DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Giant weapons maker becomes Big Brother
By William D Hartung
Have you noticed that Lockheed Martin, the giant weapons corporation, is
shadowing you? No? Then you haven't been paying much attention. Let me put it
this way: If you have a life, Lockheed Martin is likely a part of it.
True, Lockheed Martin doesn't actually run the United States government, but
sometimes it seems as if it might as well. After all, it received US$36 billion
in government contracts in 2008 alone, more than any company in history. It now
does work for more than two dozen government agencies from the Department of
Defense and the Department of Energy to the Department of
Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency.
It's involved in surveillance and information processing for the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the
Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Security Agency (NSA), the
Pentagon, the Census Bureau, and the Postal Service.
Oh, and Lockheed Martin has even helped train those friendly Transportation
Security Administration agents who pat you down at the airport. Naturally, the
company produces cluster bombs, designs nuclear weapons, and makes the F-35
Lightning (an overpriced, behind-schedule, underperforming combat aircraft that
is slated to be bought by customers in more than a dozen countries) - and when
it comes to weaponry, that's just the start of a long list.
In recent times, though, it's moved beyond anything usually associated with a
weapons corporation and has been virtually running its own foreign policy,
doing everything from hiring interrogators for US overseas prisons (including
at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq) to managing a private
intelligence network in Pakistan and helping write the Afghan constitution.
A for-profit government-in-the-making
If you want to feel a tad more intimidated, consider Lockheed Martin's sheer
size for a moment. After all, the company receives one of every 14 dollars
doled out by the Pentagon. In fact, its government contracts, thought about
another way, amount to a "Lockheed Martin tax" of $260 per taxpaying household
in the United States, and no weapons contractor has more power or money to
wield to defend its turf.
It spent $12 million on congressional lobbying and campaign contributions in
2009 alone. Not surprisingly, it's the top contributor to the incoming House
Armed Services Committee chairman, Republican Howard P "Buck" McKeon of
California, giving more than $50,000 in the most recent election cycle. It also
tops the list of donors to Democratic Senator Daniel Inouye, the powerful chair
of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the self-described "number one
earmarks guy in the US Congress".
Add to all that its 140,000 employees and its claim to have facilities in 46
states, and the scale of its clout starts to become clearer. While the bulk of
its influence-peddling activities may be perfectly legal, the company also has
quite a track record when it comes skirting with the law: it ranks number one
on the "contractor misconduct" database maintained by the Project on Government
Oversight, a Washington DC-based watchdog group.
How in the world did Lockheed Martin become more than just a military
contractor? Its first significant foray outside the world of weaponry came in
the early 1990s when plain old Lockheed (not yet merged with Martin Marietta)
bought Datacom Inc, a company specializing in providing services for state and
city governments, and turned it into the foundation for a new business unit
called Lockheed Information Management Services (IMS).
In turn, IMS managed to win contracts in 44 states and several foreign
countries for tasks ranging from collecting parking fines and tolls to tracking
down "deadbeat dads" and running "welfare to work" job-training programs. The
result was a number of high-profile failures, but hey, you can't do everything
right, can you?
Under pressure from Wall Street to concentrate on its core business -
implements of destruction - Lockheed Martin sold IMS in 2001. By then, however,
it had developed a taste for non-weapons work, especially when it came to data
collection and processing. So it turned to the federal government where it
promptly racked up deals with the IRS, the Census Bureau and the US Postal
Service, among other agencies.
As a result, Lockheed Martin is now involved in nearly every interaction you
have with the government. Paying your taxes? Lockheed Martin is all over it.
The company is even creating a system that provides comprehensive data on every
contact taxpayers have with the IRS from phone calls to face-to-face meetings.
Want to stand up and be counted by the US Census? Lockheed Martin will take
care of it. The company runs three centers - in Baltimore, Phoenix and
Jeffersonville, Indiana - that processed up to 18 tractor-trailers full of mail
per day at the height of the 2010 census count. For $500 million it is
developing the Decennial Response Information Service (DRIS), which will
collect and analyze information gathered from any source, from phone calls or
the Internet to personal visits. According to Preston Waite, associate director
of the Census, the DRIS will be a "big catch net, catching all the data that
comes in no matter where it comes from".
Need to get a package across the country? Lockheed Martin cameras will scan bar
codes and recognize addresses, so your package can be sorted "without human
intervention", as the company's website puts it.
Plan on committing a crime? Think twice. Lockheed Martin is in charge of the
FBI's Integrated Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), a
database of 55 million sets of fingerprints. The company also produces
biometric identification devices that will know who you are by scanning your
iris, recognizing your face, or coming up with novel ways of collecting your
fingerprints or DNA.
As the company likes to say, it's in the business of making everyone's lives
(and so personal data) an "open book", which is of great benefit to us all.
"Thanks to biometric technology," the company proclaims, "people don't have to
worry about forgetting a password or bringing multiple forms of identification.
Things just got a little easier."
Are you a New York City resident concerned about a "suspicious package" finding
its way onto the subway platform? Lockheed Martin tried to do something about
that, too, thanks to a contract from the city's Metropolitan Transportation
Authority (MTA) to install 3,000 security cameras and motion sensors that would
spot such packages, as well as the people carrying them, and notify the
authorities. Only problem: the cameras didn't work as advertised and the MTA
axed Lockheed Martin and cancelled the $212 million contract.
Collecting intelligence on you
If it seems a little creepy to you that the same company making ballistic
missiles is also processing your taxes, accessing your fingerprints, scanning
your packages, ensuring that it's easier than ever to collect your DNA, and
counting you for the census, rest assured: Lockheed Martin's interest in
getting inside your private life via intelligence collection and surveillance
has remained remarkably undiminished in the 21st century.
