In a political culture drowning in hidden conflicts of interests,
exploitation of political office for profit, and a rapidly eroding wall
separating the public and private spheres, Michael McConnell stands out
as the perfect embodiment of all those afflictions. Few people have
blurred the line between public office and private profit more
egregiously and shamelessly than he. McConnell's behavior is the
classic never-ending "revolving door" syndrome: public officials serve
private interests while in office and are then lavishly rewarded by
those same interests once they leave. He went from being head of
the National Security Agency under Bush 41 and Clinton directly to Booz
Allen, one of the nation's largest private intelligence contractors,
then became Bush's Director of National Intelligence (DNI), then went
back to Booz Allen, where he is now Executive Vice President.
But that's the least of what
makes McConnell such a perfect symbol for the legalized corruption that
dominates Washington. Tellingly, his overarching project while at Booz
Allen and in public office was exactly the same: the
outsourcing of America's intelligence and surveillance functions
(including domestic surveillance) to private corporations, where those
activities are even more shielded than normal from all accountability
and oversight and where they generate massive profit at the public
expense. Prior to becoming Bush's DNI, McConnell, while at Booz Allen,
was chairman of the Intelligence
and National Security Alliance, the primary business association of
NSA and CIA contractors devoted to expanding the privatization of
government intelligence functions.
Then, as Bush's DNI, McConnell dramatically expanded the extent to
which intelligence functions were outsourced to the same private
industry that he long represented. Worse, he became the leading
spokesman for demanding full immunity for lawbreaking telecoms for
their participation in Bush's illegal NSA programs -- in other words, he
exploited "national security" claims and his position as DNI to win the
dismissal of lawsuits against the very lawbreaking industry he
represented as INSA Chairman, including, almost certainly, Booz Allen
itself. Having exploited his position as DNI to lavishly reward and
protect the private intelligence industry, he then returns to its loving
arms to receive from them lavish personal rewards of his own.
It's vital to understand how this really works: it isn't that
people like Mike McConnell move from public office to the private sector
and back again. That implies more separation than really exists. At
this point, it's more accurate to view the U.S. Government and these
huge industry interests as one gigantic, amalgamated, inseparable entity
-- with a public division and a private one. When someone like
McConnell goes from a top private sector position to a top government
post in the same field, it's more like an intra-corporate re-assignment
than it is changing employers. When McConnell serves as DNI, he's
simply in one division of this entity and when he's at Booz Allen, he's
in another, but it's all serving the same entity (it's exactly
how insurance giant Wellpoint dispatched one of its Vice Presidents to
Max Baucus' office so that she
could write the health care plan that the Congress eventually
enacted).
In every way that matters, the separation between government and
corporations is nonexistent, especially (though not only) when it comes
to the National Security and Surveillance State. Indeed, so extreme is
this overlap that even McConnell, when he was nominated to be Bush's
DNI, told
The New York Times that his ten years of working "outside
the government," for Booz Allen, would not impede his ability to run the
nation's intelligence functions. That's because his Booz Allen work
was indistinguishable from working for the Government, and therefore --
as he put it -- being at Booz Allen "has allowed me to stay focused on
national security and intelligence communities as a strategist and as a
consultant. Therefore, in many respects, I never left."
As the NSA scandal revealed, private telecom giants and other
corporations now occupy the central role in carrying out the
government's domestic surveillance and intelligence activities -- almost
always in the dark, beyond the reach of oversight or the law. As Tim
Shorrock explained in his definitive
2007 Salon piece on the relationship between McConnell, Booz
Allen, and the intelligence community, in which (to no avail) he
urged Senate Democrats to examine these relationships before confirming
McConnell as Bush's DNI:
[Booz Allen's] website states that the Booz Allen team "employs
more than 10,000 TS/SCI cleared personnel." TS/SCI stands for top
secret-sensitive compartmentalized intelligence, the highest possible
security ratings. This would make Booz Allen one of the largest
employers of cleared personnel in the United States.
