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216 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS tions to private companies, but the Clinton administration in 1996 had_ privatized background checks for government employees requiring security clearances. The idea, backed by Vice President Al Gore, was to reduce the size of the federal government by out- sourcing investigating the backgrounds of millions of government applicants for jobs. The task had previously been performed by the FBI, but it was assumed that a profit-making business could do it faster and more efficiently. The private company named U.S. Inves- tigations Services was purchased in 2007 for $1.5 billion by Provi- dence Equity Partners, a rapidly expanding investment firm founded in 1989 by graduates of Duke, Brown University, and the Harvard Business School. So like Booz Allen, USIS was backed by a hedge fund determined to make money by systematically cutting the cost of a service previously carried out by the government. But such outsourcing had drawbacks. For one thing, unlike the FBI, USIS lacked the investigative clout to gain entry to certain gov- ernment agencies. A Congressional review found that the privacy act permits disclosure of government agency records to the private ) firm if they are part of a “routine use of the records,” but intelligence ® agencies did not consider all such requests to be “routine. For exam- ple, when it did the background check on Snowden in 20171, it could not get access to his CIA file. The “derog” in his file might have set off alarm bells, as might the fear that he had been threatened by an internal investigation over his alleged computer tampering in 2009. The FBI might have learned this about Snowden if it had done his background check. The lack of adequate oversight was another problem. USIS closed cases and cleared applicants without completing an adequate inves- tigation. According to a U.S. government suit filed in 2014, USIS had prematurely closed over 665,000 investigations in order to get paid for them more quickly. Because the more cases it completed each month, the more money it received from the government, the lawsuit alleged that USIS employees often “flushed” or ended cases before completing a full investigation to meet corporate-imposed quotas for getting bonuses. One employee, in an e-mail cited in the government’s complaint, said they “flushed everything like a dead goldfish.” As a result, some information specialists entering the NSA | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r.indd 216 ® 9/3016 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019704