Comment

WH Petition to Remove Private Industry from Intelligence Operations

13
EPR-radar6/13/2013 8:44:21 pm PDT

re: #11 Joanne

I appreciate what you’re saying. But the Snowden affair, in my mind, shows such lax controls surrounding our national secrets and thus our national security, that privatization should be wound down as federal employees are ramped up. Private companies should at a bare minimum have to provide evidence of controls in place to ensure secrets and, all remaining private contractor employees refer tidying their clearances annually - at their own expenses.

I’m against privatizing intelligence completely. But if it’s a MUST HAVE for reasons I’m not seeing, more controls need to be in place.

I think this takes a single data point (Snowden) and takes it too far (no contractors with clearances). There have been a lot of contractors over a span of decades who have been very good at keeping secrets.

There are lessons to be learned from the Snowden situation, of course, such as making sure that people, including sysadmins, are cleared for the data they can access. Nuking private contracting for intel from orbit is an overreaction, IMO.

E.g., would the Federal government need to hire the engineers who design/build/launch spy satellites and their payloads?