It was set in motion under Reagan, expanded under Clinton, and runs wild under the bush administration.

I now know a few of these contractors. Though they are former govt employees and presumably trustworthy, the point is that they now have a different boss (private sector) with different goals (private sector). Their primary mission now is NOT to do the best job as determined by the govt, but the best job as determined by their corporate managers whose primary goal is to please the govt enough to renew the contract.

Informant identification and development is considered one of the most sensitive, protected aspects of intelligence and LE work. Yet now we contractors doing that work. That means that corporations, who sell information for a iiving, now know the identity and nature of foreign sources. Among secrets, that's among the Holiest of Holies. That is wrong in so many ways.

Book Review: Tim Shorrock's 'Spies for Hire'
by Meteor Blades

Sun May 11, 2008 at 09:02:28 PM PDT

Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing
By Tim Shorrock
Simon & Shuster, 2008
439 pages
$17.99

If your budget is limited or your spare hours are few, sit down at Barnes & Noble and read the first chapter of Tim Shorrock’s Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. It’s hard to imagine anyone getting that far who won’t set aside the money and time to take the book home and devour the rest of it. Shorrock gives us as clear a picture of the business ties of the Intelligence-Industrial Complex as can be done by a guy without a TS/SCI, the highest security clearance.

These days, as he tells us, the majority of people who do have TS/SCIs aren’t employed by the government. They’re private contractors. And they didn’t get those clearances by talking about their work to outsiders, unless their specific task is disinformation. Despite zipped lips and unreturned phone calls, Shorrock has pried off lids and written a book as revealing in its own way as the seminal The Puzzle Palace, James Bamford’s great 1982 exposé about the National Security Agency.

You won’t read the words "ruling class" in Spies for Hire, and I’m sympathetic, because few writers who want to be taken seriously will unhesitatingly employ those words in public discourse these days. Not so much out of fear that Patrick Buchanan will redbait them as that many post-Cold War liberals will do so. But a slice of the ruling class is who Shorrock describes throughout his book.

The most dangerous people on the planet are not the fanatics squatting in hide-outs in the mountains of Pakistan or operating sleeper cells in Amsterdam. They are instead the chieftains and sub-chieftains of an interwoven array of entrepreneurial intelligence mavens engaged in a "public-private partnership" whose power and behavior and reach are limited only by the elected officials charged with their supposed oversight. At the beck and call of this dangerous array are money, information, expertise, the latest technology, lethal force, and the ear of political leaders who actively or passively set the ethical and legal parameters, if any, in which these spies for hire operate on a daily basis. They have in their hands the most sophisticated tools for going after whomever they designate as "the bad guys" – and anybody else they wish – secretly. And much else. Most of this isn’t new. But in the old days, the early ‘90s and before, those engaged in this work were almost always government guys. Now it’s hard to tell.

At the National Security Agency, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Central Intelligence Agency, indeed, the entire alphabet soup of 16 agencies that fall under the purview of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, government analysts often find themselves sitting next to corporate analysts working on the same project, but for two or three times the salary. At the CIA, they call them "green-badgers" to distinguish them from the government employees who wear blue badges, and they are everywhere. It’s not just people with badly needed, ultraspecialized experience that can’t be found in-house. Contractors have filled jobs as high as deputy chief of station for the CIA.

Epitomizing what’s happened is the guy at the top of the whole shebang, Mike McConnell. Appointed as director of national intelligence by President Bush in January 2007, McConnell came out of both the public and private sectors. A vice admiral in the Navy, where he served all but three of his 29 years as an intelligence officer, including a stint as Colin Powell’s chief of intelligence when the general was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War, McConnell departed for Booz Allen Hamilton in 1996. As executive vice president for 10 years there, he managed the company’s extensive contract jobs in military intelligence, which kept him in close contact with government intelligence agencies. How much Booz Allen profited from these contracts is classified information, but it was not peanuts. As Shorrock writes, those contracts meant that the company was "directly involved in the most sensitive initiatives taken by U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon during the war on terror."

::
At his swearing-in ceremony, McConnell said: "My work over the past ten years after leaving government has allowed me to stay focused on the national security and intelligence communities as a strategist and as a consultant. Therefore, in many respects, I never left."

Shorrock writes:

McConnell, in other words, was not a mere consultant: he and his company were high–ranking players in a community where power was shared, almost equally, between the private sector and the agents of the state. By appointing McConnell to run the Intelligence Community, Bush and Cheney sent a powerful signal to the rest of the government, particularly the Department of Defense, that private corporations were the de facto managers of the nation’s intelligence system. McConnell’s actions since taking the post only deepened that perception.

Thus, today, the President’s Daily Brief, "the most sensitive document in government," drawn heavily from analysis of e-mail and telephone intercepts, is the product of contractors in the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, and, of course, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which prepares the final draft of the PDB, which goes to the President’s desk with the DNI seal on it.

At best that seal is misleading, says, R.J. Hillhouse, an intelligence expert and the author of a popular blog on outsourcing. "For full disclosure, the PDB really should look more like NASCAR with corporate logos plastered all over it."

Shorrock relates that at Booz Allen, McConnell had become chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a group originally founded in 1979 as a forum for discussing common interests and concerns of contractors and the NSA. In 2005, it was reorganized "to serve as a bridge between the industry and the leaders of national intelligence." When Bush appointed McConnell, the media failed to mention this chairmanship.

That was a significant oversight, because shortly after taking over as intelligence chief, McConnell elevated INSA into a virtual partnership with the Office of the DNI, and used its nonprofit status to promote a dialogue within the broader IC on domestic intelligence. When it first began, that dialogue seemed innocent enough; who could argue with developing an industry consensus on this volatile issue? But, as we shall see ... as McConnell’s term at DNI progressed, he became the leader within the Bush administration of a drive to greatly expand the domestic reach of the NSA and convince Congress to grant immunity to companies that collaborated with the NSA in its surveillance program from its inception in the months after 9/11 to the present day. Seen in this light, McConnell’s experience with INSA, and the role of his company in the Bush-Cheney intelligence regime, take on greater significance.

Loyalty to What?

So, whatever McConnell’s official title, does he work for the government, for America’s interests, or for the interests of the dozens of companies with thousands of contractors working for the 16 agencies covered by the ODNI? Which side of the private-public partnership does he actually come down on? And which side do all those contractors come down on – from private security types at Blackwater International to software engineers at CACI International to former chief intelligence officers for this or that agency now sitting in the boardroom or the CEO’s office of this or that corporation with dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts for secret work? How can you tell?

But what does it matter as long as American lives are being protected, and American "interests" are being protected and promoted? Does it make a difference that, according to those Shorrock consulted, something around $40 billion a year, or 70% of the U.S. intelligence budget, is farmed out?

It depends on whom you talk to.

"It’s hard enough for a government analyst to tell it like it is and be just one step removed from the president," says Ray McGovern, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the CIA’s analytic division who once delivered the CIA’s daily briefing to President George H.W. Bush. "But think how much more difficult it is for an analyst who’s working for Booz Allen Hamilton or SAIC. There’s pressure there; there’s much more freedom for people to tailor their analysis to something they think the contracting officer would like." The problem with outsourcing is simple, he says: Contractors are in it for the money." If that is the case, few companies have been as skilled in profiting from intelligence as Booz Allen Hamilton.

Without close oversight – that is, without the committed and relentless supervision of elected people with security clearances of their own – few questions can be answered. Limited congressional efforts have been initiated to enforce some oversight, to gain some transparency, to establish some control, and to just understand, but these seem like weak efforts at best. At any rate, they are too new to offer the slightest confidence that they will put reins on the private-public intelligence partnership.

Shorrock introduces readers to a fair number of the private corporations who do business in the Intelligence-Industrial Complex. But the details are frustratingly sketchy. These companies are, after all, working on top secret projects. The few principals still in the business who agreed talk to him make telling remarks, some even criticizing the level of outsourcing.

But he was mostly left to dig his material from the public record, using skills he learned as a reporter at the Journal of Commerce, interviewing intelligence community retirees, searching for tidbits in technology and business journals, and catching the odd "slip-ups" in unclassified speeches by the likes of Joan Dempsey, now a Booz Allen vice president who went from Naval Intelligence to the Defense Intelligence Agency, and was appointed by Bill Clinton in 1997 as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and security, the highest civilian intelligence position in the Department of Defense in those days.

