Trust the professionals. What could go wrong?
by digby
When the United Arab Emirates wanted to create its own version of the National Security Agency, it turned to Booz Allen Hamilton to replicate the world’s largest and most powerful spy agency in the sands of Abu Dhabi.
It was a natural choice: The chief architect of Booz Allen’s cyberstrategy is Mike McConnell, who once led the N.S.A. and pushed the United States into a new era of big data espionage. It was Mr. McConnell who won the blessing of the American intelligence agencies to bolster the Persian Gulf sheikdom, which helps track the Iranians.
“They are teaching everything,” one Arab official familiar with the effort said. “Data mining, Web surveillance, all sorts of digital intelligence collection.”
Yet as Booz Allen profits handsomely from its worldwide expansion, Mr. McConnell and other executives of the government contractor — which sells itself as the gold standard in protecting classified computer systems and boasts that half its 25,000 employees have Top Secret clearances — have a lot of questions to answer.
Don’t worry your pretty little heads about any of that. The professionals are taking care of everything for you. No reason not to trust them implicitly with your secrets. They would never let anything slip …
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