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Comment by blisterpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

Maybe a naive question, but why do CIA and NSA hire so many contractors for such sensitive work?

Perhaps they should restrict these sensitive positions to full timers who have committed to the Agency -- i.e. they know that the organization will be watching them pretty much for the rest of their lives. Ex-agency people I've met said they have to notify the Agency whenever they travel abroad -- if they don't hear back, it's fine, but the Agency reserves the right to stop them.

The amount of damage (some might prefer to say, whistle blowing) done by contractors in recent years suggests that it's time to reexamine who gets such sensitive access.

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Capitalism at work. Commercial businesses need profit to survive and so, in general, deliver better innovative products. There is no way for CIA and NSA to compete with Google on search and web crawling, so why bother competing with them with their own subpar products?

I don't think the contractors leaked themselves. I think foreign intelligence agencies target most of them, and having multiple attack points yields more leaks than having just a single well-guarded agency. Trade-off between clamming up and remaining State-of-the-art.

Judging by your comment, you don't know very much about contracting in the IC. I'd rather you be less authoritative and leave it at "I think X" instead of "It's definitely X".

Please be more courteous with your dismissal. What shows that I don't know anything about contracting in the IC, and what really happens instead?

I also thought my answer was very careful in its assertions. What have I stated as a definite fact and why was this wrong?

Sorry, I was too harsh.

I felt it was outrageous to inject a pro-Capitalist treatise with regards to government contracting, which for me fits in two buckets:

1. Government needs some hardware (e.g. radar, missile, aircraft, watercraft). Some preapproved vendors who have already developed relationships and comply with extensive contracting requirements bid on a project. One or more win. Some vendors that win are wildly underqualified and, especially in the realm of IT, make an inferior product at 10x the price. One of the government stakeholders works for that contractor after a few years.

2. Government for political reasons can't hire or pay enough employees, so they pay a consultancy to provide employees for them.

Neither seems like an efficient capitalist action. The first due to its significant barriers to entry that forms oligopoly, and the second because it's just hiding government employment within a contract.

I don't know of a good way to improve #1, but for it to be considered a testament to the efficiency of capitalism is absurd to me.

Political bullshit has made it so hard to hire and fire government employees at realistic wages that the government couldn't function without them.

Contractors must go through the same security clearance adjudication process as gov employees. They must work in NSA accredited SCIFs at the facility or may even work at an Agency building. Additionally, the executives at a contractor need to go through a security review process as well (I do not know much about the extent of this).

Your concern absolutely makes sense when thinking of "contractors" in the private sector (in the sense that one may think security may be more lax or that they may cut corners to save money, but in the IC it is usually very close to being an Agency employee, just that contracts are used for specific needs for budgeting / forecasting purposes.

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