The Spy Who Billed Me

Dusty Gets Green Light for Green Badge

   Former number three at the CIA, Dusty Foggo, cut a sweet deal with federal prosecutors and pleaded guilty to one felony count for abusing his Agency position to funnel lucrative water contracts to Brent Wilkes, former friend and intel contractor.  The terms of the plea agreement essentially bar Foggo from holding a government position requiring a security clearance.  However, the deal expressly allows Dusty to work for an intel contractor requiring a security clearance.  In other words, Dusty has been green lighted to become a green badger and use his government contacts to steer business to intel contractors along the Beltway.   

Br'er rabbit just got thrown into the briar patch of the Beltway Bandits, restoring our shaken faith in Dusty's cunning.  Apparently federal prosecutors understanding of the world of intel contracting was as good as Br'er Fox's of the briar patch. 

And those intel contractors are probably already lining up to add Foggo to their team.  It's not that often that someone of Foggo's stature, skill and charm come onto the market.  Of course, Dusty will first have to serve a possible prison sentence of up to 37 months, but after that he be free to introduce his unique flair to Beltway business.  Beyond wining and dining blue badgers at his favorite Capital Grille in Tyson's Corner, he has most likely picked up a few more elaborate entertainment ideas from his buddy Brent -- Scotland and cigars and Hawaii and hookers. 

Okay, so hookers probably weren't Brent's idea...

Memo to Dusty:  when flying blue badgers and their families to Scotland for golf and cigars, don't use your own credit card or the company's charter jet, but use a cutout instead.  Ditto for Hawaii and hookers.  Think tradecraft. 

Contractor's Website Reveals Clandestine CIA Programs

Is there any way one can figure out some of the CIA's most highly guarded secrets from a corporate website? 

Absolutely.   

I’ve done it.   (And you can count on it that America’s friends and enemies alike have, too.) 

Recently while researching a piece for The Spy Who Billed Me, I took a break and reviewed my internet logs to see who was curious about my recent writings on the black sites.  Among hundreds of hits on the page (and thousands in the logs), one in particular jumped out.  It was a single page view that lasted for some fifty seconds and it came from an unmasked site, a common signature.  I backtracked it and was shocked at what I found.   

Typically members of the Intelligence Community have their IPs masked when they visit the blog, living no fingerprints, but not this one.  The hit was from a company I had never heard of before, but with less than a minute on their site, I knew I had discovered one of the Intelligence Community's most secretive contractors, one of the A teams.  The big surprise was that this corporate website leaked secrets like Zubaydah after his first thrifty-five second waterboarding.

I'm sure many are skeptical that a contractor would reveal clandestine ops on their sites, but keep in mind their sites are also marketing themselves to the corporate world and sometimes they say a little too much, believing that they have coded their information enough to protect it.   

So let's see what can be deduced from an open source, available to all of America's friends and enemies on the world wide web. We’ll dissect the company's website and see just how well intelligence outsourcing is working from an operational security perspective. 

(Note:  Not that every intel agency worth it's salt hasn't already scooped up this info, but out of respect for Intelligence Community sensibilities, I'll call the Dulles toll road corridor contractor "Heckle and Jeckle Gizmos" and I won't quote directly from the site.) 

 

Now the first question when reviewing Heckle and Jeckle's site, or any contractor's for that matter, is to ask: who do these guys work for?  This can help quickly zero in on what they're up to.   

Heckle and Jeckle boast that most of their employees have TS/SCI clearances, many based on a particularly thorough procedure, the highest level of security clearances. There are but a handful of government agencies that require this for contractor access and really only two major intelligence agencies that do so. One of them is located in Langley, Virginia a couple of miles from the eastern entrance to the Dulles Toll Road and it has well-known, overt satellite offices stretching out west thereon at various exits. The other is located in Ft. Meade, Maryland.   

For those who live as far out of the Beltway as I do, these clearances suggest that Heckle and Jeckle are doing business with the CIA and NSA.

The specific governmental entities Heckle and Jeckle provide outsourced services for can be quickly narrowed down though the geography of their corporate offices which are located near Dulles airport in northern Virginia; in Cumberland County, North Carolina; Virginia Beach, Virginia and Tampa, Florida and if we dig a little we discover they have staff co-located at an Annapolis Junction Maryland facility.  To the uninitiated, that means they contract with the CIA, work extensively with Army and Navy tier-one Special Forces Teams as well as Special Operations Command (SOCOM) with a little NSA thrown in.   

