In his position as a director of the NSA, which he held from March 1999 to April 2005, General Michael Hayden launched the Trailblazer program in 2000. Why?
While reading smitheus' diary about NSA and Thinthread I started to wonder how and why Michael Hayden and the NSA would scrap the apparently well designed efficient Thinthread program and replace it with a multi tiered cumbersome one costing billions.
Being suspicious of all things republican, I figured Hayden must have had a vested interest in the company or companies that had developed it so I decided to do a quick search to see if he was/is a stockholder or might have any other affiliation with said companies.
In a search limited to two queries I found the following companies and their incestuous relationships to one another, the regime currently bankrupting our country, corrupting the WH and the Constitution and enriching yet again their cronies. The only thing I found, so far, about Hayden is that he is another Bush sycophant enabler.
As listed in this diary all persons, companies, affiliates, partners and teammates named are part of yet another conspiracy to defraud American taxpayers.
2001/2002 Conquest Inc. received two contracts worth $197 million for systems engineering. Partners Northrop Grumman (and their subsidiary TRW), General Dynamics and Raytheon among others.
Scumbags, Inc.
Former officials, consultants, or shareholders of Northrop Grumman now hold posts in the Bush administration, ensuring that the company's interests are not overlooked for lucrative contracts in the "war on terrorism", including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Vice-Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby, Pentagon Comptroller Dov Zakheim, and Sean O'Keefe, director of NASA.
Secretary of the Navy, Gordon England, is a former General Dynamics executive, Former Secretary of State Colin Powell had an interest in the company as well. He received $1 million of stock in General Dynamics.
Raytheon's more secretive subsidiaries is E-Systems, whose major clients have historically been the CIA and other spy agencies like the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office.
2002 Science Applications International Corp. received a $280 million contract for a "technology demonstration platform" which is "a risk-reduction activity". *Bechtel* is one of their subsidiaries.
Spies who hate us
Today two of SAIC's most valuable products are: TeraText and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) data-mining programs that are used by intelligence agencies to sift the immense volumes of data they now collect by monitoring phone calls, faxes, e-mails, and other types of electronic communications.
But SAIC's biggest source of income is surveillance especially for the United States spy agencies: it is reportedly the largest recipient of contracts from the National Security Agency (NSA) and one of the top five contractors to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Some 5,000 employees (or one in eight employees) have security clearances. Beyster himself has one of the highest top-secret clearances of any civilian in the country. "We are a stealth company," Keith Nightingale, a former Army special ops officer, told a magazine named Business 2.0. "We're everywhere, but almost never seen."
Total public value of the contracts to these two companies $477 million. The value of classified work estimates range in the billions dollars especially when cost over runs are eventually factored into the final analysis.
In 2005
Trailblazer is viewed as the solution to many of NSA's challenges, "but the *implementation of those solutions is three to five years away*, and confusion still exists at NSA as to what will actually be provided by that program."
The problems with Trailblazer have been compounded by difficulties with another NSA program, Groundbreaker, a $2 billion effort to modernize and outsource the agency's electronics infrastructure, including computers, software and networks. A CSC-led team in 2001 won the Groundbreaker contract. As part of the contract *about 1,000 NSA employees became employees of CSC or one of its teammates*.
WTF? I would reeeealllly like it if someone could explain that last sentence to me.
Oh...and they are fucking up this bad and the program is 3 to 5 years away from completion I can hardly wait to see how bad it's gonna get when it's done.
Groundbreaker and Trailblazer were supposed to work together, but both are believed to be behind schedule and over budget, Aid said. "You cannot do one without the other," he said.
Apparently they cannot do either.
Haydens testimony in April 2005, acknowledged that NSA initially had mishandled the Trailblazer contract.
Yep, NSA mishandled the contract and the fact that Hayden was the director who launched this program says nothing about his culpability. The companies making billions off the contracts and us, have nothing to with their own problems.
2001 *Computer Sciences Corp.* -led team gets $2 billion contract for Groundbreaker.
Sold *DynCorp* in 2005. Also works with *Bechtel*
Outsourced info tech not the cash
Under Groundbreaker, the NSA will outsource much of its nonmission-related information technology support in four areas: networks, telephony, enterprise management and distributed computing.
On Aug. 1, the day after the NSA announced it was awarding the $2 billion-plus contract to CSC, the company's stock dropped 7.1 percent to $33.54 per share.
Investors had been expecting the contract to be worth $5 billion.
"My sense is that this thing is going to get a lot bigger before it all ends," said Tom Meagher, vice president of equity research with BB&T Capital Markets, Richmond, Va. "I see it more like NMCI, [growing to] $7 billion to $10 billion."
And thats what it's all about, more for the haves who steal from the rest of us.
The apparent incompetence would be laughable if it didn't involve theft of billions of taxpayers dollars for a useless program to the benefit of the few involved AND if it didn't seem just a bit too contrived to be real incompetence. If all this hadn't made me so fucking angry I would have dug deeper but this was all I could stand without throwing something at the monitor. Maybe some one with more tech knowledge and ability to connect the dots who has a stronger stomach will continue the search.