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Emails obtained by the Project On Government Oversight show that American officials, including the Diplomatic Security officer in charge of protecting the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, believe that there are “American lives at risk” because a labor dispute has reduced security protection at the embassy shortly after a terrorist attack in the city killed 21 people.
Records obtained by POGO, including photos, show approximately 400 day-shift members of the Nairobi embassy’s protective force, which totals some 1,070 personnel, began a sit-in and work stoppage on January 28 in protest over non-payment of wages and benefits by their employer, the private security firm GardaWorld’s local subsidiary, Aegis-KK Security. A Kenyan court previously ordered the company to fully compensate the guard force.
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POGO on the Hill
Scott Amey, POGO's General Counsel, testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on H.R. 1. His testimony called on Congress to close the gaps in executive branch ethics and conflict-of-interest standards to assure the American people that those in government are working to benefit the public—not themselves, their former clients, or others.
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Sarah Turberville, Director of The Constitution Project at POGO, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on H.R. 1. Her testimony called for creating a code of ethics that would apply to Supreme Court justices—the only category of judge not currently covered by a code of conduct—as well as strengthening ethics standards for Members of Congress.
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POGO's Latest
Ernie Fitzgerald, described in the pages of the Washington Postas “America’s best-known whistle blower,” was also known as “the most hated person in the Air Force." By the time Fitzgerald died on January 31, 2019, in Falls Church, Virginia, he had also become the patron saint of government whistleblowers.
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The Pentagon let up on the gas on its effort to build a nationwide missile shield following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But once again, the United States. is on the hunt for the elusive silver bullet. It would be almost quaint, if it weren’t so costly—and impossible.
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The 116th Congress faces a number of high-profile and important investigations. However, the last several Congresses have not consistently maintained a civil, united, and fact-based oversight approach without partisan agendas. How can Congress do better?
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POGO in the News
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Ambassadorships long have been among Washington’s choicest political prizes, and presidents frequently award them to friends, political allies and campaign donors.
“There was always a country club mentality with some of this,” said Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan group that investigates government ethics.
The difference now is that the president also is the country club’s proprietor, and he has handed out foreign postings and other government jobs to his paying customers.
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Through his more than 50 subsequent appearances on Capitol Hill, said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), Mr. Fitzgerald all but single-handedly “created the concept of Pentagon waste and fraud. People didn’t even think about it. And now they very much understand it is happening,” even as policymakers have failed “to listen to his message,” she said.
Mr. Fitzgerald, alternately dubbed “the patron saint of government whistleblowers” and “the most hated man in the Air Force,” was 92 when he died Jan. 31, exactly 46 years after Nixon’s Oval Office taping system recorded the president discussing Mr. Fitzgerald’s ouster.
[...] In the early 1980s, as part of his battle against Pentagon waste and inefficiency, Mr. Fitzgerald developed the idea for the Project on Military Procurement, which evolved into POGO. The organization was designed to build on the findings of Pentagon insiders such as Mr. Fitzgerald, who uncovered inflated costs as well as evidence of falsified weapons tests, in which defense contractors were “cutting corners to get things out into the field,” Brian said.
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"In addition to cost, [the Defense Department] selected the UH-60 because the aircraft is American-made and has an established, reliable logistics chain from U.S. sources, given the worldwide use of the aircraft," SIGAR explained. "Additionally, the refurbished UH-60s were available more quickly than new production aircraft and the procurement was scalable."
Critics cried foul. Mark Thompson, an analyst with the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C., noted that a Blackhawk costs five times as much to maintain as an Mi-17 does.
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“There certainly can be a debate on using this tech in more limited ways with clear checks, but the public and lawmakers should be deciding what uses should be allowed, not the other way around,” says Jake Laperruque, who serves as senior counsel at the Constitution Project and does work with facial recognition and privacy.
[...] Experts like Laperruque nevertheless acknowledge that legislators and the public could come to the conclusion that the advantages of using facial recognition in life-saving circumstances would outweigh the risks it poses to civil liberties. In that case, there would need to be strict checks and balances for government use, such as warrant approval and regular audits. “Having these sorts of incredibly powerful searches that can catalog people’s activities and find them in giant crowds, this is an over-powerful, overbearing tool that could be detrimental to democracy itself if left unchecked,” says Laperruque.
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The debate about Amazon’s use of the technology in particular has intensified because of evidence of racial bias and errors with the tool, such as when the ACLU ran a test on the software and found that it misidentified 28 members of Congress as matching with criminal mugshots — disproportionately mismatching members of color. (In today’s blog post, Amazon wrote that the “service was not used properly” in such cases.) The company has also come under fire for pitching its software to ICE, according to documents obtained by the Project on Government Oversight. Critics such as the ACLU worry that ICE could use the software to unjustly target immigrants with greater efficiency.
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Congress often seems reluctant to apply to itself the norms and standards it expects of federal agencies, particularly when it comes to personnel matters. Rebecca Jones, policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, argued it’s time for Congress to provide better whistleblower protections for its own staff. She joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin to discuss.
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Without congressional follow-up, the new law could merely create a “paper-shuffling exercise” at the Pentagon and elsewhere, says Mandy Smithberger, an analyst with the Project on Government Oversight.
“It's important to track when the Pentagon rejects the advice of independent auditors and misses opportunities to better manage our national security and taxpayer dollars, but Congress should step up and hold the department accountable, including withholding budget dollars when appropriate,” Smithberger said.
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The bill would implement a two-year ban on agency contracting officials receiving any compensation from vendors they may have worked with in awarding a government contract — double the period of time the law now prohibits.
