Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

One of these was when I went down there to negotiate my salary and sign some paperwork. At CASL I’d been making around $30K/year, but that job didn’t have anything to do with technology, so I felt comfortable asking COMSO for $50K. When I named that figure to the guy behind the desk, he said, “What about $60K?” At the time I was so inexperienced, I didn’t understand why he was trying to overpay me. I knew, I guess, that this wasn’t ultimately COMSO’s money, but I only later understood that some of the contracts that COMSO and BAE and others handled were of the type that’s called “cost-plus.” This meant that the middlemen contractors billed the agencies for whatever an employee got paid, plus a fee of 3 to 5 percent of that every year. Bumping up salaries was in everyone’s interest—everyone’s, that is, except the taxpayer’s.