Just as the Iraq war prompted a series of controversies about the role that private companies such as Blackwater were playing in assisting the military, the NSA revelations are casting a light on the close ties and revolving doors between private and public that characterise the intelligence business.
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The intelligence sector makes up around one quarter of Booz Allen Hamilton’s business, and the company has developed extremely close ties with many of the US intelligence agencies.
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“I worked as a contractor for six years myself, so I think I have a good understanding of the contribution they have made and continue to make,” Mr Clapper said at his 2010 confirmation hearing for the DNI position. Their expanded role was “in some ways a testimony to the ingenuity, innovation and capability of our contractor base”.
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The expansion in the intelligence sector has also led to a sharp increase in the number of people inside government who have access to top secret information. A 2010 Washington Post investigation calculated that 265,000 of the 854,000 people with top-secret clearances work for private organisations. The number of people who have access to classified information is believed to be more than 4m, which some experts believe has made leaks much more likely.
“Everybody agrees that there is [sic] too many secrets being created by the system these days and too may people with access to them,” says William Leonard, a former Pentagon official who helped manage the classification system.
The rapid expansion in private intelligence contractors helps explain why an individual like Mr Snowden, who claimed in an interview with The Guardian newspaper to have not graduated from high school, could have won such a sensitive security clearance at a young age. ...
All the US’s big military contractors – led by Lockheed Martin, the largest – operate separate arms offering the US military a range of services, from managing air command systems to basic computing facilities such as making laptop computers more robust for use in combat zones. However, because contracts for most services are short term, they have been among the first to suffer from spending cuts. Many of the companies are hoping that the investment by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies in cyber security will cushion some of the blow from the other budget cuts.