This isn’t all Dick Cheney and George Bush’s doing. Privatization began under Ronald Reagan, but, as Shorrock explains at some length, it really took off under Clinton, partly as a consequence of his desire to cut back on intelligence and defense budgets as part of the peace dividend. Ironically, the staff cutbacks imposed in those days – to the shrieks of Cheney, other neo-conservatives and many in the intelligence community with less rightwing credentials – are part of what led to outsourcing of the mission. Laid-off analysts sought jobs in the private sector, and many found themselves working for their old government bosses at their new companies, and then back inside the doors at the CIA or NSA as contractors. When the September 11 attacks occurred, the reduced staffs of the spy agencies could not handle the demands for "actionable intelligence" and were compelled to seek out help in the private sector. Lots of it.

The Journey of Stephen Cambone

Will new "management" make a difference in this partnership? In that regard, the story of Stephen Cambone is precautionary.

Much has been made of the changes since Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. As the point of the neocon spear inside the Pentagon, Rumsfeld not only sought to shake up the uniformed bureaucracy with a private sector zeal for downsizing and mission reshaping, but also to bypass the CIA and make intelligence far more of a Pentagon function. So rancorous was internal struggle over this that, even in an era of media complacency, some of the bruises leaked out and helped lead to the abrasive CEO-style SecDef’s ultimate departure. But not before making the Pentagon the most powerful intelligence agency, and turning a penchant for outsourcing into a fever.

In the fall of 2002, Rumsfeld with Cheney’s help managed to create a "czar" for intelligence at the Pentagon. The real title wasn’t as impressive, undersecretary of defense for intelligence. The job went to Stephen Cambone. He had previously worked for Cheney at the Pentagon during George H. W. Bush’s administration as director of strategic defense policy. "Plus," writes Shorrock, "he was a diehard neo-conservative and a charter member of the Project for the New American Century, the group of foreign policy hard-liners that, in a major policy document on ‘rebuilding America’s defenses’ issued in 2000, had proposed a greater role for intelligence agencies in war fighting."

Cambone was given enormous power, and he and Rumsfeld began programs that meant "hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of new business for the ‘Intelligence-Industrial Complex.’" Among his other duties was overseeing "Copper Green," the interrogations, much of them by private contractors, of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Cambone was so widely despised and feared at the Pentagon that an Army general had jokingly said that "if he had one round left in his revolver, he would take out Steve Cambone," according to the Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks.

Out the door with Rumsfeld, in with Gates. Does Cambone get the boot? Yes, he does, in January 2007. Gates works with McConnell to fix the "corrosive rivalry" between the Pentagon and the CIA. But, as Shorrock says, for the contractors, nothing changed. Spending continued at record levels.

In January 2008, the Pentagon’s Counter-Intelligence Field Agency granted a $30 million contract to the Missions Solutions Group of QinetiQ North America. CIFA was an agency initiated in 2002 by Rumsfeld’s then-deputy, Paul Wolfowicz, and which, among other things, had been tasked with extensive domestic spying, including control over the Talon database, which complied dossiers on thousands of U.S. citizens. Under the contract, QNA will provide unspecified "security services."

Just two months before that contract was awarded, QinetiQ hired a new vice president for strategy. His name is Stephen Cambone.

A World of Privatized Intelligence

One cannot help but imagine how things might pan out if Russia and China and Brazil and Uzbekistan were to adopt this privatized model of intelligence operations, subject to the inevitable mergers and acquisitions and other exigencies of capitalist enterprise combined with state-sanctioned power in a globalized world.

Spies for Hire is one of those books so brimful of detail, including mergers and acquisitions by intelligence companies, that one wishes for coded links and two or three charts illustrating the career trajectories and corporate genealogy of a couple dozen of the key players. And there are stories one hopes to see followed in the future with more detail, like the CIA’s $30 billion-a-year In-Q-Tel, a venture capital operation that gives a whole new meaning to the agency’s old slang for itself – "The Company."

