Shaffer Forms Spy Firm with Blackwater and Able Danger Vets

Veterans from the most infamous private security firm on Earth and one of the military’s most controversial data mining operations are teaming up to provide the Fortune 500 with their own private spies.

Take one part Blackwater, and another part Able Danger, the military data-mining op that claimed to have identified members of al-Qaida living in the United States before 9/11. Put ‘em together, and you’ve got a new company called Jellyfish.

Jellyfish is about corporate-information dominance. It swears it’s leaving all the spy-world baggage behind. No guns, no governments digging through private records of its citizens.

Jellyfish’s chief technology officer is J.D. Smith, who was part of Able Danger until lawyers for the U.S. Special Operations Command shut the program down in 2000. Also from Able Danger is Tony Shaffer, Jellyfish’s “military operations adviser” and the ex-Defense Intelligence Agency operative who became the public face of the program in dramatic 2005 congressional testimony.

Karzai: Blackwater Causes Terrorism, Deaths of Children

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has accused private security firms of fueling war in his country, while reiterating his commitment to ban them by the end of the year. “These private security firms have caused insecurity and they’ve caused infringement of people’s rights,” he said on Monday, despite pressure from the US-led alliance on him […]