When it comes to who is working for whom in the Intel Community, geography doesn't lie:  Location, location, location. 

 

For purposes of our analysis, the next question then becomes , what is Heckle and Jeckle's specialty?  According to their site, it's specialized communications, including nonattributable communication systems and communications devices that function in hostile environments.  In fact, their employees have experience working in hostile and denied areas and have immediate availability to deploy as part of a team or alone to ply their trade abroad or in the US.  (Private domestic spying, anyone?) 

Go-bags packed, ready to deploy with teams raises the obvious follow up question: which teams?   

Anyone know any teams in Virginia Beach or Fayettenam? 

And where would they be tagging along with these Special Forces teams?  Maybe to the Special Forces Club in London, but Heckle and Jeckle’s employees' background suggests foreign hostile or denied areas.   

Now what could they possibly do in hostile, denied or politically sensitive areas?   

Again, the contractor’s website gives us the answer:   Heckle and Jeckle's comm equipment has offensive and defensive capabilities.   

Offensive communications--can you say clandestine ELINT and SIGINT collection?   

In laymen's terms, setting up in a house that happens to be in the path of a highly directional signal or on top of just the right cable, but in this case the metaphorical houses are probably in such friendly spots as Iran or wherever the yellow brick road of GWOT contracting leads. 

To pull the conclusions of our open-source intelligence (OSINT) together, Heckle and Jeckle teams stand ready, custom-designed high-tech gadgets in hand, for clandestine missions in enemy territory to covertly and remotely intercept foreign communications or penetrate information systems.  This can be done independently or in conjunction with SEAL or Delta or other secret squirrel teams on behalf of SOCOM and the CIA.   

In other words, they set up black sites albeit a different type than has been in the news lately.  To put it into context, such black sites such as covert listening posts in hostile territories and even in friendlier ones where discovery could create international tensions count among the Intelligence Community's blackest secrets.  And now, thanks to the About page on Heckle and Jeckle's website, we know that the CIA is outsourcing this to Heckle and Jeckle, whose identity would make it somewhat easier to uncover the black collection sites.   

Now that's serious OPSEC. 

(We can only hope that they outsource the cover aliases they use when establishing and serving these sites.)

 

 

Digging inside the website, particularly into its previous versions which can be found in the internet archive, we can create an even more revealing picture of what Heckle and Jeckle are up to.   

From job descriptions for various types of engineers they're seeking, we learn that their main facility is near the Dulles Toll Road in northern Virginia.  Since contractors tend to locate their main facilities near their contracting agencies, this suggests that the bulk of their work is for the Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T) at the CIA, the relevant offices of which are conveniently located nearby. No surprise.  DS&T provides the equipment that the National Clandestine Services uses to do its job.

In 2005 the firm began posting job openings (although it's questionable how many linguists and engineers know enough about H&J to to go directly to their site looking for a job.)  These are rich with details indicating various clandestine programs, OSINT just waiting to be scooped up.

Here we learn that Heckle and Jeckle are seeking subject matter experts (SME) in Arabic to work with its customer's teams in Annapolis Junction, MD.  This can only be the National Security Agency.  The NSA is primarily made up of contractors and providing them with SMEs is nothing special.  Let's move on.   

Heckle and Jeckle also brag about a micro-electromechanical facility which becomes particularly interesting in conjunction with their job openings announcements.  Reviewing the skill sets they're looking for, it quickly becomes apparent that they design and program their own computer chips, so they're clearly creating proprietary cutting-edge gadgets.  It's notable how frequently they're searching for engineers with experience in one of the most miserable operating systems for mobile devices:  Windows mobile.  They're also regularly seeking programmers versed in another mobile device language:  Symbian.  Now this information taken in conjunction with their specialty and their prior claims of micro-electromechanical facilities suggests they're designing and creating a lot of mobile, hand held covert communications devices.   

