(Jeff Danziger’s website)
Via Alec MacGillis at TNR (“Edward Snowden, Exemplar of the Beltway’s Economic Boom — Washington is full of high-earning contractors just like him”), the NYTimes follows the money:
WASHINGTON — Edward J. Snowden’s employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, has become one of the largest and most profitable corporations in the United States almost exclusively by serving a single client: the government of the United States…
The government has sharply increased spending on high-tech intelligence gathering since 2001, and both the Bush and Obama administrations have chosen to rely on private contractors like Booz Allen for much of the resulting work.
Thousands of people formerly employed by the government, and still approved to deal with classified information, now do essentially the same work for private companies. Mr. Snowden, who revealed on Sunday that he provided the recent leak of national security documents, is among them.
As evidence of the company’s close relationship with government, the Obama administration’s chief intelligence official, James R. Clapper Jr., is a former Booz Allen executive. The official who held that post in the Bush administration, John M. McConnell, now works for Booz Allen…
Farhad Manjoo, at Slate:
If the NSA Trusted Edward Snowden With Our Data, Why Should We Trust the NSA?