And if they are digital, how has there not been any sort of hack? ‘Anonymous’ or foreign actors would surely love to have a chance to air the dirty laundry, no?
And if they are digital, how has there not been any sort of hack? ‘Anonymous’ or foreign actors would surely love to have a chance to air the dirty laundry, no?
Yeah, the government’s big shift from “spy on our citizens” to “create a private corporation and pay them to spy on our citizens” was largely driven by public scrutiny. Governments realized that people were watching what they did online. And rather than stop encroaching on peoples’ privacy, the various governments simply shifted towards hiring private contractors to do it for them.
A giant “Spy Agency To Definitely Spy On All Of Our Own Citizens: Fifty Bajillion Dollars” line item on the government budget looks bad when lawmakers go to vote on it. But that same fifty bajillion dollars allocated to “Private Government Contractor 19452046” looks a lot better on paper.