Running spy sites overseas. Tracking down terrorists in the centre East. Interrogating enemy prisoners. Analyzing data from spy satellites and intercepted calls. Many of these are essential intelligence tasks that have typically been performed by authorities officials accountable to Congress as well as the American people. But that’s no longer the case.

Starting during the Clinton administration, when cleverness budgets were cut drastically and privatization of federal government solutions became about Spies for Hire: The Secret WORLD of Intelligence Outsourcing national policy, and growing dramatically in the wake of 9/11, when the CIA and various other companies were frantically seeking to hire experts and linguists, the intelligence community continues to be relying more and more on companies to perform private tasks heretofore regarded as exclusively the task of federal workers. This outsourcing of cleverness activities is currently a $50 billion-a-year business that consumes up to 70 percent from the U.S. cleverness budget. And it’s really a company that the federal government has tried hard to keep under wraps.

Sketching on interviews with key players in the intelligence-industrial complex, contractors’ annual reports and public filings with the government, and on-the-spot reporting from intelligence industry conferences and investor briefings, Spies for Hire supplies the first behind-the-scenes understand this new way of spying. Shorrock shows how corporations such as for example Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, SAIC, CACI International, and IBM have grown to be full partners with the CIA, the Country wide Security Agency (NSA), as well as the Pentagon within their most delicate foreign and local operations. He explores how this relationship has resulted in wasteful spending and how it threatens to erode the privacy protections and congressional oversight that is so important to American democracy.

Shorrock exposes the kinds of spy function the personal sector is doing, such as for example interrogating prisoners in Iraq, managing covert operations, and collaborating with the NSA to eavesdrop on Us citizens’ overseas calls and e-mails. And he casts light on the ‘shadow intelligence community’ composed of previous top intelligence officials who are now employed by companies that do that spy function, such as former CIA directors George Tenet and James Woolsey. Shorrock also traces the rise of Michael McConnell from his times as head of the NSA, to being a top executive at Booz Allen Hamilton, to time for government as the country’s chief spymaster.

From CIA covert actions to NSA eavesdropping, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo, from the Pentagon’s techno-driven war in Iraq to the coming global battles over information dominance and control of cyberspace, contractors are carrying it out all. Spies for Hire goes behind today’s headlines to spotlight how private companies are assisting the growth of a new and frightening nationwide surveillance state.