So, apparently, it was a hell of a place to work:
Look at those nattily dressed, incredibly diverse, confident, walking bureaucrats there. Who wouldn't want to join them in taking the Fourth Amendment and wiping their asses with it before setting it on fire and inhaling the smoke like their shit smell is the finest opium?
NSA surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden was employed, briefly, by one of Fortune magazine's top 100 best companies to work for. Yes, for Booz Allen Hamilton, the technology consulting corporation that makes billions from the U.S. government by, among other things, harvesting data about like a mad field hand with a dull scythe, analyzing it, and providing it to the government on a silver platter (or it had better be at those prices, right? High five!).
That's right. It's not spooks in a basement bunker in Nowhere Mountain, Virginia who are investigating the internet habits of (supposedly) foreigners and the phone records of everybody. It's white collar drones at private firms like Booz Allen, one of Working Mother magazine's best companies for, well, yeah. And one of Diversity, Inc's 50 most diverse companies in 2011 and 2012.
Essentially, Booz Allen would be a wet dream of a workplace for us liberals. Except, you know, for the whole spying on everyone from 69 secret locations (in addition to a ton of other military support operations for which it is rewarded handsomely).
According to NPR, Edward Snowden was one of "hundreds of thousands" of people, most in private industry, with the top secret clearance to look at whether or not we "Liked" My Little Pony on Facebook. Yessirree, man. Eddie, the creepy IT guy, got to look over your phone records and see what patterns emerged, like, oh, hey, Lizzie called Victoria's Secret a bunch of times. Gotta say: that doesn't seem like a very secure approach to, you know, security. Even Chuckles the Todd on MSNBC asks, "[W]hy is much of our national security infrastructure being outsourced to private companies?"
That one and more questions answered tomorrow.