Can a new President and new Congress make a dent in this new intelligence order? Would they have a willingness to do so? Shorrock writes:

It’s going to take years, decades maybe, to get that 70 percent of the intelligence budget spent on contractors down to a tolerable and more controllable level; that will mean constant focus on issues of accountability, transparency, and oversight. The current proposals for the Orwellian-sounding National Administration Office discussed in Chapter 9 will almost certainly be left to the next president and Congress to implement or reject, meaning that discussions about expanding access of domestic security agencies to intelligence from satellites and sensors in the sky – and the role that private contractors play in that enterprise – will remain at the top of the national security agenda long after January 2009. In short, spying for hire is not going away anytime soon.

"Empire" is another term, like "ruling class," that isn’t discussed much in polite discourse in America despite the fact that neoconservatives have, since the fall of the Soviet Union, openly used the term to describe their vision of Pax Americana. Every empire needs tools to sustain itself, and the modern U.S. empire needs the most modern sophisticated tools it can find. The suppliers and wielders of those lucrative tools are in all-too-many cases also the men and women who help set policy for how those tools should be used. Until the empire retreats, it is hard to imagine that they will give them up.

+ + +

Tim Shorrock's Web site is here.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/5/12/0228/93413

http://timshorrock.com/?page_id=141

Be the change
you wish to see

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/06/01/intel_contractors/

The corporate takeover of U.S. intelligence
The U.S. government now outsources a vast portion of its spying operations to private firms -- with zero public accountability.

By Tim Shorrock

Jun. 01, 2007 | 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."

The DNI began an intensive study of contracting last year, but when its "IC Core Contractor Inventory" report was sent to Congress in April, DNI officials refused to release its findings to the public, citing risks to national security. The next month, a report from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence rebuked the DNI in unusually strong language, concluding that U.S. officials "do not have an adequate understanding of the size and composition of the contractor work force, a consistent and well-articulated method for assessing contractor performance, or strategies for managing a combined staff-contractor workforce."

U.S. intelligence budgets are classified, and all discussions about them in Congress are held in secret. Much of the information, however, is available to intelligence contractors, who are at liberty to lobby members of Congress about the budgets, potentially skewing policy in favor of the contractors. For example, Science Applications International Corp., one of the nation's largest intelligence contractors, spent $1,330,000 in their congressional lobbying efforts in 2006, which included a focus on the intelligence and defense budgets, according to records filed with the Senate's Office of Public Records.

The public, of course, is completely excluded from these discussions. "It's not like a debate when someone loses," said Aftergood. "There is no debate. And the more work that migrates to the private sector, the less effective congressional oversight is going to be." From that secretive process, he added, "there's only a short distance to the Duke Cunninghams of the world and the corruption of the process in the interest of private corporations." In March 2006, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., who had resigned from Congress several months earlier, was sentenced to eight years in prison after being convicted of accepting more than $2 million in bribes from executives with MZM, a prominent San Diego defense contractor. In return for the bribes, Cunningham used his position on the House appropriations and intelligence committees to win tens of millions of dollars' worth of contracts for MZM at the CIA and the Pentagon's CIFA office, which has been criticized by Congress for spying on American citizens. The MZM case deepened earlier this month when Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the former deputy director of the CIA, was indicted for conspiring with former MZM CEO Brent Wilkes to steer contracts toward the company.

U.S. intelligence agencies have always relied on private companies for technology and hardware. Lockheed built the famous U-2 spy plane under specifications from the CIA, and dozens of companies, from TRW to Polaroid to Raytheon, helped develop the high-resolution cameras and satellites that beamed information back to Washington about the Soviet Union and its military and missile installations. The National Security Agency, which was founded in the early 1950s to monitor foreign communications and telephone calls, hired IBM, Cray and other companies to make the supercomputers that helped the agency break encryption codes and transform millions of bits of data into meaningful intelligence.

By the 1990s, however, commercial developments in encryption, information technology, imagery and satellites had outpaced the government's ability to keep up, and intelligence agencies began to turn to the private sector for technologies they once made in-house. Agencies also turned to outsourcing after Congress, as part of the "peace dividend" that followed the end of the Cold War, cut defense and intelligence budgets by about 30 percent.