And here I'd venture a pure guess that these are probably designed to look like standard run-of-the-mill Treos and other smart phones, blending their “intelligent phones” into the mobile world.  The largest consumer of such gizmos is, of course, the CIA's DS&T, adding to suspicions that Heckle and Jeckle is a major DS&T contractor.  The primary use of such covert communications gear is for communications with nonofficial cover officers (NOCs) and agents.  So the information on Heckle and Jeckle's site suggests that they are likely designing and creating the latest must-have accessories for NOCs and agents, a far cry from the clunky COVCOM gear of yesteryear.   (And from the Agency's point of view, knowledge of this would be a serious security breech.  Keep in mind the CIA does not even allow contractors to acknowledge their affiliation with the Agency, let alone divulge the programs they are working on, particularly such sensitivities ones.)

 

Not only have CIA programs been compromised, so have SOCOMs.  Judging from the job postings for positions in Florida, Heckle and Jeckle are doing data mining and analytical work for SOCOM.  Among other things that can be deduced, they search for relational patterns of terrorist activity and affiliations, looking at a wide array of seemingly innocuous relationships using open source and clandestinely gathered data, particularly focusing upon financial transactional data.  I'm betting they have a very sophisticated quantitative model that they're constantly tweaking that underlies this process. 

Again, Heckle and Jeckle job postings give us hints to other SOCOM programs.  It appears that Heckle and Jeckle are involved in tracking SOCOM assets worldwide.  Moving beyond Heckle and Jeckle's own website to other open sources, it's possible to learn some of the specs of related handhelds including whose low-earth orbiting satellites they use.  Digging a little deeper, it's also possible to discover the code name of Heckle and Jeckle's RF geolocation program...

 

US national security is compromised by the Intelligence Community's heavy dependence upon corporations, corporations whose websites sometimes spill out some of the darkest government secrets to those who know how to read them.  Last week's revelations by D/CIA Hayden that CIA contractors have been involved in enhanced interrogation techniques at detention facilities (i.e. waterboarding at black sites) should make it clear even to the casual observer that private corporations are integrally involved in the Intelligence Community's most sensitive and secretive clandestine and covert programs.  Nothing is off-limits.  Corporate involvement in clandestine programs raises operational security concerns that only exist because these companies market their services to the private sector, capitalizing upon their exotic experience with the US government.   

In other words, we're taking risks with our national security, risks we don't have to take.  Perhaps some of the risk can be mitigated through restrictions upon contractor marketing and better contractor policing.  As a big fan of the private sector and of government outsourcing, I don’t like to think that the problem is inherent to outsourcing, but at the moment, it’s hard to imagine it otherwise.  A Congressional ban on using government contracting experiences for marketing purposes may be one partial solution.   

The Director of National Intelligence McConnell has been a strong proponent of increased use of open-source intelligence, OSINT.  It's overdue that the Intelligence Community takes OSINT for seriously counterintelligence (CI) purposes (and it comes as no surprise that CI uses of OSINT was a notable omission in the ODNI's Open Source Conference last summer.)  This needs to be immediately addressed--our national security depends upon it.  Eliot, are you listening?

I'm sure some in the Intelligence Community will be appalled that I have publicly posted this analysis, particularly since it involves a key clandestine player, but keep in mind, what I’ve done is an exercise in OSINT, an exercise the Intelligence Community should have done long ago.   Whereas the contents of this article might come as a surprise to intelligence professionals in Ouagadougou and Ulaanbaatar, they won't be in Moscow, Beijing or even Tehran.   

And they shouldn't be in McLean.

"Heckle and Jeckle" are the ones who posted the raw intel on their own website and they're the ones who left their corporate electronic footprints on my blog.  It's particularly ironic, since they're specialists in covert communications.  It's equally ironic that I've protected their identity when they’ve hardly bothered to hide our national secrets.   It is not my intent to hurt the company.

It's my sincere hope that as a result of this post, the Intelligence Community pays a little more attention to the operational security compromises of the divided intelligence contractor mission of serving the public interest while marketing those same services to the corporate world.  As I wrote in the Washington Post last summer, corporations have succeeded where few foreign governments have:  they've penetrated the CIA.  Now it's up to the Agency and the Intelligence Community to ensure that programs are not further compromised as a result of this wide-scale industrial penetration. 

***

(And if anyone needs assistance closing up the gaps from someone who discerns faint patterns within reams of seemingly unrelated data, I rent out for parties.) 

Congress implies CIA Contractors Involved in Criminal Activities in Iraq

In wake of the highly politicized Blackwater shooting as the House scurried to shove through legislation extending US criminal law to contractors in Iraq and other combat zones,  it seems that someone realized last minute that the legislation threatened CIA activities in Iraq.  (See "The Achilles' Heel of US War Efforts in Iraq.") 

