Irony Is Alive and Well

BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON, the defense contracting giant whose employee was charged Wednesday in connection with the theft of hacking codes used by the National Security Agency, provides a fairly ironic service to the government: spotting rogue employees.

  The Intercept

This is the second BAH employee to snatch NSA secrets. After Ed Snowden made off with a trove of secret documents, their insider threat program was to prevent it happening again. Will BAH keep their contract? Well, they seem to have been problematic even before Snowden.

[In 2012] the Air Force temporarily suspended the San Antonio division of the company from future contracts because it had obtained and distributed confidential Pentagon bidding data for its own competitive advantage. In 2006, the Justice Department said the company overbilled travel ex­penses, and the agency initially recommended that Booz Allen be barred from federal contracting.

[...]

There is no indication that Booz Allen faced penalties when its employee at MacDill received top-secret clearance despite his criminal record [he had been convicted of weapons charges and of making “willful false and misleading representations” to the U.S. government]. The travel-overbilling case was settled with the payment of a fine.

  WaPo

So my first thought is: who are they connected to?

The company [...] has deep connections within the defense and intelligence communities, including James R. Clapper Jr., a former Booz Allen executive who is the director of national intelligence, and R. James Woolsey, a former CIA director who was a senior vice president at the firm until 2008.

The man now heading Booz Allen’s intelligence operations, retired Vice Adm. John Michael McConnell, was the head of the National Security Agency in the mid-1990s and was appointed in 2007 by President George W. Bush to lead the government’s newly established Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

But wait. That's not all.

The group, located near DC with headquarters in McLean, Virginia, is an active political player. Reports show that Booz Allen contributed $1.2 million in recent years to campaign finance, with $176,757 going to Barack Obama, $54,360 to Hillary Clinton, $51,951 to Mitt Romney, and $44,264 to John McCain.

[...]

They employ over 70 individuals to sit on 54 federal advisory committees, including those that report to the Department of Defense, Department of Transportation, Federal Communications Commission, NASA, the Department of State, and the Department of Homeland Security.

  News.Mic

Booz Allen Hamilton, Edward Snowden's former employer, is a cash cow earning billions from its intelligence work for the U.S. government. Snowden is among thousands of people who used to work for the government who went on to earn far more doing the same things for legions of private contractors. Almost 500,000 private employees held top-secret clearances in 2012, giving them access to the most sensitive secrets of the United States, with much of the clearance process itself done by ... the self-same private contractors.

[...]

Antigovernment ideologues demonize government and government employees, cutting their pay and their programs and finding other ways to undercut them. That makes recruiting top-flight people much more difficult, especially in areas such as computer science or engineering. Government responds not by providing incentives to recruit and keep the best and brightest, but by going through the back door of privatizing and letting private firms pay far more to do essentially the same work. Private contractors know the game well; they can recruit top government employees and then effectively lease them back to the government, where they do the same jobs and stick taxpayers with much higher bills.

The costs are high, and not just in terms of money. This is a dangerous and dishonest business, whether in war or intelligence. There will always be a need to mediate between public and private functions, and public and private responsibilities. But we have let the mania for privatization, and the willingness of politicians to pander to antigovernment sentiment, to take it way too far.

  The Atlantic

Too far to get back, apparently.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.