Patriotic Americans Wander Why Congress is Not Investigating Snowden Employer Booz Allen Hamilton

Patriotic Americans Wander Why Congress is Not Investigating Snowden Employer Booz Allen Hamilton

Military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton of McLean, Virginia, has shot into the news recently over two of its former employees: Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who has just revealed the extent of US global spying on electronic data of ordinary citizens around the world, and James Clapper, US director of national intelligence.

Clapper worked as vice-president at Booz Allen from 1997 to 1998, while Snowden did a three-month stint at their offices in Hawaii in spring 2013 as a low-level contract employee. Both worked on intelligence contracts, which are estimated to make up almost a quarter of the company's $5.86bn in annual income. ....

.....Core values? Let's examine Booz Allen Hamilton's track record.

In February 2012, the US air force suspended Booz Allen from seeking government contracts after it discovered that Joselito Meneses, a former deputy chief of information technology for the air force, had given Booz Allen a hard drive with confidential information about a competitor's contracting on the first day that he went to work for the company in San Antonio, Texas. US air force legal counsel concluded (pdf):

"Booz Allen did not uncover indications and signals of broader systemic ethical issues within the firm. These events caused the air force to have serious concerns regarding the responsibility of Booz Allen, specifically, its San Antonio office, including its business integrity and honesty, compliance with government contracting requirements, and the adequacy of its ethics program."

It should be noted that Booz Allen reacted swiftly to the government investigation of the conflict of interest. In April that year, the air force lifted the suspension – but only after Booz Allen had accepted responsibility for the incident and fired Meneses, as well as agreeing to pay the air force $65,000 and reinforce the firm's ethics policy.

Not everybody was convinced about the new regime. "Unethical behavior brought on by the revolving door created problems for Booz Allen, but now the revolving door may have come to the rescue," wrote Scott Amey of the Project on Government Oversight, noting that Meneses was not the only former air force officer who had subsequently become an executive in Booz Allen's San Antonio office.

"It couldn't hurt having [former AF people]. Booz is likely exhaling a sigh of relief as it has received billions of dollars in air force contracts over the years."

Booz Allen has also admitted to overbilling the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) "employees at higher job categories than would have been justified by their experience, inflating their monthly hours and submitting excessive billing at their off-site rate." The company repaid the government $325,000 in May 2009 to settle the charges (pdf). Incidentally, both the Nasa and the air force incidents were brought to light by a company whistleblower who informed the government.

Nor was this the first time Booz Allen had been caught overbilling. In 2006, the company was one of four consulting firms that settled with the Justice Department for fiddling expenses on an industrial scale. Booz Allen's share of the $15m settlement of a lawsuit under the False Claims Act was more than $3.3m.

The incidents described above could be dismissed as aberrations. What is worthy of note, however, is that Ralph Shrader, the chairman, CEO and president of Booz Allen, came to the company in 1974 after working at two telecommunications companies – Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning, and RCA, where he served in the company's government communications system division.

Today, those names may not ring a bell, but these two companies took part in a secret surveillance program known as Minaret in the 1970s when they agreed to hand over to the National Security Agency (NSA) all incoming and outgoing US telephone calls and telegrams. In an interview with the Financial Times in 1998, Shrader noted that the most relevant background for his new position of chief executive at Booz Allen was his experience working for telecommunications clients and doing classified military work for the US government.

          ....Finally, Congress would also do well to investigate Clapper, Booz Allen's other famous former employee, for possible perjury when he replied: "No, sir" to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in March, when asked:

"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

 This is not about any of those mythical compromises to supposedly keep us safe, it is the massive abuse of power. They can do it so they do. Is everyone who thinks they "have nothing to hide" absolute sure these obviously corrupt private contractors will not use that information to hurt you.

Spying Program Doesn’t Make Us Safer, and Spying Leaks Don’t Harm America

Spying Program Doesn’t Make Us Safer, and Spying Leaks Don’t Harm America

America’s top national security experts say that the NSA’s mass surveillance program doesn’t make us safer … and that whistleblowers revealing the nature and extent of the program don’t harm America.

The top counter-terrorism czar under Presidents Clinton and Bush – Richard Clarke – notes:

    The just-revealed surveillance stretches the law to its breaking point and opens the door to future potential abuses

    ***

    I am troubled by the precedent of stretching a law on domestic surveillance almost to the breaking point. On issues so fundamental to our civil liberties, elected leaders should not be so needlessly secretive.

    The argument that this sweeping search must be kept secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing.

    ***

    If the government wanted a particular set of records, it could tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court why — and then be granted permission to access those records directly from specially maintained company servers. The telephone companies would not have to know what data were being accessed. There are no technical disadvantages to doing it that way, although it might be more expensive.

    Would we, as a nation, be willing to pay a little more for a program designed this way, to avoid a situation in which the government keeps on its own computers a record of every time anyone picks up a telephone? That is a question that should have been openly asked and answered in Congress.

