Comment by danso
8 years ago
Her background, according to the Guardian, is former Air Force and being fluent in Middle Eastern languages. None of that indicates that she would be especially knowledgeable of how access logs are implemented. I mean, she should have gave the NSA the benefit of the doubt given the massive clusterfuck caused by Snowden 3+ years ago. But even today, we see reports of massive data incompetence by Booz Hamilton (Snowden's employer) top secret contractors: http://gizmodo.com/top-defense-contractor-left-sensitive-pen...
The whole idea of 'top secret contractors' is wrong to begin with. You can't have people access information at that level without making them part of your culture. If you take that risk then there is a fair chance your 'top secret' is in fact 'public domain'.
It's not about whether someone is a contractor or a full time government employee. Contractors work on the government site just as much as FTE's, receive the same security training, and are indoctrinated into the same culture.
The problem is inadequate access control to classified materials. There tends to be a lot of information that people can access without a need to know, that is not rigorously tracked and locked down. This means that someone looking to steal or leak can get their hands on a lot of stuff they shouldn't without raising suspicions if they're not stupid about it.
The reason we may be seeing a number of spillage incidents with contractors is simply because there a lot of contractors working at government agencies. In IT a lot of the time contractors outnumber government people by a significant margin.
Yeah, America has not only had an over-classification problem, but it's been inundated with contractors with unnecessary top clearances. The Washington Post had a great investigation back in 2010 cataloguing the sheer size and complexity of America's security and intelligence system:
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/
Some findings:
> Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
> An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
> Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.