The hidden world of private security contractors in USA

The hidden world of of the Security and Surveillance Industrial complex has attracted the attention of big media in US.

The most complete and updated source of information on this is the Washington Post special investigation website Top Secret America where maps , interactive features and and updated articles explore the hidden business of Security in America.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

The investigation's other findings include:
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.
* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

The Department of Defence is the authority in charge to oversee those companies but it has declared recently that is overwhelmed by the amount of private companies to control and is unable to keep an eye on all their activities.
According to Democracy Now over 1/3 of USA surveillance and enforcement operations are conducted by private contractors, the surveillance grid established by the National Security Agency intercepts every 24 hours over 1.7 billion personal communications in US only.
E-mails, phone calls, SMS, internet postings all are recorded and disseminated to a wide range of private and public agencies for analysis.
Data is not provided only to big names as Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, L-3 Communications, Csc, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Blackwater, Saic, but also to a myriad of small and medium businesses which represents 70% of the industry, most of them employ less than 100 employee and are in charge of background checks, fiscal checks, phone and internet wiretapping and data analysis.
It is not only the National Security Agency or police and other governmental agencies contracting their services, more and more private companies such as corporation, banks are contracting their services for employee checks and other intelligence purposes.
Ho safe we are that public data is not being used for private interests? We are unable to say it at this stage given the lack of supervision and tracking of the information.

Oslo police terror drill 48 hours before attack

Here we go again, is it not surprising that every major terror event is accompanied by a security drill focused around the same scenario. Oslo police were conducting a bombing exercise at a location near the Oslo Opera House just 48 hours before a terrorist blast hit a government building in the Norwegian capital.
According to the translated version of an Aftenposten report, “Anti-terror police fired explosive charges at a training center in Oslo, two hundred meters from the Opera, but forgot to notify the public.”
The exercise occurred on Wednesday and revolved around anti-terror units attacking a disused building at the edge of Bjørvika pier with bombs and firearms.
Police had to publicly apologize today for not informing the public about the exercise.


To give some context on the current situation of Norwegian politics below an excerpt from Wikipedia on Stoltenberg and his cabinet:

Stoltenberg's second cabinet has governed Norway since 17 October 2005. The 2005 parliamentary election saw a vast improvement for Labour, and the party gained a majority in parliament together with the other "Red-Green" parties, the Socialist Left Party and the Centre Party. This paved the way for a historic first in Norway, with Labour joining in a coalition government, the Red-Green Coalition, after a coalition deal with Stoltenberg was struck. Since the government's formation, key political issues such as Norwegian military participation in the current war in Afghanistan, petroleum activities in the Barents Sea, LGBT rights, immigration and the quality of standard education have been greatly debated by the public. Following Stoltenberg's re-election in 2009, the government has put further restrictions on immigration matters due to ongoing threats of terrorism, centralised and re-organised health care and public hospitals, dealt with the ongoing global recession and championed for environmentalist policies through private and corporate taxation.^[15]
A marine border dispute with Russia in the Barents Sea since 1978 was settled when Stoltenberg and President of Russia Dimitry Medvedev signed an agreement on 27 April 2010 in Oslo.^[16][17] The agreement is a compromise, which divides a disputed area of around 175,000 km2 (68,000 sq mi) into two approximately equally sized parts.^[18] However, the agreement still needs ratification by the State Duma and the Parliament of Norway in order to be implemented.
In January 2011, the Stoltenberg government ordered law enforcement personnel to arrest and deport Maria Salmanova, a Russian-born writer and blogger who had lived as an undocumented immigrant in Norway since 2002, a case later known as the Maria Amelie case. It was highly covered by the press as Salmanova was gaining more support and large demonstrations were taking place; Her Facebook page has gained more than 88,000 supporters and the Norwegian Amnesty International has its own signature campaign for Maria Amalie that by 23 January 2011 had over 28,000 signatures.^{[19][20][21][22]} Reasons for this intense media attention included her exceptional fluency in the Norwegian language, and her master's degree in studies from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. On January 24 2011, Salmanova was deported from Norway to Russia^[23] to much divided public opinions according to recent pollings. ^[24] As a result of alleged government inefficiency, blunders, scandals and misquotations made by members of the cabinet, among them Centre Party leader and Minister of Local Government and Regional Development Liv Signe Navarsete, Stoltenberg's second term has attracted controversy and criticism from both conservatives and liberals. According to a recent polling, the three governing parties (combined) gained a 35.8 percent approval rating from the electorate.^[25]