Have you noticed any­thing miss­ing in the polit­i­cal dis­course about the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Administration’s unprece­dent­ed mass sur­veil­lance? There’s cer­tain­ly been a robust dis­cus­sion about the bal­ance between secu­ri­ty and lib­er­ty, and there’s at least been some con­ver­sa­tion about the intel­li­gence community’s poten­tial crim­i­nal­i­ty and con­sti­tu­tion­al vio­la­tions. But there have only been veiled, indi­rect ref­er­ences to how cash undoubt­ed­ly tilts the debate against those who chal­lenge the nation­al secu­ri­ty state.

When corporations spend big money on campaign contributions, they aren’t just buying votes for specific contracts. They are also implicitly pressuring politicians to rhetorically push the discourse in a pro-surveillance, anti-civil liberties direction.

Those indi­rect ref­er­ences have come in sto­ries about Booz Allen Hamil­ton, the secu­ri­ty con­trac­tor that employed Edward Snow­den. CNN Mon­ey notes that 99 per­cent of the firm’s multi­bil­lion-dol­lar annu­al rev­enues now come from the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. Those rev­enues are part of a larg­er and grow­ing eco­nom­ic sec­tor with­in the mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex — a sec­tor that, accord­ing to author Tim Shorrock, is ​“a $56 bil­lion-a-year industry.”

For the most part, this is where the polit­i­cal dis­course about mon­ey stops. We are told that there are high-mind­ed, prin­ci­pled debates about secu­ri­ty. We are also told of this mas­sive­ly prof­itable pri­vate indus­try mak­ing bil­lions a year from the pol­i­cy deci­sions that emerge from such a debate. Yet, few in the Wash­ing­ton press corps are will­ing to men­tion that politi­cians’ attacks on sur­veil­lance crit­ics may have noth­ing to do with prin­ci­ple and every­thing to do with shilling for cam­paign donors.

For a taste of what that kind of insti­tu­tion­al­ized cor­rup­tion looks like, peruse Influ​ence​Ex​plor​er​.com to see how much Booz Allen Hamil­ton and its par­ent com­pa­ny The Car­lyle Group spend. As you’ll see, from Barack Oba­ma to John McCain, many of the politi­cians now pub­licly defend­ing the sur­veil­lance state have tak­en huge sums of mon­ey from the firms.

These are just exam­ples from two com­pa­nies among scores, but they exem­pli­fy a larg­er dynam­ic. Sim­ply put, there are huge cor­po­rate forces with a vest­ed finan­cial inter­est in mak­ing sure the debate over secu­ri­ty is tilt­ed toward the sur­veil­lance state and against crit­ics of that sur­veil­lance state. In prac­tice, that means when those cor­po­ra­tions spend big mon­ey on cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions, they aren’t just buy­ing votes for spe­cif­ic con­tracts. They are also implic­it­ly pres­sur­ing politi­cians to rhetor­i­cal­ly push the dis­course in a pro-sur­veil­lance, anti-civ­il lib­er­ties direction.

All of this does­n’t mean there is direct con­spir­a­to­r­i­al micro­man­age­ment of politi­cians by the mil­i­tary-intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty. It does­n’t, for instance, mean that every­thing that comes out of sur­veil­lance defend­ers’ mouths comes from talk­ing points pro­vid­ed by Booz Allen’s lob­by­ists. Instead, there is some­thing much more insid­i­ous and reflex­ive at work.

As any­one who has worked in Wash­ing­ton pol­i­tics and media well knows, the cap­i­tal is not a place of com­pet­ing high-mind­ed ide­olo­gies. In terms of the mechan­ics of leg­is­la­tion and pol­i­cy, it is a place where monied inter­ests duke it out, where those with the most mon­ey typ­i­cal­ly win, and where a pow­er-wor­ship­ing media is usu­al­ly biased toward the pre­de­ter­mined winners.

In the con­text of mon­ey and nation­al secu­ri­ty, there is a clear imbal­ance — there are more monied inter­ests in the busi­ness of secre­cy and sur­veil­lance than there are orga­nized inter­ests that sup­port trans­paren­cy and civ­il lib­er­ties. That imbal­ance has con­se­quent­ly result­ed in a polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment so dom­i­nat­ed by secu­ri­ty-indus­try cash that the capital’s assump­tions auto­mat­i­cal­ly and uncon­scious­ly skew toward that indus­try’s pub­lic pol­i­cy pref­er­ences. Those pref­er­ences are obvi­ous: more secre­cy, more sur­veil­lance, and more lucra­tive pri­vate con­tracts for both.

If the sim­plest expla­na­tion is often the most accu­rate, then this finan­cial imbal­ance is almost cer­tain­ly why the pro-sur­veil­lance terms of the polit­i­cal debate in Wash­ing­ton are so at odds with pub­lic-opin­ion polling. Big Mon­ey has helped cre­ate that dis­con­nect, even though Big Mon­ey is some­how writ­ten out of the story.