A longtime high-level Pentagon intelligence analyst walked Robert Draper of the New Republic through the reasons why the government does a lousy job producing military intelligence tools:
An ambitious Army intelligence commander might want to impress his superiors by coming up with some new way of graphing intel. The procurers at the Pentagon go through the motions of ordering up the visionary new graphing software, secure in the knowledge that the commander will soon be promoted and out of their hair. The idea gets kicked over to some government agency’s development shop, which issues a design contract to one of the big defense contractors within the military-industrial complex that has developed a tight relationship with the Pentagon and has “no incentive to deliver something on time and on cost,” said the veteran analyst. At no point would anyone second-guess the ambitious commander. The agency bureaucrats were, he told me, “amateurs, essentially, who are incentivized to make their customers, the government requester, happy — to the point where they engineer things that won’t work. They accept everything as a requirement, and they judge every requirement to be equal. You say to them, ‘I want something with a bell that’ll go off whenever something interesting comes up.’ So they spent five million dollars on that, and no one asks, ‘Why the $#@! would you want a bell?’”
Really, that sounds like most IT projects in industry, too.
Here is how William Binney, a former intelligence official turned whistle-blower puts it:
“We were coming into conflict with what I refer to as ‘feasting’ by the corporations that were leeches on the side of NSA and other agencies of the government, the ‘military industrial happiness management complex’. They were keeping each other happy: officials would retire from government, go to work for those corporations, the corporations would send people in to manage the programs, they’d get the contracts back and they’d feed some more.
It’s a circle, it just keeps going round. The entire leadership at NSA was focused this way and they wanted no creativity, no innovation, no problem solved, “keep the problem going so the money keeps flowing” that was their vision statement, I just didn’t realize it.
They didn’t want success, because that means you solved the problem, which they need to ask for more money to feed the corporations.”
Paraphrased from his presentation at HOPE 2012.
That’s the same conference where private investigator Steven Rambam did Privacy, A Postmortem.
And Privacy is Dead – Get Over It before that in 2010.