A hidden world, growing beyond control

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/

by jamesbritt • 13 years ago

193 69 13 years ago

projects.washingtonpost.com

danboarder• 13 years ago

From the article:

* 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.

Is there a central place were one can get a list of the mentioned agencies and who they are accountable to? If the Washington Post did all this research it would be great to see them create an online resource with their findings.

dfc2• 13 years ago

Did you check out the "search the data" link?

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/gov-or...

The above link lists all the high level gov organizations. I am not sure where you can get a list of the 1,271 smaller organizations. As far as who each organization is accountable to that is pretty easy...

bennyg2• 13 years ago

It's not very difficult to nab top-secret clearance, you just have to work on the right projects. One of my buddies, a recent grad, has a top-secret clearance because of the project he's on at Lockheed. In Huntsville, AL almost everyone has a security clearance of some form and fashion.

dfc2• 13 years ago

If you found this article enjoyable you should check out the book:

http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/d...

This article is from a while back and in the intervening time the journalists came out with a book that goes into more detail.

coldcode2• 13 years ago

And not one of these people identified the Boston pair before they blew up the Marathon. Yes, the FBI interviewed the older brother but never followed up. If you can't catch the amateur "terrorists" how will you catch the pros?

srl• 13 years ago

I resent (and reject the need for) the growth of the "security" apparatus as much as (almost) anybody else, but it's worth pointing out that what works for catching the "pros" is quite different from what works for catching amateurs. Pros are capable of inflicting greater damage, and are therefore a greater threat in that respect, but tend to organize in order to get access to larger resources. That means there's a larger target to "hit" when probing for information, and it makes picking up on plots much easier. An amateur can't inflict as much damage, but can do so practically undetected, and there's really not much that can be done about it AFAIK.

Thought experiment: suppose you wanted to kill as many people and cause as much chaos as you could. How would you go about it? And how easy would it be for the security apparatus to catch you? Would you be able to, evading capture, perform another attack a week later? How long could you go on?

It's really quite fortunate that the sort of people who want to do large amounts of violence, are exactly the sort of people who tend not be very good at it.

6d0debc0712• 13 years ago

> Thought experiment: suppose you wanted to kill as many people and cause as much chaos as you could. How would you go about it?

I was about to answer this and then realised how stupid it would be to give people ideas on how to kill vast numbers of people with off the shelf equipment. I will say that it doesn't seem like a hard problem to me, and I can see ways you could achieve rates in the hundreds of people a month.

> And how easy would it be for the security apparatus to catch you?

Pretty much impossible beforehand. Depending on what one did and where, it wouldn't necessarily be that hard. Some of the ideas I had seem long-term viable though - the sort of thing you could repeat with little chance of getting caught.

> Would you be able to, evading capture, perform another attack a week later? How long could you go on?

Some currently vulnerable infrastructure would probably harden over time but I've put like five seconds thought into this, I'm sure there are other things that one could do as well. And even if the number of deaths might not be huge - 20 people here, 20 people there, maybe a few hundred with a higher concentration target - the fact that you could strike many targets at once, and how difficult it would be to secure against you.... I think you could do very significant damage.

The fear you'd induce in people, every day knowing that, for instance, if their kids go to school, maybe they never come home again. Or if they go shopping, or.... It's a horrible thing to think about. If that sort of crap was going on, and the police weren't catching this guy, I'm not sure I could bring myself to send my daughter out in public even knowing that statistically the risk per person would still be very low.

I'm not sure that people could get used to the idea that every month a few hundred of them were going to die. Maybe we'd just learn to live with it but it'd require a major shift in how we reacted to visible risks.

uptown• 13 years ago

"The federal government added the name of the dead Boston Marathon bombing suspect to a terrorist database 18 months before the deadly explosions, U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday."

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/officials-dead-bomber-name-te...

futhey2• 13 years ago

I'm not arguing that it's not broken, but a majority of these people deal with foreign intelligence. Very little domestic terrorism is classified above secret (It needs to be the most accessible to decision makers and local/state governments).

bennyg2• 13 years ago

How many people were caught and not publicized?

I think it's fairly impressive, all things considered, that after two IEDs went off in a crowded civilian area, only 3 people died. And that in less than a week, those responsible were killed or apprehended.