Scott Amey, the general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, said this contracting provision would help slow down the “revolving door” between industry and government.
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A group of 13 organizations penned a letter Tuesday to House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., requesting that this first meeting of the 116th Congress begin in open session.
“We understand that it likely is inconvenient for the committee to hold its business meeting in a room open to the public and then to move to a secure room should the committee vote to close the proceedings. However, the principle of defaulting to an open and accountable government and the requirement that moving to closed proceedings occur only after a public vote, enshrined in the House rules, controls in these circumstances,” reads the letter.
The letter is signed by GovTrack.us, Demand Progress Education Fund, National Security Counselors, Project On Government Oversight, the R Street Institute and others.
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Contracting officers at federal agencies would face a two-year ban on receiving any compensation from companies to which they played a role in awarding a federal contract. That would double the current cooling-off period, as well as add any affiliates and subcontractors associated with those companies. Procurement officials would also have to report any job offers their relatives receive from companies to which they have awarded contracts. Employees would face a two-year ban on any involvement with contracts involving former employers. Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, called the issue bipartisan, noting the changes simply make necessary tweaks to existing law.
[...] The bill would also serve as a reauthorization measure for the Office of Government Ethics and would make it harder for the president to fire the office's director. It also would give the agency more leeway in launching and conducting investigations and more teeth in enforcement, including through disciplinary action for ethics violators. Amey said POGO has found OGE to be a “paper tiger” due to its inability to compel agencies to comply with its requests and enforce laws on the books.
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Neil Gordon, an investigator for the Project on Government Oversight, a non-profit, non-partisan government watchdog organization, said more competition in contracting helps ensure better quality goods and services and reasonable prices.
Gordon acknowledged there are some emergencies when a no-bid contract may be needed, but questioned whether it was needed for CGI.
“I’m not sure this (IT contract) really qualifies as that. We’re talking national security emergencies, in combat zones, natural disasters, things like that,” Gordon said. “But that has to be done as rarely as possible.”
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Here are the key points offered in the letter—which was signed by among other groups, Fight for the Future, Electronic Frontier Foundation, RAICES, ACLU, Demand Progress, New America’s Open Technology Institute, The Project on Government Oversight, SumOfUs, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee:
---Risk-based targeting: The proposal calls for “an expansion of risk-based targeting of passengers and cargo entering the United States.” We are concerned that this includes the expansion of programs — proven to be ineffective and to exacerbate racial profiling — that use mathematical analytics to make targeting determinations. All too often, these systems replicate the biases of their programmers, burden vulnerable communities, lack democratic transparency, and encourage the collection and analysis of ever-increasing amounts of data in order to generate risk assessments. We oppose the replication and expansion of risk-based systems that have exacerbated current racial disparities in immigration enforcement.
---Mass surveillance: The proposal calls for “an expansion of CBP’s air and marine operations along the border.” We are concerned this means an increase in the deployment of aircraft with wide-area surveillance capabilities. Such aircraft, including unmanned drones, often include the power to capture the faces and license plates of vast numbers of people who live and work near the border. The government may scrutinize this personal information with machine-learning techniques susceptible to the same biases and problems listed above. Vendors already are applying artificial intelligence software to images captured by mounted cameras. Given the Department of Homeland Security’s particular history of using drones wastefully and irresponsibly, we do not believe there should be an expansion in their use.
---Biometrics: The proposal calls for “new cutting edge technology” at the border. If that includes new face surveillance like that deployed at international airline departures, it should not. Senator Jeff Merkley and the Congressional Black Caucus have expressed serious concern that facial recognition technology would place “disproportionate burdens on communities of color and could stifle Americans’ willingness to exercise their first amendment rights in public.” In addition, use of other biometrics, including iris scans and voice recognition, also raise significant privacy concerns. We thus oppose new spending to enhance the use of biometrics by DHS.
---License plate readers: We also are concerned that “new cutting edge technology” will include automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). These camera systems build a detailed database of where people are located over time. Border patrol has deployed ALPR systems not just at the border, but at interior checkpoints as far as 100 miles from the border, a zone within which two-thirds of Americans live. We oppose new spending to expand these interior ALPR systems beyond cars that actually cross the border.
---Biometric and DNA data: We oppose biometric screening at the border and the collection of immigrants’ DNA, and fear this may be another form of “new cutting edge technology” under consideration. We are concerned about the threat that any collected biometric data will be stolen or misused, as well as the potential for such programs to be expanded far beyond their original scope.
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Center for International Policy
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The United States has close relations with the UAE military and government. Research by the Project on Government Oversight has revealed that before he was appointed secretary of defense, Mattis sought and received approval to serve as an unpaid advisor to the UAE military, commencing in August of 2015. Mattis is not the only former U.S. military ofcial with a relationship to the UAE. Vice Admiral Robert Harward (USN-Ret.), the former deputy director of the U.S. Central Command, is now head of Lockheed Martin’s UAE operations. Brig. General Jefrey McDaniels (USAF Ret.) is now the Vice President for International Strategy at the U.S. defense contractor Leidos, with the UAE as one of his countries of focus. Rear Admiral Gary W. Rosholt (USN Ret.), a former defense attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi, UAE, is now the VP of Middle East Operations for L3.
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Just last year, Amazon tried convincing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to purchase its Rekognition software, according to documents obtained by the Project on Government Oversight. In the current political climate it’s not hard to imagine this technology being used to identify the immigration status of residents in communities throughout the country.
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