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You Can Hire the CIA!
Posted 01 Feb 10
Active CIA personnel are moonlighting - for very nice salaries – at private companies.
So far as we know, they’re not actually engaged in black-bag entry or covert assassination. (For a discussion of the latter — why not knock off your business rivals? — see this Overcoming Bias post. Interestingly, the most obvious reason,”because it’s wrong,” didn’t really enter the comment stream.) Rather, CIA experts in lie detecting are hiring out to hedge funds and the like, to evaluate the truthfulness of statements by competitors and partners.
Why anyone thinks the CIA would be good at this is a question for another day. And at a time when contractors nearly outnumber US soldiers in our two wars, concerns about line-blurring between public and private intelligence may seem quaint.
Still, it seems like a slippery slope. In Russia, a profit-seeking military has become thoroughly corrupt. That’s nothing to emulate.
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Military