It’s all about getting the clearance.

🙂 and this isn’t limited to the computer services there.

We have a lot of defense contractors locally, and it has always been suspected that some of them that provide computer services to Eglin seem to have an ‘edge’ when it comes to contract renewal. It doesn’t make a difference who gets the contracts, because the people who actually do the work don’t change, just the name on their paychecks, and what their benefit package looks like. Nothing has been proven, but there have been former contract employees who seem to have received a ‘nice inheritance’ around contract time.

Yeah, law enforcement makes you think ‘evil thoughts’ like ‘how could this be abused?’

Like a lot of small companies we’re using Google Apps for our email and Salesforce for our CRM. We really aren’t in a position to bring those functions inhouse, we’d get deluged with spam if we didn’t use someone like Google to handle it and we don’t have the Internet connectivity to run our own CRM in-house (note that the sales and marketing folks don’t work out of our office, they work from home, which is quite doable since Salesforce is out there). I had already assumed that the NSA could access our data anytime they wished to do so. But your point about the contractors… that’s a point that I hadn’t thought about. They clearly have access to way more than they should, and somehow I doubt they are as dedicated to strict confidentiality and honorable behavior as the military people were.

Do note that our pride and joy — our source code — is 100% inhouse, and the off-site backups are sneakernet (by accident, actually — our Internet connection is too slow to make off-site backups in any other way). But that’s a small consolation to knowing that information about our sales and customers could be in the hands of competitors at the whim of a contractor :(.