Welcome, Tim!

Thank you. Very happy to be here.

Tim, Welcome to the Lake.

Welcome to FDL Tim!

I’ll start with a FISA question, since that’s where I’m focused. Have you heard anything about Lockheed Martin being a prime on the warrantless wiretap program? If you look at the reasonable Dems who voted with the Republicans in the Senate–people like Barbara Mikulski–it becomes clear all of them were getting LM money.

Do you have any sense of how the telecom companies are thinking about all this? In particular, are they terrified of having discovery happen on all this or did their legal teams secure unassailable guarantees from the administration?

(There was some weirdness with the comments but it seems to have passed.)

Sorry about the little hiccup. We should be back up and running now.

I have not read the book but Valerie has and she found it riveting and very disturbing. It reinforced her commitment to work for intelligence reform going forward. Thanks for writing it.

OK…we’re underway, cool.
Yes, I do think the telecoms are terrified of the real story coming out. And so are the IT companies and defense contractors (CACI, Booz, etc) that work with the NSA to analyze signals.

Thank you, Joe, wonderful to hear from you. I really appreciate your comment. I think the most important part of intel reform is getting civilian control over the intel apparatus. Not that McConnell’s any great shakes. But placing the ODNI in charge of all intel would serve the country more than having the military having first dibs on satellite and imagery use.

Tim - and my tax dollars are going to pay for this, right?

I’ll ask this of both Joe and Tim:

What can we do to fix this? Tim talks about the mostly unnoticed work of Congressman David Price to bring some transparency to the contracting process. How much is possible without giving up the necessary things we get from contractors?

Tim, welcome to FDL this afternoon.

I have not had the opportunity to read your book but I am somewhat interested in the role that Booz, Allen may be playing in this.

I ask as a former employee of Booz, Allen whose work was involved with the “intelligence community” but at the time I was there, it was mainly in Systems engineering related activities and not in direct intelligence activities. It sounds like there has been a sea change in the way things are done now.

How are they structuring the contracts to allow these activites to be handled by civilian contractors?

Yup, this is our taxes going to support fat profits for intel and defense contractors.

I have long been of the view that we need to wrest the budget from DOD. So long as they control the resources they control the priorities and those priorities are perforce battle field intelligence rather that broader strategic political and economic intelligence. I also think the DNI is so far just another layer of bureaucracy.

I guess this is ’socializing losses’ in the sense of socializing the loss of our personal privacy.

Rep. Price and Rep. Schakowsky from Illinois have introduced a bill that would ban contractors from being involved in interrogation and rendition. That’s a very important start. But a lot more has to be done to rein in these companies.

Welcome to the Lake Mr Shorrock - thrilled to have you join us

1. Does the name Charles Black/BKSH & Associates come up anywhere in your work ?

2. What in the hell did Mr Wade and Mr Wilkes do with all that money from the contracts ?!?!? - ( at the time the story broke, many in the blogisphere suspected it was being funneled back to RNC coffers)but we know better now

3. Athena Innovative Solutions Inc (formerly MZM) doing any US Govt bidness ?

Since Marcy went after Lockheed, let me head right into my little pet goat, ManTech.

1) Why is there so little public knowledge and discussion of such a huge and key player?

2) Why do they have such a huge facility in tiny little Sierra Vista/Ft. Huachuka and why does it use so much water? (I know it is an intel base, but the ManTech facility is curiously big)

3) How involved is ManTech in the illegal mass datamining portion of Bush’s “program” and what other portions of the surveillance program are they involved in?

4) How complicit is McCain in Renzi’s duplicitous efforts to, shall we say, fix things for ManTech along the San Pedro?

Since I raised Renzi, I wanted to ask about your reporting on him. You describe the earlier contracting funny business with Betac–and that Renzi worked there. Is this what he was doing in his hidden years? I hadn’t heard of it before. Any idea what he was doing for Betac?

