The intelligence-industrial complex

[HughJass]

Anyone else reading about this in the Washington Post? Pretty incredible stuff, the amounts of money being mentioned are unbelievable....

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

continued here

Anyone who thinks that's hyperbole should just read some of what Priest and Arkin chronicle. Consider this: "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications." To call that an out-of-control, privacy-destroying Surveillance State is to understate the case.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn ... index.html

Check out the Post’s nine-page list of agencies and contractors involved in air and satellite observations, for instance. No wonder it scares the crap out of official Washington: It’s bound to provoke all sorts of questions — both from taxpayers wondering where their money goes and from U.S. adversaries looking to penetrate America’s spy complex.

....Still, this is a critique that resonates:

When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. “I told him that after 4½ years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!â€￾ he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview.

Um, three wars? Only in Top Secret America …

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07 ... z0uLFlQJCZ

 

[The Gardener]

Its a gravy train. This country is run by a white collar mob who are looting us through our teeth.

 

[Cassin]

Its a gravy train. This country is run by a white collar mob who are looting us through our teeth.

when in history, for any country...has the little man not been looted?

 

[somone uk]

hmmm a lot a waste i see, hmm i think America could do with David Cameron and we could do with Barack Obama.....anyone wanna swap?

 

[Hammy070]

Imagine they said "Well we do create lots of jobs!".

To me - such a mammoth scale industry is something I'd expect from America.

That's how America works, big big big.

Big country, big money, big people and big cars, and very tall buildings!

I'd be frankly disappointed if the intelligence sector was a typical European puny one.

Quite humorous though that 0.3% of the population have top secret security clearance. :whistle:

 

[Aplunk1]

WTF is this crap?

I don't believe any of this. I'm perfectly happy living in my own little world.

 

[somone uk]

WTF is this crap?

I don't believe any of this. I'm perfectly happy living in my own little world.