There’s an important detail in the NSA subpoena requests issued by the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday that’s been left out of most news accounts.
In addition to asking for documents pertaining to the telecommunication industry’s collaboration with the NSA, the committee also demanded records about agreements between the NSA and “internet service providers, equipment manufacturers, or data processers.”
In other words, Sen. Leahy and his committee have reason to believe that industry cooperation with the NSA went far beyond AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, and could include companies like CACI International, Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC that provide data-mining and analysis services to the NSA. Here’s what I wrote about this in the spring of 2006 in The Nation:
“There’s another group of companies, largely overlooked, that could also be cooperating with the NSA. These are firms clustered around the Beltway that contract with the agency to provide intelligence analysts, data-mining technologies and equipment used in the NSA’s global signals-intelligence operations. The largest of them employ so many former intelligence officials that it’s almost impossible to see where the government ends and the private sector begins. Booz Allen Hamilton (one of the contractors) for Trailblazer, a huge NSA project updating its surveillance and eavesdropping infrastructure, employs several NSA alumni, including Mike McConnell, its vice president (and now DNI), who retired as NSA director in 1996…SI International, a software and systems engineering company with NSA contracts, recently hired Harry Gatanas, the NSA’s former director of acquisitions and outsourcing, to oversee its $250-million-a-year business with US intelligence and the Pentagon. Science Applications International Corporation, another big NSA contractor, is run by executives with long histories in military intelligence, including COO Duane Andrews, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence.”
