Company type | Public |
---|---|
| |
Industry | |
Founded | June 18, 1914 |
Founder | |
Headquarters | , U.S. |
Key people | Horacio D. Rozanski (President & CEO) John Michael McConnell (Vice Chairman) |
Services | Management and Technology Consulting |
Revenue | US$10.7 billion (2024) |
US$1.01 billion (2024) | |
US$606 million (2024) | |
Total assets | US$6.56 billion (2024) |
Total equity | US$1.05 billion (2024) |
Number of employees | 34,200 (2024) |
Website | boozallen |
Footnotes /references [1] [2] [3] |
Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corporation (informally Booz Allen) [4] is the parent of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., an American government and military contractor, specializing in intelligence. [5] It is headquartered in McLean, Virginia, [6] in Greater Washington, D.C., with 80 other offices around the globe. The company's stated core business is to provide consulting, analysis and engineering services to public and private sector organizations and nonprofits. [7] [8]
The company that was to become Booz Allen was founded in 1914, in Evanston, Illinois, when Northwestern University graduate Edwin G. Booz founded the Business Research Service. The service was based on Booz's theory that companies would be more successful if they could call on someone outside their own organizations for expert, impartial advice. [9] Booz's service attracted a number of clients, such as Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, Chicago's Union Stockyards and Transit Company, and the Canadian Pacific Railway. [10]
During the following three decades, the company went through a number of name changes and business models, eventually settling on Booz, Fry, Allen & Hamilton, named after their partnership in 1936. Before George A. Fry's departure in 1942, the company's name was changed again to Booz Allen Hamilton. [11]
In general, the post-World War II era saw a shift in the company's client pool, with many contracts coming from governmental institutions and different branches of the Armed Forces. [10]
Edwin G. Booz died in 1951. The company received its first international contract two years later, in 1953, to help reorganize land-ownership records for the newly established Philippines government. [12]
The partnership was dissolved in 1962 and the company was registered as a private corporation. In 1998, Booz Allen Hamilton developed a strategy for the IRS to reshuffle its 100,000 employees into units focused on particular taxpayer categories. [13]
Bloomberg named it "the world's most profitable spy organization". [14] According to an Information Week piece from 2002, Booz Allen had "more than one thousand former intelligence officers on its staff". [12] According to its own website, the company employs more than 10,000 personnel who have cleared TS/SCI background checks. [15]
In 2008, the commercial arm of Booz Allen split off to form Booz & Company. In 2013, Booz & Company was acquired by PwC and renamed as Strategy&. Since then, Booz Allen has re-entered commercial markets. In 2010, Booz Allen went public with an initial public offering of 14,000,000 shares at $17 per share. [16] [17] In 2012, Booz Allen purchased the Defense Systems Engineering & Support division of ARINC, adding approximately 1,000 new employees to its roster. [18] In 2014, Booz Allen acquired Epidemico. [7] [19] In 2015, Booz Allen acquired the software development division of the Charleston, S.C. technology firm SPARC. [20] [21] In 2017, Booz Allen acquired eGov Holdings. [22] In 2018, the SEC awarded both Booz Allen and Attain a $2.5 billion contract to modernize how the SEC purchases IT services. [23]
In February 2020, the company became the SEC's major provider of cybersecurity services by securing a 10-year contract worth $113 million. [24] The company was awarded $4.4 billion in U.S. Federal obligations in fiscal year 2020. [25]
Booz Allen Hamilton has faced criticism and coverage for its close ties with leaders of both major American political parties and their donations to them, as well as its longtime alliances with the militaries and surveillance entities of nations abroad. [26] [27]
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In June 2012, Booz Allen expanded its operations in North Africa and the Middle East, with initial plans to add operations in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, United Arab Emirates. It planned to later add operations to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, during a time when those countries, as stated by Jill R. Aitoro of the Washington Business Journal, were "recover[ing] from the turmoil associated with the Arab Spring". [28] The Booz Allen employee base, when it was a part of Booz & Company, had long-term relationships with many North African and Middle Eastern countries; Booz Allen had split from Booz & Company. [28]
