Will the Real U.S. Government Please Stand Up?
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Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace:
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DrugReporter:
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Environment:
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Makenna Goodman
Food:
Despite Censorship By Beef Magnate, Michael Pollan Spreads Message About the Real Price of Cheap Food
Health and Wellness:
New York May Stop Heartless Health Insurers from Dropping Coverage When It Stops Being Profitable
William Ehart
Immigration:
NYC Marathon Raises Question of Who Is American Enough?
James E. Johnson, Jr.
Media and Technology:
Focusing on Fort Hood Killer's Beliefs Is an Easy Out to Avoid the Deeper Reasons for the Massacre
Mark Ames
Movie Mix:
The Yes Men: Pranksters Out to Fix the World
Mark Engler
Politics:
What Michelle and Barack's Marriage Has in Common with 56 Million Other Ones
Annabelle Gurwitch
Reproductive Justice and Gender:
Fetus-Shaped Potatoes? Going Undercover Inside the Weird World of Right-Wing Abortion Foes
Ann Neumann
Rights and Liberties:
"My Kids Want to Hide Their Identity; They're Scared Someone Will Attack Us": U.S. Muslims Being Targeted
Jaisal Noor
Sex and Relationships:
Instant Sex: Has the Digital Age Destroyed Relationships or Made Them Better?
Vanessa Richmond
Take Action:
G-20 Meetings: Nothing Much Happened in the Suites, and There Was Too Much Punch in the Streets
Laura Flanders
Water:
Why Natural Gas Is Not a Clean Energy Panacea
Stan Cox
World:
With Unemployment at 40 Percent, Afghan Teens Enlist in Army, Police
Lal Aqa Sherin
I've never doubted for a second that the government would spy on its own citizens -- any government -- not just ours. Information is, as the saying goes, power -- always has been, always will be. So, as much as my civil libertarian side hates it, the realist in me shrugs each time a new piece of evidence surfaces that they are up to doing just that.
Or more precisely trying to do just that.
As I downed the final dregs of a cold Corona the other day, I recalled all the stories I had written over the years about monumentally expensive failed government computer system upgrades. In fact, hard as I thought, I couldn't recall a single story lauding a government agency for a successful computer project. Not one. Ever.
Just last year we learned that the FBI had wasted $700 million trying to develop a modern networked computer system able to track criminals and terrorists, and allow its offices around the nation to talk to one another -- for the first time.
That one didn't work either. Still doesn't. In fact the FBI is now busy chucking that system and starting over.
That story produced a shrug from me, too. I recalled a 1994 meeting I had with an FBI agent just appointed to head the FBI's San Francisco office's new computer crimes division. I was working for a nascent internet company at the time, and he asked if he could drop by and check out this new thing called the internet. He explained that, though the FBI did have a computer crimes division, none of the FBI's computers were online. "Yeah," he said. "They don't allow it. It's a security issue."
Remember … this was in San Francisco … the hottest hot bed of internet R&D at the time.
Last week everyone was atwitter over news that the NSA has been scooping up all our phone records. Some say that since 9/11 they have squirreled away as many as one trillion phone transactions. Again, I shrugged.
Which brings me to the theme of this rant.
Will the real U.S. government please stand up?
Two technology programs at the heart of the National Security Agency's drive to combat 21st-century threats are stumbling badly, hampering the agency's ability to fight terrorism and other emerging threats, current and former government officials say … One is Cryptologic Mission Management, a computer software program with an estimated cost of $300 million that was designed to help the NSA track the implementation of new projects but is so flawed that the agency is trying to pull the plug. The other, code-named Groundbreaker, is a multibillion-dollar computer systems upgrade that frequently gets its wires crossed.Is it just me, or doesn't the NSA phone spying story collide a wall of contradictions? I mean collecting a trillion pieces of data is the easy part. (Because the NSA didn't collect them in the first place. The phone companies did. They could because, unlike the NSA and FBI, they have computer systems that work.) But once in possession of such a huge and ever-growing mountain of data, then what? You need to slice it, dice it, find matches, produce tracking reports, integrate data into spreadsheets … and so on. And you need computers and software that works for any and all that.
CSC spent $520,000 in 2001 to lobby Congress and various government agencies on its own behalf. That same year, the company also paid lobby firms a total of $580,000. In total, Computer Sciences Corp. spent $1,100,000 in 2001 on lobbying fees associated with a variety of issues, including appropriation and procurement bills related to the Defense Department, Treasury Department, the executive office of the president and other federal agencies. The company also lobbied on "legislative proposals for privatization and commercialization of federal services," according to lobby documents filed with Congress. In 2002, Computer Sciences Corp. spent a total of $1,110,000 to lobby on similar issues. … On April 18, 2003, Computer Sciences' DynCorp International won a contract from the U.S. Department of State to provide up to 1,000 civilian advisers to help organize civilian law enforcement, judicial and correctional agencies. The estimated value could be as high as $50 million for the first year, depending on assessments of Iraqi capabilities and needs.And the other familiar face:
Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) today announced a contract award from the National Security Agency (NSA) to be the provider of the technology demonstration platform (TDP) phase of the TRAILBLAZER program. The NSA selected the SAIC-led Digital Network Intelligence (DNI) Enterprise team that includes Northrop Grumman Corp., Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., The Boeing Co. (NYSE:BA), Computer Sciences Corp. (NYSE:CSC) and SAIC wholly owned subsidiary Telcordia Technologies to contribute to the modernization of the NSA's signals intelligence capabilities.(For more on these two companies, see my article Divvying up The Iraqi Pie)
"It's more of the same people," a former NSA official told the Sun. "The contracting system makes it very hard to engage industry, and it's very hard for people to break into government contracting. This is one of the areas I think needs tremendous review."For an administration that talks about "accountability," they sure don't walk that talk. Instead they reward failure, at least when it's among friends. Medals are handed out to those forced to get out of Dodge before their misdeeds catch up with them. And favored companies that waste billions of taxpayer dollars on failed technology projects are rehired to fix the mess they so profitably created in the first place.
Stephen Pizzo is the author of numerous books, including "Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans," which was nominated for a Pulitzer.
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