The author of the Patriot Act and chairman on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations – Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner – says:

    Lawmakers’ and the executive branch’s excuses about recent revelations of NSA activity are “a bunch of bunk”

    The government has gone far beyond what the Patriot Act intended, and that section 215 of the act “was originally drafted to prevent data mining” on the scale that’s occurred

    Whistleblower Edward Snowden is not a traitor, and Sensenbrenner would not have known the extent of abuse by the NSA and the FISA court without Snowden’s disclosures

    The Patriot Act needs to be amended to protect Americans’ privacy

The former head of the NSA’s global digital data gathering program, William Binney:

    Confirms Snowden’s allegations about the mass surveillance program

    Says that revealing the details of the spying program will not harm national security … and that government officials are only mad because it exposes their overreaching

    Says that massive surveillance doesn’t work to make us safer

    Says that he set up the NSA’s system so that all of the information would automatically be encrypted, so that the government had to obtain a search warrant based upon probably cause before a particular suspect’s communications could be decrypted. But the NSA now collects all data in an unencrypted form, so that no probable cause is needed to view any citizen’s information. He says that it is actually cheaper and easier to store the data in an encrypted format: so the government’s current system is being done for political – not practical – purposes.  Binney’s statements have been confirmed by other NSA whistleblowers...

But hey I have nothing to hide so what's the big deal. It has nothing to do with whether individuals do not care if the NSA listens to your phone calls or reads your e-mail. Whether you personally care about your rights and how they relate to the 4th Amendment and democracy, has nothing to do with hiding something. It has to do with a basic right to privacy. Anyone who loves big brother and does not think such programs should be closely monitored and have become excessive, by all means move to the 24 or so authoritarian regimes in the world, they love cooperate sheep like you. Are They Allowed to Do That? A Breakdown of Selected Government Surveillance Programs

Thank Goodness For The American People, Families and The Common Good That Health care Reform is Constitutional

Thank Goodness For The American People, Families and The Common Good That Health care Reform is Constitutional

What is at stake in the case challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), scheduled for oral argument in the Supreme Court in March? The challengers maintain that the case is about fundamental liberty, specifically our freedom not to be compelled to purchase things we don’t want. But that frame, while undoubtedly appealing to the radical libertarian strain in the Tea Party, is misleading. In fact, the only “liberty” that would be protected by a victory for the challengers is the freedom of insurance companies to discriminate against sick people.

The case is principally focused on the “individual mandate,” the law’s requirement that people who are not insured and can afford health insurance must buy it or pay a tax penalty. The federal government is a government of limited powers, and although Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce, the challengers concede, if it can force people to “enter into commerce” in order to regulate them, then its powers are in effect unlimited. The reason Congress has never imposed such a mandate, they maintain, is that the power does not properly exist.

The Supreme Court deems the issue sufficiently serious to schedule an almost unprecedented five and a half hours of oral argument (it usually schedules a single hour). But the argument against the law is remarkably flimsy. Two of the country’s most conservative judges, Jeffrey Sutton of the Sixth Circuit and Laurence Silberman of the DC Circuit, were unable to find a valid argument against the law and voted to uphold it. Harvard law professor Charles Fried, Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general, has also said the law is plainly constitutional. It’s always dangerous to predict Supreme Court rulings on controversial cases, but if the Court applies its precedents faithfully, it should be a victory for the administration.

Although the challengers focus their attack on the individual mandate, that provision cannot be separated from the act’s prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage or charging higher rates based on “pre-existing” medical conditions. No one contests Congress’s constitutional authority to enact that overwhelmingly popular protection from dubious insurance practices. But without the individual mandate, the nondiscrimination protection would be unworkable. People would have a powerful incentive to wait until they get sick before they buy insurance, because they could not be penalized for doing so. Such “free-riding” would defeat insurance’s purpose of spreading risk. As one expert told Congress, health insurance cannot work if people can delay buying it until they are on the way to the hospital. Several states have tried to prohibit discrimination against those with pre-existing conditions, but the reforms have failed everywhere they have been enacted without an individual mandate. (Only in Massachusetts, where the protection is coupled with a mandate, has the reform been sustainable.)

Conservatives are fond of reminding us that society involves not just rights but responsibilities. Yet here, they don’t seem to get it—the right afforded by the ACA will work only if it comes with the responsibility to purchase insurance if you can afford it. In the end, the challenge to “Obamacare” is not conservative at all; it’s radically libertarian.

We’ve seen this kind of libertarian constitutional argument before. In the early twentieth century, after the Industrial Revolution had concentrated economic power in employers’ hands, Congress and the states passed many laws designed to protect workers from exploitation. Time and again, the Supreme Court invalidated these statutes. It deemed the federal laws beyond Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce because they were said to regulate the terms of production, manufacture or mining, all of which were said to precede interstate commerce. And it invalidated state labor laws as infringements on the “freedom of contract” protected by the due process clause.

In the wake of the Depression and the New Deal, however, the Court overruled both lines of precedent. It abandoned altogether the due process notion that economic regulation infringes on “freedom of contract”; it has never since invalidated any law on that ground.

After years of being being hurt in auto accidents by people with no insurance all states mandated insurance or paying into an uninsured motorist fund ( a type of insurance for the lazy and responsible). Health care insurance is not fundamentally different from that. Requiring people to have basic driving skills, knowledge of road rules, and getting a driver's license is also similar. Not letting people have the individual right to kick their dog could be -according to the way conservatives think - an infringement on the rights of animal abusers. Conservationism is a noxious and fundamentally anti-American movement whose goal is to create an authoritarian plutocracy. Always beware of its toxic agenda and laughable reasoning.