General Discussion

Jesus Malverde

(10,274 posts) Tue Jun 16, 2015, 10:35 PM Jun 2015

Two of the largest National Security breaches in American history tied to Privatization.

The "OPM" hack was actually a hack of USIS

USIS was founded in 1996 after the investigative branch of the OPM was privatized. Its creation was due to an effort of Vice President of the United States Al Gore's effort to reduce the size of the civil service. Originally known as U.S. Investigations Services Inc., it was at first an employee-owned company. Around 2000 the Carlyle Group invested in USIS and in 2003 Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe committed capital to them. In 2007 Carlyle announced that it would sell USIS to Providence Equity Partners, a private equity firm, for US$1.5 billion In the fiscal year 2012 the company received $253 million for the contract work of the OPM, 67% of the OPM's contract spending for the fiscal year.

USIS profile at wikipedia

http://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2015/04/private-investigators-say-hacked-and-bankrupt-usis-didnt-shirk-security/110995/

Edward Snowden at the time he gathered evidence of widespread NSA spying was not a government employee. He was an employee of Booz allen Hamilton

Booz Allen Hamilton, Edward Snowden's employer, is one of America's biggest security contractors and a significant part of the constantly revolving door between the US intelligence establishment and the private sector.

The current of director of national intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, who issued a stinging attack on the intelligence leaks this weekend, is a former Booz Allen executive. The firm's current vice-chairman, Mike McConnell, was DNI under the George W Bush administration. He worked for the Virginia-based company before taking the job, and returned to the firm after leaving it. The company website says McConnell is responsible for its "rapidly expanding cyber business".

James Woolsey, a former CIA director was also a Booz Allen vice-president, and Melissa Hathaway, another former company executive also once worked as the top aide on cybersecurity to McConnell when he was DNI. The company headquarters in the leafy Washington suburb of McLean in northern Virginia, close to CIA headquarters and home to former and current intelligence officers.

Snowden's decision to reveal his identity as a computer systems administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton, directly handling National Security Agency IT systems, raises significant image problems for the $6bn company and its 25,000-strong staff, which has traded on a bond of trust with sensitive clients, particularly the intelligence establishment.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/booz-allen-hamilton-edward-snowden

Privatization and the hatred of civil service workers in favor of corporations, is at the root of these two massive national security debacles.

19 replies

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Highlight:

Two of the largest National Security breaches in American history tied to Privatization. (Original Post) Jesus Malverde Jun 2015 OP

Yep. Privatized intel is as stupid as privatizing banks 99th_Monkey Jun 2015 #1

No fear they would do anything on the cheap. Jesus Malverde Jun 2015 #2

+100 nt 99th_Monkey Jun 2015 #4

Not only are they not beyond, based on my observations, it is its bread and butter. raouldukelives Jun 2015 #15

I worked for USIS and it was all about the number of cases you cleared NightWatcher Jun 2015 #3

CARLYLE Group 'bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits' Octafish Jun 2015 #5

Gack libodem Jun 2015 #8

Such failures readily overlooked by conservs in their anti-gov crusade. Panich52 Jun 2015 #6

No Doubt libodem Jun 2015 #7

Secret Government is un-democratic, but profitable. Octafish Jun 2015 #9

K&R for the original post and subsequent informative posts and links. JEB Jun 2015 #10

Thanks Jesus Malverde Jun 2015 #11

Criticism of privatization is forbidden in the corporate world. JEB Jun 2015 #13

Very well done informative post! dixiegrrrrl Jun 2015 #12

Kicked and recommended a huge bunch! Enthusiast Jun 2015 #14

Of course. Utterly predictable. closeupready Jun 2015 #16

Snowden himself is a common thread as well... Blue_Tires Jun 2015 #17

He certainly had the unusual courage to open Pandora's Box... bvar22 Jun 2015 #18

Wish I could say I was surprised by this. nt City Lights Jun 2015 #19

99th_Monkey

(19,326 posts)

1. Yep. Privatized intel is as stupid as privatizing banks

Reply to Jesus Malverde (Original post)

Tue Jun 16, 2015, 10:39 PM

Jun 2015

oh wait. We did that too?

Jesus Malverde

(10,274 posts)

2. No fear they would do anything on the cheap.

Reply to 99th_Monkey (Reply #1)

Tue Jun 16, 2015, 10:43 PM

Jun 2015

The second scary part is that the owners of these companies, and senior executives also have access to this same data. I don't trust them with it to do the right thing for one minute. Blackmail, insider trading, and selling secrets are not beyond these business executives.

