In Spies for Hire, investigative reporter Tim Shorrock lifts the veil off a major story the government doesn´t want us to know about - the massive outsourcing of top secret intelligence activities to private-sector contractors. Starting during theClinton administration, when intelligence budgets were cut drastically and privatization of government services became national policy, and expanding dramatically in the wake of 9/11, when the CIA and other agencies were frantically looking to hire analysts and linguists, the intelligence community has been relying more and more on corporations to perform sensitive tasks heretofore considered to be exclusively the work of federal employees. This outsourcing of intelligence activities is now a $50 billion-a-year business that consumes up to 70 percent of the US intelligence budget. And it´s a business that the government has tried hard to keep under wraps. Spies for Hire provides the first behind-the-scenes look at this new way of spying.
