Strategic Insight Group (SIG) is a private intelligence firm serving investors, corporations, and law firms. That inherent instability provides a backdrop to Meiers fundamental point that people outside government performing intelligence-style work seem to be having a rising impact. Intelligence and the Private Sector. The dossier played no role in the FBIs decision to open the counterintelligence inquiry; the tainted wiretaps were a minor part of that effort; and the Mueller report did not use information put forward in the dossier. Yet with few exceptions, intelligence privatization has been largely ignored by the national media and the publications established to expose what they call the surveillance state. And Congress, by ignoring this huge elephant in the room, is simply not doing its job. SIGs Change-Risk Intelligence Unitaugmented by our new post-COVID servicesoffers tools that can help you manage risks associated with the velocity, complexity, and unpredictability of change in the post-COVID era. The intelligence agencies missed massive intrusions by Russia and China, forcing the administration and Congress to look for solutions, including closer partnership with private industry. By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 andagree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nations journalism. The clues included such obscure things as the apparent number of letters in the researchers blacked-out name. But Trump and his allies relentlessly sought to conflate the two efforts in the public mind. Their customers can get played, too.. Bit by bit, I matched everything with satellite imagery from Google Maps, he writes. In 2009, a fugitive Kazakh oligarch arranged a meeting in London with the head of an international private intelligence agency. 2013 - 2023, Privacy / Terms and Policy / Site map / Contact. Over the recent past, the providers became more specialised and niche services. One of the most spectacular was the infamous Trailblazer project at NSA. What is the best intelligence agency? Through his eyes, they are often unsavory people. Private Intelligence Agency - Corporate Investigation Private Intelligence Agency Former Federal Agents 100 Years of Combined Experience Investigations, Compliance & Defense Chris Quick Former Special Agent (FBI & IRS) Roger Bach Former Special Agent (DOJ-OIG & DEA) Timothy Allen Former Special Agent (U.S. Secret Service & DOJ-OIG) Ray Yuen Facing accusations of conceptual theft, Higgins said it was a coincidence, and that it was his publisher who had come up with the tagline, while noting that versions of the phrase had appeared in print before Assange adopted it. The CIA is the most recognized intelligence agency, known for spying on foreign governments and conducting covert operations, including funneling money to . 9. It includes only currently operational institutions. (The story of the flawed Steele dossier is a very different kind of mess, but Meier justifies his focus on it based on its massive political and cultural fallout.) In any field, one can start off with ideals and perform work that is genuinely beneficial or at least respectable, only to find oneself making compromises toward expedient ends that gradually start to chip away at ones moral foundation. As WikiLeaks was riding to global fame a decade ago by publishing archives of leaked American military and diplomatic files, its founder, Julian Assange, his organization an intelligence agency of the people. The slogan conjured an ideal of gathering and disseminating information solely to improve public understanding of the world and to enable democracy to better function, without the presumed machinations of a nation-state spy agency. The tragic arc of WikiLeaks is a warning that the lines between traditional journalists, private detectives, very-online activist-investigators, and nation-state intelligence operatives constantly threaten to blur. A Major Defense Contractor Buys Its Way Back Into the Spying Business Further inquiries can be made at contact@sigintelligence.com. Through a front entity, the Russian intelligence agency, WikiLeaks with Democratic Party emails, stolen as part of a covert hack-and-dump operation intended to manipulate the U.S. presidential election. Strategic Insight Group is a licensed Private Security company with the Texas Department of Public Safety pursuant to the Texas Occupations Code . An established member of the pro-Trump internet sleuth community eventually interviewed him and posted the audio online. [21], The private intelligence industry has boomed due to shifts in how the U.S. government is conducting espionage in the War on Terror. Theres so much less transparency in intelligence than in defense, says William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and the author ofProphets of War,a study of the political and social impact of Lockheed Martin. Whats at stake in intelligence outsourcing is not just the movement of money and goods, but also the security of the American public and control over the information that keeps us safe. They evaluate information and data to identify and mitigate