the US government
Want to work for the sprawling US intelligence apparatus? It might make more sense to send your CV not to a spy agency, but to one of the hundreds of for-profit contractors that provide the spies with everything from IT support to logistics to security. You will almost certainly make more money that way.
The case of Edward J Snowden, the whistleblower for the Guardian and the Washington Post who exposed massive surveillance by the US government, has opened a window into how a 29-year-old IT specialist can access some of the most sensitive secrets in US intelligence.
It also shows that as the national security apparatus expands, it entrusts an ever broader number of people with secrets that they may feel compelled to leak.
“There’s been a tremendous surge in contractor reliance, post-9/11,” said Steve Aftergood, an intelligence analyst at the US Federation of American Scientists. “Contractors are asked to perform tasks from intelligence analysis to prisoner interrogation to you name it.”
There are structural reasons for the reliance on contractors — a lucrative business. But some of it is necessity: despite the Hollywood image of competent and tech-savvy spies, much of the hardware and software employed by the 16 US intelligence agencies is provided by private firms, which are often swifter at adapting to new technologies than the cumbersome US government bureaucracy.
That holds even for the hyper-technical NSA. “Contractors are essential to NSA’s mission. They provide analysts and technicians. Contractors build custom technology for the agency’s signals gathering and analysis work,” said Shane Harris, the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State.
“NSA, like a lot of intelligence agencies, prefers to build custom systems and not buy as much technology off-the-shelf. Some contractors are more important than others,” said Harris.
“SAIC, for instance, which used to have its headquarters in California, has historically been so entrenched in the agency’s mission that employees jokingly called it NSA-West. And NSA technicians regularly go to work in the private sector, often on the same projects they worked on as government employees.”
Neither the NSA nor the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would respond to the Guardian’s inquiries about how many contractors work for the intelligence community by the time of publication. A Washington Post series on outsourced security functions found that the homeland security, counter-terrorism and spy agencies do business with around 1,931 companies in 10,000 locations across the US.
Snowden has worked for Booz Allen Hamilton for the past three months, according to a statement on Sunday from the company, as well as for other contractors, providing IT support and even security guard services to the NSA.
Booz reported $5.86bn in revenue in 2011-2012, according to its most recent financial report, which boasts that 70pc of its 25,000 employees hold a government security clearance, “of which 49pc were top secret or higher”. Some $1.3bn of its revenue comes from intelligence contracts, the New York Times reported.
Symbolising the company’s closeness with the spy agencies it does business with, the former director of US national intelligence John “Mike” McConnell is now a Booz vice-president. McConnell’s successor, retired general James Clapper, is a former company executive.
It is not just Booz. A constellation of private companies provides the intelligence community with everything from shipping to security.
William J Black, an NSA veteran, retired from the agency in 1997, joined SAIC shortly thereafter — and then returned to the NSA as deputy director in 2000. The only American ever convicted in connection with the CIA’s post-9/11 torture programme was not even a CIA employee but a contractor, David Passaro, who beat an Afghan detainee to death.
The reliance on contract personnel has sometimes alarmed the intelligence agencies’ congressional overseers. A 2007 Senate report found that the spy community had bolstered its workforces by 20pc since the September 11 attacks, a rapid increase that depended on hiring contractors.
While companies and agencies typically outsource functions to save money, the Senate intelligence committee found that contractors are more expensive than full-time government employees: “It has been estimated that the average annual cost of a United States government civilian employee is $126,500,” the committee found, while the average annual cost of a ‘fully loaded’ (including overhead) core contractor is $250,000.”
In addition to the contractor support, there is another lucrative private interest deeply involved with the NSA and the FBI: the telecommunications firms themselves.
But the reliance on contractors carries risks for the intelligence community. The more contractors it hires, the more contractors receive access to sensitive US security information - making it harder to keep that classified data out of the public eye.
