Big Brother's Private Detectives

John Louis

Big Brother's Private Detectives

Should we sacrifice our 4th amendment protections for the promise of safety? In the aftermath of Eric Snowden's leaks, President Obama made a Nixonesque defense of law and order. The president remarked, "In the abstract you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, I think we've struck the right balance." Public outrage has focused on the president, and rightly so, but there is another part to the story: a sprawling network of private contractors operating in the deep shadows of the national security state. 


In 2010, the Washington Post ran a piece of investigative journalism under the title Top Secret America.  The Post found that, "The government has built a national security and intelligence system so big, so complex and so hard to manage, no one really knows if it's fulfilling its most important purpose: keeping its citizens safe." 

The biggest lesson to be gained from the Post's investigation is that federal law enforcement agencies carry out only a small fraction of the work done in the name of national security. Federal agencies depend heavily on the support of a private industrial complex. Contractors, not civil servants, are the real agents of the national security state. 

In the post 9/11 world, the role of defense contractors has continued to grow. "Since 9/11, there has been an explosion of the amount of information obtained via technical means, particularly imagery and communications intercepts, necessitating new analytic methods of sorting and exploiting incoming information, as well as data mining to discover patterns of information and intelligence contained within huge quantities of data." The Post provides a searchable database of companies involved in "top secret work", and shows how much "intelligence analysis" is handled by private contractors.  

The NSA alone hired 484 separate contracting companies for the purposes of "intelligence analysis." Mr. Snowden worked for Booz Allen, not the NSA. He was a mid-level lackey, but his security clearance gave him daily access to terabytes of classified information. 

A lowly contractor knew enough to blow the whistle on the most secretive agency in the federal government. Roughly a million people have "top secret" security clearances. Meanwhile most members of Congress had no idea what was going on. 

What secrets remain safely hidden beyond Snowden's security clearance? What does Booz Allen know that the NSA doesn't know? Answer: it's classified. 

 We should be wary of the power we have entrusted to our public servants, but if our public servants were all we had to worry about, perhaps, the task would be easier. Politics might at least offer some recourse. 

The expansion of the national security state has not only empowered the government, but also expanded the influence of private companies providing critical surveillance services. In 1961 Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that, "The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."His warning seems more prescient now than ever. 

Americans should never forget Benjamin Franklin's admonishment that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."If we cannot trust big brother, should we trust his private detectives?


- John Louis