Incidentally, since we’re talking about Steny Hoyer’s attempts to broker a deal on FISA, folks here might be interested that Steny was the largest receipient of money from ManTech’s PAC–another thing the book notes that I had not realized.

Valerie has already reached out to the House Intel committee and to others offering her assistance. But again, money talks. Put the money, and all but battlefield intelligence in the hands of civilians and priorities change.
Valerie’s and my other strong view, from experience, is that to the extent possible the intel function has to be insulated from the political winds. Political leadership can signal its concerns and ask the hard questions but it should not try to influence the answers. Other than that, wooden stakes for the neocons is an idea.

Excellent point from Joe. When the current ‘reform’ bill was passed in 2004, the Pentagon and its supporters basically stopped the process in its tracks by demanding that the big collection agencies - NSA, NRO, NGA - stay within the Pentagon’s command and control system. With support from Rumsfeld (and Cheney in the background I’m sure), they won. The ODNI is indeed a huge bureaucracy. But there appears to be an ongoing struggle between the ODNI and the Pentagon about the control issue. There was an excellent piece on this in the Wall Street Journal about a week ago.

Under the Republican lead Congress I assume no oversight was practiced by the appropriate committees. Do you think that it now is increasing, or are the companies putting too much money in the pockets of Congress?

for more on the price/schakowsky bill, see steve aftergood: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrec.....uilds.html

What’s the bill number, do you know?

Welcome to the Lake Mr Shorrock.

renzi’s story is very interesting. his staff would not confirm his employment with betac, the intel contractor now owned by lockheed martin. but statements by rep. renzi that i quote indicate he worked for the intel community. betac was heavily involved in the secret continuity of government program. its in my history chapter.

Welcome, Tim - I’m looking forward to reading your book….and I love the idea of terrified telcoms and civilians wresting control of intel from the Pentagon.

On BKSH, Charles Black has intel connections, but mostly through private equity funds that he advises. And MZM/Athena? They’re now part of CACI International. The latest I saw on CACI’s website was Athena is now CACI’s private intel division, supporting corporations.

Given how buggy the site is acting, you’d almost think they were trying to stomp on our innocent little book salon.

In her review, Marcy mentions the dreary cavalcade of mergers and acquisitions I tried to follow. It can trip a reader up, but the industry is very incestuous. So many connections - ex officials as board members, etc - it is kind of dizzying. Makes it hard to follow.

Gosh - our NSA minders? Perish the thought. Why, if I believed that, I’d start believing the “security” services were running the intermittent attacks on activist email servers from anonymous IP’s. Fortunately, with the Air Force cruising for total toobz dominance, we can all be reassured…..

One more question I had. You talk about the multiple efforts to deploy satellite surveillance for domestic use–a practice the House Homeland Security Committee is trying to halt (with no help from Joe Lieberman), not least because DHS didn’t undergo the proper privacy review process.

But you also talk about the use of satellites in the wildfires.

Do you know whether there was earlier use of satellite surveillance of the US?

Political leadership can signal its concerns and ask the hard questions but it should not try to influence the answers.

In theory, that’s what the intelligence committee oversight function is supposed to help facilitate. Of course, that means having intelligence committee members agreeing to do their jobs. Any suggestions, either from Joe or Tim, on how that kind of oversight can be encouraged?

Oh, and one more thing, Joe: we frown on threats of violence — even metaphorical violence — here at the Lake.

;)

More on Joe Wilson’s point on civilian control: agencies such as the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency are incredibly powerful. Their technology is awesome - very very sophisticated imagery and mapping capabilities that could be used for so many useful things, like tracking climate change, following what’s happening in places like Darfur, etc. But with military control, these tasks get sidetracked. Intelligence should be a function of government that contributes to the general well-being of the people.

