5 ms·
"Over the past two years, he has fielded operatives in the mountains of Pakistan and the desert badlands of Afghanistan. Since the United States military cut of
by jdp23 16y ago
"Over the past two years, he has fielded operatives in the mountains of Pakistan and the desert badlands of Afghanistan. Since the United States military cut off his funding in May, he has relied on like-minded private donors to pay his agents to continue gathering information about militant fighters, Taliban leaders and the secrets of Kabul’s ruling class."
Sounds like the government is now outsourcing paying for private intelligence and security services as well as the work. I can see why 'small government' people would like this but from the oversight and human rights perspectives it seems like a really bad idea.
- w1ntermute 16y ago> from the oversight and human rights perspectives it seems like a really bad idea. Well, it's not like the government has a very good track record wrt human rights either.
- joe_the_user 16y agoGovernment has a terrible record but with the government, there's a slim possibility of sunshine appearing sooner or later. With private industry, it's even less so.
- zokier 16y agoI'm not so sure. With private industry a good willed (and relatively wealthy) entrepreneur can just make a cheaper offer and hope to get the job, and actually try to respect human rights. With government you are kinda stuck with what you got.
- cynest 16y agoThere are several problems with this: 1. said entrepreneur is likely to be from a similar background, eg having served in the same agency, and thus being exposed to the same culture, and from this might very well be a bit desensitized to human rights abuses. 2. a cheaper, but also more ethical, solution isn't necessarily available. An organization with fewer morals has more tools available to it, such as nonempty death threats, which ultimately lower costs. A cheaper solution has to cut somewhere else to compete. 3. sometimes an organization cannot completely keep tabs on employees, especially an intelligence organization. Simply put, this is the wishful thinking wherein the thinker believes that the private sector will correct for any nastiness and then creates a fantasy to support this belief in the specific case being discussed.
- joe_the_user 16y agoThe thing that you have to realize is that the classified world is more like a club than an open market (as is the military contracting world in general). Merely having a bunch of money in way qualifies you to bid for a large military contract. Most if not absolutely all of the staff of private military contracting firms are ex-military of some sort. So you basically start out, for good or ill, with the ethos of the military and the baggage of the military. The only question is what kind of supervision will you give to more-or-less-the-same-guys. That's it. So the whole privatization theory is essentially a "let's do it faster with less supervision" equation. There's no way human rights enters into that equation.
- runjake 16y agoThe usual practice is to buy an ex-IC (intelligence community) onto your company's board or an executive position purely for his connections.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- geekinthecorner 16y agoIt's a lot easier to fire a contractor and replace them with a better contractor than it is to change an entire mode of thinking and operations within a branch of government.
- law 16y agoActually, this is a terrific idea from the oversight and human rights perspectives. Let's consider a hypothetical for-profit corporation to which the government would outsource these operations. Under a broken system (what we have now), the management of these companies would have some sort of non-business relationship with the government officials responsible for awarding the contracts. Moreover, these companies, under a broken system, would keep their books shut, offering less transparency than we already have. Now let's consider the best case: these companies compete with each other for government contracts, which the people award. This type of system would compel the companies to maintain high levels of transparency, especially with the SEC and IRS now taking interest. The reason the government is so inefficient is because they don't have any external auditing agencies. The SEC and the IRS, for example, will never put the CIA or FBI through the same rigorous audits that they would put private companies through.
- joe_the_user 16y agoYou only know about non-classified private companies. Classified private companies today have pretty much carte blanche in similar fashion to the CIA or FBI. A friend of mine was unable to resolve a labor dispute with his classified employer because he could only sue them using a lawyer with clearance (and then his manager coerced him into signing a termination agreement... using a baseball bat! Again, try and sue?) This was not a small, fly-by-night operation either but one of the largest government contractors.
- law 16y agoThat was pretty much the point of my comment. Non-classified companies get that status because of their corporate structure. The hypothetical company that I referenced would be structured such that being classified would be impossible.
- shkb 16y agoSo what would they be doing, unclassified spying? How would you advertise and award contracts for matters you want no one to know about?