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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTwo of the largest National Security breaches in American history tied to Privatization.
The "OPM" hack was actually a hack of USIS
USIS profile at wikipedia
http://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2015/04/private-investigators-say-hacked-and-bankrupt-usis-didnt-shirk-security/110995/
Edward Snowden at the time he gathered evidence of widespread NSA spying was not a government employee. He was an employee of Booz allen Hamilton
The current of director of national intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, who issued a stinging attack on the intelligence leaks this weekend, is a former Booz Allen executive. The firm's current vice-chairman, Mike McConnell, was DNI under the George W Bush administration. He worked for the Virginia-based company before taking the job, and returned to the firm after leaving it. The company website says McConnell is responsible for its "rapidly expanding cyber business".
James Woolsey, a former CIA director was also a Booz Allen vice-president, and Melissa Hathaway, another former company executive also once worked as the top aide on cybersecurity to McConnell when he was DNI. The company headquarters in the leafy Washington suburb of McLean in northern Virginia, close to CIA headquarters and home to former and current intelligence officers.
Snowden's decision to reveal his identity as a computer systems administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton, directly handling National Security Agency IT systems, raises significant image problems for the $6bn company and its 25,000-strong staff, which has traded on a bond of trust with sensitive clients, particularly the intelligence establishment.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/booz-allen-hamilton-edward-snowden
Privatization and the hatred of civil service workers in favor of corporations, is at the root of these two massive national security debacles.
99th_Monkey
(19,326 posts)oh wait. We did that too?
Jesus Malverde
(10,274 posts)The second scary part is that the owners of these companies, and senior executives also have access to this same data. I don't trust them with it to do the right thing for one minute. Blackmail, insider trading, and selling secrets are not beyond these business executives.
99th_Monkey
(19,326 posts)raouldukelives
(5,178 posts)And with the helpful assistance of each shareholder granting them fiduciary responsibility on their behalf, they will never feel the sharp sting of justice you or I would.
NightWatcher
(39,343 posts)Not about how thorough you were.
I left after it was apparent to me that it was all about the employee stock value and not about following leads and doing good work. It was a nice cash out too when I left.
Don't even get me started on the Carlyle Group...the revolving door of what's wrong with the government and private sector relationship.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Behind the Curtain: Booz Allen Hamilton and its Owner, The Carlyle Group
Written by Bob Adelmann
The New American; June 13, 2013
According to writers Thomas Heath and Marjorie Censer at the Washington Post, The Carlyle Group and its errant child, Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), have a public relations problem, thanks to NSA leaker and former BAH employee Edward Snowden. By the time top management at BAH learned that one of their top level agents had gone rogue, and terminated his employment, it was too late.
For years Carlyle had, according to the Post, nurtured a reputation as a financially sophisticated asset manager that buys and sells everything from railroads to oil refineries; but now the light from the Snowden revelations has revealed nothing more than two companies, parent and child, bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits.
And have they ever. When The Carlyle Group bought BAH back in 2008, it was totally dependent upon government contracts in the fields of information technology (IT) and systems engineering for its bread and butter. But there wasn't much butter: After two years the companys gross revenues were $5.1 billion but net profits were a minuscule $25 million, close to a rounding error on the companys financial statement. In 2012, however, BAH grossed $5.8 billion and showed earnings of $219 million, nearly a nine-fold increase in net revenues and a nice gain in value for Carlyle.
Unwittingly, the Post authors exposed the real reason for the jump in profitability: close ties and interconnected relationships between top people at Carlyle and BAH, and the agencies with which they are working. The authors quoted George Price, an equity analyst at BB&T Capital: "[Booz Allen has] got a great brand, they've focused over time on hiring top people, including bringing on people who have a lot of senior government experience."
CONTINUED w Links n Privatized INTEL...
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15696-behind-the-curtain-booz-allen-hamilton-and-its-owner-the-carlyle-group
Wouldn't it be great to live in a democracy, a republic built on equal justice for all? That way, traitors, warmongers and banksters would be in jail instead of printing money.
Those guys.
Panich52
(5,829 posts)So they continue to want SS privatized and tied to stock market and the constitutionally mandated post office in the hands of the likes of FedEx or UPS (which considered charging extra for actually delivering packages). And lets not forget the failed promise of charter schools.
It's all tied to the unwavering belief that capitalism is the path to Utopia but only if it's left alone and unregulated. That increasing the wealth of corporations will inevitably lead to a more robust economy, ignoring the avarice and elitism that prevents trickle down from being anything more than a 'Golden Shower.'
libodem
(19,288 posts)Nice to see the research to back it up.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)CIA moonlights in corporate world
In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nations top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.
In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in deception detection, the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.
The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to connect the dots, this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.
SNIP...
But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.
The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of deception detection. BIAs clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32290.html#ixzz0eIFPhHBh
Sometimes a fortune rests on a mere scrap of information, jawohl.
