Defense Contractors

Video of the Day – Edward Snowden’s Recent Interview with German Television

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Many people have lamented the fact that the U.S. mainstream propaganda media has barely covered this excellent interview of Edward Snowden conducted recently by German television. Some have gone so far as to call it intentional censorship. Either way, I’m more than happy to bring it to you. There’s a lot of really good stuff … Read more

Meet the Black Budget: The NSA’s Surveillance Business Model

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A simply blockbuster new piece of information was just released tonight from the Washington Post, that reveals another gigantic piece of the puzzle, this time the financial one. While we already knew telecom companies were taking money for surveillance, the amounts seemed modest. That’s because that was only the part they revealed to the public. This newly released information shows a massive budget, hundreds of millions of dollars, which are being used to “grease the surveillance wheels.” The NSA seems to pay very well.

This shouldn’t come as a total surprise, atter all, Snowden wasn’t living in a teepee in the middle of Death Valley. No, he seemed to have a very comfortable life in Hawaii, and that’s how they get you. That’s why so few people talk. Who would want to shake the trees and bring down the system that is rewarding you so handsomely. Most people wouldn’t, and they don’t.

That’s precisely what makes Edward Snowden’s act so courageous. We only needed one. He knew that and realized that if not him, then who? Could he afford to wait around and assume someone else will do the job? He decided he couldn’t and for that we are forever indebted. Now from the Washington Post:

The National Security Agency is paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to U.S. companies for clandestine access to their communications networks, filtering vast traffic flows for foreign targets in a process that also sweeps in large volumes of American telephone calls, e-mails and instant messages.

The bulk of the spending, detailed in a multi-volume intelligence budget obtained by The Washington Post, goes to participants in a Corporate Partner Access Project for major U.S. telecommunications providers. The documents open an important window into surveillance operations on U.S. territory that have been the subject of debate since they were revealed by The Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper in June.

New details of the corporate-partner project, which falls under the NSA’s Special Source Operations, confirm that the agency taps into “high volume circuit and packet-switched networks,” according to the spending blueprint for fiscal 2013. The program was expected to cost $278 million in the current fiscal year, down nearly one-third from its peak of $394 million in 2011.

Although the companies are required to comply with lawful surveillance orders, privacy advocates say the multimillion-dollar payments could create a profit motive to offer more than the required assistance.

“It turns surveillance into a revenue stream, and that’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. “The fact that the government is paying money to telephone companies to turn over information that they are compelled to turn over is very troubling.”

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More Proof Emerges that “Meet the Press” is Pure Propaganda

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This brief article by Lee Fang in The Nation is extremely valuable.  While I wrote a lengthy piece on the outlandish hypocrisy laden in government lapdog David Gregory’s criticism of Glenn Greenwald, Mr. Fang exposes another manner in which the corporatist-state media fools the public. They do so by having guests on with vested financial interests making false proclamations, while all the while failing to disclose who they really are and who pays their bills.  We learn that:

On Meet the Press yesterday, shortly after host host David Gregory stunned many by suggesting that The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald should face prosecution, a roundtable of pundits discussed the unfolding Edward Snowden story. Mike Murphy, one of the Meet the Press pundits, mocked Snowden’s attempt to seek asylum, calling him a “so-called whistleblower,” and charging that “it’s never been easier in human history to be a whistleblower” through official means.

There are problems here with both the messenger and the message.

First, the message. In fact, the Obama administration has one of the worst records of any president’s in terms of prosecuting leaks and whistleblowers. Moreover, Snowden had virtually no legal protections as a member of an intelligence agency contractor (Booz Allen Hamilton).

But Murphy himself has a stake in this debate that arguably ought to have been disclosed. Though Murphy was introduced only as a “Republican strategist,” he is also the founding partner of Navigators Global, a lobbying firm that represents one of the NSA’s largest contractors. Disclosures show that Navigators Global represents Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) on issues before Congress.

Recall I covered CSC and others in my recent article:  Meet the Contractors: America’s “Digital Blackwater”

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Meet the Contractors: America’s “Digital Blackwater”

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The acronyms are seemingly endless.  From SAIC and CACI to CSC, there are many companies you’ve probably never heard of making billions of dollars spying on you and your friends and family.  As I mentioned yesterday when I highlighted how Booz Allen Hamilton earns 99% of its revenue from the U.S. government and that a substantial number of its contracts are “secret,” this entire thing is simply a gigantic racket and a very dangerous one at that.  It’d be one thing if these so-called “private” contractors were merely funneling billions of dollars of taxpayer money to themselves like the bankers and their allies at the Federal Reserve do each day, but these contractors are also destroying the Bill of Rights and Constitution at the same time.

Tim Shorrock has written an excellent article on all this for Salon.  Below are some excerpts:

Amid the torrent of stories about the shocking new revelations about the National Security Agency, few have bothered to ask a central question. Who’s actually doing the work of analyzing all the data, metadata and personal information pouring into the agency from Verizon and nine key Internet service providers for its ever-expanding surveillance of American citizens?

The revelation is not that surprising. With about 70 percent of our national intelligence budgets being spent on the private sector  – a discovery I made in 2007 and first reported in Salon – contractors have become essential to the spying and surveillance operations of the NSA.

From Narus, the Israeli-born Boeing subsidiary that makes NSA’s high-speed interception software, to CSC, the “systems integrator” that runs NSA’s internal IT system, defense and intelligence, contractors are making millions of dollars selling technology and services that help the world’s largest surveillance system spy on you. If the 70 percent figure is applied to the NSA’s estimated budget of $8 billion a year (the largest in the intelligence community), NSA contracting could reach as high as $6 billion every year.

But it’s probably much more than that.

With many of these contractors now focused on cyber-security, Hayden has even coined a new term — “Digital Blackwater” – for the industry. “I use that for the concept of the private sector in cyber,” he told a recent conference in Washington, in an odd reference to the notorious mercenary army. “I saw this in government and saw it a lot over the last four years. The private sector has really moved forward in terms of providing security,” he said. Hayden himself has cashed out too: He is now a principal with the Chertoff Group, the intelligence advisory company led by Michael Chertoff, the former secretary of Homeland Security.

So Hayden actually used the term “Digital Blackwater” in a positive sense.  What more do you need to know?

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