Outsourcing Intelligence - A Marriage Of Convenience

[muriel_volestrangler]

The excellent Charles Pierce in Esquire looks at the private espionage industry entangled in the NSA affair. He references the nation article "The Strange Case of Barrett Brown", on which there is a DU thread here.

I have had a little fun at the expense of Edward Snowden, and his apparent belief that, in many ways, he is living in the pages of an airport spy novel. However, the issues he has raised are serious and deep and ongoing. The best thing he's done is expose precisely what kind of country in which we are living, and the distance between that country and the one we boast of living in. And one of the issues, ironically, is why we're outsourcing our intelligence gathering in the first place to companies for which people like Edward Snowden work. Which makes the situation with Barrett Brown all the more serious, and all the more criminally undercovered.
...
(Say what you will about Glenn Greenwald, and I have, he also makes all the right people nervous.)

Brown also managed to reveal a staggering network of connections between the government and various private enterprises, all of which were using the privatized security apparatus that has developed in this country over the past two decades. This network engaged in all manner of surveillance and state-of-the-art ratfking. For example:
...
Years ago, people wrote books about "The Secret Government," and all they were talking about was the CIA. Look at where we are now. A nation full of private spies and corporate surveillance and a marriage of public and private law-enforcement that would make Dwight Eisenhower get up and give another speech. This is the conversation we should be having. This is the conversation that we must be having. I'm telling you, James Jesus Angleton couldn't have gotten a summer internship with these guys.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/outsourcing-intelligence-062013?src=rss

[msongs]

1. gouging the taxpayer with no accountability - a win/win for contractors AND politicians nt

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

2. The government has become the middleman between the people and corporations.

Maybe, we should just cut out the middlemen and deal with the real bosses directly.