Download Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing AudioBook Free
Running spy networks overseas. Searching for terrorists in the centre East. Interrogating opponent prisoners. Inspecting data from spy satellites and intercepted phone calls. Many of these are vital intelligence tasks that have customarily been performed by administration officials responsible to Congress and the American people. But that is no more the case. Starting during the Clinton administration, when intelligence budgets were cut drastically and privatization of administration services became countrywide policy, and growing drastically in the wake of 9/11, when the CIA and other firms were frantically looking to hire experts and linguists, the intelligence community has been relying increasingly more on corporations to perform sensitive tasks heretofore regarded as exclusively the work of federal government employees. This outsourcing of intelligence activities is now a $50-billion-a-year business that consumes up to 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget. And it's really a business that the federal government has attempted hard to keep under wraps. Attracting on interviews with key players in the intelligence-industrial complex, contractors' annual records and general public filings with the federal government, and on-the-spot reporting from intelligence industry meetings and investor briefings, Spies for Employ the service of provides the first behind-the-scenes look at this new way of spying. Shorrock explores how this collaboration has resulted in wasteful spending and how it threatens to rot the personal privacy protections and congressional oversight that is so important to American democracy.