The New York Times slipped this pregnant comment into its larger story about the legislation:

Before the bill was passed, Democrats agreed to add language specifying that it was not intended to hamper intelligence efforts.

This is probably as close as we'll ever get to an admission that CIA contractors are involved in activities in Iraq that would be in violation of US criminal law. 

Now it's the CIA's job to do whatever is necessary to accomplish its mission as long as it doesn't violate US laws.  This can involve activities outside US territory that may be criminal under US law and may be criminal under local foreign laws.  As distasteful as that might be to many, it really has to be this way for an espionage organization to function and such covert work really can preempt larger, more distasteful consequences. 

The interesting twist now is because of its heavy reliance on contractors, corporations and corporate employees are involved in those criminal activities--or so the House is implying.

So what types of activities are contractors involved in in Iraq and Afghanistan that could be considered criminal if brought under US criminal law?  Paramilitary operations-- covert actions that involve contract soldiers in offensive combat--are the first things that comes to mind.  Then, of course, there would be issues of illegal detainment of civilians as well as the problems with the use of "special interrogation methods" by individuals directly contracted to the Agency (as in non-industrial green badgers.)

It does raise the question:   Has intelligence outsourcing gone too far when we start to outsource activities that would be criminal under US law?   

Did anyone in Congress ask what the hell corporations are doing on the US Government's behalf if intelligence contractors need to be exempt from US criminal laws in war zones?  The House apparently didn't stop to question this, but the Senate still has a chance.

Forbes: Tom Clancy of the Corporate Military and Intelligence Age

Some reviews are just too good not to share.  This one was published by Forbes this week:

....Enter author R.J. Hillhouse with a fictional account of military and intelligence mercenaries in Iraq called Outsourced. This debut novel introduces Hillhouse as the Tom Clancy of the corporate military and intelligence age. In Outsourced, Hillhouse presents the contractors mostly as well-meaning patriots, though they are corruptible.

...

Like Clancy did with the military, Hillhouse has researched her subject well. Anonymous sources within the intelligence field have helped her along the way. Her nonfiction work about the CIA and the Pentagon has appeared in The Washington Post and The New York Times. There's some implication that what Hillhouse has revealed in Outsourced are truths that she couldn't talk about in plain nonfiction.

The story is key here, though. Any lover of thrillers and suspense novels will enjoy Outsourced. Camille Black is a former CIA counterterrorism officer who has gone into private practice as the CEO of Black Management. She's in Iraq, taking covert assignments for the U.S. government. Hillhouse finds plenty of comic moments as Black flexes her (ample) muscles in the man's world of covert operations and mercenaries. With a sharp tongue, a sharper knife and some obvious martial talents, Black is like a cross between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Jack Ryan.

Black finds herself with a CIA contract to eliminate her ex-fiancé, Hunter Stone. Stone is working undercover for the Pentagon, and it's unclear at the beginning of the book if he betrayed Black because of his job or to protect his own nefarious, potentially anti-American activities, including selling captured weapons to Iraqi insurgents and Al-Qaeda terrorists. Another military contractor, called Rubicon, is Black's competition. What follows is a romp through the Iraq war along with several turns and revelations that shouldn't be detailed in a review.

Hillhouse finds her subjects in the headlines out of Iraq. She imagines insurgents building car bombs and kidnapped Americans who nobody seems to be looking for. Hillhouse's prose is unadorned to say the least, but anything more fanciful would detract from the action. The book moves quickly from point to point and there's an action-film sensibility throughout. It's also fun, and perhaps illustrative, to wonder how much of this is from Hillhouse's imagination and how much is the result of stories that we haven't been told yet.

Outsourced is the first novel of its kind, because the military and intelligence agencies of the United States have, for the first time in history, given in entirely to the corporate-outsourcing trend. Hillhouse has given us the first word in a conversation that will surely outlast both the Iraq war and the War on Terror.

Read the full review here and, if you haven't already, order your copy of OUTSOURCED here.  And those who've read it, I'm happy to discuss any non-spoilers in the comments section.

DIA General Counsel: Green Badgers as Unreliable Employees

In a letter to the editor of the Washington Post last Friday, the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lt. Gen. Michael Maples responded to the WaPo story that the DIA was outsourcing a record $1 billion.

