Top Secret America

[Adios]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDLVCyCm1ck

1300 government sites nationwide and 2000 more private contractors. No one knows who is doing what.

The Post said its investigation also found that:

_In the area around Washington, 33 building complexes – totaling some 17 million square feet of space – for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since 9/11.

_Many intelligence agencies are doing the same work, wasting money and resources on redundancy.

_So many intelligence reports are published each year that many are routinely ignored.

"There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that – not just for the DNI, but for any individual, for the director of the CIA, for the secretary of defense – is a challenge," Gates told the Post.

854,000 people now have top secret clearance.

[Doktor Howl]

Read about this.

We've invented a monster we can't see!   

MAD SCIENCE!

[Cain]

http://feeds.salon.com/~r/salon/greenwald/~3/IFF23rRwqsw/secrecy

This article also has pertinent info and links

The Washington Post's Dana Priest demonstrates once again why she's easily one of the best investigative journalists in the nation -- if not the best -- with the publication of Part I of her series, co-written with William Arkin, detailing the sprawling, unaccountable, inexorably growing secret U.S. Government:  what the article calls "Top Secret America."  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.   But the far more significant fact so compellingly illustrated by this first installment is the one I described last week when writing about the Obama administration's escalating war on whistle blowers:

Most of what the U.S. Government does of any significance -- literally -- occurs behind a vast wall of secrecy, completely unknown to the citizenry. . . . Secrecy is the religion of the political class, and the prime enabler of its corruption. That's why whistle blowers are among the most hated heretics. They're one of the very few classes of people able to shed a small amount of light on what actually takes place.

Virtually every fact Priest and Arkin disclose underscores this point.   Here is their first sentence:  "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."  This all "amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight."  We chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, but this is the Real U.S. Government:  functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.

[Adios]

The one thing that really got my attention is the fact that so many intelligence reports are generated that many are routinely ignored now.

[Doktor Howl]

The one thing that really got my attention is the fact that so many intelligence reports are generated that many are routinely ignored now.

Too much information can be worse than not enough.

[Cain]

2 billion emails and calls are intercepted and stored every day.

Its fun, watching the intelligence services try to bludgeon themselves to death with so much useless info.  This is like watching a retard try to memorize every entry on Wikipedia in one sitting.

[Adios]

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.  Equally understated is the observation that we have become a militarized nation living under an omnipotent, self-perpetuating, bankrupting National Security State.  Here's but one flavoring anecdote:

    Command centers, internal television networks, video walls, armored SUVs and personal security guards have also become the bling of national security.

    "You can't find a four-star general without a security detail," said one three-star general now posted in Washington after years abroad. "Fear has caused everyone to have stuff.  Then comes, 'If he has one, then I have to have one.' It's become a status symbol."

[Doktor Howl]

2 billion emails and calls are intercepted and stored every day.

Its fun, watching the intelligence services try to bludgeon themselves to death with so much useless info.  This is like watching a retard try to memorize every entry on Wikipedia in one sitting.

That's why I'm not terribly worried about the police state.  Like everything else America does in the realm of intelligence work, we fuck it up so badly that it just isn't scary.

[Adios]

But as I wrote many times back then -- often by interviewing and otherwise citing House Intelligence Committee member Rush Holt, who has been making this point repeatedly -- the more secret surveillance powers we vest in the Government, the more we allow the unchecked Surveillance State to grow, the more unsafe we become.  That's because the public-private axis that is the Surveillance State already collects so much information about us, our activities and our communications -- so indiscriminately and on such a vast scale -- that it cannot possibly detect any actual national security threats.  NSA whistle blower Adrienne Kinne, when exposing NSA eavesdropping abuses, warned of what ABC News described as "the waste of time spent listening to innocent Americans, instead of looking for the terrorist needle in the haystack."  As Kinne put it:

    By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and aid organizations, it's almost like they're making the haystack bigger and it's harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful to somebody.  You're actually hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security.


The Beast is eating itself.

[AFK]

So, basically, all a terrorist really needs to do is learn how to craft their messages to look like noise, but embed some kind of code that contains the signal.  

[Adios]

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.

OH Goodie! A new Meme.

[Adios]

So, basically, all a terrorist really needs to do is learn how to craft their messages to look like noise, but embed some kind of code that contains the signal.  

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").


From Cains link.

[Cain]

So, basically, all a terrorist really needs to do is learn how to craft their messages to look like noise, but embed some kind of code that contains the signal.  

Mohammed Atta sent his coded messages about 9/11 as emails to his girlfriend about where he was going and what he was doing while holidaying in Germany and, later, America.

[Cain]

2 billion emails and calls are intercepted and stored every day.

Its fun, watching the intelligence services try to bludgeon themselves to death with so much useless info.  This is like watching a retard try to memorize every entry on Wikipedia in one sitting.

That's why I'm not terribly worried about the police state.  Like everything else America does in the realm of intelligence work, we fuck it up so badly that it just isn't scary.

Yes and no.  It seems on the collection and analysis side, there is more possibility of being picked up by accident than anything else.  At the same time, the paramilitary/covert ops seem to know what they're doing...but then again mindless violence isn't exactly difficult because, if it was, they wouldn't trust soldiers and spies with it.

[Adios]

Meanwhile, the Real U.S. Government -- the network of secret public and private organizations which comprise the National Security and Surveillance State -- expands and surveills and pilfers and destroys without much attention and with virtually no real oversight or accountability.  It sucks up the vast bulk of national resources and re-directs the rest to those who own and control it.  To their immense credit, Dana Priest and William Arkin will spend the week disclosing the details of what they learned over the past two years investigating all of this, but the core concepts have long been glaringly evident.  But Sarah Palin's Twitter malapropism from yesterday will almost certainly receive far more attention than anything exposed by the Priest/Arkin investigation.  So we'll continue to fixate on the trappings and theater of government while The Real Government churns blissfully in the dark -- bombing and detaining and abducting and spying and even assassinating -- without much bother from anyone.

Damn, Cain. That link has a hell of a lot of meat in it, thanks.