"Cybersecurity stings expert it has rewarded; Questions raised over companies’ access to secrets" by David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth | New York Times, June 16, 2013
WASHINGTON — When the United Arab Emirates wanted to create its own version of the National Security Agency, it turned to Booz Allen Hamilton to replicate the world’s largest and most powerful spy agency in the sands of Abu Dhabi.
A subsidiary of the Carlyle Group.
It was a natural choice: The chief architect of Booz Allen’s cyberstrategy is J. Michael McConnell, who once led the NSA and pushed the United States into a new era of big data espionage. It was McConnell who won the blessing of the US intelligence agencies to bolster the Persian Gulf sheikdom, which helps track the Iranians.
“They are teaching everything,” one Arab official familiar with the effort said. “Data mining, Web surveillance, all sorts of digital intelligence collection.”
Yet as Booz Allen profits handsomely from its worldwide expansion, McConnell and other executives of the government contractor — which sells itself as the gold standard in protecting classified computer systems and boasts that half its 25,000 employees have Top Secret clearances — have a lot of questions to answer.
Among the questions: Why did Booz Allen assign a 29-year-old with scant experience to a sensitive NSA site in Hawaii, where he was left loosely supervised as he downloaded highly classified documents about the government’s monitoring of Internet and telephone communications, apparently loading them onto a portable memory stick barred by the agency?
The results could be disastrous for a company that until a week ago had one of the best business plans in Washington, with more than half its $5.8 billion in annual revenue coming from the military and the intelligence agencies....
McConnell himself has been among the most vocal in warning of this risk.
“The defense industrial base needs to address security,” he said in an interview with The New York Times last year, months before Booz Allen hired Edward J. Snowden, its young systems administrator who has admitted to leaking documents describing secret NSA programs. “It should be a condition for contracts. You cannot be competitive in the cyber era if you don’t have a higher level of security.”
Booz Allen is saying little about Snowden’s actions or the questions they have raised about its practices. McConnell, once among the most accessible intelligence officials in Washington, declined to be interviewed for this article....
He's made his millions.
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