When the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency was created in 1995 as the primary collection agency for imagery and mapping, for example, it immediately began buying its software and much of its satellite imagery from commercial vendors; today, half of its 14,000 workers are full-time equivalent contractors who work inside NGA facilities but collect their paychecks from companies like Booz Allen Hamilton and Lockheed Martin. In the late 1990s, the NSA began outsourcing its internal telecommunications and even some of its signals analysis to private companies, such as Computer Services Corp. and SAIC.

Outsourcing increased dramatically after 9/11. The Bush administration and Congress, determined to prevent further terrorist attacks, ordered a major increase in intelligence spending and organized new institutions to fight the war on terror, such as the National Counterterrorism Center. To beef up these organizations, the CIA and other agencies were authorized to hire thousands of analysts and human intelligence specialists. Partly because of the big cuts of the 1990s, however, many of the people with the skills and security clearances to do that work were working in the private sector. As a result, contracting grew quickly as intelligence agencies rushed to fill the gap.

That increase can be seen in the DNI documents showing contract award dollars: Contract spending, based on the DNI data and estimates from this period, remained fairly steady from 1995 to 2001, at about $20 billion a year. In 2002, the first year after the attacks on New York and Washington, contracts jumped to about $32 billion. In 2003 they jumped again, reaching about $42 billion. They have remained steady since then through 2006 (the DNI data is current as of last August).

Because nearly 90 percent of intelligence contracts are classified and the budgets kept secret, it's difficult to draw up a list of top contractors and their revenues derived from intelligence work. Based on publicly available information, including filings from publicly traded companies with the Securities and Exchange Commission and company press releases and Web sites, the current top five intelligence contractors appear to be Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SAIC, General Dynamics and L-3 Communications. Other major contractors include Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI International, DRS Technologies and Mantech International. The industry's growth and dependence on government budgets has made intelligence contracting an attractive market for former high-ranking national security officials, like former CIA director George Tenet, who now earns millions of dollars working as a director and advisor to four companies that hold contracts with U.S. intelligence agencies and do big business in Iraq and elsewhere.

Congress, meanwhile, is beginning to ask serious questions about intelligence outsourcing and how lawmakers influence the intelligence budget process. Some of that interest has been generated by the Cunningham scandal. In another recent case, Rep. Rick Renzi, a Republican from Arizona, resigned from the House Intelligence Committee in April because he is under federal investigation for introducing legislation that may have benefited Mantech International, a major intelligence contractor where Renzi's father works in a senior executive position.

In the Cunningham case, many of MZM's illegal contracts were funded by "earmarks" that he inserted in intelligence bills. Earmarks, typically budget items placed by lawmakers to benefit projects or companies in their district, are often difficult to find amid the dense verbiage of legislation -- and in the "black" intelligence budgets, they are even harder to find. In its recent budget report, the House Intelligence Committee listed 26 separate earmarks for intelligence contracts, along with the sponsor's name and the dollar amount of the contract. The names of the contractors, however, were not included in the list.

Both the House and Senate are now considering intelligence spending bills that require the DNI, starting next year, to provide extensive information on contractors. The House version requires an annual report on contractors that might be committing waste and fraud, as well as reviews on its "accountability mechanisms" for contractors and the effect of contractors on the intelligence workforce. The amendment was drafted by Rep. David Price, D-N.C., who introduced a similar bill last year that passed the House but was quashed by the Senate. In a statement on the House floor on May 10, Price explained that he was seeking answers to several simple questions: "Should (contractors) be involved in intelligence collection? Should they be involved in analysis? What about interrogations or covert operations? Are there some activities that are so sensitive they should only be performed by highly trained Intelligence Community professionals?"

If either of the House or Senate intelligence bills pass in their present form, the overall U.S. intelligence budget will be made public. Such transparency is critical as contracting continues to expand, said Paul Cox, Price's press secretary. "As a nation," he said, "we really need to take a look and decide what's appropriate to contract and what's inherently governmental."

"If U were smarter, I'd have nothing 2 do"

Ok, I'll bite. What is wrong with it in so many ways?

As your and Jack's articles explain, we entrust our best (and most secret) technology with private corporations (maybe because they are the ones that actually could come up with the technology?) so what is wrong with entrusting other "secret information?"