Spy The Beloved County - The Sequel

(A follow-up of sorts to this post; by the way, there more stuff over here.)

The Murdoch Street Journal (a good place for reasonably legitimate news) reported the following from here yesterday…

WASHINGTON -- The Department of Homeland Security will proceed with the first phase of a controversial satellite-surveillance program, even though an independent review found the department hasn't yet ensured the program will comply with privacy laws.

Congress provided partial funding for the program in a little-debated $634 billion spending measure that will fund the government until early March. For the past year, the Bush administration had been fighting Democratic lawmakers over the spy program, known as the National Applications Office.

I don’t believe that’s correct; As this report from Tim Shorrock tells us…

…a National Applications Office (NAO) will be established to coordinate how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and domestic law enforcement and rescue agencies use imagery and communications intelligence picked up by U.S. spy satellites. If the plan goes forward, the NAO will create the legal mechanism for an unprecedented degree of domestic intelligence gathering that would make the U.S. one of the world's most closely monitored nations. Until now, domestic use of electronic intelligence from spy satellites was limited to scientific agencies with no responsibility for national security or law enforcement.

And as Shorrock also tells us, the companies reaping the benefit of this intrusive new growth industry under Bushco are some of the usual corporate suspects: Boeing, BAE Systems, L-3 Communications and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

(And speaking of these people, take a look here at how much they received in earmarks last year, and then take a look at how much they contributed to John W. McBush here; not earth-shattering amounts, but I would ask that you keep this in mind the next time the “straight-talk express” starts yammering about earmarks again – I’m not the biggest fan either if they’re not disclosed, but we’ve got bigger issues at the moment.)

So how exactly did we get to this point? Chalmers Johnson tells us the following from here…

To feed the NSA's insatiable demand for data and information technology, the industrial base of contractors seeking to do business with the agency grew from 144 companies in 2001 to more than 5,400 in 2006… At the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency in charge of launching and maintaining the nation's photoreconnaissance and eavesdropping satellites, almost the entire workforce is composed of contract employees working for [private] companies… With an estimated $8 billion annual budget, the largest in the IC [intelligence community], contractors control about $7 billion worth of business at the NRO, giving the spy satellite industry the distinction of being the most privatized part of the intelligence community…

...

Reagan launched his campaign to shrink the size of government and offer a large share of public expenditures to the private sector with the creation in 1982 of the "Private Sector Survey on Cost Control." In charge of the survey, which became known as the "Grace Commission," he named the conservative businessman, J. Peter Grace, Jr., chairman of the W.R. Grace Corporation, one of the world's largest chemical companies -- notorious for its production of asbestos and its involvement in numerous anti-pollution suits. The Grace Company also had a long history of investment in Latin America, and Peter Grace was deeply committed to undercutting what he saw as leftist unions, particularly because they often favored state-led economic development.

The Grace Commission's actual achievements were modest. Its biggest was undoubtedly the 1987 privatization of Conrail, the freight railroad for the northeastern states. Nothing much else happened on this front during the first Bush's administration, but Bill Clinton returned to privatization with a vengeance.

Yep, I’m afraid “The Big Dog” gets a slap on the paw too; according to Shorrock…

"Bill Clinton… picked up the cudgel where the conservative Ronald Reagan left off and… took it deep into services once considered inherently governmental, including high-risk military operations and intelligence functions once reserved only for government agencies. By the end of [Clinton's first] term, more than 100,000 Pentagon jobs had been transferred to companies in the private sector -- among them thousands of jobs in intelligence… By the end of [his second] term in 2001, the administration had cut 360,000 jobs from the federal payroll and the government was spending 44 percent more on contractors than it had in 1993." (pp. 73, 86)

These activities were greatly abetted by the fact that the Republicans had gained control of the House of Representatives in 1994 for the first time in 43 years. One liberal journalist described "outsourcing as a virtual joint venture between [House Majority Leader Newt] Gingrich and Clinton." The right-wing Heritage Foundation aptly labeled Clinton's 1996 budget as the "boldest privatization agenda put forth by any president to date." (p. 87)

After 2001, Bush and Cheney added an ideological rationale to the process Clinton had already launched so efficiently. They were enthusiastic supporters of "a neoconservative drive to siphon U.S. spending on defense, national security, and social programs to large corporations friendly to the Bush administration." (pp. 72-3)

And up to now, it should be noted that, by law, NRO activities are supposed to be confined to “foreign countries and battlefields.”

And how successful has this all been? Are you sure you want to know, because, according to Shorrock…

"If there's one generalization to be made about the NSA's outsourced IT [information technology] programs, it is this: they haven't worked very well, and some have been spectacular failures… In 2006, the NSA was unable to analyze much of the information it was collecting… As a result, more than 90 percent of the information it was gathering was being discarded without being translated into a coherent and understandable format; only about 5 percent was translated from its digital form into text and then routed to the right division for analysis.

All of this for a measly five percent?

And going back to the Journal story for a moment, I simply had to share this with you…

Homeland Security spokeswoman Laura Keehner said department officials concluded that the program "complies with all existing laws" because the GAO report didn't say the program doesn't.

Two wrongs making a right once more in the Bizarro Bushco universe; what a bunch of rapacious weasels! This sounds like another job for Rep. Henry Waxman’s House Oversight Committee.

If our ruling cabal of crooks is going to conduct ever-more-intrusive activities into our lives in violation of the spirit if not the actual intent of our laws until someone or something makes them stop (no one has so far), the least they can do is give us a better return on our taxpayer dollars for it.

Update 6/23/09: I was incorrect in my summation above, and I updated the post accordingly.