Now, I'm not pushing for a surveillance state at all. I hate everything about that notion, and I believe that what we have now is plenty adequate - if not overkill - for doing the job that needs to be done to protect our own civilians. Again, all that said, America is in a much better place when it comes to domestic "terrorism" if you will (that connotation sucks, but they were terrorizing the populous after all) than say Syria or other countries.

magic_haze• 13 years ago

What incentive does a department have to hide an attack they helped prevent? Publicizing it, on the other hand, brings massive clout and more bargaining power when it comes to budgets. Look at Canada's recent announcement, for example. Why would the US government be any different?

rdtsc• 13 years ago

> How many people were caught and not publicized?

I can see two conflicting issues here. One is the need for the agencies to justify their existence. If they exist to stop terrorists, and they feel there is public scrutiny of their budgets, they should publicize the hell out of every capture. "See, we are doing useful work, look! we captured these people red-handed with bombs about to go off!".

The other one is not giving away their methods, procedures and tactics by keeping it a secret who they captured. Say NSA is wiretapping everyone and someone calls their cousin and asks them to buy 2 tons of fertilizer and a detonator. Ok, now they are on a blacklist. But arresting them right there and then is a pretty sure giveaway of the surveillance capabilities and a lesson for other perhaps more real and dangerous bad guys to learn.

Now actually there is a third, and more disturbing issue at hand. And that is agencies going and conjuring terrorists where there are none. Think about it, their budgets, salaries and bonuses are based on capturing terrorists. If there are no terrorists, should we be surprised if they start "creating" them?

Take the example of Craig Monteilh, FBI informant that joins a mosque in Irvine, CA then goes ahead and starts recruiting radicals. "Recruiting" was more like inciting hatred. Eventually he was reported to FBI (oh the irony!), FBI was sued but lawsuit was thrown out based on "secrecy" claims.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Center_of_Irvine

Then there is a case where they caught "terrorists" about to blow a bridge up in Ohio. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/brandon-l-baxter All the details of it seems shady. There is a gray area between entrapment and undercover operations and I think with right type of people (read those who are mentally unstable) it doesn't take much effort to entrap them and still stay outside the legal definition of the word.

The point being that at some point we should not be surprised if agencies with hundred million dollar budgets that are told to look for terrorists (and remember according to the post 9/11 propaganda they are _everywhere_) will go start making terrorists were they are none.

coldcode2• 13 years ago

Also this enormous government investment not only failed to catch the two bombers, but the same government fails to invest much at all in industrial inspection, which resulted in 14 deaths and half a town blown up in West, where the industrial plant had a quarter kiloton of potential explosives. Seems like a misplaced ratio of investment.

futhey2• 13 years ago

"publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored" - I would contend this. It's simply an assumption.

Many of their sources seem to be very junior to their respective organizations.

WestCoastJustin• 13 years ago

On a related note, PBS had an episode called "Top Secret America" in 2011 [1] - it's pretty good. Overview: "A two-year examination into the massive, unwieldy, top-secret world the government has created in response to 9/11".

[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/topsecretamerica/

caycep• 13 years ago

IT's the same authors, I think. They also published this in a book a couple years ago.

gshubert17• 13 years ago

This article was written in 2010 as part of a series. Also, for a single-page view, http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articl...

morpher• 13 years ago

Thanks. I figured this was the case given the sentence "After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, ..." I wonder why the didn't include a date on the linked page. Seems like an important piece of information for any news article / investigative journalism.

rayiner4• 13 years ago

Some of these criticisms are utterly stupid:

> * 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.

Without a mention of how much work these people do on terrorism, it's meaningless. Homeland security is a cross-cutting concern. So Excelon in Illinois might have a program in place to harden their nuclear power plants against potential terrorist attack. Should they be counted as part of this "hidden world" "growing beyond control?"

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

There are a ton of reasons to have top-secret security clearances that have nothing to do with counterterrorism or intelligence gathering. Anyone doing sensitive military research, for example, will often have a top secret clearance.

> * 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.

Again, homeland security is a cross-cutting concern.

> * 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.

50,000 intelligence reports in a year is 136 per day, in a country of 300 million people.

DanBC• 13 years ago

You're right, some of the criticisms don't make much sense.

But we're going to hear a lot more like this now we know that intelligence was aware of the alleged boston bomber at least a year ago.

cmstoken• 13 years ago

But they always say that kind of stuff afterwards. How is this time any different?

johnvschmitt2• 13 years ago

When I hear that the FBI interviewed the Boston bomber a year ago, I don't immediately think of FBI incompetence. No, rather, I think, "Hey, the bomber had many experiences & changes of mind, & is truly a different person a year hence".