Business
Government
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Other fields
Booz Allen has been credited with developing several business concepts. In 1957, Sam Johnson, great grandson of the S.C. Johnson & Son founder, and Booz Allen's Conrad Jones published How to Organize for New Products [59] which discussed theories on product life-cycle management. [60] [61] In 1958, Gordon Pehrson, deputy director of U.S. Navy Special Projects Office, and Bill Pocock of Booz Allen Hamilton developed the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT). [62] [63] In 1982, Booz Allen's Keith Oliver coined the term "supply chain management". [64] In 2013, Booz Allen's Mark Herman, Stephanie Rivera, Steven Mills, and Michael Kim published the Field Guide to Data Science. [65] A second edition was published in 2015. [66] In 2017, Booz Allen's Josh Sullivan and Angela Zutavern published The Mathematical Corporation. [67]
In 2006, at the request of the Article 29 Working Party (an advisory group to the European Commission), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Privacy International (PI) investigated the U.S. government's SWIFT surveillance program, and Booz Allen's role therein. The ACLU and PI filed a memo at the end of their investigation, which called into question the ethics and legality of a government contractor (in this case Booz Allen) acting as auditors of a government program, when that contractor is heavily involved with those same agencies on other contracts. The basic statement was that a conflict of interest may exist. Beyond that, the implication was also made that Booz Allen may be complicit in a program (electronic surveillance of SWIFT) that may be deemed illegal by the European Commission. [68] [69]
A June 28, 2007 article in The Washington Post related how a United States Department of Homeland Security contract with Booz Allen increased from $2 million to more than $70 million through two no-bid contracts, one occurring after the DHS's legal office had advised DHS not to continue the contract until after a review. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the contract characterized it as not well-planned and lacking any measure for assuring valuable work to be completed. [70]
According to the article:
In a rush to meet congressional mandates to establish the information analysis and infrastructure protection offices, agency officials routinely waived rules designed to protect taxpayer money. As the project progressed, the department became so dependent on Booz Allen that it lost the flexibility for a time to seek out other contractors or hire federal employees who might do the job for less. [70]
Elaine Duke, the department's chief procurement officer, acknowledged the problems with the Booz Allen contract, but said those matters have been resolved. She defended a decision to issue a second no-bid contract in 2005 as necessary to keep an essential intelligence operation running until a competition could be held. [70]
On July 11, 2011 [71] [72] the group Anonymous, as part of its Operation AntiSec, [73] hacked into Booz Allen servers, extracting e-mails and non-salted passwords from the U.S. military. This information and a complete dump of the database were placed in a file shared on The Pirate Bay. [74] Despite Anonymous' claims that 90,000 emails were released, the Associated Press counted only 67,000 unique emails, of which only 53,000 were military addresses. The remainder of the addresses came from educational institutions and defense contractors. [75] Anonymous also said that it accessed four gigabytes of Booz Allen source code and deleted those four gigabytes. According to a statement by the group, "We infiltrated a server on their network that basically had no security measures in place." [76] [77]
Anonymous accused Booz Allen of working with HBGary Federal by creating a project for the manipulation of social media. Anonymous also accused Booz Allen of participating in intelligence-gathering and surveillance programs of the U.S. federal government and, as stated by Kukil Bora of the International Business Times , "possible illegal activities". [73] Booz Allen confirmed the intrusion on 13 July, but contradicted Anonymous' claims in saying that the attack never got past their own systems, meaning that information from the military should be secure. [78] In August of that year, during a conference call with analysts, Ralph Shrader, the chairman and CEO, stated that "the cost of remediation and other activities directly associated with the attack" were not expected to have a "material effect on our financial results". [79]