Thanks Kirk. On the telecom/FISA debate - Sen. Patrick Leahy DID subpoena the White House for records of the IT companies that participated in the NSA surveillance program. He seems to understand the importance of the IT industry to intel. His staff told me they didn’t get much from the White House - surprise, surprise. But companies like Booz, CACI, Mantech etc know they were deeply involved and I’m sure are working like crazy behind the scenes to make sure the immunity bill passes.

Any comment on the fact that the email companies–the trade group representing Google and MSN–oppose immunity? I’ve been encouraging Congress to call in the email companies, to undercut the telecom argument that the sky is falling. But I think taht suggestion fell by the wayside when the House bill passed.

I did an article for Salon about a year ago about the NGA’s deployment during Hurricane Katrina. That was the first major domestic use of this kind of intel imagery. I’ll find the link while we’re talking. I think this National Applications Office is one of the creepiest parts of the Bush intel agenda. It really needs more attention.

Papa Booz has always prided itself on hiring folks right out of the senior management positions of administrations and making them partners.

The other one I’m concerned about is Chris Carney of PA-10. HE worked in Feith’s shop pre his election and gives every indication of being all spooked-up. Perhaps an industry-selected replacement for Renzi?

On the email companies opposition to immunity - my guess would be that it has to do with the fact that google and other mail is being watched by the NSA with the help of the telecoms. Remember, all that AT&T traffic in SF was being routed directly to the NSA, according to Mark Klein; the NSA then stored the traffic and can go back to it to search for relationships, links, etc. That’s probably offensive to Google because they rely on email (and customer trust of it) for much of their income. But Google itself is getting some important contracts with the intel community.

I agree. I’ve done some coverage of the House Homeland Security Committee’s efforts to withstand Chertoff’s wishes. But your coverage of teh NAO stuff was the scariest part of your book for me.

Given Chertoff’s attempt to bypass all rules for the border wall, I have serious concerns about reining him in more than we are.

Heh.

The following is a little OT, but a true story. I listen to European radio streamed live through the internet. German radio did a great job of covering the Abu Ghraib and other abuse scandals when they broke. For the first couple days, anyway. Then, a couple days in, whenever the news would come on, the internets would pack up for a couple minutes with traffic, resulting in no stream of the audio coming through. It would always, miraculously, clear just in time for the weather and traffic at the end of the news to come through.

That went on until the Abu Ghraib scandal was not white-hot anymore.

Glad to hear about Rep. Price’s (D-NC) work and am anxious to read your book.
Have often wondered if a data mining monolith like SAS stays in private hands to avoid scrutiny of its customers/contracts.

Thoughts?

Yes, I encourage all emptywheel and FDL readers to focus on what Chertoff (and McConnell) are doing in this area. There does seem to be considerable congressional opposition though. It will come up again and again. Another scary thing was the fact that Booz Allen was deeply involved in the policy to make data from spy satellites available to domestic police agencies. The ‘independent commission’ that recommended the formation of the national Applications Office was led by a top Booz exec and staffed 50% by Booz people. The other half came mostly from other contractors, like L-3. That’s ‘independent’ for you.

On going public - many of these companies are sold on the stock market, and SEC filings were one of my key sources of information. Booz Allen remains private. However, SAIC did an IPO last year, and now is filing much more detailed stuff with the SEC. That’s how I learned SAIC had won a new contract for this big NSA project called Trailblazer that was an absolute failure: it’s in their SEC stuff. Funny how capitalism works.

Apologies for our server issues.

Welcome, Tim. Can you tell me — if Congress grants retroactive immunity, what do you think it will do to our ability to ever discover what happened?

Is there a multinational aspect to the outsourcing or is the outsourcing entirely domestic?

Here’s the link to my Salon story on Katrina and overhead surveillance:
http://archive.salon.com/news/.....index.html

It’s called ‘America Under Surveillance.’ Amazingly, the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, which represents the contractors that work for the NGA, posted my article on their website.

