Liss Is More - Lotta ins. Lotta outs. Lotta strands in old Duder's head.
About Me

Strategic Marketing Dude. Aging guitar hacker. I have been known to howl at the moon on occasion.

Currently working on my Social Media Strategy chops at Consensio.

My Other Sites
         
Tags
Get Updates
Filed under

william arkin

See all posts on posterous with this tag »
 

#TopSecretAmerica: Right Church, Wrong Pew

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety". - Ben Franklin

 "A standing military force with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty." - James Madison 

I have been reading with great interest the Top Secret America series in the Washington Post on the huge buildup in our national security system since 9/11.  So far 3 articles have been published.

While I am indebted to the 2 reporters who spent almost 2 years researching this piece, I find their slant off the mark.  Part 1 was basically about how inefficient this work is, with overlapping organizations and a lack of centralized control. Part 2 was about how much of this work is being done by civilian contractors and not by government employees.  Part 3, published today, is partly about how these secret organizations and the people that work there exist in our midst but we can't see them.

All of these slants are interesting to a point but miss the real outrage that we should be feeling on this subject.  This is a story of how we are becoming Fortress America, a police state in the making, where all of us are suspects and our lives are open to governmental snooping and compilation.  All in the name of "keeping us safe."

The reporters in this series, at least so far, seem to imply that all of this is fine except for the fact that it is costs to much and that there are too many private contractors getting rich.  In other words, this activity would not warrant reporting if there was a clear, top down chain of command which supervised the work of an all-government-employee workforce.

I object!  This is activity is not OK.  It bothers me not that civilian contractors are in on the spying.  It is the spying that concerns me.  Other than Glenn Greenwald, I don't hear any other voices ringing this alarm bell.  

This is the stuff of Totalitarian regimes and we should be outraged.

Filed under  //  dana priest   politics   Top Secret America   washington post   william arkin  
Comments (0)
Posted
 

The Out Of Control Bloated Top Secret World of National Intelligence


There is a very important series beginning in the Washington Post today.  After nearly 2 full years of work, The Post is exposing the huge apparatus which has been built since the attacks of 9/11.  In fact, this world is so big and so secret that no one knows how big it is.  The opening paragraph states:

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.

Some of the astounding facts they uncover are:

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 

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.  

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. 

This is scary scary stuff.  Nearly 1 million people with security clearance in a government collecting 1.7 billion messages per day.  And no one is in control.  Not even those closest to the work:

Such secrecy can undermine the normal chain of command when senior officials use it to cut out rivals or when subordinates are ordered to keep secrets from their commanders.

One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it. Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out about a program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer. "What do you mean you can't tell me? I pay for the program," he recalled saying in a heated exchange. 

As near as I can figure out from reading this first installment the Intelligence system that we have built is so big that no one knows what it is doing, and it generates so much information that no one can digest it.

But as Glenn Greenwald points out, this is not just about a lack of efficiency:

To the extent the series receives much substantive attention (and I doubt it will), the focus will likely be on the bureaucratic problems it documents:  the massive redundancies, overlap, waste, and inefficiencies which plague this "hidden world, growing beyond control" -- as though everything would better if Top Secret America just functioned a bit more effectively. 

And he goes on to say:

The Government did not fail to detect the 9/11 attacks because it was unable to collect information relating to the plot.  It did collect exactly that, but because it surveilled so much information, it was incapable of recognizing what it possessed ("connecting the dots").  Despite that, we have since then continuously expanded the Government's surveillance powers.  Virtually every time the political class reveals some Scary New Event, it demands and obtains greater spying authorities (and, of course, more and more money).  And each time that happens, its ability to detect actually relevant threats diminishes.  

So, what are the chances of dismantling this machine?  Slim to none.  If you think Eisenhower's Military Industrial Alliance was scary, it pales in the face of this monstrosity.  The Cold War was peanuts compared to the War on Terrorism.  There is no backbone in either party to stand up to this public-private alliance.  It is the tail that is wagging the dog.

I close with a bit of a rant from the Prophet George Carlin, which seems particularly on point with this discussion.

 

Filed under  //  dana priest   george carlin   Glenn Greenwald   national intelligence   politcs   Top Secret America   war and peace   washington post   william arkin  
Comments (0)
Posted