"2013 Black Budget: This is a classified budget in which over 6 percent of its money, $52.6 billion, was dedicated to the IC, including funding for 107,035 IC employees-more than a fifth I whom, some 21,800 people, were full-time contractors. And that number doesn't even include the tens of thousands more emloyed by companies that have signed contracts (or subcontracts, or sub-subcontracts) with the agencies for a specific service or project. Those contractors are never counted by the government even in the Black Budget, because to add their ranks to the contracting total would make one disturbing fact extraordinarily clear: the work of American Intelligence is done as frequently by private employees as it is by government servants. The real advantage for government officials is the conflict 'interest inherent in the budgeting process itself. IC directors ask congress for money to rent contract workers from private companies, congresspeople approve that money, and then those IC directors and congresspeople are rewarded, after they retire from office, 'being given high-paying positions and consultancies with the very companies they've just enriched. From the vantage of the corporate boardroom, contracting functions as governmentally assitted corruption. It's America's most legal and convenient method transferring public money to the private purse." - Edward Snowden

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"To pose arbitrarily some goal, to propose a direction for technique is to deny technique and divest it of its character and strength." - Jacques Ellul, Technological Society, 1964