security threats. Higgins labels the attacks he has faced as coming from the Counterfactual Communitya leaderless disinformation campaign, with claims leaping from conspiracy theorists to state propagandists to alternative-media outlets and back, pushed by a mix of anti-imperialists, the pro-Assad, the pro-Russian, the alt-right, the alt-left who share pathological suspicion of the West, especially the US government. They presume, he writes, given how much Bellingcat has discovered, that intelligence agencies must be feeding us stories. General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI) - . We are here to bridge the gap where austerity cuts have led to drastic reductions in police numbers, resulting in their inability to provide effective service to the communities they support. Strategic Insight Group, 1901 North Akard Street, Dallas, TX. 4 The nascent literature on 'private sector intelligence' or 'private sector risk intelligence' is not about private military contractors, espionage, or 'guns . Heres what I found in my study. The best part of his book, upstaging the other sagas, covers the Steele dossier; in Meiers telling, no story illustrates quite so clearly the oversized impact that private spies were suddenly having on politics, business, and our personal lives. During the 2016 campaign, Democrats financed opposition research into Trumps links to Russia. In fact, being too big to fail is especially potent in intelligence, which has experienced numerous failures over the years. Private intelligence services are non-state actors involved in the sector of Intelligence and are primarily collecting and analyzing information by outsourcing public funding and by providing assistance to large multinationals. But Meier focuses most on a saga that is quite different, but weird and momentous in its own way: the production of the Steele dossier, the notorious compilation of rumors about Donald J. Trumps purported links to Russia. Consider the prescient words of Ben Bagdikian, the late, great editor and media critic. To see SIGs full range of services, click here. Moreover, the fact that much of this privatized work is top secretand is generally underreported in the pressundermines the accountability and transparency of our spy agencies. Instead, it is a tightly integrated and sophisticated intelligence product unique to each client and to each case. They hired Fusion GPS, an investigative firm cofounded by a former Wall Street Journal reporter about whom Meier writes with palpable scorn. In fact, they have been exacerbated by growing tension and decoupling between the United States and China, by political and economic fracturing, by reconfiguring alliances and supply chains, and by extensive social and political unrest and uncertainty across the world. His report for Bellingcat was, Higgins writes, the groups breakout moment, and the first major salvo in a grinding effort against propagandists and denialists on the topic. Assange then stoked the conspiracy theoryapparently concocted by another Russian intelligence agencythat the emails had instead been leaked by a Democratic Party staffer, Seth Rich, who had been murdered in July that year. These case studies are characterized by showing the groups deductive homeworkwalking the reader through the identification and verification of each tile in a gradually appearing mosaic of proof. The spies-for-hire workforce includes thousands of professionals from the still-formidable intelligence divisions of Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, BAE, and Accenture, and a handful of smaller companies, including ManTech International Corporation, Engility Corporation, L-3 Communications, and PAE. Working Paper 2017.12. His latest book is Power Wars: The Relentless Rise of Presidential Authority and Secrecy. Tactical Rabbit is a Private Intelligence Agency providing actionable Business, Legal, and National Security intelligence. Since incorporation in 2002, International Intelligence Limited has provided services worldwide in support of our clients. SIG launched a Change-Risk Intelligence Unit in January 2018 with the following words: We live at a time of unprecedented change and upheaval. When not mocking Bellingcats researchers as dilettantes, its critics like to insinuate that Bellingcat must be a front for Western intelligence agencies seeking to undermine Russia. But by 2016, WikiLeaks had famously been co-opted by Russias GRU. The techniques private investigators use, as recounted in Spooked, include some old-school tradecraft, like disguising a surveillance van with a fake business logo and a phone number that a colleague is prepared to answer as if that business exists. Fusion partly subcontracted to another firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, which was run by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence official. As of 2007, the DIA was preparing to pay private firms up to $1 billion to conduct . The sheer size of the new entity makes Leidos one of the most powerful companies in the intelligence-contracting industry, which is worth about $50 billion today. Building