Jim Brown’s Weekly Column: Congress

Thursday, June 20th, 2013
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

CONGRESS — THE REAL CULPRIT IN SECURITY LEAK PROBE!

In the 2014 congressional elections, one major issue should be front and center: Incumbents are failing to do their job. We send them to Washington to oversee this massive federal bureaucracy, and to ensure that it is being run properly. We expect them to pass laws, and then to provide proper monitoring to see that these laws are carried out. The failure of Congress to properly monitor the executive branch has resulted in the wholesale exposure of the entire surveillance system that is supposed to be overseen by the NSA. Some say that this Congressional dereliction of duty has caused an irreparable breech in our national security.

Every single member of congress should be livid at the incompetence of those running the NSA. This top secret federal agency, that is responsible for gathering and securing the reams of data that will protect us from the bad guys, has proven to be inept at running its own operation. Why would they turn over the keys of our most sensitive data to a 29-year-old high school dropout? That’s the real scandal. The maladroit and ineffectual handling of America’s secrets makes us wonder if our federal spy network is being run by the Keystone Cops!

Edward Snowden, the “whistleblower” at the center of this firestorm, dropped out of high school, was forced to leave the military, and developed his “top secret” information access wizardry by taking a few computer classes at a community college in an effort to get a high school diploma, which he failed to get. He couldn’t complete the courses. So he gets a job at the NSA as a security guard. The next thing you know, he’s hired by one of the NSA’s big private contractors, Booz Allen Hamilton, which receives hundreds of millions of dollars from the NSA. In fact, over 70% of the national intelligence budget is now spent on private companies such as Booz Allen, Northrop Grumman and the Boeing subsidiary Narus.

So this high school dropout is paid $200,000 a year by a private contractor and given an open door to a top-secret national security database. He was not prepped by the FBI, the CIA, or the State Department. He’s just an IT guy and not a very good one at that. Simply put, he had no background in anything related to national security. Yet working for a private contractor, with apparently little or no oversight by the NSA, Snowden is allowed to spread America’s intelligence gathering system to the entire world. Continue Reading…………..