I mean, are personalities & motivations & intentions truly permanent? C'mon, haven't we all changed as life goes on?

It's a fallacy to think you can ever 99.9% predict the future regardless of how much "big data" & "army of experts" you have.

That approach hasn't predicted the stock market within 70% accuracy, so how can we expect it to predict security issues any better?

We need to just realize that we're far more likely to die from causes other than terrorism, & just treat it like other crimes.

pmorici• 13 years ago

I wonder how many items a large newspaper publishes in a typical year? Probably a lot; some of them are short and trivial, not everyone reads everything, they focus on topics that are interesting to them. Seems like the same might apply to intelligence reports.

Edit: To answer my own question, it looks like in the past 365 days the New York Times published over 200,000 articles

http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/#/*/365days/artic...

If you include blog posts as well it is over 400,000 so by comparison 50k doesn't seem outrageous.

omd• 13 years ago

It seems beyond outrageous to me. 200k news articles is the amount of news that is produced by 7 billion people in 200 countries worldwide. Those 50k reports is what comes out of counter terrorism by one just of those countries. That's not including the usual declassified military or police reports. There is 1 person for every 400 Americans producing and/or reading these reports. That is more than the total amount of law enforcement officers in the entire US. Tracking every email in and out of the US which seemed impossible before, seems rather trivial now.

johnvschmitt2• 13 years ago

OK, but look at the growth after 9/11. Are all of those simply hardening/defensive mechanisms?

BTW: I firmly believe that the best defense against a possible attack from ~7B+ people is:

A) in cyberspace: to simply build better security rather than counter-attack those that attack us, as there are countless attackers from anyone with internet, often with nothing to lose, so counter attacks are futile.

B) In physical space: deal with attacks as criminals, not state or stateless organizations that require sacrificing civil liberties & core morals. There are not 7B+ people who can physically attack a structure, so standard policing suffices. Giving them more attention than that is playing directly into their goals, & counter-productive.

C) Nobody likes a police state. Jefferson famously said, that all governments creep towards tyranny, so we must remain vigilant towards increased power for our "safety".

wisty2• 13 years ago

> cross-cutting concern

Does this mean - they are doing stuff they would have been doing anyway; but with 10X the budget, and 1/10th the efficiency? (Yes, the minute a project gets a security clearance it loses efficiency - mostly because oversight and transparency is now heavily restricted).

bdunbar• 13 years ago

> There are a ton of reasons to have top-secret security clearances that have nothing to do with counterterrorism or intelligence gathering.

Agreed. I held TS clearance in the Marines for a job that was, bottom-line, 'security guard'.

ams6110• 13 years ago

Yeah, one might be tempted to think that if that many people have "top-secret" clearance then stuff probably isn't really very "secret." However having a top-secret clearance doesn't mean you are privy to any and all top-secret classified stuff... you still have to pass the "need to know" hurdle on any specific information.

dj2stein92• 13 years ago

This is what bureaucracies do, they grow, more complex, more political, more expensive, and exponentially harder to dismantle. Everyone knew that once Homeland Security was created it would become a sprawling, pervasive, and never-ending drain on the country. Eliminating it now is probably out of the question because it would be substantially more costly (politically and economically) than keeping it running.

Basically they've taken the script of the TV series "24" and used it to turn the entire government into a giant anti-terrorism organization that cannot locate or defend the country against any terrorists. But year after year the programs are always "underfunded" and so the bureaucracy grows and gets worse at doing its job... It's a perfect storm of stupidity and ignorance that has no benefits other than keeping the system going for no reason whatsoever.

sybhn2• 13 years ago

this is completely of topic, i know. But could not not think about Obamacare when reading about "This is what bureaucracies do, they grow, more complex, more political, more expensive, and exponentially harder to dismantle. " ... I would also add to that: undemocratic.

ewoodrich• 13 years ago

Yes, conflate healthcare policy (that in many ways is fundamentally different) with Homeland Security. I apologize for my sarcasm, but this just seems like knee jerk partisanship.

