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Obamacare Web Program Developed By =} CGI (No-Bid Contract) Who Own =} SIlver Oak Solutions Who Developed =} PRISM Cyber Collection For =} NSA As Revealed By =} Edward Snowden
Posted on October 15, 2013 by sundance
Now that we have affirmation on WHY the website does not work. Lets take a look at how it’s put together and follow the network. (HatTip Fantasia for some links)
privacySometimes looking into the engineering side of the new Obamacare Cyber Construction (Rabbit Hole) makes you wonder…..
In 2010 when the ACA (Obamacare) was passed it was 2,700 pages, 381,517 words, formulating a bill that no-one read before it was voted on; and “we’d have to pass it to see what’s in it”.
In 2013 Obamacare, and the accompanying regulation which compromise it’s construct, is now 10,535 pages long (11,588,500 words). Thirty times larger than the initial construct and so massive that no-one knows what it all means in totality.
So a website to sign people up for it needed to be constructed.
Where did the feds turn? To a previously authorized cyber engineering firm, CGI, who held a very special status - “Indefinite Delivery and Indefinite Quantity.” As the Washington Examiner outlined:
Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut.
Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance.
CMS officials are tight-lipped about why CGI was chosen or how it happened. They also refuse to say if other firms competed with CGI, or if there was ever a public solicitation for building Healthcare.gov, the backbone of Obamacare’s problem-plagued web portal.
Instead, it appears they used what amounts to a federal procurement system loophole to award the work to the Canadian firm. [...]
In awarding the Healthcare.gov contract, CMS relied on a little-known federal contracting system called ID/IQ, which is government jargon for “Indefinite Delivery and Indefinite Quantity.”
CGI was a much smaller vendor when it was approved by HHS in 2007. With the approval, CGI became eligible for multiple awards without public notice and in circumvention of the normal competitive bidding procurement process.
The multiple awards were in the form of “task orders” for projects of widely varying size. Over the life of the CGI contract — which expires in 2017 — the IT firm can receive awards worth anywhere from the “$1,000 to $4 billion,” according to a contracting document provided by CGI to the Washington Examiner.
This is apparently the route chosen by CMS officials in awarding the Obamacare Healthcare.gov website design contract to CGI.
Between 2009 and 2013, CMS officials awarded 185 separate task orders to CGI totaling $678 million for work of all kinds, according to USAspending.gov, a federal spending database. The Obamacare website design contract was for $93 million. (link)
United States Cyber CommandBut who exactly is CGI and how do they relate to the U.S. Federal Government?
CGI owns another company called Silver Oak Solutions (SOS) which specializes in business construction platforms which take advantage of large government contracts. Seemingly innocuous until you look into what SOS controls under their proprietary development.
Through the development of its own proprietary Spend Management offerings called PRISM®, [SOS] grew from under $1 million in revenue in 1999 to over $23 million in 2005. During this period, Silver Oak Solutions emerged as the pioneer and clear market leader in the government / public sector, which represents a $100 billion total market opportunity. (link)
“PRISM®” might be familiar to you because of NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden. This UK Guardian article is from July 2013 and was one of the first to reveal the NSA super-secret cyber spying program on Americans.
Prism
PRISM scandal: tech giants flatly deny allowing NSA direct access to servers
Silicon Valley executives insist they did not know of secret PRISM program that grants access to emails and search history.
[...] Two different versions of the PRISM scandal were emerging on Thursday with Silicon Valley executives denying all knowledge of the top secret program that gives the National Security Agency direct access to the internet giants’ servers.
The eavesdropping program is detailed in the form of PowerPoint slides in a leaked NSA document, seen and authenticated by the Guardian, which states that it is based on “legally-compelled collection” but operates with the “assistance of communications providers in the US.”
Each of the 41 slides in the document displays prominently the corporate logos of the tech companies claimed to be taking part in PRISM.
However, senior executives from the internet companies expressed surprise and shock and insisted that no direct access to servers had been offered to any government agency.
The top-secret NSA briefing presentation set out details of the PRISM program, which it said granted access to records such as emails, chat conversations, voice calls, documents and more. The presentation the listed dates when document collection began for each company, and said PRISM enabled “direct access from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple“. (link)
So let me pause before moving forward. The “international” company who was quietly awarded a no-bid contract to build the Obamacare website is the same company who operates the PRISM® platform which the NSA uses to gather phone, data, telecommunication, social media, and e-mail transmissions for review. Got it?
Okay, lets move forward.
Forward, because recently it has come to light the NSA is doing a little more than just “gathering” innocuous information. As the Washington Post outlined just yesterday:
edward-snowdenNSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally - The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.
Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.
During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.
Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.
The collection depends on secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s main data routes.
Although the collection takes place overseas, two senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that it sweeps in the contacts of many Americans. They declined to offer an estimate but did not dispute that the number is likely to be in the millions or tens of millions.
A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said the agency “is focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers. We are not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans.”
