The National Security Industrial Complex and NSA Spying

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The National Security Industrial Complex and NSA Spying: The Revolving Doors Between State Agencies and Private Contractors

By Pratap Chatterjee

Global Research, June 18, 2013

CorpWatch 17 June 2013

Region: USA

Theme: Intelligence, Police State & Civil Rights

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When Edward Snowden, an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton – a military contractor based in McLean, Virginia - blew the whistle on the extent of U.S. global electronic surveillance, he unexpectedly shone a light on the world of contractors that consume some 70 percent of the $52 billion U.S. intelligence budget.

Some commentators have pounced on Snowden’s disclosures to denounce the role of private contractors in the world of government and national security, arguing that such work is best left to public servants. But their criticism misses the point.

It is no longer possible to determine the difference between employees of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the employees of companies such as Booz Allen, who have integrated to the extent that they slip from one role in industry to another in government, cross-promoting each other and self-dealing in ways that make the fabled revolving door redundant, if not completely disorienting.

Snowden, who was employed by Booz Allen as a contract systems administrator at the NSA’s Threat Operations Centre in Hawaii for three months, had worked for the CIA andDell before getting his most recent job. But his rather obscure role pales in comparison to those of others.

Pushing for Expanded Surveillance

To best understand this tale, one must first turn to R. James Woolsey, a former director of CIA, who appeared before the U.S. Congress in the summer of 2004 to promote the idea of integrating U.S. domestic and foreign spying efforts to track “terrorists”.

One month later, he appeared on MSNBC television, where he spoke of the urgent need to create a new U.S. intelligence czar to help expand the post-9/11 national surveillance apparatus.

On neither occasion did Woolsey mention that he was employed as senior vice president for global strategic security at Booz Allen, a job he held from 2002 to 2008.

“The source of information about vulnerabilities of and potential attacks on the homeland will not be dominated by foreign intelligence, as was the case in the Cold War. The terrorists understood us well, and so they lived and planned where we did not spy (inside the U.S.),” said Woolsey in prepared remarks before the U.S. House Select Committee on Homeland Security on June 24, 2004.

In a prescient suggestion of what Snowden would later reveal, Woolsey went on to discuss expanding surveillance to cover domestic, as well as foreign sources.

“One source will be our vulnerability assessments, based on our own judgments about weak links in our society’s networks that can be exploited by terrorists,” he said. “A second source will be domestic intelligence. How to deal with such information is an extraordinarily difficult issue in our free society.”

In late July 2004, Woolsey appeared on MSNBC’s “Hardball”, a news-talk show hosted by Chris Matthews, and told Matthews that the federal government needed a new high-level office – a director of national intelligence  – to straddle domestic and foreign intelligence. Until then, the director of the CIA served as the head of the entire U.S. intelligence community.

“The problem is that the intelligence community has grown so much since 1947, when the position of director of central intelligence was created, that it’s (become) impossible to do both jobs, running the CIA and managing the community,” he said.

Both these suggestions would lead to influential jobs and lucrative sources of income for Woolsey’s employer and colleagues.

The Director of National Intelligence

Fast forward to 2007. Vice Admiral Michael McConnell (retired), Booz Allen’s then-senior vice president of policy, transformation, homeland security and intelligence analytics, was hired as the second czar of the new “Office of the Director of National Intelligence” which was coincidentally located just three kilometers from the company’s corporate headquarters.

Upon retiring as DNI, McConnell returned to Booz Allen in 2009, where he serves as vice chairman to this day. In August 2010, Lieutenant General James Clapper (retired),  a former vice president for military intelligence at Booz Allen from 1997 to 1998, was hired as the fourth intelligence czar, a job he has held ever since. Indeed, one-time Booz Allenexecutives have filled the position five of the eight years of its existence.

When these two men took charge of the national-security state, they helped expand and privatize it as never before.

McConnell, for example, asked Congress to alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to allow the NSA to spy on foreigners without a warrant if they were using Internet technology that routed through the United States.

“The resulting changes in both law and legal interpretations (… and the) new technologies created a flood of new work for the intelligence agencies – and huge opportunities for companies like Booz Allen,” wrote David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in a profile of McConnell published in the New York Times this weekend.

