What A Mess
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has an informative little post: Edward Snowden Makes Himself an Even Bigger Problem to the Officialdom .
After Rumsfeld eliminated all of the IT personnel from the Department of Defense, NSA hired Booz Allen Hamilton to upgrade their computer system. The result cost twice the original contract price of $2 billion and is noticeably slower than the old system. Despite that, Booz Allen continued to receive contracts.
Actually the name of the contractors are basically irrelevant, because when a new contractor takes over a contract, they hire all of the employees of the old contractor. This means that if you didn’t like what the old contractor delivered, you will get the same problems with the new contractor.
Snowden didn’t work for the US government, he worked for Booz Allen Hamilton. That should make for an interesting court case. A good defense lawyer has a lot of leverage, and Glenn Greenwald is a first class civil liberties attorney if he gets involved in the defense.
Digby remembered this Time magazine article: Bin Laden’s Secret Communications Plan: Use a Thumb Drive. He wrote his e-mails to a flash drive, and had an assistant take the drive to an Internet café to send, and probably went to a different Internet café to download responses. He did it for years without getting caught, while the US government was downloading meta data on American citizens in the US.
June 10, 2013 4 Comments