In addition, we are not a democracy (per se), but a constitutional republic, and as such, our elected representatives decide public policy. In the case of Obamacare, Democrats had been overwhelmingly elected the prior year (and Obama ran with healthcare reform as a campaign pledge). So, I don't quite see how it is "undemocratic" either.

dj2stein92• 13 years ago

Why stop at Obamacare? It's much, much smaller than Medicare, Social Security, the US armed forces, DHS (+ all the related bureaus), the Federal Reserve, IRS, US Treasury... essentially the entire US government is a collection of dysfunctional bureaucracies that extract wealth from citizens in the form of taxes, give it back to corporations in the form of subsidies and tax refunds, and give citizens next to nothing in return.

djKianoosh• 13 years ago

You're obviously generalizing quite a bit. When you say "Homeland Security" do you mean ALL of these components: http://www.dhs.gov/department-components

That's quite a lot to "eliminate". Granted there seems to be quite some overlap there. Where and what programs would we want to specifically cut? Doesn't congress appropriate a budget for DHS? They should be able to make changes long term, right?

sfx2• 13 years ago

>"More is often the solution proposed by the leaders of the 9/11 enterprise. After the Christmas Day bombing attempt, Leiter also pleaded for more - more analysts to join the 300 or so he already had.

>"The Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals, more body scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can't find nearly enough qualified people to fill its intelligence unit now. Obama has said he will not freeze spending on national security, making it likely that those requests will be funded."

and this scares me the most:

>"Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the DHS has broken ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. DHS, in existence for only seven years, already has its own Special Access Programs, its own research arm, its own command center, its own fleet of armored cars and its own 230,000-person workforce, the third-largest after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs."

More more more, funny how all this makes me far more uneasy then any terrorist threat. At least I can fight off a terrorist, lord help you if you try to say no to the SWAT team wanting to search your home for a teenager who made a homemade explosive.

rayiner4• 13 years ago

DHS isn't an organic entity that sprung up from 0 to 230,000 in the wake of 9/11. It is just an amalgam of a bunch of agencies that already existed. It includes the Coast Guard, INS, Customs, FEMA, TSA, and Secret Service, along with a bunch of smaller agencies. Of those, the only new thing is TSA, which is 56,000 employees. And while annoying, TSA is mostly doing the same job private companies used to do under contracts with airlines.

sfx2• 13 years ago

That's an excellent point, though it still is relatively scary. Such as the powers the DHS has in "constitutional free zones"[1]. It makes me nervous having 230,000 people having this much power because they're under the umbrella of "DHS".

[1] http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/homeland-sec...

Afforess• 13 years ago

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

pjbrunet• 13 years ago

Maybe it's a self-referential, insular sense of what's a reasonable rate of expansion? Pensions for them, while the free market searches its sofa for spare change. How do we compete with India, Philippines and the rest of the world? Telecommuting, Bitcoins, the Internet, are we blind to what's coming? Ocean moats become puddles. It's an open playing field, yet we spend like the next Zuckerberg will save our ass. What if Zuck moves to China? http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2012/02/20/facebook-an...

guard-of-terra2• 13 years ago

The real danger there is that security apparatus tend to replace government as a decision making center.

Nazi Germany towards the end or Russia today, you will see security apparatus contributing most of people who has real political weight. They have clearances nobody else does, they think of themselves as defenders, they never trust anyone outside their circle, and once they're in - nobody else gets to decide anything that can't be overriden by them.

np4223• 13 years ago

(English is not my native language)

I am very surprised by the very large amount of statism that seems to be present in USA in general and on hacker news in particular.

The high level of support for GWOT and all the side dishes like TSA, mass surveillance etc is very surprising.

Each and one of all the things that have been done in the post 9/11 world may partially or completely be justifiable on it's own.

But please, take a step back and paint a picture of where we have come from and were we are going if this trend continues.

If I may help you...

http://i.imgur.com/tfPY1y0.jpg , here is a picture of the subway in New York in the 80's, dirty and full of graffiti - with drugs and violence present and by all means also music, food vendors and a lot of people going to their jobs.

http://i.imgur.com/AxWRPgl.jpg , here is the Moscow subway from the same time. Clean, spotless and no one behaves disorderly without the police arresting them quickly, police officers with none of the ridiculous limitations that the western police had in their code of conduct at that time.

In which of those two subways would you prefer to ride to work every day?

With every new alfabet law designed to protect us that passes through the parliaments, with every new government agency we move closer to a society that looks more like the Moscow subway station.

Not to long ago we were prepared for thermonuclear war to defend our ways.

Today we are giving up our open and free society with a cheer so we can stay safe. Step by step, piece by piece.