Last week, Snowden revealed to the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald that the NSA had created a secret system called “Prism” that allowed the agency to spy on electronic data of ordinary citizens around the world, both within and outside the United States.

Snowden’s job at Booz Allen’s offices in Hawaii was to maintain the NSA’s information technology systems. While he did not specify his precise connection to Prism, he told the South China Morning Post newspaper that the NSA hacked “network backbones – like huge Internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one”.

Indeed Woolsey had argued in favor of such surveillance following the disclosure of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping by the New York Times in December 2005.

“Unlike the Cold War, our intelligence requirements are not just overseas,” he told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the NSA in February 2006. “Courts are not designed to deal with fast-moving battlefield electronic mapping in which an al Qaeda or a Hezbollah computer might be captured which contains a large number of email addresses and phone numbers which would have to be checked out very promptly.”

Propaganda Puppets

Roger Cressey, a senior vice president for cybersecurity and counter-terrorism at Booz Allen who is also a paid commentator for NBC News, went on air multiple times to explain how the government would pursue the Boston Marathon case in April 2013. “We always need to understand there are priority targets the counter-terrorism community is always looking at,” he told the TV station.

Cressey took a position “on one of the most controversial aspects of the government response to Boston that completely reflects the views of the government agencies – such as the FBI and the CIA – that their companies ultimately serve,” wrote Tim Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire, on Salon. “Their views, in turn, convinces NBC hosts of the wisdom of the policy, a stance which could easily sway an uncertain public about the legitimacy of the new face of state power that has emerged in the post-9/11 period. That is influence, yet it is not fully disclosed by NBC.”

This was not the first time that Cressey had been caught at this when speaking to NBC News. Cressey failed to disclose that his former employer – Good Harbor Consulting – had been paid for advice by the government of Yemen, when he went on air to criticize democracy protests in Yemen in March 2011. (Cressey has just been hired by Booz Allen at the time)

“What is not disclosed about Cressey in this segment where he scaremongers about a post-Saleh Yemen is that he has multiple conflicts of interest with the current regime there,” wrote Zaid Jilani of ThinkProgress at the time.

A Flood of New Contracts

Exactly what Booz Allen does for the NSA’s electronic surveillance system revealed by Snowden is classified, but one can make an educated guess from similar contracts it has in this field – a quarter of the company’s $5.86 billion in annual income comes from intelligence agencies.

The NSA, for example, hired Booz Allen in 2001 in an advisory role on the five-billion-dollar Project Groundbreaker to rebuild and operate the agency’s “nonmission-critical” internal telephone and computer networking systems.

Booz Allen also won a chunk of the Pentagon’s infamous Total Information Awareness contract in 2001 to collect information on potential terrorists in America from phone records, credit card receipts and other databases – a controversial program defunded by Congress in 2003 but whose spirit survived in Prism and other initiatives disclosed by Snowden.

The CIA pays a Booz Allen team led by William Wansley, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, for “strategic and business planning” for its National Clandestine Service, which conducts covert operations and recruits foreign spies.

The company also provides a 120-person team, headed by a former U.S. Navy cryptology lieutenant commander and Booz Allen senior executive adviser Pamela Lentz, to support the National Reconnaissance Organization, the Pentagon agency that manages the nation’s military spy satellites.

In January, Booz Allen was one of 12 contractors to win a five-year contract with the Defense Intelligence Agency that could be worth up to $5.6 billion to focus on “computer network operations, emerging and disruptive technologies, and exercise and training activity”.

Last month, the U.S. Navy picked Booz Allen as part of a consortium to work on yet another billion-dollar project for “a new generation of intelligence, surveillance and combat operations”.

How does Booz Allen win these contracts? Well, in addition to its connections with the DNI, the company boasts that half of its 25,000 employees are cleared for “top secret-sensitive compartmented intelligence” – one of the highest possible security ratings. (One third of the 1.4 million people with such clearances work for the private sector.)

A key figure at Booz Allen is Ralph Shrader, current chairman, CEO and president, who came to the company in 1974 after working at two telecommunications companies – RCA, where he served in the company’s government communications system division and Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning.

