Following up on MisterMix’s “(no) value for money” post, here’s Michael Maiello (subbing for Charles P. Pierce at Esquire) on our high-dollar NSA security contractors:
… Whatever you think of Snowden, the Teflon character of his former employer, which is where the leaker got access to all of government intelligence secrets, is truly stunning. But, from a pecuniary perspective, the Snowden affair has been a non-event for Booz. Yesterday, Booz reported that quarterly sales held steady, year over year, at $1.4 billion while profits jumped 13 percent to $73.2 million. The higher profits are a result of Booz’s ability to increase rates for its billable consulting hours, a measure of the company’s prestige with clients. Booz stock is up nearly 50 percent this year.
A couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Air Force cleared Booz of any accountability for Snowden’s data heist, saying that the firm could not have known. In the earnings call, Booz chief executive Ralph W. Shrader addressed the Snowden issue for the first time, saying that “Mr. Snowden was on our payroll for a short period of time, but he was not a Booz Allen person and he did not share our values.”…
For the more civil liberties minded observer, the issue is whether or not such sensitive functions are being turned over to the private sector where public accountability is so limited. Snowden’s betrayal was informed by Libertarian zeal. The next data brigand might have malicious intent…
No matter, Shrader told investors. Booz is having no post-Snowden problems winning government contracts and is even raising prices as Snowden fades into its distant corporate memory.
cathyx
I see where the jobs are. Do they pay more than minimum wage?
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
Mammon bless patriots like Shrader.
Comrade Jake
Perhaps I missed it, but I’m not sure Snowden’s hire at Booz represented some massive fuckup on their part. Unless you want to argue that anybody who gives to Ron Paul should have their security clearance revoked, for which there may be some ground to stand on.
Svensker
But he did share your data, idiot. Which, apparently, you didn’t care enough to secure from a “non-Booz” person who had only worked for you for a short time.
This excuse gets an F for Fucking Lame.
NotMax
Open thread?
Redshirt
I’d attend a corporate hanging, if such a thing were possible, even though corporations are people, and they kill other people all the time, yet, somehow, no noose fits.
El Cruzado
@NotMax: You know, it occurs to me that if that ever happens to a homeless person that doesn’t survive, we will never know.
BillinGlendaleCA
@cathyx:
According to Snowden, yes.
@OP:
Excuse me Mr. CEO, your company hired the guy; he wasn’t a temp agency guy, he was your employee. You’re supposed to check out the guy beyond basic skills and the necessary security clearance.
Yatsuno
@Redshirt: There is a noose for corporations, but it never gets used. It’s called revocation of the corporate charter. I’m thinking a few death penalties that way might send the right kind of message.
Comrade Jake
Security clearance checks, particularly for the classification Snowden had, tend to be pretty damn thorough folks. And it probably was not conducted by Booz. I’m just sayin’.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Comrade Jake: I know, I was by and around folk with those types of clearances. I’ve also been a reference for friends seeking those type of clearances; I’ve had some nice chats with the FBI. My question is what do you need to do to be a ‘Booz Allen person’? There is some responsibility on Booz’s part.
BillinGlendaleCA
@efgoldman: Most of the major corps are chartered in Deleware.
Linnaeus
Clearly, I picked the wrong field.
BethanyAnne
I was thinking today, that the argument I hear on Twitter about the NSA is “but Facebook!”. But, um, isn’t that the same as the voting ID argument that conservatives make? “Gotta show ID to cash a check!”
JPL
@Comrade Jake: My son is a consultant and that is what he told me.
SiubhanDuinne
@Redshirt:
@Yatsuno:
No noose is good noose.
Roger Moore
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I think it’s kind of like being a responsible gun owner: you are assumed to be one until they want to disown you, at which point it turns out that you never were one.
amy c
Whatever happens with Snowden, I’m always thrilled to see the Seemingly Infinite Money Machine of defense contracting receive some attention and scrutiny.
The Dangerman
@Comrade Jake:
I had the rough equivalent of a Top Secret (maybe a hair below it); it took 6 months to clear me. They went to my high school. They went to my youth activities. And, of course, they checked over my personal life with a fine tooth comb…
…so how a character like Snowden gets a clearance is a monster fuckup someplace. Hell, back in the day, having a girlfriend that was a stripper might have been enough to get bounced from a clearance.
Anton Sirius
@Svensker:
So far all he’s shared is a bunch of Power Point slides, really.
Snowden claimed he could do a whole lot of crazy shit at BAH. He hasn’t actually provided any evidence to back that up though.
I still fail to understand why Snowden didn’t just record a private call between the President and First Lady, if he wanted to expose the NSA’s unchecked power.
Roger Moore
@BillinGlendaleCA:
A fair number are chartered in Nevada these days. My understanding is that Nevada is also very corporate friendly, but concentrates more on being friendly to management than to shareholders; it says something about today’s corporate culture that this is considered to be a plus.
Mandalay
The former Director General of MI5 in Britain….
Rather like destroying the village in order to save it: citizens must spy on fellow citizens to avoid becoming a “Stasi state”.
Redshift
@Comrade Jake:
Okay, so if Booz isn’t responsible for whether their employees are trustworthy, and they’re not responsible for a security architecture that would keep someone with that clearance from getting into pretty much anything he wanted undetected, instead of just the stuff he’s supposed to be working on, they what exactly are they responsible for that justifies their being paid many many times more than your average IT department?
Mandalay
@Anton Sirius:
Snowden has stated that additional steps were required for NSA employees to access emails of certain people, including the president. I assume that also applied to phone calls involving the president. It would be astounding if that was not the case.
