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.

Our Top Notch Intelligence

The F.B.I. secretly arrested a National Security Agency contractor [ — who like Mr. Snowden worked for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which is responsible for building and operating many of the agency’s most sensitive cyberoperations — ] in recent weeks and is investigating whether he stole and disclosed highly classified computer codes developed to hack into the networks of foreign governments [including adversaries like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea], according to several senior law enforcement and intelligence officials.

The theft raises the embarrassing prospect that for the second time in three years an insider has managed to steal highly damaging secret information from the N.S.A.

  NYT

Yeah, he's fucked.

Criminal complaint and arrest warrant for Harold Thomas Martin III

There is no indication Martin did anything with any of the information he was found to have in his possession at his home and in his vehicle.  It was illegal for him to take it off site.  One can only assume he had plans, but there's no charge other than illegal possession.  At this point.

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

Booz Allen Hamilton - NSA Contractor

The US Air Force has concluded that Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), the contractor that employed Edward Snowden prior to his becoming a whistleblower, is not responsible for the disclosure of the classified information.

[...]

The Air Force is so far the first government agency to clear BAH in the Snowden case.

  RT

Apparently each agency gets to decide on its own whether or not to do business with a contractor???

But wait. BAH has been in trouble before, even recently, for secrets violations.

The Air Force suspended indefinitely Booz Allen Hamilton's San Antonio office from future federal contracts and has proposed its debarment.

A former Air Force officer working in a Booz Allen San Antonio office allegedly shared with company colleagues protected proprietary information obtained from the Air Force, including pricing data and labor rates, on an expiring contract held by the company NIC.

[...]

Retired Lt. Col. Joselito Meneses, who was hired last April as a senior associate at Booz Allen Hamilton's San Antonio office, allegedly shared non-public information with his co-workers about the contract, the memo states.

  Federal Times

April 13, 2012: Booz Allen Hamilton’s San Antonio office has been removed from the U.S. government’s Excluded Parties List System (EPLS) and has regained full eligibility to compete for new contracts with the U.S. federal government. This results from Booz Allen having entered into an Administrative Agreement with the U.S. Air Force.

[...]

Booz Allen’s discussions with the U.S. Air Force arose from the actions of a former government employee hired by the firm who inappropriately retained and shared sensitive information about a pending government procurement that occurred in the firm’s San Antonio office in 2011.

[...]

Booz Allen has agreed, among other things, to file quarterly reports with the U.S. Air Force regarding the firm’s implementation of the remedial measures and also adhere to a number of provisions relating to enhanced disclosure of employee misconduct or violations of the firm’s ethics and compliance program.

  Booz Allen Hamilton

I wonder if the Air Force has a "Three Strikes" clause.