Private Contracting In the Intelligence Game (Part One); Post, Discussion, Notes

in #deepdives • 4 years ago

Intro

As part of my ongoing graduate work in Intelligence Studies, I am sharing some of the discussion I do in these courses. This post has been edited a bit as I have removed some school references. Also, I did my paper in the next course on this subject, so there will be a post or two along these lines in the future. And there were a LOT of notes for a fairly short post submission.

Half of this post is the class post and discussion (about a 9 minute read); half of this post is the set of notes I took...feel free to skip the notes LOL, but if you've read this far, please, at the least, skip to the end and read the last question I posit in The Notes.

Note to Self-> next post in this series should be "how you as a HIVE reader can start collecting the references cited in these posts that you wish to save for your own study". Also whip up an index for these

The question

There is a great reliance on the private sector supporting the IC. As intelligence analysis becomes more technical and specialized. There are great benefits to this relationship. The government is able to hire specific skill sets and keep them aboard as needed. However, there are also draw backs. What do you consider the three primary "pluses" to public companies supporting the IC via contractors and what are the three primary negatives? Be specific and develop your answer from a strategic perspective.

One final thought....As we enter into the final two weeks of the course, I would like everyone to share with each other what your next step is

The post

Overall, there is a negative result from employing private sector support to the IC, other than utilizing whatever collection they can provide at minimal or no cost. Why do I say that? Let’s look at the positives first, than the negatives, and then compare.

Positives

  • Importance to the IC effort; our class notes (WEEK 7: Public-Private Partnership In Intelligence Lesson Overview, n.d.) claim that “The key takeaway is that this group within the IC play a very very important part of the overall effort”, while Voelz (2006) presumes that “any effective and efficient design for intelligence support to operating forces must provide for their use.”

  • Specialized Knowledge ; the weekly lesson also argues that private contractors provide support in protection, translation, IT, and consulting.

  • Flexibility; These skills are necessary to the IC due to prior Congressional mismanagement, O’Sullivan (The intelligence community: Keeping watch over its contractor workforce, 2014) explains hat “the IC downsized and outsourced a lot of unique and specialized skills. After September 11, 2001, e found that we lacked the needed people with some core and unique skills, like terrorism analysis, ritical language skills, and cyber.” Voelz (2006) provides the legislative background:
    “A key recommendation of a 1996 House Permanent Select Committee investigation of the nation’s intelligence capabilities called for the creation of a dynamic surge capacity for crisis response. The Committee concluded that such resources “need not be self-contained within the IC,” but must be quickly marshaled “without undue concerns about who owns the assets.”

Please note that this was decided prior to the 9/11 catastrophe.

Negatives
Am I limited to three? ;>

  • A lack of control; Snowden and Vault 7 leaks are just the tip of the iceberg. Tim Shorrock, the author of "Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, argues that the increasing role of private contractors is directly linked to the rise in security failures (Kulwin, 2017). Priest and Arkin (2010) point out that “The ODNI doesn't know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of trying to find out.” Sanchez (2010) paints “a portrait of a sprawling intelligence-industrial complex drowning in data they're unable to effectively process, and choked by redundancy.“ Priest and Arkin (2010) suggest a possible cause for the lack of control, that relations between contractors and the IC have turned into a “self-licking ice cream cone”. Senator Akaka (Intelligence community contractors: Are we striking the right balance?, 2011) refers to “the movement between government and contracting firms [THAT] raises a risk that decisions made within the IC could be influenced by conflicts of interest.” Rent-seeking comes in many forms.

  • Foundation of law; government services should be run from within the government. A CIA audit (2012) refers to "inherent1y governmental functions"as defined by law. This same report also found private contractors performing such functions (returning us to the lack of control). Shorrock (2017) argues that “Without legal and financial accountability, the only way to strengthen security is to restrict high-level national security work to civil servants sworn to protect the Constitution.”

  • Do contractors take the oath? While I was unable to find a direct yes or no answer to the question, I don’t think so. Foust tells Congress (Intelligence community contractors: Are we striking the right balance?, 2011), “I have encountered situations in which contractors are put in charge of life and death decisions, either in targeting analysis shops, running drones programs, and similar situations. This makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I would be more comfortable seeing employees that have taken an oath on the Constitution making life and death decisions in the Intelligence Community.”

In one way, the positive effects actually become negative effects...if the IC relies so thoroughly on private contractors that it becomes impossible to curtail that activity, then in effect the IC has lost control over security functions for the United States, and thus, the government of the United States has lost control over it’s primary duty.

I find there is less of a problem with contractors providing IT or technical services, as long as those are NOT "inherent1y governmental functions", but the current situation is not only that these private companies do perform this work, but that there is no control over them.

I’ll move on to the next step here at this school for me after a short note about peer reviewed material. I noted in my intro discussion that I don’t take academics fully seriously, and that plays a part in my plan here. There some issues with studies (of any sort) to take into account

  • Replicability
  • Institutional bias
  • Lack of publishing for inconclusive or negative findings
  • Who pays?

None of that means that the academic process is worthless, but it does mean that as students (of an intelligence process that itself relies on critical thinking), we need to fully understand the methodology and bias in any information presented to us.

So I don’t have a plan for my degree, other than adding to my own knowledge base. I will take the “Independent Study” course, but I haven’t decided upon which question I’ll research yet. There are just too many interesting concepts out there, and somebody certainly wished that our parents’ children lived in interesting times.

References:

Central Intelligence Agency, Office of the Inspector General. (2012). Report of audit: The use of independent contractors (No. 2010-0028-AS). Retrieved from https://www.scribd.com/upload-document?archive_doc=310650920

Intelligence community contractors: Are we striking the right balance? Hearing before the Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia Subcommittee of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. United States Senate. (2011).

Kulwin, N. (2017, March 10). WikiLeaks’ CIA document release will probably be traced back to private contractors. Retrieved November 18, 2019, from Vice website: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gyd7dq/wikileaks-cia-document-release-will-probably-be-traced-back-to-private-contractors

Priest, D., & Arkin, W. M. (2010, July 19). Top Secret America—A Washington Post Investigation: A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control. Washington Post. Retrieved from http://secure.afa.org/edOp/2010/Washington_Post_Intelligence_Series.pdf

Sanchez, J. (2010, July 19). The Washington Post Looks at “Top Secret America.” Retrieved November 18, 2019, from Cato Institute website: https://www.cato.org/blog/washington-post-looks-top-secret-america

Shorrock, T. (2017). Analysis | Why does WikiLeaks keep publishing U.S. state secrets? Private contractors. Retrieved November 18, 2019, from Washington Post website: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/16/the-reason-wikileaks-receives-so-many-u-s-state-secrets-private-contractors/

The intelligence community: Keeping watch over its contractor workforce. Hearing before the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, United States Senate. (2014).

Voelz, G. J. (2006). Managing the Private Spies: Use of Commercial Augmentation for Intelligence Operations: (Discussion Paper Number Fourteen). https://doi.org/10.21236/ADA476310

WEEK 7: Public-Private Partnership In Intelligence Lesson Overview. (n.d.).

Discussion

Thanks for the note on misspelling!
It is perhaps best to be a little cynical in this business. the IC operates downstream of government, which is dependent on politics, and politics is ran by the comparative strength of the players (including government agencies themselves). Which means that things aren't always done in the best interest of defending the country on the IC's part.
In 13 Hours, the guys that went above and beyond were also contractors, so it's not an overall knock on the ability and motivations of contractors, especially when you look at the decisions of the station chief, as well.
And combining entertainment and cynicism with intel, there was actually a line I was contemplating using in last week's discussion post, for Don McQuinn's Targets, a fictional book about intel in Vietnam. I don't remember the actual quote, but paraphrasing, it was..."you do what you need to do, and the lawyers come in afterwards with the their soft, clean hands, and strangle whoever is left over"
That line has stuck with me for years!
394

There is value in using contractors for jobs that aren't "inherently governmental functions"; I would day that collections and analysis falls within that range of what sworn officers do, though. And I don't think that contractors are bad just because they're contractors ;> We can point at Manning and the Walker spy ring to see sworn agents behaving badly.
However, an NDA is not the same thing as the oath of office. In fact, it can generate a conflict of interest between the contractor and the government in some areas.

