Dude you’re getting a breach

So apparently Fast Eddie Snowden had access to classified material even as a Dell contractor, before joining Booz Allen. This is, politely put, an utter shitshow. It also points up a lot about how modern trends in business and governance have combined to make things worse.

See, there are some things that rightfully ought not be staffed out, and you would think national security would be at the top of the list.  But it has been an article of faith among the chattering classes of the Village that the private sector can always do everything better than the government. Consequently, as the government moved into things that didn’t exist in the 1970s, the odds are ever greater that those functions will be handled by contracts with private-sector employers.  Result?  Contractors and sub-contractors in positions of rather vital importance. And since government can’t pay like the private sector – because that would be a wasteful use of taxpayer dollars!!* – the sorts of people who can do these things are going to be in the private sector anyway, so you’re more or less obligated to contract out to get this done anyway.

And here’s the problem: I’ve been on the contract game. Hell, I was a government subcontractor. And the organization did not exactly inspire in me tons of loyalty – certainly not to the contracting or subcontracting companies. This is the price of treating labor as a fungible and disposable commodity – the workers will in turn treat the jobs as fungible and disposable.   That’s half the appeal of contracting, after all – you’ve got no ties to the company, you’ve got nothing invested with them, and the more you bounce around, the less incentive you have to take care of any particular job – because the next one’s around the corner.

Snowden, then, is the inevitable result of the modern mania for outsourcing.  Somewhere along the way, the powers that be decided that workers just weren’t that critical to the system.  Better to always be able to cut and run, to bring in somebody cheaper, to hit the eject button without even needing a reason.  Staff jobs disappear, population increases, more and more employers decide to go that route, and pretty soon we’re all out there making a virtue of necessity and talking about freedom and personal agency and taking control of Brand You, because that’s all that’s out there.  Add “recruiter” to “financial planner” on the platter of things you do in addition to your black-letter job responsibilities.

So there you go.  Throw our brave new world of work onto the pile with our terrorism-panic and insistence that the government spare no effort to protect us**, and you have an utterly inevitable and predictable situation – the entire Snowden affair, stem to stern, was practically predestined thirty years ago.

 

 

* Here’s the question: no matter how gold-plated the benefits, is it really cheaper to pay a staff employee than to pay a contracting company to pimp a contractor to you? I don’t use the word pimp idly – because face it, in contracting, you’re paying to dispose of the staff once the job’s done.

** The real danger for Snowden is that all this NSA stuff turns out to be completely legal, which given the exhaustive reach of the USA-PATRIOT act of 2001, its various re-authorizations, the laws enabling the FISA courts and the like – well, it’s not unthinkable.  Short of going all the way to the Supreme Court, which is mostly filled out with people appointed in the War On Terror era or those highly sympathetic to it anyway, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that for all the whistleblowing, no actual laws were broken.  If so, that puts our little Ed in a much more precarious spot legally.  Then again, being a guest of Putinist Russia might be its own punishment at this point.  It might not hurt for him to leak those girlfriend pics again.

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