CSC, NetCracker IT staff worked on US military telecoms 'without govt security clearance' The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has extracted $12m (£7.78m) from contractors accused of using workers who had not been given proper security clearances before performing government IT work. The DoJ said Netcracker Technology Corp would pay $11.4m and Computer Sciences Corp (CSC) would shell out $1.35m to settle allegations …
There is so little oversight by really independent groups that thievery is now the norm.
I'm in the fine USofA. I don't know about you folks in other countries. But I think I know very well that only the soddiest of the sods report cash transactions.
In some countries even the supposed employees expect to get paid by special perks.
Not terribly illustrative, but our new US Speaker of the House gets lots of family leave time etc that he won't allow his minions to enjoy.
>but our new US Speaker of the House gets lots of family leave time etc that he won't allow his minions to enjoy.
Well they should have pulled themselves up by the bootstraps just like Mr. Ryan did.
"Ryan's rise to political power and financial stability was boosted by family connections and wealth. The larger Ryan family has repeatedly helped the candidate along in his career, giving him a job when he needed one and piling up tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions."
When I contracted at the British MoD it took 6+ months to get your security clearance - if you were lucky that is and your paperwork didn't get lost or have tea spilled on it or get mistaken for a completely different contractors.
None of which stopped you from working (or not working for that matter and spending 50% of your time at the local).
When I contracted at the British MoD it took 6+ months to get your security clearance - if you were lucky that is and your paperwork didn't get lost or have tea spilled on it or get mistaken for a completely different contractors.
Originally I was wondering about this too as you can work under supervision, clearance is just required so you can access and handle information independently. This case is about the minimum qualifications of the people the company was contractually obliged to supply. I suspect they were able to negotiate substantially elevate rates for cleared people, but were then caught placing people who were not cleared, thus breaching the contract.
Being simultaneously in breach of contract and in violation of National Security requirements may have some side effects for their management. Muppets.
"When I contracted at the British MoD it took 6+ months to get your security clearance - if you were lucky that is and your paperwork didn't get lost or have tea spilled on it or get mistaken for a completely different contractors."
The same is true in the US, as well as complimentary PII sharing with the PRC via the OPM breach.
If no great big flags pop up on the initial background check, one is granted an interim clearance. After the interim clearance is granted, the real investigation begins by burial of the forms in a peat bog for six months, quadruplicate copies misfiled, refiled, lost, found, twisted. folded and mutilated before the investigator gets the paperwork.
In my case, the investigator then annoyed all of my friends and neighbors, but thankfully left this BOFH MK 2 alone.
US rules are different. If you aren't cleared you can't look at it. Not even under supervision. That's assuming of course it is some sort of secret clearance as opposed to the "clearance" of we ran him through the usual police databases and nothing turned up so he's ok to work here and Bob's Farcebook search didn't turn up anything either clearance. Given how they treat telecoms at my agency where I got the second type of clearance, I expect they really did need the first. And yeah, those cost a contracting premium.
Oh, and depending on your situation, that clearance might or might not transfer to a another project even if it is the exact same type of work.
"Would be great to see our UK government taking strong action against vendors like the US gov does."
Well.. this may not be "strong action" but it is action. How strong it is depends on how much the contract was worth. It's possible that this fine gets paid out of petty cash instead of being a serious hit to the bottom line.
Fear not. Those fines sound rather small in the context of these sorts of contracts. Also, given the size of CSC it feels odd reading they were the sub. Finally, as the companies can't be allowed to go out of business, they'll figure out a way to bill it back to the government on other contracts, plus a percentage for all the work of re-billing it through other channels.
So in a sense, your UK departments are saving you money because you won't incur the cost of re-billing the fines.
The only one in this fiasco who MIGHT be coming out with some money in his pocket is the whistle blower, and even that is a 50/50 thing.
Same issue in Australia. Extremely invasive, then the paperwork literally gets lost. You're waiting months to get clearance. The outsourcer agrees to this but doesn't consider the implications for actual contract execution (or someone up the vast overpopulated management chain decides a few bucks saved is better) and we have people all over the place working without clearance, and sharing user IDs to do so. The whole thing seems like a massive butt covering exercise rather than serious security to protect seriously sensitive data.
That it would. And I can't think of a more deserving group of schmucks. I worked there for almost 30 years and to see what they did to that company, at the expense of a lot of good employees and unsuspecting companies and governments is nothing less than profane. I am thankful every day that I was able to find an employer who needed someone with my specialized skill set.
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