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Contractor | 35 the Ars Technica site against the complicity of private corporations, such as Dell, that assisted the NSA. In his online posts in 2010, Snowden expressed loathing for the assistance that corporate Amer- ica was providing the intelligence community. “It really concerns me how little this sort of corporate behavior bothers those outside of technology circles,” he wrote under his TrueHooHa alias. He said he feared that America was already on “a slippery slope,” and he sug- gested, perhaps adumbrating his own later actions, that this corpo- rate assistance to U.S. intelligence “was entirely within our control to stop.” What the “computer crusader” expressed in these angry Internet postings was an almost obsessive concern over individuals’ freely submitting to government authority. “Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types,” he wrote on Ars Technica without mentioning that he himself worked for a corporation that assisted spy agencies. He asked rhetorically on this public forum whether the sinister slide toward a surveil- lance state “sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government © secrecy.” ® The outright contempt he expressed toward this “government secrecy” did not prevent him from seeking even more secret work at Dell for the intelligence services. In February 2011, after his CIA security clearance ran out, he applied to renew it. The new clearance now required a new background check and filling out the govern- ment’s 127-page Standard Form 86. Since 1996, background investigations for the NSA, like much of the computer work at the NSA, had been outsourced to a private company. It had proceeded from the effort of the Clinton adminis- tration to cut the size of government by privatizing tasks that could be more efficiently done by for-profit companies. U.S. Investiga- tions Services, or USIS, as it is now called, which won the contract for background checks, was initially owned by the private equity fund Carlyle Group, which later sold it to another financial group, Providence Equity Partners. For the private equity and hedge funds, profits were the measure of success. To increase its profits from the contract with the NSA, USIS had to move more quickly in conclud- ing background checks because it did not get paid more for extensive | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 35 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019523