99th_Monkey

(19,326 posts)

4. +100 nt

Reply to Jesus Malverde (Reply #2)

Tue Jun 16, 2015, 10:59 PM

Jun 2015

raouldukelives

(5,178 posts)

15. Not only are they not beyond, based on my observations, it is its bread and butter.

Reply to Jesus Malverde (Reply #2)

Wed Jun 17, 2015, 11:27 AM

Jun 2015

And with the helpful assistance of each shareholder granting them fiduciary responsibility on their behalf, they will never feel the sharp sting of justice you or I would.

NightWatcher

(39,343 posts)

3. I worked for USIS and it was all about the number of cases you cleared

Reply to Jesus Malverde (Original post)

Tue Jun 16, 2015, 10:48 PM

Jun 2015

Not about how thorough you were.

I left after it was apparent to me that it was all about the employee stock value and not about following leads and doing good work. It was a nice cash out too when I left.

Don't even get me started on the Carlyle Group...the revolving door of what's wrong with the government and private sector relationship.

Octafish

(55,745 posts)

5. CARLYLE Group 'bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits'

Reply to Jesus Malverde (Original post)

Tue Jun 16, 2015, 11:06 PM

Jun 2015

Behind the Curtain: Booz Allen Hamilton and its Owner, The Carlyle Group

Written by Bob Adelmann
The New American; June 13, 2013

According to writers Thomas Heath and Marjorie Censer at the Washington Post, The Carlyle Group and its errant child, Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), have a public relations problem, thanks to NSA leaker and former BAH employee Edward Snowden. By the time top management at BAH learned that one of their top level agents had gone rogue, and terminated his employment, it was too late.

For years Carlyle had, according to the Post, “nurtured a reputation as a financially sophisticated asset manager that buys and sells everything from railroads to oil refineries”; but now the light from the Snowden revelations has revealed nothing more than two companies, parent and child, “bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits.”

And have they ever. When The Carlyle Group bought BAH back in 2008, it was totally dependent upon government contracts in the fields of information technology (IT) and systems engineering for its bread and butter. But there wasn't much butter: After two years the company’s gross revenues were $5.1 billion but net profits were a minuscule $25 million, close to a rounding error on the company’s financial statement. In 2012, however, BAH grossed $5.8 billion and showed earnings of $219 million, nearly a nine-fold increase in net revenues and a nice gain in value for Carlyle.

Unwittingly, the Post authors exposed the real reason for the jump in profitability: close ties and interconnected relationships between top people at Carlyle and BAH, and the agencies with which they are working. The authors quoted George Price, an equity analyst at BB&T Capital: "[Booz Allen has] got a great brand, they've focused over time on hiring top people, including bringing on people who have a lot of senior government experience."

CONTINUED w Links n Privatized INTEL...

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15696-behind-the-curtain-booz-allen-hamilton-and-its-owner-the-carlyle-group

Wouldn't it be great to live in a democracy, a republic built on equal justice for all? That way, traitors, warmongers and banksters would be in jail instead of printing money.

libodem

(19,288 posts)

8. Gack

Reply to Octafish (Reply #5)

Wed Jun 17, 2015, 01:12 AM

Jun 2015

Those guys.

Panich52

(5,829 posts)

6. Such failures readily overlooked by conservs in their anti-gov crusade.

Reply to Jesus Malverde (Original post)

Tue Jun 16, 2015, 11:12 PM

Jun 2015

So they continue to want SS privatized and tied to stock market and the constitutionally mandated post office in the hands of the likes of FedEx or UPS (which considered charging extra for actually delivering packages). And lets not forget the failed promise of charter schools.

It's all tied to the unwavering belief that capitalism is the path to Utopia but only if it's left alone and unregulated. That increasing the wealth of corporations will inevitably lead to a more robust economy, ignoring the avarice and elitism that prevents trickle down from being anything more than a 'Golden Shower.'

libodem

(19,288 posts)

7. No Doubt

Reply to Jesus Malverde (Original post)

Wed Jun 17, 2015, 01:11 AM

Jun 2015

Nice to see the research to back it up.

Octafish

(55,745 posts)

9. Secret Government is un-democratic, but profitable.

Reply to Jesus Malverde (Original post)

Wed Jun 17, 2015, 01:45 AM

Jun 2015

CIA moonlights in corporate world

In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.

In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.

The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.

SNIP...

But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.

The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.

CONTINUED...

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32290.html#ixzz0eIFPhHBh

Sometimes a fortune rests on a mere scrap of information, jawohl.

