LES CIBLES SECRÈTES DE BARACK OBAMA-

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  • Booz Allen Grew Rich on Government Contracts - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/us/booz-allen-grew-rich-on-government-contracts.html

    #privatisation #porte_tournante et #conflit_d’intérêt

    Edward J. Snowden’s employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, has become one of the largest and most profitable corporations in the United States almost exclusively by serving a single client: the government of the United States.

    ...

    As evidence of the company’s close relationship with government, the Obama administration’s chief intelligence official, James R. Clapper Jr., is a former Booz Allen executive. The official who held that post in the Bush administration, John M. McConnell, now works for Booz Allen.

    “The national security apparatus has been more and more privatized and turned over to contractors,” said Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group that studies federal government contracting. “This is something the public is largely unaware of, how more than a million private contractors are cleared to handle highly sensitive matters.”

    It has gone so far, Ms. Brian said, that even the process of granting security clearances is often handled by contractors, allowing companies to grant government security clearances to private sector employees.

    • Booz Allen Statement on Reports of Leaked Information
      http://www.boozallen.com/media-center/press-releases/48399320/statement-reports-leaked-information-060913

      June 9, 2013
      Booz Allen can confirm that Edward Snowden, 29, has been an employee of our firm for less than 3 months, assigned to a team in Hawaii. 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. We will work closely with our clients and authorities in their investigation of this matter.

    • US security focus shifts to private sector experts - FT.com
      http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9cc73438-d1f1-11e2-9336-00144feab7de.html

      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.

      ...

      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.

      ...

      “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”.

      ...

      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.

    • Les marchands d’armes souhaitent une promotion de la « cyber-sécurité » pour compenser la baisse de leurs chiffres d’affaires écrit ci-dessus le FT.

      Obama ne demande qu’à rendre service
      http://seenthis.net/messages/146385

      ... une directive signée par Barack Obama où figure une liste de cibles potentielle de #cyber-attaques contre des pays étrangers (...) [et] daté[e] du 20 octobre 2012, vante les mérites des « Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) » susceptible d’offrir « les capacité uniques et non conventionnelles susceptibles de faire avancer les objectifs nationaux américains à travers le monde ».

  • Piratage informatique : la Chine et les Etats-Unis discutent en tête à tête
    http://www.lemonde.fr/asie-pacifique/article/2013/06/08/piratage-informatique-la-chine-et-les-etats-unis-discutent-en-tete-a-tete_34

    Début mai, l’agence Bloomberg a retracé dans le détail un vol qui résume bien les techniques des pirates chinois. Cette attaque a visé, entre 2007 et 2010, la société de sécurité privée Qinetiq, un sous-traitant du Pentagone. Qinetiq fabrique des satellites, des drones, des systèmes robotiques et des logiciels utilisés par les forces spéciales américaines en Aghanistan et au Moyen-Orient. On attendrait d’elle un niveau de sécurité exemplaire. Son amateurisme a laissé les experts pantois.

    Les pirates ont notamment pu pénétrer l’ordinateur d’un spécialiste des logiciels pour puces électroniques. Ces données auraient facilité la construction par la Chine, l’an dernier, d’un robot démineur proche du Dragon Runner de Qinetiq. Elles pourraient également permettre à la Chine de s’entraîner à prendre le contrôle de drones américains durant leur déploiement.

    Via les ordinateurs de dix-sept employés de Qinetiq, les hackers ont également eu accès à une base de données à laquelle est connecté chaque hélicoptère militaire de type Blackhawk et Apache américain, en Afghanistan comme dans le Maine. Un outil de collecte de données inséré dans chaque appareil transmet à la base son lieu de déploiement, ses performances, ses heures de vol, sa durée de vie... Installant des canaux de sortie discrets, les pirates ont fait passer ces données par petits paquets, lentement, afin de fondre leurs vols dans le trafic Internet régulier de l’entreprise. Au total, ils ont ainsi volé quelque 20 gigaoctets de données, soit l’équivalent compressé de 40 DVD ou 1,3 millions de pages texte.