The strong temptation will be to compartmentalise more security information, to limit the ability of any one private user to access terabytes of sensitive data. But that’s hard to do with systems administrators and technical specialists. GUARDIAN NEWS
Want to work for the sprawling US intelligence apparatus? It might make more sense to send your CV not to a spy agency, but to one of the hundreds of for-profit contractors that provide the spies with everything from IT support to logistics to security. You will almost certainly make more money that way.
The case of Edward J Snowden, the whistleblower for the Guardian and the Washington Post who exposed massive surveillance by the US government, has opened a window into how a 29-year-old IT specialist can access some of the most sensitive secrets in US intelligence.
It also shows that as the national security apparatus expands, it entrusts an ever broader number of people with secrets that they may feel compelled to leak.
“There’s been a tremendous surge in contractor reliance, post-9/11,” said Steve Aftergood, an intelligence analyst at the US Federation of American Scientists. “Contractors are asked to perform tasks from intelligence analysis to prisoner interrogation to you name it.”
There are structural reasons for the reliance on contractors — a lucrative business. But some of it is necessity: despite the Hollywood image of competent and tech-savvy spies, much of the hardware and software employed by the 16 US intelligence agencies is provided by private firms, which are often swifter at adapting to new technologies than the cumbersome US government bureaucracy.
That holds even for the hyper-technical NSA. “Contractors are essential to NSA’s mission. They provide analysts and technicians. Contractors build custom technology for the agency’s signals gathering and analysis work,” said Shane Harris, the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State.
“NSA, like a lot of intelligence agencies, prefers to build custom systems and not buy as much technology off-the-shelf. Some contractors are more important than others,” said Harris.
“SAIC, for instance, which used to have its headquarters in California, has historically been so entrenched in the agency’s mission that employees jokingly called it NSA-West. And NSA technicians regularly go to work in the private sector, often on the same projects they worked on as government employees.”
Neither the NSA nor the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would respond to the Guardian’s inquiries about how many contractors work for the intelligence community by the time of publication. A Washington Post series on outsourced security functions found that the homeland security, counter-terrorism and spy agencies do business with around 1,931 companies in 10,000 locations across the US.
Snowden has worked for Booz Allen Hamilton for the past three months, according to a statement on Sunday from the company, as well as for other contractors, providing IT support and even security guard services to the NSA.
Booz reported $5.86bn in revenue in 2011-2012, according to its most recent financial report, which boasts that 70pc of its 25,000 employees hold a government security clearance, “of which 49pc were top secret or higher”. Some $1.3bn of its revenue comes from intelligence contracts, the New York Times reported.
Symbolising the company’s closeness with the spy agencies it does business with, the former director of US national intelligence John “Mike” McConnell is now a Booz vice-president. McConnell’s successor, retired general James Clapper, is a former company executive.
It is not just Booz. A constellation of private companies provides the intelligence community with everything from shipping to security.
William J Black, an NSA veteran, retired from the agency in 1997, joined SAIC shortly thereafter — and then returned to the NSA as deputy director in 2000. The only American ever convicted in connection with the CIA’s post-9/11 torture programme was not even a CIA employee but a contractor, David Passaro, who beat an Afghan detainee to death.
The reliance on contract personnel has sometimes alarmed the intelligence agencies’ congressional overseers. A 2007 Senate report found that the spy community had bolstered its workforces by 20pc since the September 11 attacks, a rapid increase that depended on hiring contractors.
While companies and agencies typically outsource functions to save money, the Senate intelligence committee found that contractors are more expensive than full-time government employees: “It has been estimated that the average annual cost of a United States government civilian employee is $126,500,” the committee found, while the average annual cost of a ‘fully loaded’ (including overhead) core contractor is $250,000.”
In addition to the contractor support, there is another lucrative private interest deeply involved with the NSA and the FBI: the telecommunications firms themselves.
But the reliance on contractors carries risks for the intelligence community. The more contractors it hires, the more contractors receive access to sensitive US security information - making it harder to keep that classified data out of the public eye.
The strong temptation will be to compartmentalise more security information, to limit the ability of any one private user to access terabytes of sensitive data. But that’s hard to do with systems administrators and technical specialists. GUARDIAN NEWS
