Edward Snowden

Much has been written, and will be about this 29 year old government contractor. He’ll either move to a country and be granted political asylum. People and governments who hate us will embrace and protect him, until they grow bored, use up his political value for their own ends and then sideline or dump him.

I won’t comment, as so much is left to write by other people. I will comment, however, on his statement that he was making nearly $200,000 working for a U.S. government contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton and one other point. It is one of perhaps two dozen very large companies that get very lucrative “competitive bid” contracts from our government.

Snippet from “The Guardian” newspaper

If you can ignore the faux government remarks about how leaking these “secret” papers will cause irreparable damage to national security and think about what our government is doing to its citizens, you’ll be upset. So much for defending our Constitution. Do you really think that terrorists don’t know about what we’re doing, as they are do their best to evade being detected? Some are very stupid and are caught because of it. The smart ones aren’t.

Think of it this way. Our government is collecting, at an accelerating pace, every conceivable record and piece of information using a trawling technique. A fishing trawler drags a huge net behind its boat. Only the small fish slip through the nets, the rest are caught. The terrorists are the small fish; you are a big ones.

My real question is this… how much does Booz Allen Hamilton receive per year, per contractor to be able to pay $200,000 for a systems administrator? In the commercial world you can easily get one for under one-half that? May I suggest that Booz Allen Hamilton is making at least $500,000 per contractor from our government (taxpayers) to be able to pay $200,000?

If so, it’s not only an outrage that our government wants to record and store everything about its citizens lives so it can be used against us if they want to, but that they are reckless with budgets. It’s no wonder we’re spending over $40,000 a second more than our government collects so we’re forced to borrow it from the Chinese that will, by 2030 have an economy twice our size.

Where is the outrage about that?