America paid about $16 billion to five companies last year for 80% of our contracted domestic and international surveillance: Leidos Holdings, CSRA Inc., SAIC, CACI International, and Booz Allen Hamilton, recently in the news following an employee arrest on cyberweapons theft charges.

Tim Shorrock at The Nation did the legwork to to come up with the numbers.

"The problem with just five companies providing the lion's share of contractors is that the client, the U.S. government, won't have much alternative when a company screws up," says David Isenberg, the author of Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq. […] "There comes a point when the marketplace is so concentrated that the service provider simply becomes too big to fail, no matter how lousy their performance," says Isenberg, who closely monitors the privatization of national-security work. "If that makes you think of the financial-services industry, well, that's exactly what I'm talking about."

• 5 Corporations Now Dominate Our Privatized Intelligence Industry (The Nation)

Image: Thomas Tolkein