In the 1970s, RCA and Western Union both took part in a secret surveillance program known as Minaret, where they agreed to give the NSA all their clients’ incoming and outgoing U.S. telephone calls and telegrams.

In an interview with the Financial Times in 1998, Shrader noted that the most relevant background for his new position of chief executive at Booz Allen was his experience working for telecommunications clients and doing classified military work for the US government.

Caught for Shoddy Work

How much value for money is the government getting? A review of some of Booz Allen’s public contracts suggests that much of this work has been of poor quality.
In February 2012, the U.S. Air Force suspended Booz Allen from seeking government contracts after it discovered that Joselito Meneses, a former deputy chief of information technology for the air force, had given Booz Allen a hard drive with confidential information about a competitor’s contracting on the first day that he went to work for the company in San Antonio, Texas.

“Booz Allen did not uncover indications and signals of broader systemic ethical issues within the firm,” wrote the U.S. Air Force legal counsel. ”These events caused the Air Force to have serious concerns regarding the responsibility of Booz Allen, specifically, its San Antonio office, including its business integrity and honesty, compliance with government contracting requirements, and the adequacy of its ethics program.”

It should be noted that Booz Allen reacted swiftly to the government investigation of the conflict of interest. In April that year, the Air Force lifted the suspension – but only after Booz Allen had accepted responsibility for the incident and fired Meneses, as well as agreeing to pay the air force $65,000 and reinforce the firm’s ethics policy.

Not everybody was convinced about the new regime. “Unethical behavior brought on by the revolving door created problems for Booz Allen, but now the revolving door may have come to the rescue,” wrote Scott Amey of the Project on Government Oversight, noting that noting that Del Eulberg, vice-president of the Booz Allen’s San Antonio office had served as chief engineer in the Air Force.

“It couldn’t hurt having (former Air Force people). Booz is likely exhaling a sigh of relief as it has received billions of dollars in air force contracts over the years.”

That very month, Booz Allen was hired to build a $10 million “Enhanced Secured Network” (ESN) for the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. An audit of the project released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office this past February showed that it was full of holes.

The ESN “left software and systems put in place misconfigured—even failing to take advantage of all the features of the malware protection the commission had selected, leaving its workstations still vulnerable to attack,” wrote Sean Gallagher, a computer reporter at ArsTechnica.

Booz Allen has also admitted to overbilling the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) “employees at higher job categories than would have been justified by their experience, inflating their monthly hours and submitting excessive billing at their off-site rate.” The company repaid the government $325,000 in May 2009 to settle the charges.

Nor was this the first time Booz Allen had been caught overbilling. In 2006, the company was one of four consulting firms that settled with the U.S. Department of Justice for fiddling expenses on an industrial scale. Booz Allen’s share of the $15 million settlement of a lawsuit under the False Claims Act was more than $3.3 million.

Incidentally, both the NASA and the Air Force incidents were brought to light by a company whistleblower who informed the government.

Investigate Booz Allen, Not Edward Snowden

When Snowden revealed the extent of the U.S. national surveillance program earlier this month, he was denounced immediately by Booz Allen and their former associates who called for an investigation of his leaks.

“For me, it is literally – not figuratively – literally gut-wrenching to see this happen because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities,” Clapper toldNBC News’s Andrea Mitchell. “This is someone who, for whatever reason, has chosen to violate a sacred trust for this country. I think we all feel profoundly offended by that.”

“News reports that this individual has claimed to have leaked classified information are shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm,” Booz Allen said in a press statement.

Yet instead of shooting the messenger, Edward Snowden, it might be worth investigating Shrader and his company’s core values in the same way that the CIA and NSA were scrutinized for Minaret in the 1970s by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Frank Church of Idaho in 1975.

Congress would also do well to investigate Clapper, Booz Allen’s other famous former employee, for possible perjury when he replied: “No, sir” to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in March, when asked: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

* Excerpts of this piece appeared on the Guardian’s Comment is Free and Inter Press Service. Jim Lobe contributed research.