In June 2013, Edward Snowden—at the time a Booz Allen employee [80] contracted to projects of the National Security Agency (NSA)—publicly disclosed details of classified mass surveillance and data collection programs, including PRISM. The alleged leaks are said to rank among the most significant breaches in the history of the NSA [81] and led to considerable concern worldwide. Booz Allen condemned Snowden's leak of the existence of PRISM as "shocking" and "a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm". [82] The company fired Snowden in absentia shortly after and stated he had been an employee for less than three months at the time. Market analysts considered the incident "embarrassing" but unlikely to cause enduring commercial damage. [83] Booz Allen stated that it would work with authorities and clients to investigate the leak. Charles Riley of CNN/Money said that Booz Allen was "scrambling to distance itself from Snowden". [84]
According to Reuters, a source "with detailed knowledge on the matter" stated that Booz Allen's hiring screeners detected possible discrepancies in Snowden's résumé regarding his education, since some details "did not check out precisely" but decided to hire him anyway; Reuters stated that the element which triggered these concerns, or the manner in which Snowden satisfied the concerns, were not known. [85]
On July 10, 2013, the United States Air Force stated that it cleared Booz Allen of wrongdoing regarding the Snowden case. [86]
In 2013, David Sirota of Salon said that Booz Allen and parent company The Carlyle Group make significant political contributions to the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as well as individual politicians, including Barack Obama and John McCain. [87] Sirota concluded that "many of the politicians now publicly defending the surveillance state and slamming whistleblowers like Snowden have taken huge sums of money from these two firms", referring to Booz Allen and Carlyle, and that the political parties are "bankrolled by these firms". [87] According to Maplight, a company that tracked campaign donations, Booz Allen gave a total of just over $87,000 to U.S. lawmakers from 2007 to June 2013. [88]
According to CNBC, these contributions resulted in a steady stream of government contracts, which puts Booz Allen in privileged position. Due to the company's important government services, “the government is unlikely to let the company go out of business. It's too connected to fail”. [89] Furthermore, the influence Booz Allen carries in Washington isn't restricted to donations, but to a large network of lobbyists and political insiders. According to government watchdog OpenSecrets, “4 out of 6 Booz Allen Hamilton lobbyists in 2015-2016 have previously held government jobs”.
Booz Allen helped the Government of the United Arab Emirates create an equivalent of the National Security Agency for that country. According to David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth of The New York Times, "one Arab official familiar with the effort" said that "They are teaching everything. Data mining, Web surveillance, all sorts of digital intelligence collection." [90] In 2013 Sanger and Perlroth said that the company "profits handsomely from its worldwide expansion". [90]
Booz Allen has particularly come under scrutiny for its ties to the government of Saudi Arabia and the support it provides to the Saudi armed forces. Alongside competitors McKinsey & Company and Boston Consulting Group, Booz Allen are seen as important factors in Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s drive to consolidate power in the Kingdom. [91] On the military side, Booz Allen is employing dozens of retired American military personnel to train and advise the Royal Saudi Navy and provide logistics for the Saudi Army, but denies its expertise is used by Saudi Arabia in its war against Yemen. Additionally, it also entered an agreement with the Saudi government that involves the protection and cyber-security of government ministries, [92] with experts arguing that these defensive maneuvers could easily be used to target dissidents.
