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9/11 Vs Pearl Harbour

Running head: Spies for Hire

Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing
Randall D. Carney
SCTY 315 Strategic Intelligence I


Abstract
Tim Shorrock gives us as clear a picture of the business ties of the Intelligence Industrial Complex as can be done by a guy without a Top Secret/ Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI), the highest security clearance. These days, as he tells us, the majority of people who do have TS/SCIs aren’t employed by the government, they’re private contractors.

Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing
Shorrock introduces readers to a fair number of the private corporations who do business in the Intelligence-Industrial Complex. But the details are frustratingly sketchy. These companies are, after all, working on top secret projects.
The most dangerous people on the planet are not the fanatics squatting in hide outs in the mountains of Pakistan or operating sleeper cells in Amsterdam. They are instead the chieftains and sub-chieftains of an interwoven array of entrepreneurial intelligence mavens engaged in a "public-private partnership" whose power and behavior and reach are limited only by the elected officials charged with their supposed oversight. At the beck and call of this dangerous array are money, information, expertise, the latest technology, lethal force, and the ear of political leaders who actively or passively set the ethical and legal parameters, if any, in which these spies for hire operate on a daily basis. They have in their hands the most sophisticated tools for going after whomever they designate as "the bad guys" and anybody else they wish secretly.
Privatization began under Ronald Reagan, but, as Shorrock explains at some length, it really took off under Clinton, partly as a consequence of his desire to cut back on intelligence and defense budgets as part of the peace dividend. Ironically, the staff cutbacks imposed in those days was part of...