All the NSA Will Say About Its Alarmingly Entrepreneurial Top Spy Is That She’s Resigning
I think the real story here is not a conflict of interest but the exposure of the NSA secret policy to retain key critical employees on the government payroll by double dipping (illegal within the government pay system for the same hours worked) through laundering the double payment of government money through a private contractor to the government employee.
Does the government funnel money through contractors to pay key government employees to retain them in government service when the GS pay scale is inadequate to compensate them for that the private sector would pay so much more for?
Intelligence agencies, by the nature of their work sometimes have to do things that would otherwise be illegal. Like torture. Good people work for intelligence agencies. How does the institution get good people to do illegal things? Good people are logically moral and by their the standard of the employing government agency dedicated to value system of the institution. Maybe that criteria is why they were chosen in the first place. Is it simply a meme that the FBI tended to hire Irish Catholics as agents?
"We have to do this even if it is illegal because "good of the nation" what else can we do. If you are caught doing this you will be protected.
Is this a test question to enter classified compartmented programs:
Would you agree that the law of government employment that makes it illegal to par the same worker for two different job positions worked the same hours (double pay) was not intended to preclude the government from paying critical key employees absolutely necessary to the defense of our nation a salary equal to what their services are valued at in the private sector? Could you blame them if they chose private sector employment because it pays more?
Maybe the prior question is prefaced by this:
Was the Constitution really meant to be a suicide pact? In other words, The fundamental law the Constitution was certainly not intended to work against us if it would destroy us by complying with what it what it establishes as the law of the land.
A powerful question when it is put to a person that will (or probably has) sworn to support and defend the Constitution.
Maybe the antidote is: Now that we have established who you are we are now just haggling over price. But if what you have to do is for the greater good it is not wrong. The greater good is what this country was founded on isn't it?
Logic. Persuasion. Intelligence is good at twisting/hiding the truth as well as discovering it.
Was Teresa Shea payed by an unofficial government intelligence agency policy to funnel money to an essential employee through a private sector entity to equalize her combined government and funneled pay to what she would receive in private sector employment.
We just have to do it. People would not understand that it is being done for their own good. They would understand if we told them. Therefore we have to keep it secret. It is the right thing to do. The law was meant to protect us, not destroy us.
Don't you agree?
Did Teresa Shea agree?
Hmmmm.....
Follow the money.
But if the trail leads to the government the right thing to do is to make sure that it does not.
In some key intelligence positions a government employee knows to much about a secret program and how it is managed on the government side to even consider hiring a private contractor and paying accordingly. Unless, of course that employed private contractor individual was previously employed by the government with the appropriate security clearance. Such a person can be formally read out of a compartmentalized program when leaving the government but still be an "unofficial part of it when they become employed by a private contractor participating in it.
Private contracting companies participate in compartmented programs but their participation is under the belief of a cover story that they believe or at least do not question and ultimately know they better not question.
Is there an intended benefit of having a prior government employee who knows the real program inserted into a related private sector contractor? A win/win for the government when it comes to paying a salary. The prior government employee is still working for the government but not being paid by the government. Beholding of course to the government for sliding them into the job and not knowing who might as easily slide them out of the job is they fail to perform adequately. "You'll never work in this town again". A strong government control over a prior employee with unique skills and knowledge.
At the link news story about Teresa Shea:
"All the NSA would tell BuzzFeed is that Shea’s exit from her role was routine and long planned — “well before recent news articles” — and that she would remain employed in some capacity."
Moonlighting? The government eats its cake and pays for it too? It is still win/win. The business of Intelligence is about not losing.
"Shea is not the only high-ranking current or former NSA official coming under scrutiny for their financial dealings. Former agency director Keith Alexander was engaged in commodity trading linked to countries such as Russia and China — countries upon which the NSA spied heavily — while he was working at the agency."
Is Teresa Shea only a single example of many government employees working in key top positions in Intelligence agencies? It applies not only to top positions but there are key secret positions at all levels that simply must be government employees but must be paid more than the government can officially afford.
The NSA is afraid of having its secrets revealed. This story is one that they might be very afraid of. Consequently, what will the Agency do about it. It is not just a secret that applies to the NSA, if it is a secret (who knows?) but all government agencies performing top level classified work.
Who knows?
The matter is certainly getting a great amount of attention! It does not take a security clearance to go to this link and look at what might be secret information. It is Open Source intelligence.
What about Dowd? This at the link:
Dowd had agreed to work as many as 20 hours per work for Alexander’s firm, a deal that top NSA managers had approved. But a few days after the agreement was made public, Alexander pulled the plug on it. “While we understand we did everything right," he told Reuters, "I think there's still enough issues out there that create problems for Dr. Dowd, for NSA, for my company.”
The NSA is between a rock and a had place. It can't say it was done for the good of the country. But maybe it can if it worked for the torture problem? Probably not because torture was patriotic. This is something that about moonlighting money. Doing it for the troops is patriotic but doing it just for the money is........just plain old......
Teresa Shea is not new news. Her story was revealed 18 Sept by Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed seems to be patient zero by virtue of attribution in this outbreak of media interest to put it into terms recently popularized but seem to be equally appropriate to how a story that used to be called a "scoop" or "exclusive" spreads. The spread is the important thing. Patient zero source? Well, I suppose they get bragging rights as well as eyeball capture cred.
Picking up in the epidemiology theme: It appears that it it broke out on the 16th of October, the contagion was mild initially. Then it took off rapidly. It could be graphed using this time line link as input and expressed in terms of a correlating disease vector.
It would be interesting to overlay the geographic initiating related story reporting on a map to see where they did or did not cluster. Even more interesting to overlay the geographic points of where the story was read on the world wide web.
Subsequent note: I will leave the following paragraph in the sequence of my examination even although the paragraph following it clearly indicates that the search results of the following paragraph do not connect to actual stories in the hit link about "Teresa Shea" It is a puzzle!
It takes scanning the timeline of the Google hits for 17 pages just to get back to hits over 24 hours on "Teresa Shea". Maybe it is the week end big news skewing factor? Only one page more of hits take them back to 2 days ago. Then it takes 28 more pages of hits two days ago to take the hits back to the 3 days ago point. Buried in the Friday news cycle? Then it takes three more pages of hits in the time line to jump to 4 days ago. One more page to go to 5 days. Two more pages to go to 6 days.
Something strange in the time line results web hit results for "Teresa Shea" related to this story. After looking back a one month time line I went to one year and was still tracing back the time line to hits attributed to almost a year ago. Not possible for a story that first broke on 16 Oct. but there it is. Even within the one month time line of hits on "Teresa Shea" there are false positive results because going to the site I could not find mention of "Teresa Shea" even although the snippet in the hit return mentions the story. Maybe it is a news aggregation problem that breaks a direct time line link between the reporting news agency and the story reported meaning that at any subsequent time the news agency reported this story? I don't know, hard to follow. As elusive as Ebola false positives.
Does Google do exactly this kind of epidemiology analysis somewhere in its Lab?
Google knows all, sees all but.......how do they look at the picture?
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