Weak Government Security Sometimes stories come up in the news that really make one think. Recently one story which I read suggested to me that there are things going on between the United States and Saudi Arabia which are not common knowledge and some of them might even be top secret for all we know. Apparently, according to the article which was dated December 12, 2019 and was from Reuters news service, NSA had hackers working for them, which is not unusual, and somehow these hackers were put to work to help Saudi Arabia build a secret surveillance center. These were hackers with a top-secret security clearance, according to the article. The article is pretty clear and asking the question which was to paraphrase what was said, how do you keep your top-secret security clearance in check while working for a foreign spy service? Well, it is obvious to me if we were the ones who built the surveillance center for them, we would know all about it and perhaps that is the reason we loaned our people to the Saudis. Maybe Israel asked us to do this so they could keep their finger on the pulse of the Arab countries? After all we are their best ally. Another question comes to mind which is who are the Saudis eavesdropping on, could some of the people be our allies? If this is the case, we really shouldn’t have gotten involved. When our computer hackers help a foreign country while they are observing us doing it, don’t they learn a lot of secrets? Why would we let anybody or any country observe us doing this? Apparently, this was started in 2010 and ran until 2016. The operation was run by a company which was a defense contractor for the NSA. The company shuttled these computer hackers between the NSA and back to the company for other assignments. This seems to mean there were people who knew many NSA secrets and yet were not actually NSA employees, but employees of the contractor. If the NSA is so worried about keeping their secrets, why would they ever allow a set up like this? It certainly seems dangerous to the United States to say the least. Apparently while this is extremely distasteful and could be dangerous, it is not illegal to have revolving door employees allowed to work on top secret projects, or why would they have top-secret clearances? We worry about spying and yet we allow something like this to take place. What is wrong with us? Are the people that run these things stupid, corrupt or just incapable of noticing the obvious problem here? It was also said some of these employees had these top NSA clearances and yet never worked for the NSA. Is the government just passing out top-secret clearance is the anybody? The article goes on to say having these clearances doesn’t mean these employees are subject to scrutiny by the NSA. This seems to make matters even worse. While I was assuming we had a special deal with Saudi Arabia, it looks like I was wrong because apparently these contractors can farm these people out to anywhere that wants to hire the contractor. The article goes on to say a former NSA official was asked about this and he said former NSA employees have to report to the NSA about any work for a foreign government within two years of leaving the agency. I don’t know what this really means. Does it mean the people that were given these NSA clearances had to do that even though they didn’t seem to be permanent employees and were working for a contractor? I remember when I was in the military and for a while worked for the intelligence section. They would take documents that were no longer needed and burn them, then take the ashes down to the beach and mixed them with sand and bury them. These people if around today would never believe what was going on. Just saying someone who did some work for the NSA is responsible to keep the secrets when they are contract employees seems ridiculous to me. The United States has a huge government and there have been many security breaches over the years but one would think they would be corrected, but I am not so sure about that. I understand sometimes a security breach happens from a person which seems to be very unlikely to do it, but there always seems to be a breach of security protocol involved. I remember a Chinese-American scientist who worked for thirty years for one of our government agencies on secret projects and suddenly he stole a lot of data and went to China before that was discovered. One of the problems is having family outside of the United States who can be threatened by other people or governments, if you don’t perform a certain espionage act. Still he managed to smuggle out a thumb drive with the data on it when everybody leaving their facility should have been searched. There are also those people who are totally incompetent and violate rules. One of these people worked for the Veterans Administration and decided to take home a laptop with the names addresses and delicate information of hundreds of thousands of veterans on it. He took the subway and forgot to take the laptop with him when he got off. How did he get out of the building carrying the laptop? I know the Veterans Administration is not a top-secret organization but still, you would’ve thought somebody would’ve questioned him about what he was doing when he left the building. There is so much espionage going on it would boggle your mind. Brian Patrick Regan was a former master sergeant in the United States Air Force. Apparently, he liked money better than being loyal to his country. He worked in the National Reconnaissance Office as a signal intelligence specialist. In 1999 he decided to cash in and downloaded over 15,000 pages from the office files. He wrote a letter to Saddam Hussein offering to sell him the material for $13,000,000, and also made the same offer to the leaders in Libya and China. In 2001 he was arrested by the FBI at Dulles International Airport as he was getting ready to fly to Zürich. When they arrested him, he was carrying classified documents and contact information for several foreign embassies for countries which we did not have the best relations with. It is bad enough when a spy manages to somehow circumvent our security, but there is no excuse for weak security and irrationally weak protection.
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