zimv20
Jun 2, 2007, 01:40 PM
salon (http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/06/01/intel_contractors/)
The U.S. government now outsources a vast portion of its spying operations to private firms -- with zero public accountability.
More than five years into the global "war on terror," spying has become one of the fastest-growing private industries in the United States. The federal government relies more than ever on outsourcing for some of its most sensitive work, though it has kept details about its use of private contractors a closely guarded secret. Intelligence experts, and even the government itself, have warned of a critical lack of oversight for the booming intelligence business.
On May 14, at an industry conference in Colorado sponsored by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. government revealed for the first time how much of its classified intelligence budget is spent on private contracts: a whopping 70 percent. Based on this year’s estimated budget of at least $48 billion, that would come to at least $34 billion in contracts. The figure was disclosed by Terri Everett, a senior procurement executive in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the agency established by Congress in 2004 to oversee the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence infrastructure. A copy of Everett's unclassified PowerPoint slide presentation, titled "Procuring the Future" and dated May 25, was obtained by Salon. (It has since become available on the DIA's Web site.) "We can't spy ... If we can't buy!" one of the slides proclaims, underscoring the enormous dependence of U.S. intelligence agencies on private sector contracts.
The DNI figures show that the aggregate number of private contracts awarded by intelligence agencies rose by about 38 percent from the mid-1990s to 2005. But the surge in outsourcing has been far more dramatic measured in dollars: Over the same period of time, the total value of intelligence contracts more than doubled, from about $18 billion in 1995 to about $42 billion in 2005.
"Those numbers are startling," said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and an expert on the U.S. intelligence budget. "They represent a transformation of the Cold War intelligence bureaucracy into something new and different that is literally dominated by contractor interests."
Because of the cloak of secrecy thrown over the intelligence budgets, there is no way for the American public, or even much of Congress, to know how those contractors are getting the money, what they are doing with it, or how effectively they are using it. The explosion in outsourcing has taken place against a backdrop of intelligence failures for which the Bush administration has been hammered by critics, from Saddam Hussein's fictional weapons of mass destruction to abusive interrogations that have involved employees of private contractors operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Aftergood and other experts also warn that the lack of transparency creates conditions ripe for corruption.
Trey Brown, a DNI press officer, told Salon that the 70 percent figure disclosed by Everett refers to everything that U.S. intelligence agencies buy, from pencils to buildings to "whatever devices we use to collect intelligence." Asked how much of the money doled out goes toward big-ticket items like military spy satellites, he replied, "We can't really talk about those kinds of things."
The media has reported on some contracting figures for individual agencies, but never before for the entire U.S. intelligence enterprise. In 2006, the Washington Post reported that a "significant majority" of the employees at two key agencies, the National Counterterrrorism Center and the Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office, were contractors (at CIFA, the number was more than 70 percent). More recently, former officers with the Central Intelligence Agency have said the CIA's workforce is about 60 percent contractors.
But the statistics alone don't even show the degree to which outsourcing has penetrated U.S. intelligence -- many tasks and services once reserved exclusively for government employees are being handled by civilians. For example, private contractors analyze much of the intelligence collected by satellites and low-flying unmanned aerial vehicles, and they write reports that are passed up to the line to high-ranking government officials. They supply and maintain software programs that can manipulate and depict data used to track terrorist suspects, both at home and abroad, and determine what targets to hit in hot spots in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such data is also at the heart of the National Security Agency's massive eavesdropping programs and may be one reason the DNI is pushing Congress to grant immunity to corporations that may have cooperated with the NSA over the past five years. Contractors also provide collaboration tools to help individual agencies communicate with each other, and they supply security tools to protect intelligence networks from outside tampering.
Outsourcing has also spread into the realm of human intelligence. At the CIA, contractors help staff overseas stations and provide disguises used by agents working under cover. According to Robert Baer, the former CIA officer who was the inspiration for the character played by George Clooney in the film "Syriana," a contractor stationed in Iraq even supervises where CIA agents go in Baghdad and whom they meet. "It's a completely different culture from the way the CIA used to be run, when a case officer determined where and when agents would go," he told me in a recent interview. "Everyone I know in the CIA is leaving and going into contracting whether they're retired or not."
The DNI itself has voiced doubts about the efficiency and effectiveness of outsourcing. In a public report released last fall, the agency said the intelligence community increasingly "finds itself in competition with its contractors for our own employees." Faced with arbitrary staffing limits and uncertain funding, the report said, intelligence agencies are forced "to use contractors for work that may be borderline 'inherently governmental'" -- meaning the agencies have no clear idea about what work should remain exclusively inside the government versus work that can be done by civilians working for private firms. The DNI also found that "those same contractors recruit our own employees, already cleared and trained at government expense, and then 'lease' them back to us at considerably greater expense."
A Senate Intelligence Committee report released on Thursday spells out the costs to taxpayers. It estimates that the average annual cost for a government intelligence officer is $126,500, compared to the average $250,000 (including overhead) paid by the government for an intelligence contractor. "Given this cost disparity," the report concluded, "the Committee believes that the Intelligence Community should strive in the long-term to reduce its dependence upon contractors."
