> from the oversight and human rights perspectives it seems like a really bad idea.

Well, it's not like the government has a very good track record wrt human rights either.

Government has a terrible record but with the government, there's a slim possibility of sunshine appearing sooner or later. With private industry, it's even less so.

I'm not so sure. With private industry a good willed (and relatively wealthy) entrepreneur can just make a cheaper offer and hope to get the job, and actually try to respect human rights. With government you are kinda stuck with what you got.

There are several problems with this:

1. said entrepreneur is likely to be from a similar background, eg having served in the same agency, and thus being exposed to the same culture, and from this might very well be a bit desensitized to human rights abuses.

2. a cheaper, but also more ethical, solution isn't necessarily available. An organization with fewer morals has more tools available to it, such as nonempty death threats, which ultimately lower costs. A cheaper solution has to cut somewhere else to compete.

3. sometimes an organization cannot completely keep tabs on employees, especially an intelligence organization.

Simply put, this is the wishful thinking wherein the thinker believes that the private sector will correct for any nastiness and then creates a fantasy to support this belief in the specific case being discussed.

The thing that you have to realize is that the classified world is more like a club than an open market (as is the military contracting world in general).

Merely having a bunch of money in way qualifies you to bid for a large military contract.

Most if not absolutely all of the staff of private military contracting firms are ex-military of some sort. So you basically start out, for good or ill, with the ethos of the military and the baggage of the military. The only question is what kind of supervision will you give to more-or-less-the-same-guys. That's it. So the whole privatization theory is essentially a "let's do it faster with less supervision" equation. There's no way human rights enters into that equation.

The usual practice is to buy an ex-IC (intelligence community) onto your company's board or an executive position purely for his connections.

Actually, this is a terrific idea from the oversight and human rights perspectives. Let's consider a hypothetical for-profit corporation to which the government would outsource these operations. Under a broken system (what we have now), the management of these companies would have some sort of non-business relationship with the government officials responsible for awarding the contracts. Moreover, these companies, under a broken system, would keep their books shut, offering less transparency than we already have.

Now let's consider the best case: these companies compete with each other for government contracts, which the people award. This type of system would compel the companies to maintain high levels of transparency, especially with the SEC and IRS now taking interest.

The reason the government is so inefficient is because they don't have any external auditing agencies. The SEC and the IRS, for example, will never put the CIA or FBI through the same rigorous audits that they would put private companies through.

a hypothetical for-profit corporation like Blackwater?

or the guys who were pimping Afghan teenage boys to warlords?

yeah, that worked well.

Right, I tried to make it clear that our current system is broken... the for-profit corporation approach absolutely can work with transparency.

Transparency in spying?

You only know about non-classified private companies.

Classified private companies today have pretty much carte blanche in similar fashion to the CIA or FBI.

A friend of mine was unable to resolve a labor dispute with his classified employer because he could only sue them using a lawyer with clearance (and then his manager coerced him into signing a termination agreement... using a baseball bat! Again, try and sue?)

This was not a small, fly-by-night operation either but one of the largest government contractors.

That was pretty much the point of my comment. Non-classified companies get that status because of their corporate structure. The hypothetical company that I referenced would be structured such that being classified would be impossible.

So what would they be doing, unclassified spying? How would you advertise and award contracts for matters you want no one to know about?

The same way companies contract with other service providers without disclosing secrets. Companies do this all the time: obviously they can't give away all the details about whatever it is they're doing, so they either do it in-house, or they reveal the minimal information necessary to attract candidates, and use non-disclosure agreements to begin discussing the rest of the details. This is absolutely something that contract law could handle.

So what issues do you see? Oh right: the over-arching theme of corruption. However, I addressed that in my initial post; the only way we can get to a point where government efficiency is no longer questioned is by eliminating corruption.

I think one way to reduce corruption is to decrease the government's size, but that of course leads to situations like those we presently face. There will always be corrupt politicians who award contracts to their friends in return for some sort of illegal remuneration, but I think by reducing the number of politicians/government employees with the power to make those decisions, we will lower the amount of corruption present.

It looks like everyone missed the point of this post. I'm advocating for transparency in the companies with which we contract regarding their day-to-day operations, their budgets, etc. For-profit corporations have an economic incentive to remain frugal, which comes, in part, from external government pressure. My point is that the government does not have the equivalent financial oversight that corporations have.

Any questions of classified operations is completely irrelevant; of course you won't be able to load profiles of all spies à la tv shows like '24'.

I think everyone did get your point, but you've not addressed the problems that people have mentioned. Just hand-waving and saying 'transparency' is not convincing.