5 Companies That Make Money By Keeping Americans Terrified of Terror Attacks

[Octafish]

"Money trumps peace." -- George Walker Bush, Feb. 14, 2007*

5 Companies That Make Money By Keeping Americans Terrified of Terror Attacks

Alex Kane
Alternet.org, August 16, 2013

Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency, has invaded [3] America’s television [4] sets [5] in recent weeks to warn about Edward Snowden’s leaks and the continuing terrorist threat to America.

But what often goes unmentioned, as the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out, [6] is that Hayden has a financial stake in keeping Americans scared and on a permanent war footing against Islamist militants. And the private firm he works for, called the Chertoff Group, is not the only one making money by scaring Americans.

Post-9/11 America has witnessed a boom in private firms dedicated to the hyped-up threat of terrorism. The drive to privatize America's national security apparatus accelerated in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, and it’s gotten to the point where 70 percent of the national intelligence budget is now spent on private contractors, as author Tim Shorrock reported. [7] The private intelligence contractors have profited to the tune of at least $6 billion a year. In 2010, the Washington Post revealed that there are 1,931 private firms [8]across the country dedicated to fighting terrorism.

What it all adds up to is a massive industry profiting off government-induced fear of terrorism, even though Americans are more likely to be killed by a car crash or their own furniture than a terror attack.

CONTINUED with details, links, etc:

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/5-companies-make-money-keeping-americans-terrified-terror-attacks

The Five:

The Chertoff Group
Booz Allen Hamilton
Science Applications International Corporation
Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies
Security Solutions International

DU's pegged a few over the years. Still would be nice for more people to know about them, considering how they and their secret masters threaten democracy itself.

* http://election.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3208027

[Initech]

1. Just further proves how right George Carlin was: it's a big club and we're not in it!

[Octafish]

2. Regarding No. 2: Booz Allen, the World's Most Profitable Spy Organization

Booz Allen, the World's Most Profitable Spy Organization

By Drake Bennett and Michael Riley
June 20, 2013, Business Week

EXCERPT...

Edward Snowden was not hired as a spy. He’s a mostly self-taught computer technician who never completed high school, and his first intelligence job was as a security guard at an NSA facility. In an interview in the Guardian, he says he was hired by the Central Intelligence Agency for his computer skills to work on network security. In 2009 he left for the private sector, eventually ending up at Booz Allen. The job he did as a contractor for the NSA appears to have been basic tech support and troubleshooting. He was the IT guy.

People in intelligence tend to divide contract work into three tiers. In the first tier are the least sensitive and most menial jobs: cutting the grass at intelligence facilities, emptying the trash, sorting the mail. In classified facilities even the janitors need security clearances—the wastebaskets they’re emptying might contain national secrets. That makes these jobs particularly hard to fill, since most people with security clearances are almost by definition overqualified for janitorial work.

SNIP...

William Golden heads a recruiting and job placement company for intelligence professionals. In mid-June, he’s trying to fill three slots for contractors at the Defense Intelligence Agency. As it happens, Booz Allen isn’t involved, but these are the sort of jobs the firm has filled in thousands of other instances, Golden says. Two postings are for senior counter-intelligence analyst openings in Fort Devens, Mass., one focusing on the threat to federal installations in Massachusetts, the other on Southwest Asia. The contractors would be trawling through streams of intelligence, from digital intercepts and human sources alike, writing reports and briefings just like the DIA analysts they would be sitting next to. Both postings require top-secret clearances, and one would require extensive travel. The third job is for a senior linguist fluent in Malayalam, spoken mostly in the Indian state of Kerala, where there’s a growing Maoist insurgency. That the Pentagon is looking for someone who speaks the language suggests American intelligence assets are there. The listing specifies “austere conditions.”

Golden says he constantly sees openings at Booz Allen and other contractors for “collection managers” in posts around the world. “A collection manager is someone at the highest level of intelligence who decides what assets get used, how they get used, what goes where,” he says. “They provide thought, direction, and management. They basically have full status, as if they were a government employee. The only thing they can’t do is spend and approve money or hire and fire government workers.”

SNIP...

As a result, says Golden, the headhunter, a common complaint in spy agencies is that “the damn contractors know more than we do.” That could have been a factor in the Snowden leak—his computer proficiency may have allowed him to access information he shouldn’t have been allowed to see. Snowden is an anomaly, though. What he did with that information—copying it, getting it to the press, and publicly identifying himself as the leaker—cost him his job and potentially his freedom, all for what appear so far to be idealistic motives. The more common temptation would be to use knowledge, legally and perhaps not even consciously, to generate more business.

CONTINUED...

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-20/booz-allen-the-worlds-most-profitable-spy-organization



Truth and staplers for Democracy.

[Initech]

4. "PC Load Letter? What the fuck does that mean?"

[Octafish]

6. Just saw that for the first time a few weeks back...

A kinder, gentler hobnailed boot stamping on the face of humanity forever.com:



LMFAO. Now I know where the company name came from.

[Initech]

9. The Bobs interview Sarah Palin:

"What would ya say... ya do here?"

[LisaLynne]

3. k&r nt

[Octafish]

7. Regarding No. 3: Science Applications International Corporation

The great DUer bobthedrummer brought their communication business to our attention in 2004.