David Sirota of Salon said that politicians in the United States who received financing from Booz Allen and "other firms with a similar multinational business model" have vested interests in "denigrating the democratic protest movements that challenge Mideast surveillance states that make those donors big money, too." [87]
In 2023, Booz Allen agreed to a $377 million settlement over allegations that it had fraudulently billed the US government from 2011 to 2021, one of the largest procurement fraud settlements in history, without admitting civil liability. [93] The settlement was the result of an investigation sparked by a whistleblower and former Booz Allen employee, who noticed that the firm was overbilling the US government in 2016. [94] The whistleblower said that Booz Allen lowballed the cost of work done with foreign governments and corporations, then lumped the costs it incurred together with US government contracts to bill to the US government. [93] The whistleblower initially alerted colleagues of the overbilling, but says that she was told that the Department of Defense was "too stupid" or "not smart enough" to catch Booz Allen and recover the money. [94] She subsequently filed a qui tam lawsuit under the False Claims Act against Booz Allen. [93]
A related federal criminal investigation into the company was closed without charges in 2021, while a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation is ongoing as of 2023. [93]
The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, specializing in a discipline known as signals intelligence (SIGINT). The NSA is also tasked with the protection of U.S. communications networks and information systems. The NSA relies on a variety of measures to accomplish its mission, the majority of which are clandestine. The NSA has roughly 32,000 employees.
Keith Brian Alexander is a retired four-star general of the United States Army, who served as director of the National Security Agency, chief of the Central Security Service, and commander of the United States Cyber Command. He previously served as Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2 (Intelligence), United States Army from 2003 to 2005. He assumed the positions of Director of the National Security Agency and Chief of the Central Security Service on August 1, 2005, and the additional duties as Commander United States Cyber Command on May 21, 2010.
James Robert Clapper Jr. is a retired lieutenant general in the United States Air Force and former Director of National Intelligence. Clapper has held several key positions within the United States Intelligence Community. He served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from 1992 until 1995. He was the first director of defense intelligence within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and simultaneously the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. He served as the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) from September 2001 until June 2006.
Trailblazer was a United States National Security Agency (NSA) program intended to develop a capability to analyze data carried on communications networks like the Internet. It was intended to track entities using communication methods such as cell phones and e-mail.
The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger. Its purpose is to support the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), though its precise mission is classified. The National Security Agency (NSA) leads operations at the facility as the executive agent for the Director of National Intelligence. It is located at Camp Williams near Bluffdale, Utah, between Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake and was completed in May 2014 at a cost of $1.5 billion.
Operation Anti-Security, also referred to as Operation AntiSec or #AntiSec, is a series of hacking attacks performed by members of the hacking group LulzSec and Anonymous, and others inspired by the announcement of the operation. LulzSec performed the earliest attacks of the operation, with the first against the Serious Organised Crime Agency on 20 June 2011. Soon after, the group released information taken from the servers of the Arizona Department of Public Safety; Anonymous would later release information from the same agency two more times. An offshoot of the group calling themselves LulzSecBrazil launched attacks on numerous websites belonging to the Government of Brazil and the energy company Petrobras. LulzSec claimed to retire as a group, but on 18 July, they reconvened to hack into the websites of British newspapers The Sun and The Times, posting a fake news story of the death of the publication's owner Rupert Murdoch.
PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies. The program is also known by the SIGAD US-984XN. PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google LLC and Apple under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms. Among other things, the NSA can use these PRISM requests to target communications that were encrypted when they traveled across the internet backbone, to focus on stored data that telecommunication filtering systems discarded earlier, and to get data that is easier to handle.
Boundless Informant is a big data analysis and data visualization tool used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA). It gives NSA managers summaries of the NSA's worldwide data collection activities by counting metadata. The existence of this tool was disclosed by documents leaked by Edward Snowden, who worked at the NSA for the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Those disclosed documents were in a direct contradiction to the NSA's assurance to United States Congress that it does not collect any type of data on millions of Americans.
Edward Joseph Snowden is an American former NSA intelligence contractor and whistleblower who leaked classified documents revealing the existence of global surveillance programs. He became a naturalized Russian citizen in 2022.
Mustafa Al-Bassam is an Iraqi- British computer security researcher, hacker, and co-founder of Celestia Labs. Al-Bassam co-founded the hacker group LulzSec in 2011, which was responsible for several high profile breaches. He later went on to co-found Chainspace, a company implementing a smart contract platform, which was acquired by Facebook in 2019. In 2021, Al-Bassam graduated from University College London, completing a PhD in computer science with a thesis on Securely Scaling Blockchain Base Layers. In 2016, Forbes listed Al-Bassam as one of the 30 Under 30 entrepreneurs in technology.
