So, yeah. I’m beating a dead horse’s head, here, I know. But really, the whole ever-widening Dubai scandal boils down to two fundamental issues, rather than the six I originally cited: Those being the Imperial Presidency and the outsourcing our government. The Imperial Presidency angle is one that’s been gone over more than once by people much brighter than I, so I’ll stick with the subcontracted government for this. In this at least I can claim some intimate knowledge.

The question, as I raised it in the above-linked article, is weather we as a society really reap any particular benefits from outsourcing responsibilities formerly assumed by the government. It is a case of a simple cost/benefit analysis in which the public is seldom a party.

The standard justification of outsourcing government jobs is cost, and to a limited extent, governments on the state, federal and local levels do tend to save some cash by using corporate resources. I say limited because there is a (perhaps not written, but perfectly understood) curve between the cost savings and the loss of direct control associated with outsourcing that defines a threshold that cannot sensibly be crossed. I speak as a person whose current career in IT has existed solely on the basis of this very curve, and have watched government agencies struggle with the balancing act needed for outsourcing.

And even if you do not deal with client service for a living, everybody understands that when you pay your parking tickets, you need to go into a government office. That’s because making sure they get paid is not something most municipalities are willing to entrust in a third party if they don’t have to. Yep. That’s a threshold, alright.

So how could our federal government regard port security open for subcontact? Ten years ago, this might have seemed a good idea for government bureaucrats looking to cut costs; I’m sure that’s exactly when the original deal with Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation started.? But that a thing such as this continues these days proves that the White House is just not paying any attention. The comittee that approves these decisions is by all accounts a rubber-stamp agency in the best of times, but it certainly seems like an adminstration that had been paying attention on 9/11 would have been keenly abreast of the issue in 2006.

And of course John Snow used to deal with the company, and there’s this whole cronyism angle that ensues, but of course all of this serves to prove how open such deals are to corruption. That is not the only hazard of outsourcing: lack of clear communication, conflicting priorities and contractual negotiations abound. Deploying a truly effective outsourced solution takes quite a bit of time and patience, two things we can ill-afford to grant in the security realm.