{"id":9461,"date":"2011-01-17T00:00:03","date_gmt":"2011-01-16T23:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=9461"},"modified":"2011-01-11T17:18:56","modified_gmt":"2011-01-11T16:18:56","slug":"is-lockheed-martin-shadowing-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2011\/01\/is-lockheed-martin-shadowing-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Lockheed Martin Shadowing You?"},"content":{"rendered":"

How a Giant Weapons Maker Became the New Big Brother<\/em><\/p>\n

Have you noticed that Lockheed Martin, the giant weapons corporation, is shadowing you?\u00a0 No?\u00a0 Then you haven\u2019t been paying much attention.\u00a0 Let me put it this way: If you have a life, Lockheed Martin is likely a part of it.<\/p>\n

True, Lockheed Martin doesn\u2019t actually run<\/a> the U.S. government, but sometimes it seems as if it might as well.\u00a0 After all, it received<\/a> $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone, more than any company in history.\u00a0 It now does work for more than two dozen<\/a> government agencies from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency.\u00a0 It\u2019s involved in surveillance and information processing for the CIA, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, the Census Bureau, and the Postal Service.<\/p>\n

Oh, and Lockheed Martin has even helped train<\/a> those friendly Transportation Security Administration agents who pat you down at the airport. Naturally, the company produces cluster bombs<\/a>, designs nuclear weapons<\/a>, and makes the F-35 Lightning<\/a> (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\u2019s just the start of a long list. In recent times, though, it\u2019s moved beyond anything usually associated with a weapons corporation and has been virtually running its own foreign policy, doing everything from hiring interrogators<\/a> for U.S. overseas prisons (including at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq) to managing<\/a> a private intelligence network in Pakistan and helping write the Afghan constitution.<\/p>\n

A For-Profit Government-in-the-Making<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you want to feel a tad more intimidated, consider Lockheed Martin\u2019s 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 \u201cLockheed Martin tax\u201d 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<\/a> and campaign contributions<\/a> in 2009 alone.\u00a0 Not surprisingly, it\u2019s the top contributor<\/a> to the incoming House Armed Services Committee chairman, Republican Howard P. \u201cBuck\u201d McKeon of California, giving more than $50,000 in the most recent election cycle. It also tops the list<\/a> of donors to Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), the powerful chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the self-described<\/a> \u201c#1 earmarks guy in the U.S. Congress.\u201d<\/p>\n

Add to all that its 140,000 employees and its claim<\/a> to have facilities in 46 states, and the scale of its clout starts to become clearer.\u00a0 While the bulk of its influence-peddling activities may be perfectly legal, the company also has quite a track record when it comes to law-breaking: it ranks number one<\/a> on the \u201ccontractor misconduct\u201d database maintained by the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington-DC-based watchdog group.<\/p>\n

How in the world did Lockheed Martin become more than just a military contractor?\u00a0 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).\u00a0 In turn, IMS managed to win contracts<\/a> in 44 states and several foreign countries for tasks ranging from collecting parking fines and tolls to tracking down \u201cdeadbeat dads\u201d and running \u201cwelfare to work\u201d job-training programs. The result was a number of high profile failures, but hey, you can\u2019t do everything right, can you?<\/p>\n

Under pressure from Wall Street to concentrate on its core business — implements of destruction — Lockheed Martin sold<\/a> IMS in 2001.\u00a0 By then, however, it had developed a taste for non-weapons work, especially when it came to data collection and processing.\u00a0 So it turned to the federal government where it promptly racked up deals with the IRS, the Census Bureau, and the U.S. Postal Service, among other agencies.<\/p>\n

As a result, Lockheed Martin is now involved in nearly every interaction you have with the government. \u00a0Paying your taxes?\u00a0 Lockheed Martin is all over it.\u00a0 The company is even creating<\/a> a system that provides comprehensive data on every contact taxpayers have with the IRS from phone calls to face-to-face meetings.<\/p>\n

Want to stand up and be counted by the U.S. Census?\u00a0 Lockheed Martin will take care of it.\u00a0 The company runs<\/a> 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.\u00a0 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<\/a> Preston Waite, associate director of the Census, the DRIS will be a \u201cbig catch net, catching all the data that comes in no matter where it comes from.\u201d<\/p>\n

Need to get a package across the country?\u00a0 Lockheed Martin cameras will scan<\/a> bar codes and recognize addresses, so your package can be sorted \u201cwithout human intervention,\u201d as the company\u2019s web site puts it.<\/p>\n

Plan on committing a crime?\u00a0 Think twice.\u00a0 Lockheed Martin is in charge of<\/a> the FBI\u2019s Integrated Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), a database of 55 million sets of fingerprints.\u00a0 The company also produces<\/a> 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.\u00a0 As the company likes to say, it\u2019s in the business of making everyone\u2019s lives (and so personal data) an \u201copen book,\u201d which is, of course, of great benefit to us all. \u201cThanks to biometric technology,\u201d the company proclaims<\/a>, \u201cpeople don\u2019t have to worry about forgetting a password or bringing multiple forms of identification.\u00a0 Things just got a little easier.\u201d<\/p>\n

Are you a New York City resident concerned about a \u201csuspicious package\u201d finding its way onto the subway platform?\u00a0 Lockheed Martin tried to<\/a> do something about that, too, thanks to a contract from the city\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Only problem: the cameras didn\u2019t work as advertised and the MTA axed Lockheed Martin and cancelled<\/a> the $212 million contract.<\/p>\n

