Wherein our intrepid investigator shares further tales of how private industry mixed with covert government programs, illegal surveillance of American citizens, and greedy bloodsucking business consultants, uses and abuses its stupid, selfish, shortsighted technerds who eventually get what's coming to them.
More speculation about the warrantless wiretapping and private industry and intentional obfuscation.
I hope you've read my notes about Total Information Awareness, a DARPA project from 2002-2004 that entailed massive surveillance on US citizens. I've been looking at the people and companies involved, trying to find evidence for the threads that lead from TIA to the warrantless wiretapping.
Yesterday, the Washington Post posted this article about an IT consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which I recognize from the cover of that terrible design document for TIA.
Apparently, Booz Allen Hamilton is considering spinning its government consulting side into a separate company from its commercial side. They are a huge firm of 20,000 employees, and have seen sales double to $4.1 billion since the promotion of Ralph W. Shrader of in 1999.
BAH is the company that originated the idea of the supply chain; their commercial business has fallen behind in the recent past, as focus has been placed on growing the government consulting side, where Shrader has most of his experience.
One source of tension inside the company is that while the two units operate separately, both sides share in the proceeds, sometimes disproportionately.
As a private company, Booz Allen is owned by about 300 senior executives. Most are concentrated in the commercial unit. So when profits were divvied up among the owners at the end of the year, many executives in the government division felt an inordinate share was going to executives in the commercial division.
So the business guys are reaping the profit from the government guys? Who would have expected any kind of milking to go on? Shocking!
But wait, there's more.
Shrader also expanded the company's ties to government -- he hired Dov S. Zakheim, an undersecretary of defense under Donald Rumsfeld, and R. James Woolsey Jr., a CIA director in the Clinton administration who joined the firm after Sept. 11, 2001, to work on homeland security issues but now has turned his attention to energy.
Can you say "revolving door?" I knew you could.
If the government unit is bought out, it will come as the boom in federal spending has started to slow.
"It's going to make it more difficult for companies in this business to make the profits they've expected to make because of the new administration," said Michael R. Steed, a partner in Paladin Capital Group, a District private-equity firm specializing in homeland security.
Am I reading this right? Booz Allen is considering spinning off its government contracting business, which has done extensive work on massive illegal surveillance systems, which had brought in massive amounts of cash that has been siphoned off into the pockets of people who didn't even do the work? And you're going to kill that goose? Because you know the new administration won't be so into that kind of work? WTF?!
Michael Lent, a former Booz Allen employee, recently noted in his Government Services Insider newsletter that some current employees "have voiced in private concerns and uncertainties about prospective financial rewards, their future role under an outside owner, inevitable departures of valued colleagues, changes in a distinctive, successful culture, and the need to revise the brand in the government space under new ownership."
Ohhhhhh... These tech nerds aren't so stupid! They know they're being had - being put out to pasture so that YOU can't be held liable for what they did under YOUR leadership! Classic move - decide to do something illegal, hire the guy to do it, then fire him after he did it, so he doesn't have evidence that it happened or that you made him do it in the first place.
Well maybe if you guys had some ETHICS or something, and didn't work for a company who was helping your government SPY ON YOU AND YOUR NEIGHBORS you wouldn't be in this little mess, now would you?!
So there you have it, folks. Booz Allen, defense contractor extraordinaire, will drain the profit, spin off the risk, then kill the goose dead dead dead before anyone can be called to testify.
D.C. reeks so bad we can smell it from Seattle.