Gen. Maples writes:

The proposal is a consolidation of more than 30 existing contracts into a single contract vehicle that can be more effectively managed. Hence, this posting is not a "record" in outsourcing intelligence activities; rather, it is a better way of aggregating existing requirements.

Now it's a clever defense that the contract is not record-setting since these services are already outsourced--we're not doing anything eye-popping--we did that a long time ago; it's just that no one was looking.  Given the Beltway love of word parsing, it is also worth noting that no where does the general claim that that $ 1 billion of current contracts are being canceled or replaced.  We have no idea as to the size of the 30 existing contracts that will be folded into the new contract vehicle.

One real question it raised for me was in the statement, "DIA contractors currently represent about 35 percent of our workforce."  It's a tough one to reconcile with an unclassified presentation at a conference in May by the Office of the General Counsel of the DIA included this enlightening slide:

 

Now can anyone help me understand this?  If it's true that contractors make up only 35% of the workforce of the DIA, why are they 51% of the personnel in DIA office space?  Is the DIA that generous with its office space?  Or are we perhaps looking at yet another case of numbers parsing to minimize the real issue?

Call me naive, but I'm guessing the DIA *loves* to share its office space with green badgers, wanting them to feel comfortable in big, roomy offices where they can exercise their "fiduciary duty to their employer only," while applying their "profit motive" to do the DIA's work to "diverse and different standards".... 

Now I'm guessing the same thing is going on at Headquarters where those blue badger government employees with their "taxpayer funded salaries" are probably doing everything they can to provide comfortable, generous office space to their green badger workforce.  Perhaps yet another way for the blue badgers to fulfil their "fiduciary obligation to serve the public good" through their "universal and strict conduct standards" might be requiring all blue badgers to use public transportation so that the green badgers don't have to deal with the hassle of the current parking crunch at Langley.  We can't forget, green badgers are part of the public those blue badgers serve.  At the very least, the blue badgers could move to the back of the parking shuttle and let the green badgers sit in the front.  After all, as the General Counsel of the DIA points out, "contractor can reassign employees from one contract to another at whim," so it makes sense to give green badgers unobstructed access to the nearest exists...

Perhaps DIA leadership should have consulted its own General Counsel before contracting out $1 billion of intel services with the goals of adding "greater flexibility to realign government resources, improve oversight and be more responsive, with potential savings in cost and manpower."  This slide suggests that the Office of the General Counsel might not be in agreement.

It could very well be that outsourcing some DIA intel services could be a good thing, but before doing so, many issues need to be resolved.  Given the difference between government employees and contract employees as viewed by the Office of the General Counsel of the DIA itself, the real question the press, Congress and the public should  be posing to Generals Maples and Clapper and others at the Pentagon is: 

• Why do they intend to increase their number of contract employees when they recognize such inherent problems with the employment model? 
• Can the DIA afford $1 billion of staff who are paid a "private business salary" when it's own government staff receive "taxpayer funded salaries"? 
• Can the DIA really afford $1 billion of staff who do not have a fiduciary duty to the DIA, but to another entity? 
• Can the DIA afford $1 billion of staff who have "diverse and different standards?"  Can the DIA afford $1 billion of staff who contractors can "reassign from one contract to another at a whim"? 
• And can the DIA afford the coming green badger morale crisis when those current contract employees who occupy 51% of DIA office space get squeezed to wedge in the new $1 billion of green badger staff?  Could it be they're counting on their blue badgers to feel the squeeze, do their "fiduciary obligation to serve the public good" and suck it in even more.

Happy Labor Day.

DIA Outsources a Record $1 billion+ of Intel Services

I'm on vacation, but a report today in the Washington Post was enough to lure me away from my kneeboard and back to the keyboard:

The Defense Intelligence Agency is preparing to pay private contractors up to $1 billion to conduct core intelligence tasks of analysis and collection over the next five years, an amount that would set a record in the outsourcing of such functions by the Pentagon's top spying agency.

While it's a jaw-dropping figure, it's not surprising given the Director of National Intelligence's emphasis upon acquisitions.  (See "The ODNI's Wal-Mart Approach to Intel.")  But it does fly in the face of the DNI's public statements.  For example, Ronald P. Sanders, Associate Director of National Intelligence wrote in response to my July Washington Post article:

Our workforce has recovered to the point that we can begin to shed some contract personnel or shift them away from core mission areas...