(more)
The U.S. government now outsources a vast portion of its spying operations to private firms -- with zero public accountability.
More than five years into the global "war on terror," spying has become one of the fastest-growing private industries in the United States. The federal government relies more than ever on outsourcing for some of its most sensitive work, though it has kept details about its use of private contractors a closely guarded secret. Intelligence experts, and even the government itself, have warned of a critical lack of oversight for the booming intelligence business.
On May 14, at an industry conference in Colorado sponsored by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. government revealed for the first time how much of its classified intelligence budget is spent on private contracts: a whopping 70 percent. Based on this year’s estimated budget of at least $48 billion, that would come to at least $34 billion in contracts. The figure was disclosed by Terri Everett, a senior procurement executive in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the agency established by Congress in 2004 to oversee the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence infrastructure. A copy of Everett's unclassified PowerPoint slide presentation, titled "Procuring the Future" and dated May 25, was obtained by Salon. (It has since become available on the DIA's Web site.) "We can't spy ... If we can't buy!" one of the slides proclaims, underscoring the enormous dependence of U.S. intelligence agencies on private sector contracts.
The DNI figures show that the aggregate number of private contracts awarded by intelligence agencies rose by about 38 percent from the mid-1990s to 2005. But the surge in outsourcing has been far more dramatic measured in dollars: Over the same period of time, the total value of intelligence contracts more than doubled, from about $18 billion in 1995 to about $42 billion in 2005.
"Those numbers are startling," said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and an expert on the U.S. intelligence budget. "They represent a transformation of the Cold War intelligence bureaucracy into something new and different that is literally dominated by contractor interests."
Because of the cloak of secrecy thrown over the intelligence budgets, there is no way for the American public, or even much of Congress, to know how those contractors are getting the money, what they are doing with it, or how effectively they are using it. The explosion in outsourcing has taken place against a backdrop of intelligence failures for which the Bush administration has been hammered by critics, from Saddam Hussein's fictional weapons of mass destruction to abusive interrogations that have involved employees of private contractors operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Aftergood and other experts also warn that the lack of transparency creates conditions ripe for corruption.
Trey Brown, a DNI press officer, told Salon that the 70 percent figure disclosed by Everett refers to everything that U.S. intelligence agencies buy, from pencils to buildings to "whatever devices we use to collect intelligence." Asked how much of the money doled out goes toward big-ticket items like military spy satellites, he replied, "We can't really talk about those kinds of things."
The media has reported on some contracting figures for individual agencies, but never before for the entire U.S. intelligence enterprise. In 2006, the Washington Post reported that a "significant majority" of the employees at two key agencies, the National Counterterrrorism Center and the Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office, were contractors (at CIFA, the number was more than 70 percent). More recently, former officers with the Central Intelligence Agency have said the CIA's workforce is about 60 percent contractors.
But the statistics alone don't even show the degree to which outsourcing has penetrated U.S. intelligence -- many tasks and services once reserved exclusively for government employees are being handled by civilians. For example, private contractors analyze much of the intelligence collected by satellites and low-flying unmanned aerial vehicles, and they write reports that are passed up to the line to high-ranking government officials. They supply and maintain software programs that can manipulate and depict data used to track terrorist suspects, both at home and abroad, and determine what targets to hit in hot spots in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such data is also at the heart of the National Security Agency's massive eavesdropping programs and may be one reason the DNI is pushing Congress to grant immunity to corporations that may have cooperated with the NSA over the past five years. Contractors also provide collaboration tools to help individual agencies communicate with each other, and they supply security tools to protect intelligence networks from outside tampering.
Outsourcing has also spread into the realm of human intelligence. At the CIA, contractors help staff overseas stations and provide disguises used by agents working under cover. According to Robert Baer, the former CIA officer who was the inspiration for the character played by George Clooney in the film "Syriana," a contractor stationed in Iraq even supervises where CIA agents go in Baghdad and whom they meet. "It's a completely different culture from the way the CIA used to be run, when a case officer determined where and when agents would go," he told me in a recent interview. "Everyone I know in the CIA is leaving and going into contracting whether they're retired or not."
The DNI itself has voiced doubts about the efficiency and effectiveness of outsourcing. In a public report released last fall, the agency said the intelligence community increasingly "finds itself in competition with its contractors for our own employees." Faced with arbitrary staffing limits and uncertain funding, the report said, intelligence agencies are forced "to use contractors for work that may be borderline 'inherently governmental'" -- meaning the agencies have no clear idea about what work should remain exclusively inside the government versus work that can be done by civilians working for private firms. The DNI also found that "those same contractors recruit our own employees, already cleared and trained at government expense, and then 'lease' them back to us at considerably greater expense."
A Senate Intelligence Committee report released on Thursday spells out the costs to taxpayers. It estimates that the average annual cost for a government intelligence officer is $126,500, compared to the average $250,000 (including overhead) paid by the government for an intelligence contractor. "Given this cost disparity," the report concluded, "the Committee believes that the Intelligence Community should strive in the long-term to reduce its dependence upon contractors."
(more)