Collecting Intelligence on You<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s easier than ever to collect your DNA, and counting you for the census, rest assured: Lockheed Martin\u2019s interest in getting inside your private life via intelligence collection and surveillance has remained remarkably undiminished in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n

Tim Shorrock, author of the seminal book Spies for Hire<\/em>, has described Lockheed Martin as \u201cthe largest defense contractor and private intelligence force in the world.\u201d As far back as 2002, the company plunged into<\/a> the \u201cTotal Information Awareness\u201d (TIA) program that was former National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter\u2019s pet project.\u00a0 A giant database to collect telephone numbers, credit cards, and reams of other personal data from U.S. 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.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, since at least 2004, Lockheed Martin has been involved in the Pentagon\u2019s Counterintelligence Field Activity<\/a> (CIFA), which collected personal data on American citizens for storage in a database known as \u201cThreat and Local Observation Notice\u201d (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<\/em> military and intelligence expert William Arkin revealed<\/a> that, while the database was theoretically being used to track anyone suspected of terrorism, drug trafficking, or espionage, \u201csome military gumshoe or overzealous commander just has to decide someone is a \u2018threat to the military\u2019\u201d for it to be brought into play. Among the \u201cthreatening\u201d citizens actually tracked by CIFA were members of antiwar groups<\/a>. \u00a0As part of its role in CIFA, Lockheed Martin was not only monitoring intelligence, but also \u201cestimating future threats.\u201d\u00a0 (Not exactly inconvenient for a giant weapons outfit that might see antiwar activism as a threat!)<\/p>\n

Lockheed Martin is also intimately bound up in the workings of the National Security Agency, America\u2019s largest spy outfit.\u00a0 In addition to producing spy satellites for the NSA, the company is in charge of \u201cProject Groundbreaker,\u201d<\/a> a $5 billion, 10-year effort to upgrade the agency\u2019s internal telephone and computer networks.<\/p>\n

While Lockheed Martin may well be watching you at home — it\u2019s my personal nominee for twenty-first-century \u201cBig Brother\u201d — it has also been involved in questionable activities abroad that go well beyond supplying weapons to regions in conflict. \u00a0There were, of course, those interrogators it recruited for America\u2019s 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<\/a> 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 U.S. intelligence agencies allegedly could not get on their own.\u00a0 Instead, the companies turned out to be supplying targeting information used by U.S. Army Special Forces troops to locate and kill suspected Taliban leaders.<\/p>\n

The private firms involved were managed by Lockheed Martin under a $22 million contract from the U.S. Army.\u00a0 As Mark Mazetti of the New York Times<\/em> has reported<\/a>, there were just two small problems with the effort: \u201cThe American military is largely prohibited from operating in Pakistan.\u00a0 And under Pentagon rules, the army is not allowed to hire contractors for spying.\u201d\u00a0 Much as in the Iran\/Contra scandal<\/a> 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 U.S. military and intelligence activities in Pakistan.\u00a0 It should not, then, be too surprising that one of the people involved in the Lockheed-Martin-managed network was Duane \u201cDewey\u201d Claridge<\/a>, an ex-CIA man who had once been knee deep in the Iran\/Contra affair.<\/p>\n

A Twenty-First Century Big Brother<\/strong><\/p>\n

There has also been a softer side to Lockheed Martin\u2019s foreign policy efforts.\u00a0 It has involved<\/a> contracts for services that range from recruiting election monitors for Bosnia and the Ukraine and attempting to reform Liberia\u2019s justice system to providing personnel involved in drafting the Afghan constitution.\u00a0 Most of these projects have been carried out by the company\u2019s PAE unit<\/a>, the successor to a formerly independent firm, Pacific Architects and Engineers, that made its fortune building and maintaining military bases during the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n

However, the \u201csoft power\u201d side of Lockheed Martin\u2019s operations (as described on its web site) may soon diminish substantially as the company has put PAE up for sale<\/a>. \u00a0Still, the revenues garnered from these activities will undoubtedly be more than offset by a new $5 billion, multi-year contract<\/a> awarded by the U.S. Army to provide logistics support for U.S. Special Forces in dozens of countries.<\/p>\n

Consider all this but a Lockheed Martin pr\u00e9cis.\u00a0 A full accounting<\/a> of its \u201cshadow government\u201d would fill volumes.\u00a0 After all, it\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Even listing the government and quasi-governmental agencies the company has contracts with is a daunting task, but here\u2019s 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,\u00a0 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 U.S. Customs Service, the U.S. Postal Service, the Department of Transportation, the Transportation Security Agency, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.<\/p>\n

When President Eisenhower warned<\/a> 50 years ago this month of the dangers of \u201cunwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,\u201d he could never have dreamed that one for-profit weapons outfit would so fully insinuate itself into so many aspects of American life.\u00a0 Lockheed Martin has helped turn Eisenhower\u2019s dismal mid-twentieth-century vision into a for-profit military-industrial-surveillance complex fit for the twenty-first century, one in which no governmental activity is now beyond its reach.<\/p>\n

I feel safer already.<\/p>\n

____________________<\/p>\n

William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation and the author of <\/em>Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex<\/a> (Nation Books, January 2011).\u00a0 To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Hartung discusses the unsettling reach of Lockheed Martin,\u00a0click here<\/a> or, to download it to your iPod,\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2011 William D. Hartung<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How a Giant Weapons Maker Became the New Big Brother: After all, it received $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\u2019s involved in surveillance and information processing for the CIA, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, the Census Bureau, and the Postal Service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}