Wiki: Dov S. Zakheim

 Dov S. Zakheim was born December 18, 1948 in Brooklyn, New York. He earned his bachelor's degree in government from Columbia University in 1970, and his doctoratein economics and politics at St. Antony's College, Oxford University.

Zakheim served in various Department of Defense posts during the Reagan administration, including Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Planning and Resources from 1985 to 1987. There was some controversy in both the US and Israel over Zakheim's involvement in ending the Israeli fighter program, the IAI Lavi. He argued that Israeli and U.S. interests would be best served by having Israel purchase F-16 fighters, rather than investing in an entirely new aircraft...

...During the 2000 U.S. Presidential election campaign, Zakheim served as a foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush as part of a group led by Condoleezza Rice that called itself The Vulcans....

From 1987–2001, Zakheim was CEO of SPC International, a subsidiary of System Planning Corporation, a high-technology analytical firm. During that period he served as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and sat on a number of major DoD panels, including its Task Force on Defense Reform (1997) and the DoD's first Board of Visitors of Overseas Regional Centers (1998–2001). In September 2000 Zakheim is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the United States Naval Institute, and a member of the editorial board of the journal The National Interest...

...Zakheim was then appointed as Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) from 2001 in George W. Bush administration, and served in this capacity until April 2004. During his term as Comptroller, he was tasked to help track down the Pentagon's 2.3 trillion dollars' worth of unaccounted transactions.[4] In 2008, he was appointed by President Bush as a member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan....

Zakheim retired as a Senior Vice President of Booz Allen Hamilton in 2010. He currently is a Senior Fellow at the CNA Corporation, a Senior Advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is also Co-Vice Chair of Global Panel America (Global Panel Foundation) with Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former UK Foreign Secretary and Minister of Defense....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dov_S._Zakheim

Belgian terror attacks bring this $937M Booz Allen contract into focus

The defense industry is once again in focus following Tuesday's terror attacks in Brussels, but it is government services — not the the bombs, the missiles and the airplanes — that typically get a boost in federal funding.

Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. (NYSE: BAH), for example, announced in September 2015 it won a $937 million task order to provide “global threat mitigation” services to the Pentagon. And while the details are sensitive as to exactly what the McLean-based company is doing under the contract, we do know that the growing specter of terrorist attacks drive more federal spending to it.

In the wake of the November terror attacks in Paris, Booz CFO Kevin Cook said the company is "certainly going to burn that ceiling and I think there’s a lot of room for growth" on the big contract.

“Global threat mitigation was a $900 million-plus contract we won in September to assess risks around the world and working with our defense and intel clients, craft mitigation strategies if these things were to occur,” Cook said. "Since we’ve won that, unfortunately, there’s been a lot of things going on in the world between Paris and Mali and others..."

http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/blog/fedbiz_daily/2016/03/belgian-terror-attacks-bring-this-937m-booz-allen.html

How Private Contractors Have Created a Shadow NSA

About a year ago, I wangled a media invitation to a “leadership dinner” in northern 
Virginia sponsored by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. INSA is a powerful but 
little-known coalition established in 2005 by companies working for the National Security Agency. In recent years, it has become the premier organization for the men and women who run the massive cyberintelligence-industrial complex that encircles Washington, DC.

The keynote speaker was Matthew Olsen, who was then the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). He used his talk to bolster the morale of his colleagues, which had recently been stung by the public backlash against the NSA’s massive surveillance programs, the extent of which was still com-ing to light in the steady release of Edward Snowden’s huge trove of documents. “NSA is a national treasure,” Olsen declared. “Our national security depends on NSA’s continued capacity to collect this kind of information.” There was loud, sustained applause.

One of those clapping was a former Navy SEAL named Melchior Baltazar, the CEO of an up-and-coming company called SDL Government. Its niche, an eager young flack explained, is providing software that military agencies can use to translate hundreds of thousands of Twitter and Facebook postings into English and then search them rapidly for potential clues to terrorist plots or cybercrime.

It sounded like the ideal tool for the NSA. Just a few months earlier, Snowden had leaked documents revealing a secret program called PRISM, which gave the NSA direct access to the servers of tech firms, including Facebook and Google. He had also revealed that the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ, had special units focused on cracking encryption codes for social media globally...

http://www.thenation.com/article/208481/how-private-contractors-have-created-shadow-nsa

5 Companies That Make Money By Keeping Americans Terrified of Terror Attacks

Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency, has invaded America’s television sets in recent weeks to warn about Edward Snowden’s leaks and the continuing terrorist threat to America.

But what often goes unmentioned, as the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out, is that Hayden has a financial stake in keeping Americans scared and on a permanent war footing against Islamist militants. And the private firm he works for, called the Chertoff Group, is not the only one making money by scaring Americans.

Post-9/11 America has witnessed a boom in private firms dedicated to the hyped-up threat of terrorism. The drive to privatize America's national security apparatus accelerated in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, and it’s gotten to the point where 70 percent of the national intelligence budget is now spent on private contractors, as author Tim Shorrock reported. The private intelligence contractors have profited to the tune of at least $6 billion a year. In 2010, the Washington Post revealed that there are 1,931 private firms across the country dedicated to fighting terrorism...

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/5-companies-make-money-keeping-americans-terrified-terror-attacks

Whistleblower Behind the NSA Surveillance Speaks Out - Full Interview - Edward Snowden - 6/9/13