With many of these contractors now focused on
cyber-security, Hayden has even coined a new term —
“Digital Blackwater” – for the industry. “I use that for
the concept of the private sector in cyber,” he told a
recent conference in Washington, in an odd reference to
the notorious mercenary army. “I saw this in government
and saw it a lot over the last four years. The private
sector has really moved forward in terms of providing
security,” he said. Hayden himself has cashed out too:
He is now a principal with the Chertoff Group, the
intelligence advisory company led by Michael Chertoff,
the former secretary of Homeland Security.
One of NSA’s most important contractors may be Narus, a
subsidiary of Boeing that makes a key telecommunications
software that allows government agencies and
corporations to monitor huge amounts of data flowing
over fiber-optic cables. According to Bill Binney, one
of four NSA whistle-blowers who’ve been warning about
NSA’s immense powers, one Narus device can analyze
1,250,000 1,000-character emails every second. That
comes to over 100 billion emails a day.
“Narus is the one thing that makes it all possible,”
Binney told me over the weekend, of the Verizon
surveillance program unveiled by the Guardian. “They
probably pick up 60 to 80 percent of the data going over
the [U.S.] network.” The Narus technology, he added,
“reconstructs everything on the line and then passes it
off to NSA for storage” and later analysis. That
includes everything, he said, including email, cellphone
calls, and voice over Internet protocol calls such as
those made on Skype.
NSA’s use of the Narus technology first came to
attention in 2006. That was when an AT&T technician
named Mark Klein went public
with his discovery that NSA had hooked Narus devices
to AT&T’s incoming telecom stream in San Francisco and
set up a secret room that allowed NSA to divert AT&T’s
entire stream to its own databases. Binney believes the
equipment was hooked up to as many as 15 sites around
the country.
The Narus devices can’t pick up everything, however,
because large amounts of traffic (such as domestic calls
and Internet messages) don’t go through the switches.
That’s why NSA apparently decided in 2006 to create
the PRISM program to tap into the
databases of the Internet service providers such as
Yahoo and Google, Binney says. “Even though there’s so
many Narus devices collecting on the Net, they don’t get
it all,” he explained. “So if they go to the ISPs with a
court order, they fill in the gaps from the collection
on Narus.”
But once the data is downloaded, it has to be analyzed.
And that’s where Booz and the other contractors that
surround the NSA come in.
Booz Allen Hamilton is one of
the NSA’s most important and trusted contractors.
It’s involved in virtually every aspect of intelligence
and surveillance, from advising top officials on how to
integrate the 16 U.S. spy agencies to detailed analysis
of signals intelligence, imagery and other critical
collections technologies. I first introduced Booz’s
intelligence business in a 2007 profile in Salon
when President Bush appointed Michael McConnell, a Booz
veteran and former NSA director, to be director of
national intelligence (he’s now back at Booz).
Among other secret projects, Booz was deeply involved in
“Total Information Awareness,” the controversial
data-mining project run for the Bush administration by
former National Security Adviser John Poindexter that
was outlawed by Congress in 2003.
Another major presence at NSA’s Business Park is SAIC. Like
Booz, it stands like a private colossus across the whole
intelligence industry. Of its 42,000 employees, more
than 20,000 hold U.S. government security clearances,
making it one of the largest private intelligence
services in the world. “SAIC provides a full suite of
intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and
cybersecurity solutions across a broad spectrum of
national security programs,” it claims on its website.
Despite its grandiose claims, however,
SAIC is also known for several spectacular intelligence
failures, including NSA’s ill-fated Trailblazer project
to privatize its analysis of signals intelligence. Other
companies acting as pillars of NSA’s SIGINT analysis
team include Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, CACI
International,
and hundreds of smaller companies scattered around the
Washington Beltway (you can read detailed explanations
of what they do for NSA in my book
“Spies for Hire”). They,
in turn, are surrounded by a small army of “big data”
companies that are hired by NSA to sift through data for
suspicious patterns and map the creation of “illicit
networks” that can be followed or investigated.
In
April, I wrote about one of those companies, Palantir
Technologies Inc., in Salon. It
sells a powerful line of data-mining and analysis
software that maps out human social networks that would
be extremely useful to NSA analysts trying to make sense
of all the telephone and Internet data downloaded from
Verizon and nine Internet companies that was described
in the latest blockbuster stories in the Guardian and
the Post.
“Their bread and butter is mapping disparate networks in
real time,” a former military intelligence officer who
has used Palantir software told me. “It creates a
spatial understanding that can be easily used by
analysts.” (See the detailed profile of
Palantir I posted on my website last Friday.)
But how did NSA, long considered the crown jewel of U.S.
intelligence, become so privatized in the first place?
In
the late 1990s, faced with a telecommunications and
technological revolution that threatened to make the
NSA’s telephonic and radar-based surveillance skills
obsolete, the agency decided to turn to private
corporations for many of its technical needs.
The outsourcing plan was finalized in 2000 by a special
NSA Advisory Board set up to determine the agency’s
future and codified in a secret report written by a
then-obscure intelligence officer named James Clapper.
“Clapper did a one-man study for the NSA Advisory
Board,” recalls Ed Loomis, a 40-year NSA veteran who,
along with Binney and two others, blew
the whistle on corporate corruption at the NSA.
“His recommendation was that NSA acquire its Internet
capabilities from the private sector. The idea was, the
private sector had the capability and we at NSA didn’t
need to reinvent the wheel.”
Hayden, who was the NSA director at the time, “put a lot
of trust in the private sector, and a lot of trust in
Clapper, because Clapper was his mentor,” added Loomis.
And once he got approval, “he was hell-bent on
privatization and nothing was going to derail that.”
Clapper is now President Obama’s director of national
intelligence, and has denounced the Guardian leaks as
“reprehensible.”
Hayden was relentless in shifting NSA from an agency
that relied on in-house experts for its technology to
one of the most privatized agencies in government today.
His first action, a project known as Groundbreaker,
outsourced all of NSA’s internal communications system.
In one fell swoop, hundreds of longtime NSA employees
left their government jobs one day and walked in the
next morning wearing their green badges from CSC and its
many subcontractors.
“To this day, the IT at Fort Meade is owned by a private
sector company,” Hayden boasted recently. “That worked.
That was a really good idea.” CSC remains the head of
the “Eagle Alliance” consortium, and is now one of NSA’s
biggest suppliers of cybersecurity services.
But Hayden’s master project, the grandiose Trailblazer
project to private NSA’s analysis of signals
intelligence flowing over the Internet, didn’t fare so
well. Managed by SAIC in a consortium that included
Northrop Grumman and Booz Allen Hamilton, it burned
through over $5 billion without producing any actionable
intelligence, and was canceled in 2005.
Despite the scandals and massive amount of money spent
on private intelligence contractors, however, the
mainstream media has been slow to report on the topic.
It took until 2010, years after the spending spree
began, for the Washington Post to highlight intelligence
outsourcing in its famous series on “Top Secret
America.” The paper, despite its work on the PRISM
story, is still
behind the curve.
On
Monday,
it reported for the first time the 70 percent figure
I discovered back in 2007 and wrote about for Salon. But
no credit was given to me or this publication for that
blockbuster finding. Maybe next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment