WASHINGTON (AP) — Before Edward Snowden began leaking national security secrets, he twice cleared the hurdle of the federal government's background check system — first at the CIA, then as a systems analyst at the National Security Agency.
Snowden's path into secretive national security jobs has raised concerns about the system that outsources many of the government's most sensitive background checks to an army of private investigators and pays hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts to companies that employ them.