Tim, do you have any idea why some of the telecoms went along with warrantless wiretapping in the first place?

Is it simply “the President asked and we saluted?” or did they somehow get the idea they didn’t need warrants? They all have plenty of in-house attorneys, who know the law inside and out. These folks are paid big money to keep the companies out of the position where they have to work behind the scenes to get immunity. Don’t the CEOs listen to their lawyers?

Booz, Allen did have a period of time where they traded publicly but wnet back to the privately held partnership as the feeling was it cost them money to be public.

And they do like their money.

It’s international - mostly confined to the Brits. Two big UK companies, QinetiQ and BAE Systems, are among the top US intel contractors. As I report in the book (and recently wrote about in CorpWatch), QinetiQ recently hired Steve Cambone, Rumsfeld’s intel guy, for a senior exec position. A few Israeli companies are deeply involved as well.

Tim, thanks for coming to The Lake!

On the Senate side of things, do you have some insight on just why Jello Jay Rockefeller is so complicit with Administration on retroactive immunity for the Telcos?

Is it really because he’s:

1. Weak-willed?
2. Compromised?
3. Has a crush on anything Intel?

one other thing - it seems, from skimming the threads over at TPM - that the NYT-Pentagon doc dump on the retired generals shilling on TV for Rummy is turning up all sorts of cc’s on the emails, to people at places like MZM, CACI, etc. Some of the commenters there are indicating they think it looks a lot like an “information warfare operation”.

Which, BTW, would tie in (sorta tangentially) with Yoo’s Torture Memo and its reference (we’ve discussed over at EW’s place before) to the Fourth Amendment not applying to domestic military operations.

One of the big companies involved is BAE Systems–the same company accused of bribing Bandar bin Sultan.

Also, something I did not realize, is that QnetiQ, the company that Stephen Cambone revolving doored too, used to be Britain’s equivalent to our DARPA. Of course, on the surveillance front we’ve long had ties to the UK.

That’s true about Booz once being public. The Carlyle Group is now considering buying their government division, which holds all of its intel contracts. Booz’s revenues are supposed to be $4 billion a year. But I hear that their classified business is about $1 billion a year.

Scribe,

could you please define “all spooked” with regard to Carney? I don’t understand exactly what you are trying to say.

There was a decision by the Brits’ high court a couple weeks ago (I have no link available to me) which rejected the British gov’ts intervention with their Serious Fraud office, which had stopped the investigation into the BAE-Saudi bribing scheme. The UK gov’t had argued, in so many words, that the need to keep the Saudis friendly and keep the arms trade going overbore the interests of the Serious Fraud Office in enforcing the law.

That did not go down well at all with the Court.

When I was there, the Government work was very structured and stove pipe with partners pretty much “owning” the employees. At the time there were 170 partenrs world-wide with 100 or so on commercial side and 70 on gov’t but there were only approx 1,500 employees on commercial side and 4,500 on gov’t.

That he’s still a member in good standing of the intel community, even though he’s now a Congressman.

I relate an anecdote in my history chapter about the UK equivalent of DARPA, which was sold off in 2003 and privatized (by the Carlyle Group). In 1999, the Clinton administration got really nervous when the Brits were about to privatize this defense research unit because it shared high-level intel with the NRO, which controls military spy satellites. That’s where the Clinton people apparently drew the line on outsourcing. So the sale was stopped - temporarily. Then in 2003 it was sold.

The return of Porter Goss?

Boy I miss him … not.

Thanks for the info on Booz. We need more reports from insiders at these companies. After all, they get 70 percent of the US gov’t intel budget.

He’s shown himself to be pretty adept at backstabbing, given the way he’s treated Blue America and its positions since being elected.

Goss did one good thing - apparently he kicked one company out of the CIA cafeteria because they were recruiting intel officers while they ate lunch. The company was this strange outfit called Abraxas - around page 137 of my book. Abraxas at one point was responsible for making the disguises and aliases used by CIA officers under non-official cover. A pretty major task for a contractor to be doing.

