U.S. PIRG Consumer Blog: Contractor [Unisys] may have covered up massive data hack at Homeland Security

While the government is right to be concerned about stopping fraud and graft by military personnel and other federal employees in contracting, as reported in the New York Times story Graft in U.S. Army Contracts Spread From Kuwait Base, the bigger problem may be the powerful and largely unaccountable role of the many corporations that make their living (and, it is a good one) doing jobs in the security-industrial complex. As reported by Ellen Nakashima and Brian Krebs in today's Washington Post, in the story Contractor Blamed in DHS Data Breaches:

Security-industrial complex, by the way, is an update to the phrase popularized after it was used as a warning in president Dwight Eisenhower's farewell speech: military-industrial complex. The new phrase is attributable to Robert O'Harrow, himself a Washington Post reporter but also the principal author of No Place to Hide. You can read an excerpt here, where the publisher's description explains:

In No Place to Hide, award-winning Washington Post reporter Robert O'Harrow, Jr., lays out in unnerving detail the post-9/11 marriage of private data and technology companies and government anti-terror initiatives to create something entirely new: a security-industrial complex. Drawing on his years of investigation, O'Harrow shows how the government now depends on burgeoning private reservoirs of information about almost every aspect of our lives to promote homeland security and fight the war on terror.