Entry tags:
Book Musings
I am reading “Spies for Hire” by Tim Shorrock. I picked it up initially because I have occasionally been crazy about everything on spies.
Again I find that God has a sense of humor. I dislike dealing with money, so I end up as treasurer for Temple Sinai’s Sisterhood. I was glad that Lockheed-Martin, General Dynamics, and other military companies bypassed me when I interviewed with them during my senior year at LSU. So, of course I end up working for the commercial side of a company whose business is 90% governmental. And according to this book, part of the military-industrial complex. Well, the author has paraphrased it as part of the “intelligence-industrial” complex.
It’s distressing to read that a lot of the out-sourcing or privatization of spying went on during the Clinton administration. Shorrock describes it occurring just as the outsourcing came about at Entergy. The various agencies saw technology whizzing by them; they decided that they were in the intelligence business and not the technology business; they out-sourced the hardware and software part of spying to a technology company. Or rather to lots of various technology companies. Makes sense.
First: the technology companies hire your people. After all, they know the system. However, now their loyalty is to the new company and not to you. Old-timers will favor their old bosses, but gradually the old-timers leave or die off. Now you have young adults who have allegiance only to the new outsourcing company.
The utility industry is regulated, but the secrecy industry is not. Prices rise. After all, you are paying for the employees’ salary and the cut to the contract company.
If you make impossible requests, your old employees (with fear in their hearts) would have told you that they could not complete your request. The contract company is in the business of fulfilling your request—no matter how much it takes. If you change the specifications, they will remind you that the change costs money, but they will start over and attempt to fulfill the new request.
So, what’s the solution? Honestly, Entergy was probably right to out-source. They are in the electric utility business and changing from mainframe to PC to networks was eating them alive. They couldn’t keep up. I’ve only just begun this book, so I can’t give an opinion about the NSA, CIA, etc, etc. outsourcing their work to various agencies. But it doesn’t seem safe to me to inject capitalism into the "enterprise" of ensuring the safety of the country. Ensuring the future of a business isn’t the same thing as ensuring the future of the country. One must return a short-term profit; the other generational returns.
(Which reminds me…I have to pop over to NPR to hear an interview with John Le Carre’ that I missed.)
Then I noticed that the company that I work for, SAIC, had three lines of page references in the index of this book. So, of course, I had to check the book out of the library.Again I find that God has a sense of humor. I dislike dealing with money, so I end up as treasurer for Temple Sinai’s Sisterhood. I was glad that Lockheed-Martin, General Dynamics, and other military companies bypassed me when I interviewed with them during my senior year at LSU. So, of course I end up working for the commercial side of a company whose business is 90% governmental. And according to this book, part of the military-industrial complex. Well, the author has paraphrased it as part of the “intelligence-industrial” complex.
It’s distressing to read that a lot of the out-sourcing or privatization of spying went on during the Clinton administration. Shorrock describes it occurring just as the outsourcing came about at Entergy. The various agencies saw technology whizzing by them; they decided that they were in the intelligence business and not the technology business; they out-sourced the hardware and software part of spying to a technology company. Or rather to lots of various technology companies. Makes sense.
First: the technology companies hire your people. After all, they know the system. However, now their loyalty is to the new company and not to you. Old-timers will favor their old bosses, but gradually the old-timers leave or die off. Now you have young adults who have allegiance only to the new outsourcing company.
The utility industry is regulated, but the secrecy industry is not. Prices rise. After all, you are paying for the employees’ salary and the cut to the contract company.
If you make impossible requests, your old employees (with fear in their hearts) would have told you that they could not complete your request. The contract company is in the business of fulfilling your request—no matter how much it takes. If you change the specifications, they will remind you that the change costs money, but they will start over and attempt to fulfill the new request.
I have to admit that things were like this at Entergy before we were out-sourced.
So, what’s the solution? Honestly, Entergy was probably right to out-source. They are in the electric utility business and changing from mainframe to PC to networks was eating them alive. They couldn’t keep up. I’ve only just begun this book, so I can’t give an opinion about the NSA, CIA, etc, etc. outsourcing their work to various agencies. But it doesn’t seem safe to me to inject capitalism into the "enterprise" of ensuring the safety of the country. Ensuring the future of a business isn’t the same thing as ensuring the future of the country. One must return a short-term profit; the other generational returns.