One billion plus dollars of intel contracting seems less like shedding and more like a Sumo wrestler gorging himself before a match. 

I was unable to quickly find the DIA announcement of the contract (and would appreciate the link from readers who find it), however, the WaPo article gives a few clues about the contract:

The DIA did not specify exactly what it wants the contractors to do but said it is seeking teams to fulfill "operational and mission requirements" that include intelligence "Gathering and Collection, Analysis, Utilization, and Strategy and Support."  It holds out the possibility that five or more contractors may be hired ...

Translated, this means broad, soup to nuts intel work, from running agents to creating those analytical products that get funneled into the President's Daily Brief--anything the DIA can conceive of. 

On the upside, if they are able to pull in some of the contractors who are currently doing work for the CIA, the overall quality of Defense Intel could be improved.

Holding out the possibility that five or more contractors could be hired for such indefinite tasks strongly suggests this is some form of an IDIQ contact vehicle--Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity  In all likelihood, it means the $1 billion plus of contracts is already targeted for the primes such as Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SAIC and probably Scitor, maybe also Raytheon.  (Sorry Abraxas--just be grateful you can still hold your own at the NCS...)

The smaller firms will be forced to line up with one of the primes who will largely control their fate for the life of the contract.  It also suggests there will be layered management structures, with contractors overseeing contractors from other firms with limited government oversight.  But hey, it works for satellites and human intel gathering and analysis really aren't that different--just ask the DNI and D/CIA...

And at this point the DIA isn't sure what it wants to contract for, only that it intends to outsource a billion dollars of services and it has to go through the motions of an RFP to meet Federal Acquisition Rules (FAR) requirements to give the appearance of an open competition that is, in reality, anything but. 

Even though it seems at this point the DIA doesn't entirely understand its needs, rest assured that soon after the award, the primes and subs will rush to their DIA contracts and show them exactly what it is that they have been looking for all along, how their firms can provide that precise service and just how easily it can be procured now that the "competitive" bidding is out of the way. This happens in part because the expertise to understand the intel services and even the intelligence needs has been lost to government as expertise has migrated to the private sector.  And this loss is guaranteed to accelerate since so many green dollars are being thrown into the DIA which is already heavily outsourced.

So will the DIA get what it really needs through such a procurement system that gives contractors the power to define the Pentagon's intelligence needs?  Unfortunately, the 800-pound gorilla of the Intel Community will never know because it's outsourced its brains. 

Pass the bananas--or rather issue a task order to Halliburton for a bunch.

Mini-KGB for Rent

In one of the more fun articles I've read in ages, BusinessWeek's Eamon Javers explores the world of ex-KGB and ex-GRU spies for rent at a Virginia company called Trident Group (not to be confused with my literary agency, Trident Media Group, although publishing insiders will know there are some obvious similarities between the two beyond the company name...)   Trident, which is staffed mainly by former GRU officers and some former KGB, assists Western firms navigate the treacherous free-for-all of Born Again capitalism in Russia and the other former Soviet states where business "ethics" are usually spoken of in finger quotes.  Special activities that have to happen for a company to succeed there are best left to silent professionals who are hired by companies that don't like to ask a lot of questions.

Now this brings up the interesting issue of when a Fortune 500 company would be better advised to use the services (though a cutout, of course) of Cofer Black's Total Intelligence or Yuri Koshkin's Trident, a mini-CIA vs. mini-KGB.  In the end the choice probably comes down to style preferences, how big your Russian troubles are and whether you like your ethics in finger quotes. 

BusinessWeek's Javers is quickly distinguishing himself for shedding light upon some of the more interesting and unique corners of the private intelligence industry.

---

Addendum:  Companies seeking assistance with business dealings in Russia/CIS might also want to consider the services of iJet.  And remind Alex to send my customary referral fee...

Exclusive: Intel Outsourcing at Heart of Gonzales Controversy

At the heart of the Constitutional dispute over domestic spying between current Attorney General Gonzales and former Attorney General John Ashcroft is corporate America. Almost all of the government data mining has been outsourced to corporations. The data mining controversy isn’t about the US government spying on Americans. It’s about the government using big corporations as a Constitutional workarounds to spy on Americans. It’s not the government that actually sifts through our emails and phone records but companies such as Lockheed Marin, Raytheon,  SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton and their subcontractors. 

