The Guardian understands that a total of 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors with top secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases.
Currently, according to the US government, there are about 1.5 million soldiers, civilians, and private contractors with Top Secret clearances; overall that would suggest that 25,000 have doctorates, of which our sample represents about 6percentt.
First, it is dangerous to have half a million people — the number of private contractors holding top-secret security clearances — peering into the lives of their fellow citizens.
While a prime contractor's top person may not be aware of the details Ms. Johnson needs to discuss, a lower-level manager may lack answers to broader questions, such as, "What does the contract require?" Sometimes, the lower-level employees who see Ms. Johnson come to think of her as "Jessica," their peer, instead of as "Ms. Johnson," the owner of a business.
Half a million civilian contractors hold top-secret security clearance, and, existing outside the direct chain of command of the agencies employing them, they are – just like Blackwater – subject to a minimum amount of oversight.
I think it's probably completely lawless if the top contractors are not thoroughly checking".
Halliburton soared from 73rd to 18th on the Pentagon's list of top contractors.
Finmeccanica, more than 30 percent state-owned, is one of the top contractors for the Pentagon as well as for the armed forces of many European countries.
The newspaper, which branded DfID's top contractors as "poverty barons", honed in on consultancies such as Adam Smith International (ASI), which grew out of the Adam Smith Institute, a rightwing thinktank.
The group's latest push on arms sales began last October, when it released an index indicating that 85 of 129 top contractors had not made enough information public to tell if they had serious anticorruption systems.