Tim Shorrock, author of the seminal book Spies for Hire, has described
Lockheed Martin as "the largest defense contractor and private intelligence
force in the world". As far back as 2002, the company plunged into the "Total
Information Awareness" (TIA) program that was former National Security Advisor
Admiral John Poindexter's pet project. A giant database to collect telephone
numbers, credit cards, and reams of other personal data from US citizens in the
name of fighting terrorism, the program was de-funded by congress the following
year, but concerns remain that the National Security Agency is now running a
similar secret program.
In the meantime, since at least 2004, Lockheed Martin has been involved in the
Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which collected personal
data on American citizens for storage in a database known as "Threat and Local
Observation Notice" (and far more dramatically by the acronym TALON).
While congress shut down the domestic spying aspect of the program in 2007
(assuming, that is, that the Pentagon followed orders), CIFA itself continues
to operate.
In 2005, Washington Post military and intelligence expert William Arkin
revealed that, while the database was theoretically being used to track anyone
suspected of terrorism, drug trafficking or espionage, "some military gumshoe
or overzealous commander just has to decide someone is a 'threat to the
military' " for it to be brought into play. Among the "threatening" citizens
actually tracked by CIFA were members of anti-war groups. As part of its role
in CIFA, Lockheed Martin was not only monitoring intelligence, but also
"estimating future threats". (Not exactly inconvenient for a giant weapons
outfit that might see antiwar activism as a threat.)
Lockheed Martin is also intimately bound up in the workings of the National
Security Agency, America's largest spy outfit. In addition to producing spy
satellites for the NSA, the company is in charge of "Project Groundbreaker", a
$5 billion, 10-year effort to upgrade the agency's internal telephone and
computer networks.
While Lockheed Martin may well be watching you at home - it's my personal
nominee for 21st century "Big Brother" - it has also been involved in
questionable activities abroad that go well beyond supplying weapons to regions
in conflict.
There were those interrogators it recruited for America's offshore prison
system from Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan (and the charges of abuses that so
naturally went with them), but the real scandal the company has been embroiled
in involves overseeing an assassination program in Pakistan.
Initially, it was billed as an information-gathering operation using private
companies to generate data the CIA and other US intelligence agencies allegedly
could not get on their own. Instead, the companies turned out to be supplying
targeting information used by US Army Special Forces troops to locate and kill
suspected Taliban leaders.
The private firms involved were managed by Lockheed Martin under a $22 million
contract from the US Army. As Mark Mazetti of the New York Times has reported,
there were just two small problems with the effort: "The American military is
largely prohibited from operating in Pakistan. And under Pentagon rules, the
army is not allowed to hire contractors for spying."
Much as in the Iran/Contra scandal of the 1980s, when Oliver North set up a
network of shell companies to evade the laws against arming right-wing
paramilitaries in Nicaragua, the army used Lockheed Martin to do an end run
around rules limiting US military and intelligence activities in Pakistan. It
should not, then, be too surprising that one of the people involved in the
Lockheed-Martin-managed network was Duane "Dewey" Claridge, an ex-CIA man who
had once been knee-deep in the Iran/Contra affair.
A 21st century big brother
There has also been a softer side to Lockheed Martin's foreign policy efforts.
It has involved contracts for services that range from recruiting election
monitors for Bosnia and Ukraine and attempting to reform Liberia's justice
system to providing personnel involved in drafting the Afghan constitution.
Most of these projects have been carried out by the company's PAE unit, the
successor to a formerly independent firm, Pacific Architects and Engineers,
that made its fortune building and maintaining military bases during the
Vietnam War.
However, the "soft power" side of Lockheed Martin's operations (as described on
its website) may soon diminish substantially as the company has put PAE up for
sale. Still, the revenues garnered from these activities will undoubtedly be
more than offset by a new $5 billion, multi-year contract awarded by the US
Army to provide logistics support for US Special Forces in dozens of countries.
Consider all this but a Lockheed Martin precis. A full accounting of its
"shadow government" would fill volumes. After all, it's the number-one
contractor not only for the Pentagon, but also for the Department of Energy. It
ranks number two for the Department of State, number three for the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration, and number four for the Departments of
Justice and Housing and Urban Development.
Even listing the government and quasi-governmental agencies the company has
contracts with is a daunting task, but here's just a partial run-down: the
Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Land Management, the Census Bureau,
the Coast Guard, the Department of Defense (including the army, the navy, the
marines, the air force and the Missile Defense Agency), the Department of
Education, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the
Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the
Federal Technology Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the General
Services Administration, the Geological Survey, the Department of Homeland
Security, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Internal Revenue Service, the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Institutes of
Health, the Department of State, the Social Security Administration, the US
Customs Service, the US Postal Service, the Department of Transportation, the
Transportation Security Agency and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
When president Dwight D Eisenhower warned 50 years ago this month of the
dangers of "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex", he could never have dreamed that one for-profit
weapons outfit would so fully insinuate itself into so many aspects of American
life. Lockheed Martin has helped turn Eisenhower's dismal mid-20th century
vision into a for-profit military-industrial-surveillance complex fit for the
21st century, one in which no governmental activity is now beyond its reach.
I feel safer already.
William D Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at
the New America Foundation and the author of
Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial
Complex(Nation Books, January 2011). To listen to Timothy MacBain's
latest TomCast audio interview in which Hartung discusses the unsettling reach
of Lockheed Martin, click
here or, to download it to your iPod,
here.
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