Articles by: Pratap Chatterjee

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http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-national-security-industrial-complex-and-nsa-spying-the-revolving-doors-between-state-agencies-and-private-contractors/5339634

Spying for Dollars: Military Contractors and Security Firms Reap Huge Profits

As the Defense Budget Soars, Billions of Dollars are Channelled Offshore to Avoid Paying Taxes

By Tom Burghardt

Global Research, February 15, 2010

Antifascist Calling 14 February 2010

Region: USA

Theme: Global Economy

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The Obama administration is seeking to increase the obscenely bloated U.S. Defense Department budget to a whopping $708 billion for fiscal year 2011, 3.4% above 2010′s record level, The Wall Street Journal reported.

While the overall budget deficit will balloon to a staggering $1.6 trillion in 2011, the result of massive tax cuts for the rich, declining revenues, a by-product of capitalism’s economic meltdown, imperial adventures abroad and general corporate malfeasance (the old tax-dodge grift), the administration plans to cut $250 billion over three years from non-military “discretionary spending” on domestic social programs.

However, as the World Socialist Web Site points out: “President Barack Obama has done nothing to reverse decades of wage stagnation, mounting poverty, and attacks on the social welfare system. On the contrary, following George W. Bush, he has seized on the crisis to redistribute wealth to a tiny financial elite through the ongoing bailout of the finance industry.”

It is no small irony that despite stark budget figures and an even bleaker future for the American working class, Washington Technology reported January 28 that the “29 largest publicly traded defense contractors increased their use of offshore subsidiaries by 26 percent from 2003 to 2008.”

Citing reports by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), journalist Alice Lipowicz disclosed that the “subsidiaries helped the contractors reduce taxes, in part by avoiding Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes for U.S. workers hired at the foreign subsidiaries.”

Considering that the Pentagon hands out some $396 billion annually to contractors, outsourcing everything from “in theatre” construction in places like Afghanistan and Iraq to pricey “intelligence analysts” at secret state agencies, cash not spent on payroll taxes by dodgy firms slices another hole into the already-shredded social safety net.

Amongst the largest firms cited in GAO’s 2008 report, updated inJanuary 2010, Oracle Corp., operates in 77 tax havens; Boeing Co., 38; Dell Inc., 29; BearingPoint Inc., 28; Computer Sciences Corp., 21; Fluor Corp., 34; General Dynamics, 5; Harris Corp., 13; Hewlett-Packard, 14; Honeywell International, 7; ITT Corp., 18; L-3 Communications, 15; Sprint Nextel, 7.

Many of the firms are heavily-leveraged in the lucrative “homeland security” market and provide technology and “cleared” intelligence analysts, many of whom jumped ship from government service for richer, if more dubious employment, to a host of secret state agencies including the CIA, DIA, NSA as well as ultra-secretive outfits engaged in global satellite surveillance such as the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).

You would think these firms, flush with record profits since the U.S. embarked on its “War on Terror” in 2001, would do something as pedestrian as paying their fair share of taxes or providing benefits to workers, given severe budgetary pressures on domestic programs, dizzying housing foreclosure rates and skyrocketing unemployment.

You’d be wrong, however; dead wrong.

An “Island Paradise” Where Profits Go to Hide

Despite fabulous riches showered on shareholders by taxpayers, the Military-Industrial-Security-Complex will not rest until every dime has been squeezed from the American people, swelling corporate abdomens well-past the bursting point.

In cinematic terms, think of America’s ruling elite as a horde of sociopathic zombies gobbling everything in sight. Instead of screaming “Brains!” as in Sam Raimi’s cult classic, The Evil Dead, corporate zombies cry “Cash! I Need Cash!” as they take down entire nations in one rapacious bite!

A new report published by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in January found, “Many of the top 29 U.S. publicly traded defense contractors–those with $1 billion or more in DOD contracts in fiscal year 2008–have created offshore subsidiaries to facilitate global operations. Between fiscal years 2003 and 2008, they increased their use of these subsidiaries by 26 percent, maintaining at least 1,194 in 2008.”

GAO auditors revealed that corporate subsidiaries in tax havens such as the Bahamas, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, Bahrain, Netherlands Antilles, Jersey, Bermuda, the Channel Islands, Luxembourg, Macao, Lebanon, Liechtenstein and Cyprus “helped the 29 contractors reduce taxes, with about one-third decreasing their effective U.S. corporate tax rates in 2008 in part through the use of foreign affiliates, lower foreign tax rates, and indefinite reinvestment of foreign income outside of the United States.”

