Realizing that someone might have sympathies towards people they worked with in the past, and might look forward to future employment with them, and that this might affect their decisionmaking when they're asked to do something ethically borderline, is a far cry from "Area 51".
Are you at all worried about a revolving door between the defense/security bureaucracy and industry, the way someone like Eisenhower was? Or is that a non-issue?
That's the kind of discussion I'd rather have anyway. I don't have any particular reason to believe any specific person is compromised or dishonest. But I am skeptical of the stability and reliability of an employment structure that has regular back-and-forth personnel moves between the private sector and the state-security sector.
If I had to pick specific places to start, I'll admit, ex-Facebook staff would be much lower on my list than a whole host of private-sector (tempted to say "nominally private-sector") defense contractors.
Whenever I read a discussion about "the revolving door problem" I never see any serious discussion of an alternative. Would you prefer an enormous monoculture inside of the government because they cannot hire people from the private sector? Any system that enforced a waiting period between government IT job to private sector IT job would essentially end someone's career.
I think it would be more honest and open to have the government working via people actually in the government, yes. That would be more amenable to developing some kind of oversight and some policies. When someone spends their whole career in the NSA, at least you can plan for that. When someone is moving back and forth between the NSA and Booz Allen Hamilton, I think you only complicate any accountability.
Perhaps it does raise the likelihood of defections, as this case indicates, which is one possible safety valve. But those are not supposed to be part of the planned-for strategy.
I have a similar viewpoint on using private military contractors like Blackwater, rather than regular career military staff. I think once you start outsourcing these kinds of security jobs, you are just weakening oversight, both formal oversight and any attempt to develop a culture of rule-following. Not to mention the ethical problems that come from having people who are literally mercenaries working for your armed forces.
There is actually already a lot of law and regulation that deals with what types of functions contractors working for government are allowed to do.
IMHO the government far overstepped those lines during Bush and have failed to come back under Obama, as that would mean taking on civil servant headcount to replace the contractors leaving, which is politically a hot potato.
Unfortunately the people only rarely expect and demand less service from the government; instead they want the government to stop all the stuff that they don't personally use. So of course this means that the government rarely stops with a given function entirely.
The military ended up with the same problem. The draft would not be politically feasible and you only get to go to war with "the Army you've got, not the Army you'd wished you had". What the Army did have was money, and so they farmed out everything they could make even a half-hearted case as being a "generic business function" (e.g. building security) off on private contractors.
And that's even with the Navy drawing down on its already-undermanned force to send sailors to Iraq and Afghanistan to free up even more soldiers to do Army-type things.
I am confused, I thought we were discussing "the revolving door problem." From the outset your comment seems to be concerned with the government's use of private contractors.
In the grand scheme of things, you've got three crappy choices:
1) No regulation. I.e. the moneyed corporations do whatever they want.
2) Regulation, staffed by professional bureaucrats. Less conflict of interest, but that results in a bureaucracy that has no idea what industry needs. This describes a lot of European countries before the liberalizations of the 1980's and 1990's.
3) Regulation, staffed by people from industry. Creates conflicts of interest, but you have people who actually know what they're doing.
I guess I don't really buy the characterization of #2/#3. Where I live (Denmark) is mostly still staffed by professional bureaucrats, and they are generally quite far-sighted. So I don't get the view that they are somehow out of touch. Their job is to organize a bureaucracy to serve the public needs, which includes balancing several competing interests. The system should serve everyone equally and fairly: it should enable business; it should protect the poor; it should advance science and knowledge; and it should maintain social stability. That's not easy, but one can make a go of it.
Meanwhile, I have absolutely no confidence that the people from industry "actually know what they're doing", especially in a broad sense of knowing how to balance all those interests, rather than just maximize profits. The purpose of government is not just to make Maersk or Carlsberg richer, but to make the country as a whole prosper, which includes thinking about things like income inequality and scientific progress. Do the people in industry think about those? Usually, no. I tend to think of them (perhaps unfairly) as mostly being comprised of opportunists trying to line their pockets, while telling us all that they're acting in "our" interests (i.e. the stock-market's interests). I have much more confidence in the civil service than in the idea that we should just put all the Maersk managers in charge of the country.