Stratfor: executive boasted of 'trusted former CIA cronies'

By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent
9:08PM GMT 28 Feb 2012
The Telegraph

A senior executive with the private intelligence firm Stratfor boasted to colleagues about his "trusted former CIA cronies" and promised to "see what I can uncover" about a classified FBI investigation, according to emails released by the WikiLeaks.

Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence at the Texas firm, also informed members of staff that he had a copy of the confidential indictment on Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.

The second batch of five million internal Stratfor emails obtained by the Anonymous computer hacking group revealed that the company has high level sources within the United States and other governments, runs a network of paid informants that includes embassy staff and journalists and planned a hedge fund, Stratcap, based on its secret intelligence.

SNIP...

Mr Assange labelled the company as a "private intelligence Enron", in reference to the energy giant that collapsed after a false accounting scandal.

CONTINUED...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9111784/Stratfor-executive-boasted-of-trusted-former-CIA-cronies.html

Then, there's Booz Allen, NSA's go-to private spyhaus, vacuums and filters the right stuff for Carlyle Group, a buy-partisan business which always seems to know where and what to bomb and make a buck.

The Knights of the Revolving Door

When War is Swell: the Carlyle Group and the Middle East at War

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
CounterPunch, Weekend Edition September 6-8, 2013

Paris.

A couple of weeks ago, in a dress rehearsal for her next presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, the doyenne of humanitarian interventionism, made a pit-stop at the Carlyle Group to brief former luminaries of the imperial war rooms about her shoot-first-don’t-ask-questions foreign policy.

For those of you who have put the playbill of the Bush administration into a time capsule and buried it beneath the compost bin, the Carlyle Group is essentially a hedge fund for war-making and high tech espionage. They are the people who brought you the Iraq war and all those intrusive niceties of Homeland Security. Call them the Knights of the Revolving Door, many of Carlyle’s executives and investors having spent decades in the Pentagon, the CIA or the State Department, before cashing in for more lucrative careers as war profiteers. They are now licking their chops at the prospect for an all-out war against Syria, no doubt hoping that the conflagration will soon spread to Lebanon, Jordan and, the big prize, Iran.

For a refresher course on the sprawling tentacles of the Carlyle Group, here’s an essay that first appeared in CounterPunch’s print edition in 2004. Sadly, not much has changed in the intervening years, except these feted souls have gotten much, much richer. – JSC

Across all fronts, Bush’s war deteriorates with stunning rapidity. The death count of American soldiers killed in Iraq will soon top 1000, with no end in sight. The members of the handpicked Iraqi Governor Council are being knocked off one after another. Once loyal Shia clerics, like Ayatollah Sistani, are now telling the administration to pull out or face a nationalist insurgency. The trail of culpability for the abuse, torture and murder of Iraqi detainees seems to lead inexorably into the office of Donald Rumsfeld. The war for Iraqi oil has ended up driving the price of crude oil through the roof. Even Kurdish leaders, brutalized by the Ba’athists for decades, are now saying Iraq was a safer place under their nemesis Saddam Hussein. Like Medea whacking her own kids, the US turned on its own creation, Ahmed Chalabi, raiding his Baghdad compound and fingering him as an agent of the ayatollahs of Iran. And on and on it goes.

Still not all of the president’s men are in a despairing mood. Amid the wreckage, there remain opportunities for profit and plunder. Halliburton and Bechtel’s triumphs in Iraq have been chewed over for months. Less well chronicled is the profiteering of the Carlyle Group, a company with ties that extend directly into the Oval Office itself.

Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his son’s war making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld. They’ve remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you have friends like this, you don’t need to hire lobbyists..

Bush Sr. serves as a kind of global emissary for Carlyle. The ex-president doesn’t negotiate arms deals; he simply opens the door for them, a kind of high level meet-and-greet. His special area of influence is the Middle East, primarily Saudi Arabia, where the Bush family has extensive business and political ties. According to an account in the Washington Post, Bush Sr. earns around $500,000 for each speech he makes on Carlyle’s behalf.

One of the Saudi investors lured to Carlyle by Bush was the BinLaden Group, the construction conglomerate owned by the family of Osama bin Laden. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Bush convinced Shafiq Bin Laden, Osama’s half brother, to sink $2 million of BinLaden Group money into Carlyle’s accounts. In a pr move, the Carlyle group cut its ties to the BinLaden Group in October 2001.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/06/when-war-is-swell-the-carlyle-group-and-the-middle-east-at-war/

This barely scratches the surface. The reality is that underneath what shows for public navigators is one enormous iceberg made from blood-red ice, invisible to the proles and serfs who are doing their best to keep afloat in a frozen sea of austerity, endless war and debt servitude, thanks to the banksters and warmongers' ability to use the USA PATRIOT Act to their advantage.