A convenient shell game since the “indefinite reinvestment of foreign income” isn’t taxable until its been repatriated to the United States. What do you think the chances are of thathappening any time soon?

As an added incentive that helped firms hit the old corporate “sweet spot,” the congressional watchdogs found that “companies principally used offshore subsidiaries to hire U.S. workers providing services overseas on U.S. government contracts in order to avoid Social Security, Medicare–known as Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA)–and other payroll taxes. This practice allowed contractors to offer lower bids when competing for certain services and thereby reduce costs for DOD.”

Not that workers derived any benefit from this “special” arrangement; in fact, the use of off-shore tax havens by defense grifters had dire consequences when workers lost their jobs.

“In one state,” GAO auditors revealed, “we reviewed documentation for about 140 former employees of several contractors who were denied unemployment benefits in 2009. State workforce officials indicated these benefits were denied because the employees worked for a foreign subsidiary and not an American employer.”

Interestingly enough, many of the global hidey-holes used to shield corporate wealth from the IRS have long been identified by law enforcement investigators and political researchers as prime money-laundering venues for the international drugs trade.

This is hardly surprising. Considering the close proximity of U.S. covert operations, illicit arms- and drug trafficking, and general subversive activities carried out by the CIA and other members of the “Intelligence Community,” what better way for defense firms to keep it “all in the family” so to speak, then to stash war-derived loot in discrete locations.

As researcher Alan Block described the metastatic growth of the tax-haven phenomenon in his groundbreaking work, Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the Internal Revenue Service in the Bahamas, “professional criminals were those who took it upon themselves to organize crime. Their true work was the process of organizing crime itself.”

Block’s description is all the more appropriate considering that it is the American militarist state that “took it upon themselves” to organize corporate looting on a planetary scale. After all, resource wars, military interventions or the standing-up of death squad states through CIA fomented coups, directly benefit imperialism’s real, indeed only, constituents: U.S. multinational corporations.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

A futile exercise perhaps, given that our corrupt representatives in Congress, “change” Democrats and troglodytic Republicans alike, will do nothing to close tax loop-holes big enough to sail an aircraft carrier through.

And why would they, since the largest contributors flooding congressional campaign coffers with cold, hard cash are the same firms that reap the benefits of corporate-friendly tax codes, as the Center for Responsive Politics points out.

Just for kicks, let’s take a look at some of the worst malefactors, firms whose stated mission is to “protect” heimat citizens while inflating the bottom line through the creative use of foreign subsidiaries.

Aside from “taking advantage of foreign government markets for commercial work,” the GAO reports, “a key benefit of using offshore subsidiaries cited by contractors and other experts we spoke with was the ability to reduce overall taxes.”

Indeed, “one defense contractor’s offshore subsidiary structure decreased its effective U.S. tax rate by approximately 1 percent equaling millions of dollars in tax savings,” which of course did nothing to reduce America’s swelling deficit or ameliorate crashing social services for millions of workers.

GAO “identified some defense contractors that used subsidiaries registered outside the place of contract performance to support DOD service contracts abroad. These offshore subsidiaries had no staff or business activity where registered.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think Netherlands Antilles or the Cayman Islands have ever been major manufacturing hubs producing ballistic missiles, spy satellites, supercomputers or other assorted goodies for the National Security State!

Typically however, GAO discovered that for “one contract task order we reviewed, more than 80 percent of the contractor’s staff were employed by its offshore subsidiary.”

Tellingly, “while five of the six contractors in our case studies said that reducing FICA tax payments was the primary reason for using offshore subsidiaries,” the auditors concluded that “this practice also allowed the contractors to reduce costs by avoiding state and federal unemployment insurance taxes for U.S. personnel working overseas.”

“For U.S. citizens performing certain work outside the United States,” we’re informed that “federal law requires only American employers to pay unemployment taxes; foreign subsidiaries are not defined as American employers under the law.”

Therefore if a worker is “let go,” the enterprising grifter is off the hook for unemployment payments. Pretty neat trick, eh!

Flying the Friendly Skies … With the CIA!

What do these studies tell us? It pays to have friends in high places! Let’s take a peek at just two of the 29 firms profiled in GAO’s 2010 report as well as their earlier 2008 investigation.

The Boeing Company (Boeing): Washington Technology listsBoeing as No. 2 on their Top 100 list of federal contractors with $10,838,231,984 in overall revenue.

Primary government contracts include projects for NASA, the Navy, Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. One subsidiary, and contract, which the giant firm isn’t too keen on publicizing is Jeppesen International Trip Planning, the booking agent for CIA torture flights.

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, the firm is being sued by victims of the Bush administration’s illegal practice of “rendering” (kidnapping) so-called “terrorists” into the hands of torture-friendly regimes or to CIA “black sites” in Europe and the Middle East.

The ACLU’s landmark litigation on behalf of the victims,Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. seeks to hold the Boeing subsidiary accountable for planning and providing logistical support for CIA “ghost flights.” The Obama administration, like their Bushist predecessors oppose the suit on grounds that “vital state secrets” will be disclosed.

On February 10, the British High Court ordered Britain’s secret state to release documents disclosing MI5′s collaboration in Binyam Mohamed’s torture. Mohamed is a litigant in the ACLU’s suit against Jeppesen.

The Guardian reported that “MI5 faced an unprecedented and damaging crisis tonight after one of the country’s most senior judges found that the Security Service had failed to respect human rights, deliberately misled parliament, and had a ‘culture of suppression’ that undermined government assurances about its conduct.”

In response to the release of previously classified documents by the British government, as promised, the U.S. Government has threatened that the disclosure “would cloud future intelligence relations with Britain,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Meanwhile back in the heimat, Boeing and Jeppesen’s corporate officers continue to hold get-out-of-jail-free cards from the Obama administration.

As investigative journalist Jane Mayer revealed in The New Yorker back in 2006, Bob Overby, the managing director of Jeppesen International Trip Planning, said during a breakfast for new hires in San Jose, Calif., “We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights–you know, the torture flights. Let’s face it, some of these flights end up that way.”

Technical writer Sean Belcher blew the whistle on the firm and told Mayer that Overby, extemporaneously extolling the virtues for the corporatist bottom line, said: “It certainly pays well. They”–the CIA–”spare no expense. They have absolutely no worry about cost. What they have to get done, they get done.”

But facilitating CIA torture flights wasn’t the only, or even the most lucrative, enterprise driving Boeing’s close collaboration with the National Security State.

Little known outside the security industry, Boeing’s Defense, Space and Security division (DSS, formerly Integrated Defense Systems or IDS) is the firm’s intelligence unit.

With some 71,000 employees, most holding top secret clearances, DSS is probably the most profitable of the firm’s divisions with some $32 billion in revenues, about half of Boeing’s annual earnings.

According to investigative journalist and security analyst Tim Shorrock, writing on CorpWatch’s Spies for Hire collaborative research web site, DSS “has close ties with the NSA and the intelligence community’s signals intelligence units. It has an important office about a mile from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, in an industrial park filled with NSA contractors.”

And within DSS, its most important intelligence unit is theAdvanced Global Services & Support division.

According to Boeing, Advanced Global Services & Support “is the advanced arm of the Global Services & Support business unit … responsible for driving the development, growth and transition of innovative, knowledge-based logistics capabilities for Global Services & Support. With a central focus on the emerging network-centric logistics marketplace, Advanced Global Services & Support is working on deploying integrated solutions for end-to-end (factory-to-foxhole) logistics. Its focus–’readiness transformation’.”

The unit provides “horizontal integration” for “Intelligence Community customers” such as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA).

“In December 2007″ Shorrock writes, “Boeing formed a new Intelligence and Security Systems (I&SS) division that appears to combine many of the company’s services for foreign and domestic intelligence. Based in Washington, D.C., I&SS has a workforce of about 2,000 people at nine locations nationwide, and includes four program areas: Advanced Information Systems; Mission Systems; Security Solutions, which includes SBInet (the electronic wall being built on the US-Mexico border); and Advanced I&SS. According to a company press release, the new division ‘enables increased focus on the complex challenges faced by our homeland security and intelligence community customers. …I&SS will improve our ability to bring comprehensive, net-enabled capabilities to meet our customers’ dynamic requirements’.”