It’s been over 14 years since I was there so I know many things have changed which is why I asked my first question about the contract structures. When I was there, management was always looking to hire folks with the “proper tickets” (i.e., alphabet soup security clearances) but the work was still mainly systems engineering, design support, installations and such.

If Booz, Allen and others are doing actual intel gathering and analysis, that is new since my days there.

I’d love to hear you comment about the privatization of getting clearances. Was that what led to backlogs?

And what kind of counter-intelligence function do we have overseeing these corporations? Imagine what Angleton would say!

I describe in my chapter on Booz its incredibly deep involvement in actual intel operations. McConnell was a key adviser to the major collection agencies - such as the NSA, for which Booz managed some very important programs. It’s interesting to watch McConnell after he took over at the ODNI and see how quickly he got up to speed on the surveillance and eavesdropping programs. I would bet that, as a former NSA director, he knew precisely what was going on with the warrantless spying program.

But of course he has claimed–to Congress–that he knows nothing about the illegal program from before everything went to FISA in Jan 2007. It’d be really nice to bust him on that claim–it’d be actionable in a way his other misrepresentations to Congress probably aren’t.

Angleton would do nuts (a lot of people think he was nuts anyway). On the clearances, I don’t think it was the outsourcing that slowed it down. It was more the bureaucratic battles between agencies. For example, I heard that the NSA would get someone with a CIA background applying for a job. The NSA would call the CIA to verify his employment and security clearance, and the CIA would refuse to provide the info! Plus, imagine, for some clearances they have to interview all your past and current associates EVERY YEAR. So its a huge bureaucratic snafu.

Okay, going to try this again now that the fed watchers seem to have headed to the loo. Since Marcy went after Lockheed, let me head right into my little pet goat, ManTech.

1) Why is there so little public knowledge and discussion of such a huge and key player?

2) Why do they have such a huge facility in tiny little Sierra Vista/Ft. Huachuka and why does it use so much water? (I know it is an intel base, but the ManTech facility is curiously big)

3) How involved is ManTech in the illegal mass datamining portion of Bush’s “program” and what other portions of the surveillance program are they involved in?

4) How complicit is McCain in Renzi’s duplicitous efforts to, shall we say, fix things for ManTech along the San Pedro?

5) Do you think the ManTech operation involves tapping into the massive digital fiber optic trunk lines that go through the Southern Arizona desert?

I’d love to hear Tim’s take on how all this affects us lawyers. I have to constantly warn my clients not only that whatever they do is not secure, but also that it might be a competitor (or someone thinking of becoming a competitor) who is doing the processing for the NSA.

Let’s suppose one of these private contractors decides that a business they’ve been monitoring (as one of many, even) has an interesting business model that would be profitable. What’s to stop them from diving into that business’ network and lifting it whole?

Or, the other way - let’s say the non-intel community side of one of these consultancies/I-banks decides they like a particular company’s model. What’s to stop them from going to higher management and asking that the other division of the company do a little digging to help out?

After all, the directors of these companies (private or not) have a fiduciary duty to the owners to maximize profit. Not to mention their own profit lust.

On McConnell’s prior knowledge - it sure would be nice to prove that. Some contractors must have been briefed on the program, though. SAIC, as the prime on Trailblazer, probably would have known, because they were managing the data-mining program that the NSA undoubtably used to decide which people to wiretap. I also think the Senate Intel Committee did an extremely poor job during McC’s nomination hearing. All he got was nice little softball questions.

Isn’t this just more reason for us all to install PGP and encrypt all our communications?

Same thing with Clapper, right?

