WASHINGTON — Edward J. Snowden’s employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, has become one of the largest and most profitable corporations in the United States almost exclusively by serving a single client: the government of the United States. Over the last decade, much of the company’s growth has come from selling expertise, technology and manpower to the National Security Agency and other federal intelligence agencies. Booz Allen earned $1.3 billion, 23 percent of the company’s total revenue, from intelligence work during its most recent fiscal year. The government has sharply increased spending on high-tech intelligence gathering since 2001, and both the Bush and Obama administrations have chosen to rely on private contractors like Booz Allen for much of the resulting work. [...] As evidence of the company’s close relationship with government, the Obama administration’s chief intelligence official, James R. Clapper Jr., is a former Booz Allen executive. The official who held that post in the Bush administration, John M. McConnell, now works for Booz Allen.

The man behind the explosive leaks of the NSA's wiretapping and Internet sweeping programs came forward this weekend in an extended interview with. Whereas many pundits and intelligence observers were assuming the leaker would be a senior person deep inside the NSA upper echelons, the reality of the leaker is far more disquieting: He's a 29-year old who got all of this information from his job as an intelligence contractor A 29 year-old kid, not working for the government, had access to all of this information, has the ability to wiretap any official in the U.S. It's bad enough to have our government secretly scooping up the information of who we call, when we call them, how long those conversations are, and where we're at when we make the call, not to mention Internet activity and credit card transactions . But it's even worse to have our governmentthat extreme invasion of our privacy. And we're paying for it!

The war on terror has become little more than a gravy train for contractors. We've got the military/industrial complex, and now we have the intelligence/industrial complex. How much of this war is about keeping us safe, and how much of it is keeping this beast—deeply embedded already into our government—fed?