Up to 60 percent of the CIA workforce has been outsourced.
Spiegel Online reveals some of the intelligence money outside of government.
Contractors are responsible for at least half of the estimated $48 billion a year the government now spends on intelligence.
Former CIA chief George Tenet carried on a “deep involvement in the privatization of US intelligence.”
Among several firms, Tenet is now assisting L-1 Identity Solutions, the nation’s biggest player in biometric identification. L-1’s software can store millions of ID records based on fingerprints and eye and facial characteristics. L-1 technology is also employed by the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security for U.S. passports, visas, drivers’ licenses and transportation worker ID cards.
The National Counterterrorism Center is staffed primarily by contractors.
Update:
Frontline at PBS examines how the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program works and the clashing viewpoints on whether the president has violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and infringed on constitutional protections.
Probing such projects as Total Information Awareness, and its little known successors, Smith discloses that even former government intelligence officials now worry that the combination of new security threats, advances in communications technologies, and radical interpretations of presidential authority may be threatening the privacy of Americans.
War is an inside thing “…as government and industry work together to fight terrorism”. We may find that any future peace will reveal that we live in a very different world.