Mantech - this is complicated so I’ve copied the question below. Part of the lack of knowledge is the way the MSM, particularly the Wash Post, covers this industry. These companies, for the most part, are in the Post’s backyard. Yet go through the coverage of ManTech and CACI over the years and there’s virtually no investigative reporting on what these firms actually do. It’s all rah rah business coverage. I’m sure they’re big advertisers too. Second, the press doesn’t cover the intel industrial complex as an entity - instead these companies fall into either IT contracting or defense contracting.

Can’t address the water issue in Arizona, but there’s a lot of info on it from the citizens’ groups down there who opposed the big breaks the base received from Renzi’s bill.

And on ManTch’s role (and CACI’s) in data-mining and other programs, read my chapter on the NSA and the ‘pure-plays.’ They lay out on their own websites a lot of what they do, and it appears to be considerable.

TS

Okay, going to try this again now that the fed watchers seem to have headed to the loo. Since Marcy went after Lockheed, let me head right into my little pet goat, ManTech.

1) Why is there so little public knowledge and discussion of such a huge and key player?

2) Why do they have such a huge facility in tiny little Sierra Vista/Ft. Huachuka and why does it use so much water? (I know it is an intel base, but the ManTech facility is curiously big)

3) How involved is ManTech in the illegal mass datamining portion of Bush’s “program” and what other portions of the surveillance program are they involved in?

4) How complicit is McCain in Renzi’s duplicitous efforts to, shall we say, fix things for ManTech along the San Pedro?

5) Do you think the ManTech operation involves tapping into the massive digital fiber optic trunk lines that go through the Southern Arizona desert?

All well and good, but my opinion is that if there’s a crypto system or device out there, the NSA can read through it in real time. You ain’t gonna buy something at Staples or Office Depot that they can’t break.

Sort of a corollary of the old auto mechanic’s rule: “if it’s made by the hand of man, it can be fixed by the hand of man”.

Clapper, just prior to his appointment at the Pentagon, was a contractor himself, working for companies that were less involved in NSA stuff and more involved in NGA/imagery stuff (he was, after all, the former NGA director).

WTF, my computer got nailed while I was reading Tim’s Salon Katrina article.

Never blacked out like that before.

Welcome to the “fossil” people running the NWO.

It’s virtually impossible to avoid global outsourcing in any aspect of IT. Unless it’s your stated policy (which would harm your ability to raise funds, since offshoring is considered an essential element in cost control), you use no subcontractors or service providers, and control how your telecoms are routed. Impossible assumptions.

I think the question is what protections exist when data and services are offshored. But like the question of who actually processes and stores White House communications, in many cases, we don’t know and we should.

The NSA and its contractors are really, really good at encryption and decryption. That’s always been their forte. I think any activist and activist group doing any work around intel, defense and national security should just assume their phone calls and emails are monitored. I was doing some research for a South Korean NGO that opposes the construction of a big US base in a place called Pyongtaek, South Korea. I discovered, through unclassified reports on the internet and in the military media, that the base is/was a major NSA eavesdropping and surveillance station, including many contractors (CACI). Because NSA foreign to foreign surveillance is perfectly legal, any Korean or US citizen involved in opposing that base would be under very tight surveillance. We’re living in dangerous times.

Maybe.

I doubt it, though. NSA raised holy hell about the export of RSA with 256 bit encryption. Perhaps they only did it for show, but complexity analysis of the problem suggests otherwise.

You can crack it, but it can’t be done (so far as is known) routinely. You have to know there’s something in the message that you want.

If we all encrypt our personal communication we create an identification problem for the snoopers. Yes, they can crack the messages they want to, but how do they know which messages to crack?

On outsourcing - you’re right, of course lots of IT stuff is going to be outsourced. I’ve been a journalist for 30+ years, and during that time went from manual typewriters to my Macbook. Incredible changes have taken place, and I’m happy to ‘outsource’ those tasks and functions at Apple or whoever. But my thinking and writing has to be done by me alone. I think the same principle should work for the gov’t. High-level analysis and report-writing should not be done by contractors but by gov’t employees.

