David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Bill Keller Wish Snowden Had Just Followed Orders
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/06/17
Tom Friedman (Getty Images)
Edward Snowdens disclosures, the New York Times reported on Sunday, have renewed a longstanding concern: that young Internet aficionados whose skills the agencies need for counterterrorism and cyberdefense sometimes bring an anti-authority spirit that does not fit the security bureaucracy.
Agencies like the NSA and CIA -- and private contractors like Booz Allen -- cant be sure that all employees will obey the rules without interference from their own idealism. This is a basic dilemma for the warfare/surveillance state, which must hire and retain a huge pool of young talent to service the digital innards of a growing Big Brother.
With private firms scrambling to recruit workers for top-secret government contracts, the current situation was foreshadowed by novelist John Hersey in his 1960 book The Child Buyer. When the vice president of a contractor named United Lymphomilloid, in charge of materials procurement, goes shopping for a very bright ten-year-old, he explains that my duties have an extremely high national-defense rating. And he adds: When a commodity that you need falls in short supply, you have to get out and hustle. I buy brains.
Thats what Booz Allen and similar outfits do. They buy brains. And obedience.