The spokesman, Shawn Turner, added that rules approved by the attorney general require the NSA to “minimize the acquisition, use and dissemination” of information that identifies a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. (read more)
Posted on October 15, 2013 by sundance
Now that we have affirmation on WHY the website does not work. Lets take a look at how it’s put together and follow the network. (HatTip Fantasia for some links)
privacySometimes looking into the engineering side of the new Obamacare Cyber Construction (Rabbit Hole) makes you wonder…..
In 2010 when the ACA (Obamacare) was passed it was 2,700 pages, 381,517 words, formulating a bill that no-one read before it was voted on; and “we’d have to pass it to see what’s in it”.
In 2013 Obamacare, and the accompanying regulation which compromise it’s construct, is now 10,535 pages long (11,588,500 words). Thirty times larger than the initial construct and so massive that no-one knows what it all means in totality.
So a website to sign people up for it needed to be constructed.
Where did the feds turn? To a previously authorized cyber engineering firm, CGI, who held a very special status - “Indefinite Delivery and Indefinite Quantity.” As the Washington Examiner outlined:
Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut.
Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance.
CMS officials are tight-lipped about why CGI was chosen or how it happened. They also refuse to say if other firms competed with CGI, or if there was ever a public solicitation for building Healthcare.gov, the backbone of Obamacare’s problem-plagued web portal.
Instead, it appears they used what amounts to a federal procurement system loophole to award the work to the Canadian firm. [...]
In awarding the Healthcare.gov contract, CMS relied on a little-known federal contracting system called ID/IQ, which is government jargon for “Indefinite Delivery and Indefinite Quantity.”
CGI was a much smaller vendor when it was approved by HHS in 2007. With the approval, CGI became eligible for multiple awards without public notice and in circumvention of the normal competitive bidding procurement process.
The multiple awards were in the form of “task orders” for projects of widely varying size. Over the life of the CGI contract — which expires in 2017 — the IT firm can receive awards worth anywhere from the “$1,000 to $4 billion,” according to a contracting document provided by CGI to the Washington Examiner.
This is apparently the route chosen by CMS officials in awarding the Obamacare Healthcare.gov website design contract to CGI.
Between 2009 and 2013, CMS officials awarded 185 separate task orders to CGI totaling $678 million for work of all kinds, according to USAspending.gov, a federal spending database. The Obamacare website design contract was for $93 million. (link)
United States Cyber CommandBut who exactly is CGI and how do they relate to the U.S. Federal Government?
CGI owns another company called Silver Oak Solutions (SOS) which specializes in business construction platforms which take advantage of large government contracts. Seemingly innocuous until you look into what SOS controls under their proprietary development.
Through the development of its own proprietary Spend Management offerings called PRISM®, [SOS] grew from under $1 million in revenue in 1999 to over $23 million in 2005. During this period, Silver Oak Solutions emerged as the pioneer and clear market leader in the government / public sector, which represents a $100 billion total market opportunity. (link)
“PRISM®” might be familiar to you because of NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden. This UK Guardian article is from July 2013 and was one of the first to reveal the NSA super-secret cyber spying program on Americans.
Prism
PRISM scandal: tech giants flatly deny allowing NSA direct access to servers
Silicon Valley executives insist they did not know of secret PRISM program that grants access to emails and search history.
[...] Two different versions of the PRISM scandal were emerging on Thursday with Silicon Valley executives denying all knowledge of the top secret program that gives the National Security Agency direct access to the internet giants’ servers.
The eavesdropping program is detailed in the form of PowerPoint slides in a leaked NSA document, seen and authenticated by the Guardian, which states that it is based on “legally-compelled collection” but operates with the “assistance of communications providers in the US.”
Each of the 41 slides in the document displays prominently the corporate logos of the tech companies claimed to be taking part in PRISM.
However, senior executives from the internet companies expressed surprise and shock and insisted that no direct access to servers had been offered to any government agency.
The top-secret NSA briefing presentation set out details of the PRISM program, which it said granted access to records such as emails, chat conversations, voice calls, documents and more. The presentation the listed dates when document collection began for each company, and said PRISM enabled “direct access from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple“. (link)
So let me pause before moving forward. The “international” company who was quietly awarded a no-bid contract to build the Obamacare website is the same company who operates the PRISM® platform which the NSA uses to gather phone, data, telecommunication, social media, and e-mail transmissions for review. Got it?
Okay, lets move forward.
Forward, because recently it has come to light the NSA is doing a little more than just “gathering” innocuous information. As the Washington Post outlined just yesterday:
edward-snowdenNSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally - The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.
Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.
During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.
Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.
The collection depends on secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s main data routes.
Although the collection takes place overseas, two senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that it sweeps in the contacts of many Americans. They declined to offer an estimate but did not dispute that the number is likely to be in the millions or tens of millions.
A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said the agency “is focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers. We are not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans.”
The spokesman, Shawn Turner, added that rules approved by the attorney general require the NSA to “minimize the acquisition, use and dissemination” of information that identifies a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. (read more)
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