Much the same can be said of Boeing’s imaginative use of tax-havens. According to GAO’s 2008 study, Boeing maintained 38 foreign subsidiaries in major airline manufacturing hubs such as Bermuda (6); Cayman Islands (1); Gibraltar (2); Hong Kong (4); Ireland (4) Netherlands Antilles (2); Singapore (3); and U.S. Virgin Islands (16).

Spying for Dollars

Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC): One of the largest defense contractors operating under the radar, CSC is No. 9 on Washington Technology’s Top 100 list of prime federal contractors with some $3,435,767,906 in revenue.

The Falls Church, Virginia-based outfit’s business includes consulting, systems integration and outsourcing, and their major customers include the Defense Department, NASA, Navy, Army, Air Force, Treasury Department, Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, Transportation Department and Department of State.

In his essential book Spies for Hire, Shorrock has described CSC as “one of the NSA’s most important contractors,” managing “global information networks and produces and disseminates intelligence products, including specialized expertise in the area of imagery processing and archiving.”

“After 9/11″ Shorrock writes, “CSC formed a new business unit to go after homeland security and intelligence work,” including contracts with the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Shorrock reveals that one of the “mission critical” consortiums that run DIA global operations “is managed by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). … The CSC team includes CACI International and L-3 MPRI. This last company is one of the largest private armies in the world, and would have at its disposal hundreds of paramilitary officers who would fit in exceedingly well with the DIA’s secret intelligence teams in the Middle East and North Africa.”

According to the firm’s web site, CSC’s Intelligence Analysis and Operational Support division “applies advanced information technology, expert knowledge, best practices, and business process improvement in all phases of the intelligence cycle (planning and direction, collection, processing, analysis and production, and dissemination).”

“At the enterprise level,” CSC informs us, “our prowess in systems integration, engineering, and consulting help create IT infrastructures and ways of doing business that put the right tools in the right hands at the right time, so that intelligence staffs and decision makers can get on with the business of protecting the country.”

With no end in sight, the data-mining growth curve continues along its merry way, integrating and analyzing the electronic communications of Americans “captured” by CIA, DIA, FBI, NCTC and NSA data miners and their partners in the telecommunications industry.

Accordingly, CSC “develops and integrates automated tools for unique requirements of specialized intelligence analysts.” Tools that enable secret state agencies to “Capture and mine information from multiple sources in multiple languages; Collaborate in real time with fellow analysts; Create models in which to store working data and test hypotheses; Discover insider threats by tracking network behavior; Automatically analyze and visualize complex data using intelligent software agents.”

As with hundreds of other firms who trade top secret security clearances as if they were trading cards, CSC provides “experienced, cleared intelligence professionals who perform intelligence analysis, database construction and population, editorial support and quality assurance, production and collection management, analytic tradecraft training, on-the-ground acquisition of unique data sets, and foreign language support.”

Conveniently, CSC has some 1,200 employees who they rent to the secret state at a premium price “who meet DCID 6/4 eligibility requirements and have access to Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) or Special Access Programs (SAPs),” i.e., Pentagon, CIA and NSA “black programs” only known by code words that escape congressional scrutiny, or indeed any democratic oversight.

The firm’s “Information Refinery” is touted as an “innovative approach to open source intelligence that captures multilingual information from the Internet and other publicly available sources, then mines, refines and translates it for use by government intelligence analysts and decision makers.”

Translation: CSC, on behalf of secret state “stakeholders” surveil web pages, blog posts and other electronic communications and “assist” spooks in transforming data, including First Amendment-protected free speech into grist for the “actionable intelligence” mill.

One would think a red-blooded, patriotic American firm like CSC would do their all for “God and Country,” and pay their fair share of taxes, considering the billions of dollars in contracts the firm has speared from the government. Think again, chumps!

GAO reports that CSC has 21 subsidiaries “in jurisdictions listed as tax havens” by the federal government. Some of the firm’s global operations are located in tech manufacturing powerhouses such as Bermuda (1); British Virgin Islands (4); Costa Rica (1); Hong Kong (5); Ireland (2); Luxembourg (2); Macao (1); Singapore (4); Switzerland (1).

