Privatizing The Surveillance State

By Cernig

Glenn Greenwald had a great post yesterday in which he looked at the way in which various statutes enacted during the current administration's tenure have enabled a expansion of surveillance on the American populace, via methods such as database mining and the REAL ID act.

However, when it comes to the pervasiveness of the surveillance state and the level to which it is being handed off, in great part, to private companies, he hardly touches the tip of the iceberg. Take, for instance, this article from toady's Washington Post, buried in the Metro Business section:

A Reston company funded by an arm of the CIA will be working with the FBI and several intelligence agencies to mine databases for hidden clues about people who might turn out to be threats to national security.

Initiate Systems Inc. got its start 12 years ago matching health-care records within massive patient databases. Last year, the firm received financing from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, to adapt its system to help law enforcement and intelligence agencies track down suspects and lawbreakers across disparate databases.

Most recently, the company was named a subcontractor under Raytheon Co. to develop a system for the FBI that finds relationships between records kept in national and local databases.

Initiate Systems is a market leader in health care and corporate database mining - but since deciding to get into government contracting on security-based data mining, the company has grown 66% in the last year and has had to move to bigger offices.

Just about all of the nation's intelligence agencies are getting heavily involved in data mining by searching for links across seemingly unrelated databases. To do that, often, they find it easier and more secure to keep all the databases in the same place. The NSA, it has just been announced, is to build a massive new data-storage facillity in San Antonio, Texas.

And in almost every case, private companies will not only be heavily involved, they will probably be doing most of the work. According to testimony to Congress reported in the Washington Post last May:

contractors were "a significant majority" of analysts working at the new National Counterterroism Center (NCTC), which has primary responsibility for providing the White House and others with analysis based on foreign and domestic information, Gannon said. The proportion is even greater at CIFA, the Pentagon's new agency coordinating "force protection" at Defense Department facilities. CIFA officials have told The Washington Post that 70 percent of their workers are contractors.

Cunnigham briber Michael Wade's company MZM Inc. was one of CIFA's main contractors - its successor Athena Innovative Solutions Inc. (still run by Michael Wade) remains so. CIFA culls "commercial data," including financial records, criminal records, credit histories and more in its search for threats to pentagon sites. Back in December, NBC was given a portion of one of its databases, known as "Cornerstone" and found data on non-violent anti-war protestors. Indeed, it was determined in a subsequent Pentagon investigation that the database was riddled with entries that shouldn't have been there.

It is worrying enough that the government's surveillance apparatus - which is increasing being turned on its own citizens - is being increasingly dominated by civilian contractors who are primarily drawn from those with an ex-military background, leaving scope aplenty for potential cronyism and conflicts of interest. It is even more worrying when contractors who have proven that they are capable of grand-scale corruption are involved in data-mining the lives of US citizens.

Edit In comments, Gbal points out that it is "Mitchell" not Michael" Wade, and that he has been removed from Athena Innovative Solutions. Thanks for the error-check, Gbal, although the remaining fact that the government kept employing a company Mitch Wade was involved in even after investigations made it clear he was a person of interest should still worry.