Silicon Valley Doesn't Just Help the Surveillance State—It Built It

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http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/silicon-valley-doesnt-just-help-the-surveillance-state-it-built-it/276700/



Some of America's biggest social media and tech companies have been denying in recent days that they were aware of the National Security Agency's recently-exposed "PRISM" and telephone monitoring programs. But these denials obscure a larger truth: The government's massive data collection and surveillance system was largely built not by professional spies or Washington bureaucrats but by Silicon Valley and private defense contractors.

So says Michael V. Hayden, the retired Air Force general who as director of the NSA from 1999 to 2006 was a primary mover behind the agency's rebirth from Cold War dinosaur into a post-9/11 terror-detection leviathan with sometimes frightening technical and legal powers.

After many false starts, that transformation was achieved largely by drafting private-sector companies that had far more technical know-how than did the NSA, and contracting with them to set up and administer the technical aspects of these surveillance programs, Hayden told National Journal in an interview Sunday.

"There isn't a phone or computer at Fort Meade [NSA headquarters] that the government owns" today, he says.


***the Information Industrial Complex: not unlike the MIC.

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1. It's largely a make-work (and profits) program for Geeks, and a very expensive one.

They weren't "drafted" - NSA and CIA contractors are better paid than any other group in America, except investment bankers and stock brokers.