John J. Hamre
Since leaving his post as deputy secretary of defense, Hamre has become a
professional board member with a knack for picking controversial and compromised
companies. He sits on the boards of ITT Industries, Inc., ChoicePoint, Science
Applications International Corp. (SAIC) and the MITRE Corporation – the last thre
exposed for degrees of inepitude, fraud or graft that compromise American security.
Hamre spent his early career working on defense budgets at the Congressional
Budget Office and the Senate Armed Services Committee. In 1997, he was promoted to
U.S. deputy secretary of defense. He left government in 2000 to join the Center for
Strategic & International Studies. CSIS is a strong supporter of the Saudi
government.
SAIC, which Hamre joined in 2005, was hired by the FBI in June
2001 to create a computer network for the agency. After five years and $170 million
the FBI discovered that SAIC’s system was riddled with failures. According to the
Washington Post, “the system delivered by SAIC was so incomplete and unusable that
it left the FBI with little choice but to scuttle the effort altogether.” Today,
agents still rely on the same paper system used since the 1930s. But the FBI debacle
hasn’t hurt the company or Hamre’s finances: SAIC came in 5th on Washington
Technology’s list of top defense contractors, with $4.3 billion dollars from federal
contracts in 2007.
Since 2002, Hamre has been a director of ChoicePoint,
where he chairs the company’s privacy committee. In 2005, ChoicePoint mistakenly
sold the personal financial records, military records, and social security numbers
of more than 163,000 consumers to inadequately vetted fake businesses. The mistake
resulted in at least 750 cases of attempted identity theft. The FTC accused
ChoicePoint of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act, despite getting subpoenas
from federal government since 2001 alerting it to fraudulent activities. In 2006,
the company paid $15 million to settle the FTC claims.
ChoicePoint’s
mistakes pre-date the subpoenas. In 2000, ChoicePoint complied the faulty list of
94,000 "felons" purged from Florida’s voter rolls before the presidential
election.
Choicepoint uses the Sybase software program for its data-mining
operations. Winston Partners, co-founded by Marvin Bush, owns a large portion of Sybase.
Choicepoint and Sybase provide programs for many of the world’s financial companies
to comply with the Patriot Act’s requirements.
Federal agencies have spent at
least $117 million on contracts with ChoicePoint since the company's inception in
1997, according to procurement data stored by the U.S. General Services
Administration. The company has worked on many high-level government projects,
including tracking the 19 al Qaida bombers responsible for the September 11 attacks.
Hamre also sits on the board at ITT Industries Inc., which is relatively
scandal-free. The company is a top contractor, coming in 16th on the Washington
Technology list with $865,350,426 from federal contracts in 2005.
He is on
the board of MITRE, which shared offices with the FAA and Ptech before September 11.
Ptech, an information technology company, supplied software to many government
agencies before September 11 including the FBI and the Pentagon. In 2002, it was
raided by government officials, which suspected the company of being a terrorist
financer. Saudi founder Yassen Al Qadi is a designated terror financer who funneled
$3 million to Osama bin Laden.
In 2002, Hamre co-authored the President's
Commission on the Future of the US Aerospace Industry - Final Report: Anyone,
Anything, Anytime, Anywhere. He was also a member of the exercise staff of Operation
Dark Winter, a bio-terror attack simulation conducted in June 2001.
Categories
Middlemen | Government Officials | Information Technology | Functionaries | Homeland Security | Defense
Sources
- “Feds probe IT sector links to al-Qaeda,” Computerworld, 12/9/02.
- “$170 Million Bought FBI an Unusable Computer System,” Washington Post, 8/18/06.
- “2006 Top 100 List,” Washington Technology, 5/15/06.
- “Government Employing Brokers as Data Posse,” The Palm Beach Post, 4/24/2005.
- “Officials Wary of Felon Purge,” St. Petersburg Times, 5/19/2004.
-
Hamre bio on CSIS
website:
http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_experts/task,view/type,/id ,145/ - http://foi.missouri.edu/privacyact/govtemploying.html