Redshift
@BethanyAnne: It’s worse than that, it’s the refusal to understand the concept of consent (especially among conservatives, but way to common among other people, too.) No matter what information you choose to share on Facebook, that doesn’t mean you give up your right to keep anything private.
BillinGlendaleCA
@efgoldman: Except for right pigment, I’m not sure had any of the above.
Anne Laurie
@Anton Sirius:
Gosh, wouldn’t it have been convenient if “we” could just dismiss Snowden as another Teabagger/racist/emoprog whose only grievance was just That Black Man in the White House?
Of course, there’s quite a few people doing that already, but as it stands they have to work out much longer chains of inference. Fekkin ingrate civil libertarian, pretending it’s about “rule of law” and not just a tribal vendetta…
Anne Laurie
@efgoldman: True, but I don’t trust the commentor making the oh-so-innocent suggestion.
Fergus Wooster
FYI, Doghouse Riley passed away.
DIdn’t see it posted earlier, so apologies if I missed.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/RIP_To_One_Of_The_Best_Of_Them
mainmati
@Svensker: Booz is a giant defense and accounting contractor. They launder employees regularly. This is definitely a case of bad management not bad personnel choice. I happen to think Snowden did a useful public service because the NSA really is out of control .But the larger lesson is that the big defense contractors are focused on cost minimization (profitability) and working for the gummint always means low profit margins* so you have to go for large volumes. So a lot of the fine management gets lost.
*There is, of course, the “Halliburton Exception” where politically connected firms (large or small) can fleece at will. And that definitely still goes on.
Anton Sirius
@Anne Laurie:
This response is completely incoherent, and has nothing whatsoever to do with what I posted.
Good job, Anne.
Anton Sirius
@Mandalay:
There’s a lot that’s astounding about his story and his claims.
It would certainly make sense that there are/were a lot of roadblocks in the way of random NSA agents accessing certain information. But that’s hardly the narrative Snowden and Greenwald are pushing.
Mandalay
@Anton Sirius:
I explained that Snowden had explicitly stated that there was a roadblock to accessing the president’s email, and you just ignore that. The cognitive dissonance from some here is astounding.
Mandalay
@Anton Sirius:
It wasn’t, and it did.
LAC
@Anton Sirius: don’t worry …snowden is the libertarian Justin Bieber for some folks. “Betta’ not say nothing about my Eddie!! “
BethanyAnne
@Redshift: I knew I didn’t like the argument, but I hadn’t thought about that part. I feel like a damn libertarian in some of this. I’m willing to have a more risky life, just to keep myself private. I don’t have a Facebook account at all because of privacy.
Older
@Svensker: “We are completely open to depredation by persons who ‘do not share our values’ …”
Oh, good …
Anton Sirius
@Mandalay:
The original Snowden quote, lest we forget:
Meanwhile, Greenwald continues to publish columns implying or stating outright that the NSA can do whatever the hell it wants, whenever the hell it wants. Sometimes he’ll bury an “oh, yeah, they need a warrant” in the middle somewhere, but the derision with which he says it bleeds through pretty clearly.
So which is it? Are there actual roadblocks to NSA analysts performing ‘wiretaps’, or do they just need someone’s email address (which is not a roadblock by any reasonable definition)?
Anton Sirius
@Mandalay:
Then explain it to me. Because my original post had fuck all to do with race. Or teabaggers, or emoprogs, or any other cutesy internet tribal buzzwords.
Ash Can
@Mandalay: I know you’re not old enough to know or remember this, but the “spying” Rimington is referring to has been going on for decades. Anyone riding the London underground back in the 70s, e.g., saw posters on the walls instructing people to be on the lookout for unattended packages and to report them to authorities immediately. The same thing has been going on here since 9/11 — commuter trains here in Chicago make the same announcements. Hell, I “spy” on my fellow citizens myself — shortly after Obama was elected, I came across a particularly violently threatening website targeting him, and sent a notification to the FBI about it. None of this comes anywhere close to what the Stasi actually did in East Germany back in the day, or what the East German government wanted its citizens to do.
Interrobang
Is it just me, or is corporate-speak about “values” even creepier when coming from a suit at a high-dollar defence contractor? Brr…
Mandalay
@Ash Can:
Not in Britain it hasn’t. You are drawing a massive false equivalence between “instructing people to be on the lookout for unattended packages” and being told to “Spy on your neighbours”.
In the 70s the IRA had an active campaign of public bombings in Britain, so warning people to be on the lookout for unattended packages made a lot of sense. It still does, though for different reasons.
In Britain they reduced the size of mailbox slits to make it harder to post bombs. They have removed trash cans in some public areas to make it harder to leave bombs. At train stations in London you just throw trash on the ground – you have no choice – and someone promptly comes along an sweeps it up. In Britain they have installed CCTV cameras far more than most places. They take very strong measures to reduce the probability of public bombings. But they do not have politicians telling people to spy on their neighbors. There is a very good reason for that: they would never be re-elected.
Really? I lived and worked in London in the 70s and rode the underground. Did you? You need to be better informed before oozing your condescension.
Mandalay
@Anton Sirius: You post that Snowden wrote “I…certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone…even the president, if I had a personal e-mail“.
So why on earth did you ever write “I still fail to understand why Snowden didn’t just record a private call between the President and First Lady”?
What part of the “if I had a personal e-mail” roadblock don’t you understand?
Ignoring the evidence that others provide is one thing – folks do that here all the time. But you ignore the evidence that you provide yourself! Just stunning,
Anton Sirius
I like that you say I’m ‘ignoring the evidence others provide’ while ignoring things I post that answer your questions before you ask them, Mandalay. It’s cute, in a sad, trollish sort of way.
tofubo
has anyone asked mr Ralph W. Shrader whether his PC on his desk can tap into the same stuff snowden (and many others in that company) did ??