I have come to the opinion that the general NSA employees are working within the confines but an amount equal to their entire cost is being spent with “contractors” and “consultants”.
These groups are directed by political appointees and higher level people that can be influenced by political agendas and additionally do not have the tight training and strictures of a full time classified intelligence service employee.
All of the leaks, problems and issues have been with these folks and interagency low levels piped into the NSA feeds like the young army traitor.
As this is this sensitive, cut out the contractors, restrict the programs and have the trained people do the jobs (or refuse to do the jobs) as put together by the political appointees.
The loyal grunts that do the work are being cut by sequestration, not the top level hogs. Further budget cuts are going to come out of the trained line-level employees not out of the contractors working on “specials” in my worry.
When we have a corrupt and agenda driven administration in place for another 3 years all we can do is cut the purse strings but we need to give it direction.
I am in private industry but work with DOD people everyday and have some idea of the cultures and types of people involved.
Only a complete and utter moron would believe that the disaster that is our intelligence industry came about because of the Obama administration alone.
Regarding your point about politically connected contractors and consultants being given access to abuse the system, I think it’s good to remember who some of those contractors are. Back during the ‘08 election cycle, there was a security breach in the confidential State Department passport databases, when the employees of an “outside contractor” illegally accessed the records of McCain, Obama, and Clinton. Officially, those employees were just fooling around, independently, and they were terminated when their employer found out. Whether or not you believe the official story is the whole story is a matter for everyone to decide for themselves.
The interesting thing, to me, is that their employer was a consulting group owned by John Brennan, obviously a highly politically connected Democrat operative, who just happens to have been appointed director of the CIA. So not only are political operatives getting contracts to handle sensitive things for all sorts of agencies, but those same operatives can end up running the agencies themselves.
In the end, all these agencies answer to the President, the biggest political operative of them all. If he decides to push an agenda, he can fill the internal posts with all of his loyal soldiers, so cutting out the contractors is just a stopgap. We really need, I think, some better oversight over all these agencies that deal with classified information. I’m not sure what kind of oversight will work, but the systems we have in place don’t seem to be working.
my friend i believe you have outlined a good approach and defined many of the current problems...thanks for your input