Among those on Booz Allen's payroll are former CIA Director and neoconservative
extremist James Woolsey, George Tenet's former Chief of Staff Joan
Dempsey, and Keith Hall, the former director of the National
Reconnaissance Office, the super-secret organization that oversees the
nation's spy satellites. As Shorrock wrote: "Under McConnell's watch,
Booz Allen has been deeply involved in some of the most controversial
counterterrorism programs the Bush administration has run, including the
infamous Total Information Awareness data-mining scheme" and "is almost
certainly participating in the agency's warrantless surveillance of the
telephone calls and e-mails of American citizens." For more details on
the sprawling and overlapping relationships between McConnell, Booz
Allen, the INSA, the Government and the private intelligence community,
see Shorrock's interview
with Democracy Now and his 2008 interview
with me.
Aside from the general dangers of vesting government power in
private corporations -- this type of corporatism (control of government
by corporations) was the hallmark of many of the worst tyrannies of the
last century -- all of this is big business beyond what can be
described. The attacks of 9/11 exploded the already-huge and secret
intelligence budget. Shorrock estimates that "about 50 percent of this
spending goes directly to private companies" and "spending on
intelligence since 2002 is much higher than the total of $33 billion the
Bush administration paid to Bechtel, Halliburton and other large
corporations for reconstruction projects in Iraq."
* * * * *
All of that is crucial background for understanding just how
pernicious and deceitful is the Op-Ed
published this weekend by The Washington Post and authored
by McConnell. The overarching theme is all-too-familiar: we face a
grave threat from Terrorists and other Very Bad People ("cyber wars"),
and our only hope for protection is to vest the Government with massive
new powers. Specifically, McConnell advocates a
so-called "reeingeer[ing] of the Internet" to allow the Government and
private corporations far greater capability to track what is being done
over the Internet and who is doing it:
The United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are
losing. It's that simple. . . . If an enemy disrupted our financial and
accounting transactions, our equities and bond markets or our retail
commerce -- or created confusion about the legitimacy of those
transactions -- chaos would result. Our power grids,
air and ground transportation, telecommunications, and water-filtration
systems are in jeopardy as well.
Scary! And what do we need to submit to in order to avoid these
calamaties? This:
The United States must also translate our intent into
capabilities. We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor
cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of
attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military
and legal options -- and we must be able to do this in milliseconds.
More specifically, we need to reengineer the Internet
to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and
impact assessment -- who did it, from where, why and what was the result
-- more manageable.
In one sense, this is just typical fear-mongering of the type the
National Security State has used for decades to beat frightened
Americans into virtually full-scale submission: you are in grave
danger and you can be safe only by vesting in us far greater power,
which we'll operate in secret: here, allowing us to "reengineer" the
Internet so we can control it.
Think about how dangerous that power is in relationship to the war
I wrote about this weekend being
waged on WikiLeaks, which allows the uploading of leaked, secret
documents that expose the corruption of the world's most powerful
interests. This "reengineering of the Internet" proposed by McConnell
would almost certainly enable the easy tracing of anyone who
participates. It would, by design, destroy the ability of anyone to
participate or communicate in any way on the Internet under the shield
of anonymity. Wired's Ryan Singel -- noting that "the biggest
threat to the open internet is . . . Michael McConnell" -- documents
the dangers from this "cyber-war" monitioring policy and how much
momentum there now is in the Executive and Legislative branches for
legislation to implement it (as a result of initiatives that began
during the Bush era, under McConnell, and which continue unabated).
But there's something even worse going on here. McConnell doesn't
merely want to empower the Government to control the Internet this way;
he wants to empower private corporations to do so -- the same
corporations which pay him and whose interests he has long served. He
notes that this "reengineering" is already possible because "the
technologies are already available from public and private
sources," and explicitly calls for a merger of the NSA
with private industry to create a sprawling, omnipotent network
for monitoring the Internet:
To this end, we must hammer out a consensus on how to best
harness the capabilities of the National Security Agency, which I had
the privilege to lead from 1992 to 1996. The NSA is the only agency in
the United States with the legal authority, oversight and budget
dedicated to breaking the codes and understanding the capabilities and
intentions of potential enemies. The challenge is to shape an effective
partnership with the private sector so information can move quickly
back and forth from public to private -- and classified to
unclassified -- to protect the nation's critical infrastructure.
