COLUMN - Edward Snowden and the disaster of privatization

Thu Jul 11, 2013 1:44pm EDT

By Donald Cohen

July 11 (Reuters) - In May, computer analyst Edward Snowden flew to China, handed over volumes of National Security Agency surveillance data to a reporter, and launched a heated national conversation about our nation's surveillance state. Underscoring that conversation was the fact that Snowden was a private contractor, given access to a vast store of information despite having virtually no track record with the NSA or the private firm with which he was employed.







Preventing horror stories like the above is precisely why my organization, In the Public Interest, developed the Taxpayer Empowerment Agenda which is a series of state and local proposals to restore transparency, accountability, shared prosperity and competition.


These reforms couldn't come fast enough. As veteran newsman Ted Koppel recently said on National Public Radio, "We are privatizing ourselves into one disaster after another. We've privatized a lot of what our military is doing. We've privatized a lot of what our intelligence agencies are doing. We've privatized our very prison system in many parts of the country. We're privatizing the health system within those prisons. And it's not working well."

Indeed, whether it's outsourced security or schools, it's not working well at all. And it's time for taxpayers to reclaim control.