Tuesday, January 28, 2014

America's Private Sector Achilles' Heel

What if there are dozens of Edward Snowdens inside today's American security apparatus only they're working for America's enemies?

It's been said that the easiest way to get a mole inside the American intelligence establishment is by getting them hired by any of the dozens of private contractors to which the intelligence operation has been outsourced.  The backdoor to America's secrets is held open by the private sector.

Not only does the United States outsource a lot of its intelligence operations but it even outsources the vetting of the people employed by those intelligence contractors and the government itself  - with the predictable results.

The U.S. Justice Department, which itself has yet to be outsourced, is pursuing one of these security vetting contractors, US Investigative Services (USIS), for failing to properly vet hundreds of thousands of federal "clearance holders."

“Shelves are as clean as they could get. Flushed everything like a dead goldfish.”

That’s what a key supervisor in charge of reviewing federal security clearances told a superior in April 2010, in a message boasting about how he and his colleagues had approved numerous clearances and sent them on to the federal Office of Personnel Management without conducting required quality reviews.

Oh, lordy, lordy, say it ain't so.


Update:   USIS handled the vetting of Edward Snowden.

1 comment:

Purple library guy said...

Doubtless true, and amazingly foolish on their part, but no skin off my nose. So their vaunted security is amazingly insecure . . . big deal.