Thanks. It was a complicated, multiple parted, pile of junk question for this kind of forum. Sorry about that. I know well of said citizens groups. Will take a look at your book as suggested. Thanks much for your efforts on said book and your gracious participation here. Will see you later.

Incidentally, for anyone interested in the encryption debates, go back to those hearings that took place in the 1990s. I covered some of them for the Journal of Commerce. That’s where I first encountered McConnell, who was the NSA point man on controlling encryption exports. That whole debate was very interesting.

Tim, Thank you for spending some time at the Lake today and sharing your knowledge and comments with us.

Where are you going to be on the book tour in the next week or so?

Everyone - if you haven’t bought the book, there is a link above, excellent book.

Tim, thanks again,

I agree wholeheartedly. Seems pretty obvious, to me, anyway.

My questions at 72 were the ones I think more interesting. What is your opinion of the likelihood of the contractors using the contractually gained access to the surveillance world, to enhance their own businesses at the expense of other businesses not having similar access? E.g., the surveillance people pass along an interesting concept to the non-surveillance side of the contractor’s business, or the non-surveillance side finds an idea and tasks the surveillance side to dig it out?

We’re living in dangerous times.

That is a refreshing change from “an interesting age.”

Thank you all for your interest, and to Marcy and Bev for setting this up. I’m on a quick book tour this week in DC, and will be speaking tonight at Ollson’s at 7pm and on Monday noon at the Institute for Policy Studies. Email me at timshorrock@gmail.com for exact times and locations, or check my website, timshorrock.com, where I’ll post the info. And I’ll be back in DC.

One of the great dangers in this trend, it seems to me, is the inability to distinguish private company business development needs from legitimate systems and substantive intel needs of government. The leviathan swallows its own tail, while impossibly growing larger.

Most of the taxpayer costs here are somewhere in black box budgets. Who actually knows the cash cost of this trend, in the administration or Congress, much less its implications for who controls our intel and for what ends?

The parallel with private contractors like of Blackwater constituting half the personnel in Iraq is obvious. But the intel side seems more dangerous because it’s more secret, therefore harder to get at and regulate, and more pernicious with respect to the potential abuse of personal information. Heck, what about shere competence? What’s the error rate on the “Terrorist” Watch List alone?

Everyone - if you haven’t bought the book, there is a link above, excellent book.

ordered it this morning, marcy’s post convinced me it is a must read.

Tim,

Do you know if the hearings transcripts are available?

BC

“Angleton would dgo nuts (a lot of people think he was nuts anyway).”

Angleton was deep into the spy vs. spy business. How anyone seriously responsible in that arena can keep their sanity is beyond me. Basically, it becomes a matter of who can you trust? And I think Angleton decided that the only accurate answer was “No one.” If you live in a world where you can’t trust anyone, how can you stay sane? No wonder he loved his cat.

But the intel side seems more dangerous because it’s more secret, therefore harder to get at and regulate, and more pernicious with respect to the potential abuse of personal information. Heck, what about shere competence? What’s the error rate on the “Terrorist” Watch List alone?

That’s why I got sick to my stomach reading this. Shorrock agrees with Eric Lichtblau, I think, that what we know of the warrantless wiretap indicates it didn’t work–it didn’t find much meaningful. But still, it got to suck up all our data.

And then you add on the satellite surveillance on top of that–ugh.

But Darth Cheney gets Google to pixelate the Naval Observatory grounds? Do you suppose he likes to sunbathe or something?

But what do you do, then, if you’re outsourcing everything? What’s to stop one of these companies–or even one of its employees, who after all has already chosen money over country–to sell all this data to other countries, potentially including blackmail information? It seems like with corporations, it would be hopeless to conduct any meaningful counterintelligence, even ignoring the prevalence of the profit motive.

Haven’t read all the comments so forgive me if this has been covered

Tim could you talk about how 70% of all intelligence is analyzed by contractors