If you think the exchange of 12 Russian spies on US soil was strange, take a look at the PBS Frontline story on 2,000 private companies that span the nation in intelligence operations with no real oversight.

Tim Shorrock, author of the book, "Spies for Hire" broke the story in 2005 about the privatization of American intelligence.  Shorrock reveals that Lockheed Martin, SAIC, Booz Allen Hamilton, Accenture, Northrop Grumman, and others "have grown by doing intelligence on the world and the American people," he says. The mission of these companies -- to make money for their business. "The business they do is in the companies' web sites, in their annual reports and at their annual investor meetings, says Shorrock.

The question becomes, how does this work serve intelligence or protect the nation?

Now a two year investigation by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and Bill Arkin called “Top Secret America” shows 10,000 US locations and some 800,000 people are involved in privatized intelligence operations from coast to coast; that no one knows how much money is being spent on the program.  The documentary will run in October.  Click on excerpt.

In a similar case Microsoft employee, Alexey Karetnitov, featured in an earlier blog title here, is the friend of 12 spies who were recently deported back to Russia. He was deported too. The Frontline investigation shows that many IT companies are involved in the secret operation  -- some 2000.  The number of employees hired represents a much wider group than the US military industrial complex, according to the documentary.

The levels above the "top secret" category include Super Users who have access to all governmental data, the documentary shows, with special logins and computers.  Since the information is not shared inter-agency it seems that one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing.

It appears that journalists from many genres, from video, to newspaper and publishing has done its job to inform the audience as to this quasi-government operation.  Did the Founding Fathers intend for the rights to privacy to be violated.  Did they intend for a vast secret operation to exist in every back yard around the nation?  Perhaps the documentary will be the foundation for a new national debate.