While the old link's busted, the info is still around:

"… the Pentagon provided the Center copies of seven contracts awarded to Science Applications International Corporation for work in Iraq. The total contract value was omitted, although some …"

http://www.publicintegrity.org/news/Science-Applications-International-Corporation

[KoKo]

5. K&R....hopefully more news will come out about the extent

to which Private Contractors and Security Interests have taken over the duties of NSA...and maybe CIA/FBI... Following the Money.

[Octafish]

8. Privatized Intel goes with Privatized Profit or ''We Can't Spy... If We Can't Buy.''

‘We Can't Spy … If We Can't Buy!’: The Privatization of Intelligence and the Limits of Outsourcing ‘Inherently Governmental Functions’

Simon Chesterman*
European Journal of International Law, Vol. 19, Issue 5, 2008

Though it lags behind the privatization of military services, the privatization of intelligence has expanded dramatically with the growth in intelligence activities following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States. The recent confirmation by the Director of the CIA that contractors have probably participated in waterboarding of detainees at CIA interrogation facilities has sparked a renewed debate over what activities it is appropriate to delegate to contractors, and what activities should remain ‘inherently governmental’. The article surveys outsourcing in electronic surveillance, rendition, and interrogation, as well as the growing reliance on private actors for analysis. It then turns to three challenges to accountability: the necessary secrecy that limits oversight; the different incentives that exist for private rather than public employees; and the uncertainty as to what functions should be regarded as ‘inherently governmental’ and thus inappropriate for delegation to private actors.

On 14 May 2007 a senior procurement executive from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence gave a presentation to an intelligence industry conference in Colorado convened by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), part of the US Department of Defense.1 Her unclassified PowerPoint presentation, ‘Procuring the Future’, was posted on the DIA website, but later modified and subsequently removed.2 In it, she revealed that the proportion of the US intelligence budget spent on private contractors is 70 per cent. By removing the scale from a table on intelligence expenditures but not the underlying figures, she also revealed that the amount the United States spends on such contractors is US$42 billion, out of an implied total intelligence budget of US$60 billion for the 2005 financial year. At its midpoint the presentation cheerily exhorted: ‘We can’t spy … if we can’t buy!’3

Though it lags behind the privatization of military services, the privatization of intelligence has expanded dramatically with the growth in intelligence activities following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States.4 In a report published three days after those attacks, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence encouraged a ‘symbiotic relationship between the Intelligence Community and the private sector’.5 In addition to dollars spent – dominated by large items such as spy satellites – this has seen an important increase in the proportion of personnel working on contract. More than 70 per cent of the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) unit is staffed by contractors, known as ‘green badgers’, who also represent the majority of personnel in the DIA, the CIA's National Clandestine Service, and the National Counterterrorism Center. At the CIA's station in Islamabad contractors reportedly outnumber government employees three to one.6

Controversy over government reliance on outsourcing in this area frequently coalesces around issues of cost (a contractor costs on average US$250,000 per year, about double that of a government employee), ‘brain-drain’, and periodic allegations of self-dealing and other forms of corruption. More recently, however, the confirmation by the Director of the CIA that contractors have probably participated in waterboarding of detainees at CIA interrogation facilities has sparked a renewed debate over what activities it is appropriate to delegate to contractors, and what activities should remain ‘inherently governmental’.7 (This is, of course, separate from whether such activities should be carried out in the first place – a topic that is not the focus of this article.8)

Privatization of intelligence services raises many concerns familiar to the debates over private military and security companies (PMSCs). One of the key problems posed by PMSCs is their use of potentially lethal force in an environment where accountability may be legally uncertain and practically unlikely; in some circumstances, PMSCs may also affect the strategic balance of a conflict.9 The engagement of private actors in the collection of intelligence exacerbates the first set of problems: it frequently encompasses a far wider range of conduct that would normally be unlawful, with express or implied immunity from legal process, in an environment designed to avoid scrutiny. Engagement of such actors in analysis raises the second set of issues: top-level analysis is precisely intended to shape strategic policy, and the more such tasks are delegated to private actors the further they are removed from traditional accountability structures such as judicial and parliamentary oversight, and the more influence they may have on the executive.

This article will survey the manner in which US intelligence functions have been outsourced in collection activities such as electronic surveillance, rendition, and interrogation, as well as the growing reliance on private actors for analysis. It will then turn to accountability issues raised by this new phenomenon, focusing on three areas: first, the necessary secrecy that limits oversight of intelligence and thus militates against further removal of such activities from democratic structures; secondly, the different incentives that exist for private rather than public employees; and finally the uncertainty as to what functions should be regarded as ‘inherently governmental’ and thus inappropriate for delegation to private actors.

CONTINUED...

http://ejil.oxfordjournals.org/content/19/5/1055.full

PS: And you know the Socialized Risk means Taxpayers foot bills for PermaWar and the Bankster Bailouts for ever. Billions? Trillions? I cannot fathom how anyone would trust secret Government when that means zero accountability.

[KoKo]

10. +1 for Sure! "Socialized Risk Means Taxpayers Food Bills for "Perma War!" Link:

CONTINUED...

http://ejil.oxfordjournals.org/content/19/5/1055.full

PS: And you know the Socialized Risk means Taxpayers foot bills for PermaWar and the Bankster Bailouts for ever. Billions? Trillions? I cannot fathom how anyone would trust secret Government when that means zero accountability.