Despite the fact that “DOD officials were aware of the roles offshore subsidiaries played in the DOD contracts we reviewed,” GAO investigators found that “contracting officials stated that the use of offshore subsidiaries did not negatively impact contract schedule or performance.”

After all, $708 billion does a lot of talking!

http://www.globalresearch.ca/spying-for-dollars-military-contractors-and-security-firms-reap-huge-profits/17626

Neuroscience and National Security: The Complex Relationship between Science and the Military

The military commonly enlists science in its efforts. But when science is humanity, the relationship gets a little stickier

By Emily Badger

Global Research, February 15, 2010

Miller-McCune 22 January 2010

Theme: Militarization and WMD, Science and Medicine

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Neuroscience and national security go together somewhat uneasily. Stick the two in a single sentence, and University of Pennsylvania historian Jonathan Moreno starts getting e-mails from all kinds of people who are sure they’ve been brainwashed by the CIA. (It might not help his inbox that he wrote a book called Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense.)

“It’s hard to talk about these issues in part because we have kind of a paranoid popular-culture background,” Moreno said. Maybe you’ve seen The Manchurian Candidate, or, more recently, The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Neuroscience and national security, though, sit at the forefront of the complex relationship between science and the military, bedfellows that have produced not just compelling fiction, but also real dilemmas for the researchers who bridge them.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science hosted a conference today of its year-old Science and Human Rights Coalition, a group whose joint concerns are embodied most starkly in the application of science to war.

“The human rights frame is almost completely missing from this discussion,” said Len Rubenstein, the former executive director of Physicians for Human Rights and now a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins. He spoke at the conference’s opening session. “The question of research for military purposes and scientific activity for military purposes is usually viewed either through the frame of professional ethics or scientific integrity. If human rights is introduced at all, it comes through the question of human subjects research with the Nuremberg Code.”

Scientists ought to consider, he argues, the broader question of human rights in work that ranges from weapons development to anthropology. As the science and potential military applications have grown more sophisticated, it follows that the ethics are now more complex, too.

Researchers, for instance, are already mulling whether beta-blockers could be used to reduce feelings of guilt in soldiers who do the unpleasant work of interrogation. Conversely, scientists wonder if oxytocin could induce trust in the interrogated. And what if neuro-imaging could help indicate what combatants are thinking? Or if brain monitoring could track how soldiers handle stress in training?

“We’re moving clearly more and more in the direction of being able to manage neural activity, manage behavior, attitudes and perception at a distance,” Moreno said.

Rubenstein, in response, pointed to the little-recognized Article 22 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It entitles a person to social security indispensable for both dignity and “the free development of his personality.”

“When we have weapons that are deliberately designed to change people’s personalities, to manipulate people’s personalities, we have a problem,” Rubenstein said. “Not only an ethical problem, not only a national security problem, we have a human rights problem.”

It’s not that human rights are opposed to national security, Rubenstein argues; this is why the Geneva Conventions attempt to regulate conduct in war, not oppose war all together. From there, the distinctions are important. Weapons incapable of discriminating between combatants and civilians — like land mines or cluster bombs — violate human rights, he said, suggesting scientists who contribute to developing them must bear this in mind.

The most public example of murky scientific involvement in warfare has come from the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System, a controversial program to embed anthropologists with soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Department of Defense billed the program, which was unveiled in 2007, as a path toward greater cultural understanding and, ultimately, less violence.

But the American Anthropological Association roundly denounced the program. The participating anthropologists typically wear military uniforms and sometimes carry firearms. The military has insisted the program isn’t designed to gather intelligence for combat, but the AAA questioned how the one can ever be separated from the other in the context of war.

The Human Terrain System, the AAA concluded, violates many of the association’s main ethical tenets, including the obligation to do no harm and to obtain “informed consent” from subjects — something it may be impossible to give when facing a scientist in uniform.

In the new worlds of asymmetrical warfare, counterterrorism and neuroscience, however, all of the ethical guidelines may not yet be written.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/neuroscience-and-national-security-the-complex-relationship-between-science-and-the-military/17612