Private companies receive 70% of intelligence money

In keeping with the defense contractors theme, about a week ago I heard an interview on NPR with Tim Shorrock, author of the book Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. In it, he cites a fantastic figure as the percentage of intelligence spending that's doled out to the "private" sector (as if state intelligence and espionage could be considered a market-driven industry):

What happened at Abu Ghraib, and CACI's refusal to discuss it, stands as a kind of high-water mark for intelligence contracting. In 2006, the year Humphrey delivered his comments, the cost of America's spying and surveillance activities outsourced to contractors reached $42 billion, or about 70 percent of the estimated $60 billion the government spends every year on foreign and domestic intelligence. Unfortunately, we cannot know the true extent of outsourcing, for two reasons. First, in 2007, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) refused to release an internal report on contracting out of fear that its disclosure would harm U.S. national security interests. Second, most intelligence contracts are classified, allowing companies like CACI to hide their activities behind a veil of secrecy.

What this actually is is a sort of retirement plan for intelligence officers: working in the private sector requires a security clearance, which is easiest to have if you've already worked for the government and already posses one – it's a revolving door between government and industry, and of course the private sector pays more. According to the interview, most of the contractors are former government employees. I did a little more research, and apparently this isn't even a new revelation – Salon published an article citing the 70% figure a year ago. I'm just surprised that the figure doesn't get more play in the media.

Available wherever military-grade weapons and services are sold

I've wondered before why government contractors like Raytheon and BAE advertise: they aren't selling products to consumers, and theoretically the people making purchasing decisions aren't going to base contracts worth billions of dollars on 30-second TV ads. But I think I've found the answer: in case any of their deals come under public scrutiny. Essentially, it's a PR hedge against unflattering information surfacing in the media. The ads both soften up the public, and – I would assume – make media bosses think twice before digging up dirt on their advertisers.

What we all knew about terrorism, confirmed

The Washington Post published an entirely unsurprising article today, citing confidential government sources giving the details of data compiled by the US government on suicide bombings worldwide. Last year, there were 658 suicide attacks world wide, with 542 in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 21,350 have been killed in these attacks since 1983, and more than 80% of these have happened since 2001. The article says suicide bombings have occurred on five continents – the one without, I suppose, would be Oceania. According to the article, "[a]t least two-thirds of suicide bombings since 1983 have targeted U.S. policy goals." I take that to mean two-thirds of all attacks, not two-thirds of all victims of attacks. That number, I suspect, would be larger.

What disturbs me most about the article, though, is the fact that this had to be anonymously leaked and wasn't automatically made public. The article cites a military spokesman as saying that US casualties from suicide bombs in Iraq couldn't be revealed "because it might show the effectiveness of the enemy's weapon." In other words, we can't tell you, because you'd realize we're losing if we did.

Terrorism, rent-seeking, and Academe

In an article from Wired called "Civil Libertarians See a Hopeful Dawn in 2009 ... the Fools," comes this ominous paragraph:

"There is so much money in the terrorism trough," says Steven Aftergood, who runs the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy Project. "There are constituencies within agencies who are going to be advocating for retention of those practices. It will take a lot of work to roll back practices that have been entrenched for the last seven years."

I personally got creaped out about this when I moved to Washington to go to Georgetown, and noticed a) ads by Raytheon and colleges advertising "Homeland Security" certificates in the Metro, and b) the obsession with students and academics in Georgetown's foreign studies departments with terrorism. The rent-seeking associated with anti-terrorist things is obvious – there are many companies who do a lot of business with governments. And then there's the academic side of it – academic rockstars like Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama inspire future generations of grad students and aspiring academics, who in turn coax undergraduates into classes on terrorism and Arabic. This pattern isn't new: socialism and statist brewed in universities across the US and Europe in the early twentieth century, and then the ideologies bled over into the real world. But at least statism was romantic and progressive-feeling – this shit is just fear-mongering.