Security fears over FBI contracting out highly sensitive surveillance documents

The FBI has contracted out with a private firm to handle, distribute and monitor highly sensitive surveillance documents, in an arrangement veteran FBI agents consider a potential privacy and counterintelligence risk.

Since 2015, the FBI has entrusted a national-security professional services contractor, Aveshka, to prepare, organize, courier and disseminate surveillance materials, including documentation leading to court orders under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), the legal wellspring of domestic national-security surveillance.

Neither the company nor its employees have been accused of any wrongdoing, but national security has come under renewed scrutiny in the wake of the arrest last week of a Booz Allen Hamilton employee on suspicion of stealing National Security Agency computer code. FBI veterans and other surveillance experts consider the bureau to be effectively inserting a private firm as a middleman in surveillance, which they consider an inherent and seemingly unnecessary security vulnerability.

“The FBI here is literally giving out the keys to the national security kingdom,” said Jim Wedick, a 35-year FBI agent who retired in 2004.