The problem with flexibility as it is currently practiced in IC contracting is that it incentivizes the use of private contractors over the use of sworn officers.
The ODNI (2006) noted that “We find ourselves in a war for talent, often for the most arcane and esoteric of skills,sometimes between ourselves and/or with our own contractors.“
Priest and Arkin (2010) call "into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest".

References:
Office of the Director of National Intelligence. (2006). Strategic human capital plan. Retrieved from https://fas.org/irp/dni/humancapital.pdf
Priest, D., & Arkin, W. M. (2010, July 20). Top Secret America—A Washington Post Investigation: National Security Inc. Washington Post. Retrieved from http://secure.afa.org/edOp/2010/Washington_Post_Intelligence_Series.pdf

Would you say the the lack of support to accompany the growth of the IC via private contracting included a structured form of control? A CIA audit (2012) found that contractors were performing "inherently governmental functions". Kulwin (2017) notes that former CIA officers accuse contractors of being less professional that sworn officers.

Central Intelligence Agency, Office of the Inspector General. (2012). Report of audit: The use of independent contractors (No. 2010-0028-AS). Retrieved from https://www.scribd.com/upload-document?archive_doc=310650920
Kulwin, N. (2017, March 10). WikiLeaks’ CIA document release will probably be traced back to private contractors. Retrieved November 18, 2019, from Vice website: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gyd7dq/wikileaks-cia-document-release-will-probably-be-traced-back-to-private-contractors

Notes

Note to The Notes; I almost made this section a post of it's own, due to length, but I included it with the original material for reference's sake; Notes are incorrectly formatted, but I hope they are readable anyhow.

“The ODNI doesn't know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of trying to find out,

“What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest “

“They did this to limit the size of the permanent workforce, to hire employees more quickly than the sluggish federal process allows and because they thought - wrongly, it turned out - that contractors would be less expensive. “

ME: not likely, they knew the kickback would flow

“Gates, who has been in and out of government his entire life, puts it: "You want somebody who's really in it for a career because they're passionate about it and because they care about the country and not just because of the money."

ME: do these bozos have any self awareness?

“The government doesn't know how many are on the federal payroll. “

“Misconduct happens, too. A defense contractor formerly called MZM paid bribes for CIA contracts, sending Randy "Duke"
Cunningham, who was a California congressman on the intelligence committee, to prison. “

“invented a technology that made finding the makers of roadside bombs easier and helped stanch the number of casualties from improvised explosives, “

ME: there is a HUGE difference between marketing technology and performing fundemental government tasks

“A 2008 study published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that contractors made up 29 percent of the workforce in the intelligence agencies but cost the equivalent of 49 percent of their personnel budgets “

“In September 2009, General Dynamics won a $10 million contract from the U.S. Special Operations Command's psychological operations unit to create Web sites to influence foreigners' views of U.S. policy. To do that, the company hired writers, editors and designers to produce a set of daily news sites tailored to five regions of the world. They appear as regular news Web sites, with names such as "SETimes.com: The News and Views of Southeast Europe." The first indication that they are run on behalf of the military comes at the bottom of the home page with the word "Disclaimer." Only by clicking on that do you learn that "the Southeast European Times (SET) is a Web site sponsored by the United States European Command."