Ryan Ackroyd, a.k.a.Kayla and also lolspoon, is a former black hat hacker who was one of the six core members of the computer hacking group "LulzSec" during its 50-day spree of attacks from 6 May 2011 until 26 June 2011. Throughout the time, Ackroyd posed as a female hacker named "Kayla" and was responsible for the penetration of multiple military and government domains and many high profile intrusions into the networks of Gawker in December 2010, HBGaryFederal in 2011, PBS, Sony, Infragard Atlanta, Fox Entertainment and others. He eventually served 30 months in prison for his hacking activities.
The mass surveillance industry is a multibillion-dollar industry that has undergone phenomenal growth since 2001. According to data provided by The Wall Street Journal, the retail market for surveillance tools has grown from "nearly zero" in 2001 to about US$5 billion in 2011. The size of the video surveillance market rose to US$13.5 billion in 2012 and is expected to reach US$39 billion by 2020.
During the 2010s, international media reports revealed new operational details about the Anglophone cryptographic agencies' global surveillance of both foreign and domestic nationals. The reports mostly relate to top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The documents consist of intelligence files relating to the U.S. and other Five Eyes countries. In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published, with further selected documents released to various news outlets through the year.
The global surveillance disclosure released to media by Edward Snowden has caused tension in the bilateral relations of the United States with several of its allies and economic partners as well as in its relationship with the European Union. In August 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama announced the creation of "a review group on intelligence and communications technologies" that would brief and later report to him. In December, the task force issued 46 recommendations that, if adopted, would subject the National Security Agency (NSA) to additional scrutiny by the courts, Congress, and the president, and would strip the NSA of the authority to infiltrate American computer systems using "backdoors" in hardware or software. Geoffrey R. Stone, a White House panel member, said there was no evidence that the bulk collection of phone data had stopped any terror attacks.
Global mass surveillance can be defined as the mass surveillance of entire populations across national borders.
The ANT catalog is a classified product catalog by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) of which the version written in 2008–2009 was published by German news magazine Der Spiegel in December 2013. Forty-nine catalog pages with pictures, diagrams and descriptions of espionage devices and spying software were published. The items are available to the Tailored Access Operations unit and are mostly targeted at products from US companies such as Apple, Cisco and Dell. The source is believed to be someone different than Edward Snowden, who is largely responsible for the global surveillance disclosures during the 2010s. Companies whose products could be compromised have denied any collaboration with the NSA in developing these capabilities. In 2014, a project was started to implement the capabilities from the ANT catalog as open-source hardware and software.
Global surveillance whistleblowers are whistleblowers who provided public knowledge of global surveillance.
This timeline of global surveillance disclosures from 2013 to the present day is a chronological list of the global surveillance disclosures that began in 2013. The disclosures have been largely instigated by revelations from the former American National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
The United States is widely considered to have one of the most extensive and sophisticated intelligence network of any nation in the world, with organizations including the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, amongst others. It has conducted numerous espionage operations against foreign countries, including both allies and rivals. Its operations have included the use of industrial espionage, cyber espionage. and mass surveillance.
Harold Thomas Martin III is an American computer scientist and former contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton who in 2019 pleaded guilty to illegally removing 50 terabytes of classified information from the National Security Agency. The motive for the crime has been a subject of debate, investigators reportedly had difficulty determining if Martin was engaged in espionage or digital hoarding since throughout his decades of work, he appeared not to have ever accessed any of the files once he removed them from government facilities.
While in the business world, Ms. Goldsmith became one of the first women to become a partner at the firm Booz Allen Hamilton.
Box 3.1 Origins of product life-cycle thinking; Figure 3.1. Product life-cycle depicted as sales