Stratfor: executive boasted of 'trusted former CIA cronies'
By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent
9:08PM GMT 28 Feb 2012
The Telegraph
A senior executive with the private intelligence firm Stratfor boasted to colleagues about his "trusted former CIA cronies" and promised to "see what I can uncover" about a classified FBI investigation, according to emails released by the WikiLeaks.
Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence at the Texas firm, also informed members of staff that he had a copy of the confidential indictment on Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
The second batch of five million internal Stratfor emails obtained by the Anonymous computer hacking group revealed that the company has high level sources within the United States and other governments, runs a network of paid informants that includes embassy staff and journalists and planned a hedge fund, Stratcap, based on its secret intelligence.
SNIP...
Mr Assange labelled the company as a "private intelligence Enron", in reference to the energy giant that collapsed after a false accounting scandal.
CONTINUED...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9111784/Stratfor-executive-boasted-of-trusted-former-CIA-cronies.html
Then, there's Booz Allen, NSA's go-to private spyhaus, vacuums and filters the right stuff for Carlyle Group, a buy-partisan business which always seems to know where and what to bomb and make a buck.
The Knights of the Revolving Door
When War is Swell: the Carlyle Group and the Middle East at War
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
CounterPunch, Weekend Edition September 6-8, 2013
Paris.
A couple of weeks ago, in a dress rehearsal for her next presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, the doyenne of humanitarian interventionism, made a pit-stop at the Carlyle Group to brief former luminaries of the imperial war rooms about her shoot-first-dont-ask-questions foreign policy.
For those of you who have put the playbill of the Bush administration into a time capsule and buried it beneath the compost bin, the Carlyle Group is essentially a hedge fund for war-making and high tech espionage. They are the people who brought you the Iraq war and all those intrusive niceties of Homeland Security. Call them the Knights of the Revolving Door, many of Carlyles executives and investors having spent decades in the Pentagon, the CIA or the State Department, before cashing in for more lucrative careers as war profiteers. They are now licking their chops at the prospect for an all-out war against Syria, no doubt hoping that the conflagration will soon spread to Lebanon, Jordan and, the big prize, Iran.
For a refresher course on the sprawling tentacles of the Carlyle Group, heres an essay that first appeared in CounterPunchs print edition in 2004. Sadly, not much has changed in the intervening years, except these feted souls have gotten much, much richer. JSC
Across all fronts, Bushs war deteriorates with stunning rapidity. The death count of American soldiers killed in Iraq will soon top 1000, with no end in sight. The members of the handpicked Iraqi Governor Council are being knocked off one after another. Once loyal Shia clerics, like Ayatollah Sistani, are now telling the administration to pull out or face a nationalist insurgency. The trail of culpability for the abuse, torture and murder of Iraqi detainees seems to lead inexorably into the office of Donald Rumsfeld. The war for Iraqi oil has ended up driving the price of crude oil through the roof. Even Kurdish leaders, brutalized by the Baathists for decades, are now saying Iraq was a safer place under their nemesis Saddam Hussein. Like Medea whacking her own kids, the US turned on its own creation, Ahmed Chalabi, raiding his Baghdad compound and fingering him as an agent of the ayatollahs of Iran. And on and on it goes.
Still not all of the presidents men are in a despairing mood. Amid the wreckage, there remain opportunities for profit and plunder. Halliburton and Bechtels triumphs in Iraq have been chewed over for months. Less well chronicled is the profiteering of the Carlyle Group, a company with ties that extend directly into the Oval Office itself.
Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his sons war making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld. Theyve remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you have friends like this, you dont need to hire lobbyists..
Bush Sr. serves as a kind of global emissary for Carlyle. The ex-president doesnt negotiate arms deals; he simply opens the door for them, a kind of high level meet-and-greet. His special area of influence is the Middle East, primarily Saudi Arabia, where the Bush family has extensive business and political ties. According to an account in the Washington Post, Bush Sr. earns around $500,000 for each speech he makes on Carlyles behalf.
One of the Saudi investors lured to Carlyle by Bush was the BinLaden Group, the construction conglomerate owned by the family of Osama bin Laden. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Bush convinced Shafiq Bin Laden, Osamas half brother, to sink $2 million of BinLaden Group money into Carlyles accounts. In a pr move, the Carlyle group cut its ties to the BinLaden Group in October 2001.
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http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/06/when-war-is-swell-the-carlyle-group-and-the-middle-east-at-war/
This barely scratches the surface. The reality is that underneath what shows for public navigators is one enormous iceberg made from blood-red ice, invisible to the proles and serfs who are doing their best to keep afloat in a frozen sea of austerity, endless war and debt servitude, thanks to the banksters and warmongers' ability to use the USA PATRIOT Act to their advantage.
JEB
(4,748 posts)Jesus Malverde
(10,274 posts)Something that's unlikely to be discussed in the "mainstream" corporate media.
JEB
(4,748 posts)dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)closeupready
(29,503 posts)K&R
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)bvar22
(39,909 posts)...and show the World the evils inside.
Thank You, Snowden.