of that data easier and faster than you think.
Secondly, it wasn’t inevitable that private companies could glean so much from us. The terms of user agreements that we’re forced to accept if we want to use the internet were determined by retail and computer industry lobbyists, and the legislators who seek their money. We could be living in a very different world right now if the public’s interests drove policy.
I’m not talking about user agreements, I’m talking about open standards and protocols. You may be forced to accept a user agreement to use Google or Facebook, but there are no terms of use for the internet itself. The internet is governed by organizations like W3C and ICANN, which are mainly concerned with the technical challenges involved in making it possible for any computer on the planet to interact with any other computer on the planet.
For instance, we all have an interest in keeping our email addresses private, so we don’t get overwhelmed with spam. But there is no way to use your email without revealing your address to somebody, somewhere. And the same principle applies, whatever I do on the internet. If I click that Donate button over there, I am forced to reveal my bank account number if I want the payment to go through.
So it isn’t just a question of what’s legal, it’s also a question of what’s possible and what you can get away with. So actually my point wasn’t that Google and Apple already have your data, it’s that the government already has your data. And so does anybody else who wants it bad enough.
And that last is the problem. Obviously some data sharing is necessary for basic functions, but too often private companies demand stuff that doesn’t matter and private companies who you DIDN’T specifically share data with can have access to it and use it for things like behavioral targeting.
Oh, and don’t make any assumptions about what I think can be done with massive amounts of data. In fact, I already said what I think can be done: anything you want to. But it’s still a commitment of resources that could be used for other purposes. There are always costs.
For instance, I thought of one possible scenario: the feds decide to come down on all the pot smokers in the states that have legalized it for medical or recreational purposes. Whatever the cost in IT resources, let’s assume they could come up with some kind of list of tens of millions of pot smokers.
And? Are they going to round all those people up? Send them threatening letters? Seize their assets? It would still take a huge amount of manpower and processing power to harass and persecute the nation’s pot smokers, and to what end? And what else what the government even be able to do at the same time?
Not that the government is above wasting resources on that scale, but there’s no way the benefits would even begin to match the costs.
“Benefits” should be in scare quotes, mind you. I’m just talking about what kind of return you’d be getting on your investment of resources–even in terms of eradicating marijuana, if that was your goal.
I am wondering why Booz Allen Hamilton didn’t figure out it was their guy talking. So much for BAH security, couldn’t mine enough data to figure out their employee was traveling to the same city as a Guardian Reporter.
Excellent point. But maybe they did but events moved faster than they could act. But Hong Kong is a big place, and lots of folks might have reason to interact with a Guardian reporter.
It sort of points out the Achilles heel of this “big data” approach to intelligence. (See also the How Metadata Found Paul Revere link I put up above.) You are depending on assumptions about what the data means. That generates lots of false positives (say, members of mosques).
Then there is the point that Snowden is in no way a terrorist or part of those networks.
I don’t know maybe incompetence is at play at BAH. Because their search would be limited to their employees with knowledge of the project, their employee’s travel plans, crossed searched with the ticket purchase of known newspaper journalist.
I can figure out a limited search so should BAH?
I’m old enough to remember when contracting out of government functions started in the 1960’s. I’m disregarding special cases such as the MIT Radiation Lab in WWII and the like. We were told that it would be cheaper to contract non-governmental services such as food service, road grading, building construction and garbage collection. Garbage was widely cited. Over the years, contracting extended more and more, but the last law that I was aware of exempted “essential government services”. Now mercenary companies fight our wars and run our spies, besides lobbyists drafting complete legislation and presenting it without prior legislative input. What are “essential government services” if not warmaking, espionage, and legislation? Are courts next? Oh, yeah, I think that would cover my being billed from some New England company for running a red light in Illinois. No traffic cop to argue with, no day in court to plead my case before a judge. Corporate justice. “Pay me.”
Road repair work was often a government service — quicker than contracting out — but grading and road construction and most definitely building construction were always contracted out to the private sector. Government regulations and oversight created a functional government-private system that minimized the existence of fraud and corruption. Never eliminated bid rigging by road contractors, but they were busted often enough that the risks became too high for many.
I should have specified military road construction and military housing construction. Likewise food service and garbage disposal. Public roads and housing have always been, to the best of my knowledge, private contracts.
That history might be a bit more complicated and with a longer history than either of our comments suggest:
In 1802 became a division of the federal government. Constructing with its own labor force or contracting out probably varied over time and by location. The history written from that perspective might be interesting. (For a few years, had not infrequent professional interactions with COE officers and they were smart, competent and hard-working.
The same is true across a whole range of privatized services.
Gutting the Seabees and replacing them with construction contractors, for instance, has been a huge boondoggle.
I wouldn’t get too upset about privatizing national security at this point. Not because it isn’t upsetting, but because the CIA since its inception has set up innumerable private companies as fronts. Booz Allen is one of them, so what’s the difference?
IMHO, the CIA should have died with the Cold War.
Instead they transformed the Cold War into the War on Terra.
The CIA is a big problem.
Well, they had to do something to justify their continued existence.
True enough.
Had it not been born, would there have been a Cold War?
NATO should definitely have died when the USSR collapsed.
I think so. Either that or a Hot possibly Nuclear War. Stalin was a very evil and ruthless paranoid. Could it have been ended between Khrushchev and Kennedy? I doubt that too. Kennedy was a full Cold Warrior. Johnson? Nixon? Reagan? Very doubtful. Bush I? No, he was steeped in CIA. So, there was no chance until the Soviet Union fell apart, ironically due to an internal reformer who believed in Communism and was a product of the system. So, Clinton could have ended the Cold War. Or could he? Internal politics of the USA required him to not be “soft on Communism”. Even though Communism was and is dead. Totalitarianism? That’s a horse of a different color. Alive and well in both the former USSR and the former USA.
That’s obvious, because he pushed the Partial Test Ban Treaty through Congress. James Douglass has made a compelling case that JFK was assassinated because he wanted to thaw the Cold War.
On a related note, a recent conspiracy theory is that the reason that Obama is such a bad president is because he doesn’t want to end up like JFK.
Living in an Era of Unprecedented Bullshit
Whether or not it’s about Obama, I don’t know, but it’s most definitely the mindset of those that argue for more police/military/etc. just in case because there would be no excuse if the “just in case” happened.
Even Charles P. Pierce fell for that in his Snowden piece:
What’s weird is that they seem not to notice that nobody in government has paid any price for the successful attacks. They show up at church memorials for the victims and receive applause.
Worse they totally ignore the massive cost of all this security for so little benefit. Monies that could have been deployed for far greater benefit.
Yes, of course, it’s the general Beltway mindset, not just Obama. Obama is just particularly good at cravenly expressing it. I’m actually surprised that there are two senators who think that the NSA’s surveillance has gone to far.
As for the money being spent on the NSA: it serves no public benefit, but neither does the vast majority of defense spending. The point is not public benefit, but private benefit.