19.Jul.2010 Top Secret America

Democracy Now! reports on the massive outsourcing of U.S. counterterrorism efforts to private companies, a practice that involves the farming out IT jobs to civilian contractors rather than qualified government agencies or the military and the spending of billions of dollars on secret programs that operate without government oversight. A series of stories will come out in the Washington Post this week; co-author William Arkin describes the technological aspect of the problem:

We think of the military-industrial complex in a sort of old-fashioned way still. In fact, we don’t even have an appropriate word to describe what this enterprise is today, and we’ve struggled ourselves to try to figure that out. You know, the military-industrial complex of the Eisenhower era was one that produced massive amounts of capital goods for the military—bombers, missiles, nuclear weapons, etc. But today’s national security establishment really values information technology more than it values weapons. And really, one of the things that was most surprising to us, but maybe not so surprising given the nature of society, is that a half of the companies in this particular area are really IT companies, information technology companies, and support companies.

The report is accompanied by an interactive presentation, which lets you know what government spooks are doing in a given area.