On Sunday, July 29^th, 2007, the New York Times reported that the dispute between Gonzales and Ashcroft involved data mining and its threat to privacy and noted, “It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate.” The reason is most likely the growing use of corporations to perform critical intelligence functions and how these corporations can be used to circumvent legal restrictions upon the government. Outsourcing shifts the legalities or apparently that was what Gonzales was hoping. 

In most cases, corporations are contracted to provide full traffic and pattern analysis services with the US government providing the targets. However, in some instances, contractors actually prepare the target list then conduct the data mining themselves. Not only can corporations be used to violate civil liberties where the government is prohibited, they also have the potential to spy on our email and phone records for their own corporate or client needs. The potential for abuse is tremendous, and, just like with corporate involvement in the President’s Daily Brief, there are no serious mechanisms to guard against this. And some of the very same tools they’re using for data mining could be adapted to monitor for misuse. Of course, abuse on the level of the Administration using corporations to conveniently ignore US law needs Congressional oversight. 

Over the past five to ten years, most government intelligence functions have been outsourced to corporations, with seventy percent of the intelligence budget now going to contractors. As the Associate Director of National Intelligence recently admitted in the Washington Post  in response to my article there, “we could not accomplish our intelligence missions without them [contractors].” The National Security Agency (NSA) which is responsible for monitoring communications has been at the forefront of intelligence outsourcing and has even handed over some of its own management and administrative structures to industrial contractors.

The Mainstream Media is missing the biggest part of the story, that systemic changes due to the outsourcing of critical intelligence functions open up new possibilities for circumventing the Constitution. 

The Nation: Outsourcing Intelligence

ug I have the lead story at The Nation today:  Outsourcing Intelligence.

Their editorial staff is a wonderful group and I found their fact-checking more exacting than any other publication I've worked with--and as someone who's meticulous, this is something for which I have a particular appreciation.

Corporate Content and the President's Daily Brief

Employees of corporations are handling sensitive government responsibilities in the Intelligence Community, including analytical products that are incorporated into our nation’s most important and sensitive document, the President’s Daily Brief.  Thanks to outsourcing, for-profit companies have the American president’s ear on a daily basis and their words carry the weight of the combined intelligence agencies of the United States. The possibilities for manipulating politics on a global scale are unprecedented and chilling.

The President’s Daily Brief is a summary and analysis of national security issues that requires the President’s immediate attention and that the National Intelligence Director presents to the President each morning.

Across the board, US government intelligence agencies are now highly dependent upon the staff of companies for critical national security functions. Corporate intelligence professionals from companies such as Lockheed, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC and others are thoroughly integrated into analytical divisions throughout the Intelligence Community, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence which produces the final document of the President’s Daily Briefing, based upon analytical products created by the Intelligence Community.  It would be hard to find an analytical product that does not have contractor involvement in some way, shape, or form. And it’s not just the products. Raw intelligence gathered by contractors also goes into the pipeline. 

These analytical products from multiple agencies are sifted through, probably in part by contractors, and presented to the President every day as the US Government’s most accurate and most current assessment of priority national security issues. It’s true that the government pays for and signs off on the assessment, but much of the analysis and even some of the underlying intelligence gathering is corporate. Corporations have so penetrated the Intelligence Community that it’s impossible to distinguish their work from the government’s. Although the President’s Daily Brief has the seal of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, it is misleading. For full disclosure, the PDB really should look more like NASCAR with corporate logos plastered all over it.

Theoretically, if a corporation wanted to manipulate the national security agenda, it could introduce something into the system and no one would realize what’s happening, particularly since these companies have analysts and often intelligence collectors spread throughout the system. For argument’s sake, let’s say a company is frustrated with a government that’s hampering its business or business of one of its clients. Introducing and spinning intelligence on that government’s suspected collaboration with terrorists would quickly get the White House’s attention and could be used to shape national policy. To get us into the Iraq war, manipulation of intelligence regarding alleged weapons of mass destruction had to be very artfully done to short-circuit a formidable bureaucracy designed to prevent just such warping of intelligence. Due to the shift toward wide-scale industrial outsourcing in the Intelligence Community, that safeguard has been eroded. 

Solutions are readily available.  There’s really no need to move this service from the private sector back into government. The tools are already there in the private sector that could be applied, at least in concept, to monitor for any suspicious activity. 

It’s a matter of leadership by the DNI.