Wonder what Ashcroft is up to? He is raking in the bucks

[n2doc]

Ashcroft Finds Private-Sector Niche
Ex-Attorney General Helps Firms Get Homeland Security Deals
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 12, 2006; Page D01


Former U.S. attorney general John D. Ashcroft, whose tenure saw the creation of a burgeoning homeland security industry, has emerged as the highest-ranking former Bush administration official to lobby for and invest in companies in that field.

Nearly two years after he left the Justice Department for a glass-and-marble office tower six blocks away, Ashcroft is building a lucrative consulting company helping security and other firms find business with federal agencies. Federal spending on homeland security is expected to reach nearly $60 billion in fiscal 2007, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

snip:
In all, Ashcroft's firm has 30 clients, many of which make products or technology aimed at homeland security, and about a third of which the firm has not disclosed, to protect client confidentiality. The firm also has equity stakes in eight client companies, a trend the company plans to continue as it gradually turns its focus toward venture capital. Privacy experts and civil libertarians, who battled Ashcroft's policies to enlarge surveillance powers, warned that the types of businesses promoted by the former attorney general and other lobbyists are fast becoming a de facto branch of the government, beyond traditional oversight. They question whether the security offered by these firms, some of which specialize in analysis of government and private data, is balanced by adequate protection for civil liberties.
Ashcroft's client list includes Nanodetex Corp. in New Mexico, which offers technology that can detect airborne pathogens such as anthrax or liquid explosives such as the type authorities say a group of terror suspects planned to use to blow up passenger jets between Britain and the United States. Another is Exegy Inc., a Missouri firm that does high-speed data mining.

Innova Holdings Inc. makes software that can remotely command robots and drones, or unmanned vehicles, the sort that police borders or fly above the mountains and valleys of Pakistan and Afghanistan searching for al-Qaeda cells. The company, which signed with Ashcroft's firm last week, has developed a technology for robots that will undertake a NASA repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Still another client is Dulles Research LLC, a small Northern Virginia firm that claims its technology can detect illicit networks like the group of men who went on to hijack four planes on Sept. 11, 2001. The firm says its technology detects the threat of terrorist behavior by analyzing people's actions -- not their identities, an effort to safeguard individuals' privacy.

"What network-analysis technology does is not look at the individual, but rather at the gravity and weight of relationships between people who appear to be doing something harmful to our interests or in opposition to the law," said Drew Eginton, Dulles Research's founder and chief executive.

more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/11/AR2006081101846.html

[thepurpose]

1. What's John's background in security. Does he know any thing other then

the Senate and WH phone numbers?

[Buzz Clik]

3. He slashed domestic security funding prior to 9/11

He made it clear with his statements that domestic security was a low priority.

Doesn't that qualify him as an expert?

[thepurpose]

5. The article gives the impression he had some thing to do with the creating

HLS without explaining what he did other than he happen to be AG at the time.

[Octafish]

9. He knew not to fly commercial in summer 2001.

Ashcroft Flying High

CBS News. WASHINGTON, July 26, 2001

Fishing rod in hand, Attorney General John Ashcroft left on a weekend trip to Missouri Thursday afternoon aboard a chartered government jet, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart.

In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.

"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines," an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.

A senior official at the CIA said he was unaware of specific threats against any Cabinet member, and Ashcroft himself, in a speech in California, seemed unsure of the nature of the threat.

"I don't do threat assessments myself and I rely on those whose responsibility it is in the law enforcement community, particularly the FBI. And I try to stay within the guidelines that they've suggested I should stay within for those purposes," Ashcroft said.

CONTINUED...

Traitor and Warmonger

[NMDemDist2]

2. IIRC he was named to the Home Depot Board of Directors

which is when I stopped shopping there

and his new "consulting" biz is just a way to send bribes to his old buddies in government

[ikojo]

4. Is this what Jesus would do?

[The Backlash Cometh]

6. These Repubs have a sweet deal.

Take a public sector job, breach your fiduciary responsibility to the public, then get rewarded by the cronies in the private sector.

Damn, I wish that I were as unscrupulous. I'll have to work on it.

[reichstag911]

7. "Let the Eagles Wallow" nt

[FUGW]

8. Don't worry the richer they get the safer we all are, NOT.

[Joe Fields]

10. And such a fine "Christian" man, too.

[UTUSN]

11. "Let the EEEE-gle SOOAAARRR!!1" n/t