New, Rare and Unreleased Material from the DMZ Empire
New, Rare and Unreleased Material from the DMZ Empire
In 2008, I published SPIES FOR HIRE, the first and only book on the privatization of US intelligence. I began my reporting on the nexus of national security and capitalism five years earlier, when I was thunderstruck to discover that the Pentagon had hired private contractors to “interrogate” Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The best of my reporting on privatization, much of it from The Nation, is displayed here.
Big Chief Counterinsurgent David Kilcullen prefers hagiography to reporting. This photograph was taken in 2014 at a Washington seminar on Syria where I was finally able to speak directly to David Kilcullen about a story I was preparing about his…
The Five Pure-Plays that Dominate US Intelligence Just out, in The Nation: By Tim Shorrock The recent integration of two military contractors into a $10 billion behemoth is the latest in a wave of mergers and acquisitions that have transformed…
That’s the word yesterday from Defense One, a military publication that’s itself funded by Honeywell and other big defense contractors. The number of private contractors working for the U.S. Defense Department in Iraq grew eight-fold over the past year, a rate that…
I just published a story at The Nation about the recent kidnapping of three U.S. contractors in Baghdad. The tale underscores an important truth about the vast expansion of military contracting in war zones over the past 15 years: it’s…
In January 2010, a few days after a Nigerian terrorist came close to blowing up a US passenger plane on its way to Detroit, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser made an extraordinary confession. “I told the President today I let him…
The New York Times just posted a story shedding new light on that big fight in 2004 between the George W. Bush White House and the Justice Department over the post-9/11 mass collection of domestic calling data by the NSA. …
So you think this is what only the government and the military can do? Think again – my latest, in Salon: And here’s the contractors leading the way on this $400 million contract:
There was only one person I wanted to contact when I read the Wall Street Journal’s astonishing report that the NSA has built a surveillance system capable of spying on 75 percent of all U.S. Internet traffic: Bill Binney. Binney…
Read this unbelievable story from today’s Washington Post: There’s not much lower you can go as a company, or a contractor, or a country. Weeks after winning dismissal of a case alleging that CACI International employees directed mistreatment of Abu Ghraib detainees,…
That’s basically what I argue in this op-ed I just posted at the New York Times – my first byline ever in the Gray Lady. We’ve allowed contractors to conduct our most secret and sensitive operations with virtually no oversight.…
Here it is, the 2007 ODNI slide that says , in bright color, exactly how much of the U.S. intelligence budget goes to contractors. I first reported this amazing figure in Salon on June 1, 2007, and I’ve been citing it…
My latest, in Salon. I was interviewed about this article today on Democracy Now! “The largest concentration of cyber power on the planet is the intersection of the Baltimore Parkway and Maryland Route 32,” says Michael V. Hayden, who oversaw…
The Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA): A Field Guide By Tim Shorrock INSA was originally founded in 1979 as a forum for informal discussions between the NSA and its many contractors, and had its headquarters in the National…
In the wake of the amazing stories from The Guardian and the Washington Post on the expansion of NSA surveillance, I’ve been tweeting links to stories and websites on the contractors who help the world’s largest spying agency analyze all…
Palantir Technologies and Booz Allen Hamilton, for starters. My latest in Salon on what NBC’s isn’t telling you about their oh-so-objective national security analysts. Compared to the near-hysterical reporting on Fox and the mistake-prone efforts at CNN, the handling of…
On March 28, I appeared on a segment of Huff Post Live today with NSA whistleblowers Tom Drake and Bill Binney, along with their attorney Jesselyn Radack and Ben Freeman of the Project on Government Oversight. We got deep into Thin Thread…
My latest, published today in The Nation: In the annals of national security, the Obama administration will long be remembered for its unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. Since 2009, it has employed the World War I–era Espionage Act a record six…
If you want to know why it’s important to cherish the First Amendment to the Constitution, please watch this amazing and powerful speech delivered by Thomas Drake recently at the National Press Club in Washington. It’s one of the most…
A few days ago I started getting requests on Twitter to comment on the WikiLeaks documents about TrapWire, a potentially frightening surveillance program developed by a company called Abraxas that was started by former CIA officers in 2001 and later…
Last year, I got a surprise call from a staffer on the Senate Homeland Security Committee: would I be willing to provide some input about an upcoming hearing on intelligence contractors? As the author of SPIES FOR HIRE and many…
Blackwater, the notorious mercenary company now known as “Xe,” has a new Chief Operating Officer (COO) – Charles (Chuck) Thomas, formerly of the British-owned defense and intelligence contractor BAE Systems Inc. According to today’s press release from Blackwater owner USTC…
By Tim Shorrock WASHINGTON, DC – Not long ago, as I was preparing an article on government contracting, I was given a tour of Northern Virginia by a friend who spent over a decade as an intelligence operative and another…