“Some IT companies integrate the mishmash of computer systems within one agency; others build digital links between agencies; still others have created software and hardware that can mine and analyze vast quantities of data. “

ME: and these are all tasks that privates can be trained to do

“Such coziness worries other officials who believe the post-9/11 defense-intelligence-corporate relationship has become, as one senior military intelligence officer described it, a "self-licking ice cream cone." Another official, a longtime conservative staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee, described it as "a living, breathing organism" impossible to control or curtail. "How much money has been involved is just mind-boggling," he said. "We've built such a vast instrument. What are you going to do with this thing? . . . It's turned into a jobs program." “

“The schools, indeed, are among the best, and some are adopting a curriculum this fall that will teach students as young as 10 what kind of lifestyle it takes to get a security clearance and what kind of behavior would disqualify them. “

ME:creating a caste of people w loyalty to their corporation instead of their country

“paint a portrait of a sprawling intelligence-industrial complex drowning in data they're unable to effectively process, and choked by redundancy: “

It also, somewhat orthogonally, jibes with a point Clay Shirky has pressed about complex organizations:
Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer [historian Joseph] Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

  • Voelz, G. J. (2006). Managing the Private Spies: Use of Commercial Augmentation for Intelligence Operations: (Discussion Paper Number Fourteen). https://doi.org/10.21236/ADA476310
    “ any effective and efficient design for intelligence
    support to operating forces must provide for their use”

ME: biased much?

“ A key recommendation of a 1996 House Permanent Select Committee investigation
of the nation’s intelligence capabilities called for the creation of a dynamic surge
capacity for crisis response. The Committee concluded that such resources “need
not be self-contained within the IC,” but must be quickly marshaled “without undue
concerns about who owns the assets.””

  • Michaels, J. D. (2008). All the President’s spies: Private-public intelligence partnerships in the War on Terror. California Law Review, 96(4), 901–966.

ME:nothing on skim thru

  • Simeone Jr, M. J. (2007). The integration of virtual public-private partnerships into local law enforcement to achieve enhanced intelligence-led policing. Retrieved from DTIC Document website: http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA474348

  • Intelligence community contractors: Are we striking the right balance? Hearing before the Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia Subcommittee of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. United States Senate. (2011).

SENATOR AKAKA
“the movement between government and contracting
firms raises a risk that decisions made within the IC could be
influenced by conflicts of interest.”
JOSHUA FOUST
“I have encountered situations in which contractors are put in charge of life and death decisions, either in targeting analysis shops, running drones programs, and similar situations. This makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I would be more comfortable seeing employees that have taken an oath on the Constitution making life and death decisions in the Intelligence Community.”

Glenn Carle, a former CIA operations officer who worked at the agency for 23 years, said it makes sense for the leaks to have originated from contractors.
“The standards of security and professionalism among contractors are lower,” he said. “There’s this exponentially growing body of people with access to highly sensitive information, who are theoretically held to the same standards [as agency employees], but in practice don’t have them.”

“Tim Shorrock, author of “Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing,” says that the growing role of private firms in intelligence work is directly related to a rise in the number of large security breaches. “

“ The purpos;e .l?ehii:ld this .t:'!lle is to ·prevent the U.s.
Government from· improperly tra-nsferring its authority to
c<;mt:;·racto:rs . As suc;:h, "inhe·rent1y -goverrunental functions"
u~ua lly involve the· c;liscretionary el:'(ercise of goverrunent
authority or financial transactions. There is no ha:rd and fast
rule for determining when a particular· a:·ctivity qualifies as
an inhe ·~.ently goV..ernmental function·.”

“ Some Independent Contractors Are Performing Inherently .
Governmental Functions “

"relies heavily on independent contractors to accomplish important facets of its mission,"

Shorrock, T. (2017). Analysis | Why does WikiLeaks keep publishing U.S. state secrets? Private contractors. Retrieved November 18, 2019, from Washington Post website: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/16/the-reason-wikileaks-receives-so-many-u-s-state-secrets-private-contractors/

Tim Shorrock is the author of "Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing."