on decades of geopolitical and global market intelligence work, CEO Dee Smith, along with senior executives Roderick Grierson and Scott Malcomson, created a television documentary series named A World on the Brink. Western intelligence agencies have been known to be shortsighted at times, and an official so inclined might not sufficiently care about the risk that the groups enemies, whether sincerely or with cynicism and bad faith, would use any subsequent leak about that tip as ammunition in their efforts to damage its idealistic reputation as an intelligence agency just working on behalf of the public, as Higginss British subtitle put it. They are now joined with about 2,000 cleared employees from Lockheeds IT unit, for a total of 11,400 cleared professionals (in its story on the merger, The Washington Post said the total number was 13,000). Re-upping old investments in a radically changed world is almost certain to fail, even if it appears to be a conservative strategy. If anyone wants to know where we get our material, they can read our reports, click the links and judge for themselves., The problem with this rebuttal is that it does not address the possibility of parallel construction. China Business China's relaxed COVID-19 policy and reopening prompt optimistic growth forecasts, but geopolitical . Private intelligence operatives can charge 800 ($960) per hour and above. ", http://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/politicalbots/wp-content/uploads/sites/89/2017/07/Troops-Trolls-and-Troublemakers.pdf, https://citizenlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Disinformation-Bibliography.pdf, "Facebook says Israeli company used fake accounts to target African elections", "The Outsourcing of U.S. Intelligence Analysis", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Private_intelligence_agency&oldid=1143264153, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 6 March 2023, at 19:35. While WikiLeaks focused on collecting leaked or hacked documents, Bellingcat specializes in sifting for clues within information that is already publicly available. These new off-the-shelf applications could turn our devices into one-stop-shops for intelligence agencies to peer into our private lives. But Meier makes the case for taking a close look now at what he calls the private spy industry, arguing that operatives-for-hire in the twenty-first century are no longer content to lurk in the shadows and have become more emboldened than ever before.. Here are 5 of the best (and coolest) jobs that intelligence agencies and contractors have to offer that you might not have considered. An intelligence analyst is a government employee who pieces together information from a variety of sources in order to assess threats and prevent attacks from interior and exterior enemies. Given how easily nongovernmental intelligence work can go awry, is Bellingcat a rare exception? tn_keyword: ['defense-co', 'defense-sp', 'government', 'mergers-an', 'military-i', 'nsa-survei', 'outsourcin', 'privatizat', 'us-intelli', 'us-militar'], Our background in government and private security and investigations provides us with a fundamental knowledge of . Analysis designed to discover previously undetected patterns in the data array leads to hypotheses. Nothing stirs the online investigative community like fabrications from the powerful, Higgins writes. At the same time, new types of digital tools have entered the market, made by private companies and marketed to governments as cutting-edge spyware with mouth-watering surveillance and hacking capabilities. Through these methods, scattered and seemingly random material can be harnessed into an evidentiary trail proving who did what, and who is lying about it. Added together, the five companies employ 44,600 cleared personnel, which I rounded out to 45,000. * * *.article-wrap .article-body aside.left.custom_background_223704{background:none !important; On Monday, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency announced that it had awarded a $10 million contract to HawkEye 360 to track and map radio frequency emissions around the world,. Higgins helped insert facts into the public debate. If that person was something other than what he represented himself to bea clever, politically motivated amateurhe did a good job faking it. Whether you admire Trump or scorn him, this private intelligence product did harm. That total is twice as high as contractor penetration in the rest of the Intelligence Community, and further evidence of how much of our spying is done for profit. Through a front entity, the Russian intelligence agency provided WikiLeaks with Democratic Party emails, stolen as part of a covert hack-and-dump operation intended to manipulate the U.S. presidential election. Interning within the private sector can develop a students' personal interests, research and briefing skills while the student experiences more focused intelligence tasks that match the company's goals. Now, they must be. Heres Why. Ill start this analysis with a closer look at the members of the new monopoly and a detailed explanation of how I