We must give key private-sector leaders (from the
transportation, utility and financial arenas) access to information
on emerging threats so they can take countermeasures. For this to work,
the private sector needs to be able to share network
information -- on a controlled basis -- without inviting lawsuits from
shareholders and others. . . .
[T]the reality is that while the lion's share of cybersecurity
expertise lies in the federal government, more than 90 percent of the
physical infrastructure of the Web is owned by private industry. Neither
side on its own can mount the cyber-defense we need; some collaboration
is inevitable. Recent reports of a possible partnership between
Google and the government point to the kind of joint efforts
-- and shared challenges -- that we are likely to see in the future.
No doubt, such arrangements will muddy the waters between
the traditional roles of the government and the private sector.
We must define the parameters of such interactions, but we should not
dismiss them. Cyberspace knows no borders, and our defensive efforts
must be similarly seamless.
In other words, not only the Government, but the private
intelligence corporations which McConnell represents (and which are
subjected to no oversight), will have access to virtually unfettered
amounts of information and control over the Internet, and there should
be "no borders" between them. And beyond the dangerous power that will
vest in the public-private Surveillance State, it will also generate
enormous profits for Booz Allen, the clients it serves and presumably
for McConnell himself -- though The Washington Post does not
bother to disclose any of that to its readers. The Post
basically allowed McConnell to publish in its Op-Ed pages a blatant
advertisement for the private intelligence industry while masquerading
as a National Security official concerned with Keeping America Safe.
It's not an exaggeration to say that the "cyber-war" policies for
which McConnell is shilling is the top priority of the industry he
serves. Right this very minute, the front page of the intelligence
industry's INSA website (previously chaired by McConnell) trumpets
the exact public-private merger for "cyber-war" policies which McConnell
uses the Post to advocate:
The Report
just published by that that industry group (.pdf) is entitled "Addressing Cyber Security
Through Public-Private Partnership." The industry's Report
sounds like a virtually exact replica of what McConnell just published
in the Post: America is under grave threat and can Stay Safe
only by transferring huge amounts of public funds to these private
corporations in order to restructure the Internet to allow better
detection and monitoring. And look at the truly Orwellian and
unintentionally revealing logo under which the Report is written:
showing a complete linkage of Government institutions (such as Congress
and regulatory agencies), the Surveillance State, private intelligence
corporations, and the Internet (click on image to enlarge):
Readers of The Washington Post, exposed to McConnell's
Op-Ed, would know none of this. They would think that they were reading
the earnest National Security recommendations of a former top military
and government official, and would have no idea about the massive profit
motives driving him. Although the Op-Ed, at the end, identifies
McConnell as "executive vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, which
consults on cybersecurity for the private and public sector" (as well as
a former NSA head, DNI, and retired Admiral), there's no hint that Booz
Allen, its multiple clients, and the industry it represents (along with
McConnell himself) would stand
to benefit greatly from the very policies he advocates in The Post. Indeed,
just like the INSA, the Booz Allen website, at the top, this very
minute promotes the exact policies McConnell advocates:
So here we have a perfect merger of (a) exploiting public office
for personal profit, (b) endless increases in the Surveillance State
achieved through rank fear-mongering, (c) the rapid elimination of any
line between the public and private sectors, and (d) individuals deceitfully
posing as "objective commentators" who are, in fact, manipulating
our political debates on behalf of undisclosed interests.
And, as usual, it is our nation's largest media outlets (in this
case The Washington Post) which provide the venue for these
policies to be advocated and glorified, all the while not only failing
to expose -- but actively obscuring -- the bulging conflicts of
interests that drive them. While "news" outlets distract Americans with
the petty partisan dramas of the day, these factions -- whose power is
totally impervious to changes in party control -- continue to expand
their stranglehold on how the Government functions in ways that
fundamentally alter our core privacy and liberties, and radically expand
the role private corporations and government power play in our lives.