“some 70 cents of every intelligence dollar is allocated to the private sector.”

“the relentless pace of mergers and acquisitions in the spies-for-hire business has left five corporations in control of about 80 percent of the 45,000 contractors employed in U.S. intelligence. “

“Despite the trust placed in them by the government and the public, private contractors — including the big ones — continue to make catastrophic mistakes in overseeing their employees. “

“Without legal and financial accountability, the only way to strengthen security is to restrict high-level national security work to civil servants sworn to protect the Constitution. “

“We find ourselves in a war for talent, often for the most arcane and esoteric of skills,sometimes between ourselves and/or with our own contractors. “

  • The intelligence community: Keeping watch over its contractor workforce. Hearing before the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, United States Senate. (2014).

STEPHANIE O’SULLIVAN,1PRINCIPAL DEPUTY DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

“During the 1990s, like the rest of the Federal Government, the IC downsized and outsourced a lot of unique and specialized skills. After September 11, 2001, we found that we lacked the needed peo-ple with some core and unique skills, like terrorism analysis, crit-ical language skills, and cyber.

TIMOTHY J. DINAPOLI,1DIRECTOR, ACQUISI-TION AND SOURCING MANAGEMENT, U.S. GOVERNMENT AC-COUNTABILITY OFFICE

“We found a number of limitations, including changes to the definition of ‘‘core contrac-tors,’’ inconsistent methodologies for estimating the number of core contractors, errors in reporting contract costs, and poor documenta-tion, that, when you put them all together, undermined the utility, comparability, accuracy, and consistency of the inventory’s informa-tion “

ME:Begs the question: is a society which doesn't put out (create) the manpower to defend itself worth saving? A question outside our immediate purview
I deleted this line from my paper

#informationwar #national-security #spying #intelligence #education #academics #grad-school #graduate #security
4 years ago in #deepdives by
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     4 years ago  

    I am both aghast and fascinated that in this discussion of the tension between private contracting and government service, the word Israel does not once appear. I am confident you are aware of the eminence of Mossad and associated Israeli agencies in the field, and also that you know that a plethora of private firms have been formed by 'former' Israeli intelligence personnel, and you should know that Netanyahu and the Israeli government have an official policy of meeting USG contracting needs with those firms. I have made no effort to assess the scope of the issue, but names like PROMIS, PRISM, and Palantir, to pick just one alliterative recollection, quite roll off the tongue. It will not require extensive research to connect those programs with Israel, and if you are not well familiar with that fact, I commend to you a few minutes on Startpage to become so. Or just go to Ha'aretz and search there.

    It is absolutely fantastic (as in fantasy) that this OP and discussion fails to mention even Russia as a potential source of double agents acting as private contractors. Hell, the enemedia do all the time, and CNN twice on Sundays. Absent even a hint of awareness of this issue, it is hard to credit the program you are undertaking with utility regarding the IC in the real world.

    Thanks!

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     4 years ago  

    The main reason to hire outside the govern-cement is to lose the shackles that bind a govern-cement agency.

    A govern-cement agent cannot go onto your property and take pictures of things like

    • combustible materials
    • code violations
    • number of structures
    • etc

    But a contractor can.
    Get a person to deliver a flyer saying that "only you can prevent wild fires" and while there, snap a few pictures.
    A fire marshall doing so is breaking several rules. (like the constitution)

    Further, FASABI-56 allows entire budgets to go dark.
    Thus enabling the creation of private armies
    And private armies need private intelligence.

    This is the reason why Space-X is now doing things instead of NASA.
    The public facing side is still all staged.

    Lastly the NWO people want complete surveillance everywhere. And this cannot be done by govern-cements legally. So, enter the private contractor.

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     4 years ago  

    Another good point that goes along with the loss of control point.

    But I think we all agree that none of this is accidental; the problems that arise from privatization all benefit the corruptocrats

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       4 years ago  

      HIVE.D!

      OSINT

      Counter Intelligence.png

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