reached my conclusions about their workforce. Moreover, his own office is crawling with contractors. Booz said my estimate was false and not accurate. But it declined my request to interview Ronald Sanders, a Booz vice president who, as the ODNIs chief human capital officer, presided over the offices first inventory of contractor personnel in 2007. A private intelligence agency (PIA) is a private sector (non-governmental) or quasi-non-government organisation devoted to the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information, through the evaluation of public sources (OSINT or Open Source INTelligence) and cooperation with other institutions Contact Us Country * Down the Rabbit Hole. US Department of the Army Fort Benning, GA $116,393 Annually Full-Time This position is in the Defense Civilian Intelligence Personnel System (DCIPS). Probably the best analogy is the media itself, which have seen incredible concentration over the past half-century. The present crisis undoubtedly includes opportunities as well as challenges, new solutions as well as new problems. To Meier, this pedestrian origin of the dossier brought into focus what he sees as a certain flimflam about the entire operatives-for-hire industry. For the first time since spy agencies began outsourcing their core analytic and operational work in the late 1990s, the bulk of the contracted work goes to a handful of companies: Leidos, Booz Allen Hamilton, CSRA, SAIC, and CACI International. For Reprints and Permissions, click here. Private Intelligence Jobs 16,696 Private Intelligence Jobs Jobs within 5000 miles of Boydton, VA Change location Intelligence Specialist (Operations) NEW! or to investigate perceived threats such as environmental groups or human rights groups. placementName: "thenation_right_rail", Smaller companies have outsourced such capabilities on a need to basis. Compounding matters, Bellingcat is increasingly moving away from its founding principle of using only open source information, by relying as well on clues in nonpublic data like flight manifests and cell phone records it has purchased on the black or gray market. Instead, he turned out to be a relatively young researcher based in the United States. We were not missionaries out to fix the world, but we had enough of a moral compass to repudiate the other routes to an outsized impact online, such as trolling and hacking. Intelligence Analyst. Obamas Crackdown on Whistleblowers UPDATE: OpenSSL patch available, vulnerability severity scaled down News item |01-11-2022 |6:32 pm | NCSC Investigation, Intelligence & Digital Forensics, Digitpol is licensed by the Ministry of Justice: Licence Number POB1557, Crypto Currency Fraud & Scam Investigation, GSM Jammer Detector Cloud based detection of Signal Jamming, Intellectual Property Crime Investigation, Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM), Connected Car Security & Automotive Forensics, OpenSSL patch available, vulnerability severity scaled down, Severe vulnerability found in Fortinet SSL VPN, New clipboard hijacker replaces crypto wallet addresses with lookalikes, Seizure of $3.36 billion in bitcoin stolen a decade ago from illegal Silk Road marketplace. A private intelligence agency (PIA) is a private sector (non-governmental) or quasi-non-government organization devoted to the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information, through the evaluation of public sources (OSINT or Open Source INTelligence) and cooperation with other institutions. Vertical diligence is accretive and iterative rather than linear. SIGs Change-Risk Intelligence Unit combines a team of multi-disciplinary experts with a global intelligence network and robust capabilities in flexible approaches. The marketplace is so concentrated that the service provider simply becomes too big to fail. David Isenberg, The marketplace is so concentrated that the service provider simply becomes too big to fail. David Isenberg, (As I did with Leidos, I ran my numbers by each company, with varying results. Tiffany Kary. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. Booz Allen deploys an intelligence workforce of 12,000 cleared personnel; CACI, 10,000; CSRA, 8,000; and SAIC, 6,600. Private Intelligence Contractors Need Better Oversight The lack of transparency surrounding the government's use of private military contractors abroad costs American taxpayers and threatens our national security. SIGs Change-Risk Intelligence Services can help to define change-related strategies, operations, and tactics for investment and business projects in: industries and sectors suddenly affected by COVID-19 in unexpected ways, existing industries and practices now facing rapid and disruptive transformation, understand and navigate geopolitical risks and challenges, assess and evaluate innovations in technology and the policy changes that they produce, chart emerging change-related opportunities in specific industries and sectors of interest to you, discover investment and business pathways that integrate intelligence, situational awareness, and security. 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