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Snowden Would've Been Furloughed: The Shutdown Sent the NSA's Contractors Home

70 percent of the civilian contractors for the US intelligence community have been sent home without pay.
Image: Wikimedia

So the government is still "shut down." Nearly a million federal employees have been sent home on unpaid leave, primarily because Tea Party Republicans decided that throwing a tantrum over a three-year-old health law was more important than maintaining a functioning government. Among those employees are approximately 400,000 government contractors, thousands of which work for the NSA. Among them are the Edward Snowden-level employees of the nation, overseeing the United States' outsourced surveillance operations.

"We have over 960 Ph.D.s, over 4,000 computer scientists, over a thousand mathematicians," NSA chief Keith Alexander told Congress today. "They are furloughed. Our nation needs people like this.”

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According to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, a full 70 percent of civilian intelligence workers have been furloughed. Why? Well, "they were not deemed to be addressing an imminent threat to life or property, although that number would be adjusted if the shutdown continues," Reuters reports.

Those workers include those of Booz Allen Hamilton, a private security company now known best as the place where Edward Snowden worked as a contractor for the CIA and NSA. In other words, Edward Snowden probably would have been furloughed. The company wouldn't say exactly how many of its employees were being furloughed, but it expressed concern about the shutdown—98 percent of its revenues come from government contracts, after all.

Clapper is concerned about operating the mammoth security apparatus without his fleet of less-conscionable Snowdens.

At the Congressional hearing today, Senator Chuck Grassley asked Clapper, "Does America remain safe, even with a shutdown?"

The response will strike fear into the hears of the paranoid: "I have to qualify that sir. I don't feel that I can make such a guarantee as each day of this shutdown goes by. I'm very concerned about the jeopardy to the country because of this."

Without the contractors, in other words, Clapper 'can't guarantee' the nation's safety. Clapper has been known to exaggerate and lie outright, but this seemed more like an admission that he can't run this domestic surveillance dragnet without his staff.

Alexander, the NSA honcho, for his part, is just worried about losing his best men to the other side: “This is a dreamland for foreign intelligence services to recruit," Alexander said. "So we’re spending our time setting up counseling services for employees to help them manage their finances." Maybe one of them would have been Snowden, if he'd stuck around that long.

Regardless, a major portion of the intelligence industry—along with most of NASA and hundreds of thousands more—is currently out of work.