Why can't the otherwise so intelligent and educated crowd of hacker news see that our society is heading in the direction of a police state? We are not there yet, but it is where we will end up if we don't turn around soon.

seanmcdirmid2• 13 years ago

> Why can't the otherwise so intelligent and educated crowd of hacker news see that our society is heading in the direction of a police state? We are not there yet, but it is where we will end up if we don't turn around soon.

We don't have much of a choice unless we want to regress into a pre-state hunter gatherer society (aka, a non-society). People live closely together, people don't want to get shot by their neighbor.

Advanced society requires the right set of laws to protect our safety and our liberty. And the USA is not alone in trying to balance these concerns: look at western Europe, Japan, Aus, NZ, ..., they all have the same issues to consider. There is also no "right" solution, its not black or white, but rather there are many tradeoffs to be made.

crusso• 13 years ago

We don't have much of a choice unless we want to regress into a pre-state hunter gatherer society

Yikes, so we become a police state or we go roll things back 5000 years. Amazing.

It's like the United States wasn't a world power and thriving before the New Deal.

np4223• 13 years ago

Almost all of the things that I consider to be "excessive policing" and taking us in the wrong direction has happened since the the late 1980-ish, with a very strong acceleration after 9/11.

I don't think reversing to a state comparable to the mid 1980'ies would put us in a hunter gatherer society.

guard-of-terra2• 13 years ago

"and no one behaves disorderly without the police arresting them quickly"

This isn't true, early 80-s is a peak of alchoholisation in USSR, there will be a lot of drunkards and police won't be able to do much.

(USSR didn't have nearly as much police as modern Russia does)

svachalek• 13 years ago

There is a lot of growing evidence that most autoimmune disorders from allergies on up are caused by living in an environment that is too clean. I'm starting to think we are seeing the same effect when it comes to safety. Most of us now come into so little violence in our daily lives, we can't stop thinking about violence happening thousands of miles away to people we've never met. We can somehow ignore all the real problems all the "protection" is causing us in order to protect ourselves from problems we don't have, that no one we know has.

knowaveragejoe• 13 years ago

That picture of the Moscow subway is absolutely not from the same time period. It may have looked like that at the time, but the picture is from 2009: http://www.flickr.com/photos/waldenpond/4021913253/

np4223• 13 years ago

Please forgive for painting a picture with a broad brush.

I wasn't really talking about subways, they only served as a metaphor for the society at large.

chiph• 13 years ago

Rent-seeking is not limited to the private sector -- it happens within the government as well.

sophacles• 13 years ago

There is something not at all touched on in this article that I feel has a big impact on the growth of classified space. That is the classification system itself. Essentially "top secret" is a viral license. Information synthesized from N sources gets a secrecy level of at least max_level(sources). Frequently even more.

Further, if someone with secret knowledge works on something that isn't at all in classified space, it may turn out that the new product/work needs to be classified, because classified knowledge may have gone into it.

This is a very virulent license - worse than the most paranoid analyses of GPL.

Countering this, the declassification process is slow, difficult, and a bit ridiculous. Lots of things remain classified not because they present a continuing issue, but because they make someone look bad. Or because they may be used to establish a pattern or MO that could endanger current operations. Even if that information is widely published.

As an aside - one of the fun games you can play with your friends that have some sort of clearance is to ask them recent news related to their area of work. If they respond with vague statements "oh thats interesting" or "I don't know anything about that" and keep trying to change the subject, it generally means they saw a classified briefing about it, or expect to, and can't reveal or discuss anything about it, even if it is all over the news. Particularly if they're very resistant to such discussion. It's a nice way to screw with them. (It's a game because they figure out what you're doing and start screwing with you back, be careful tho, you don't want to get them in serious trouble, or yourself in trouble for pushing too hard).

Anyway, the weird viral classified things is why I have rejected offers of work requiring a clearance. It is just too annoying to get interesting side projects and open source participation done when you're in the world of classified. That and I just like sharing cool and interesting things with people. I don't think I'd be happy not sharing.

Nick_C• 13 years ago

> things remain classified...because they make someone look bad

I thought this was a felony in the US. (I wish it was in Australia.)

zby• 13 years ago

This is really worrisome - all I read about secret organizations shows how crazy they become with time.

snake_plissken• 13 years ago

when was this published? I read something very similar to this, maybe 1.5-2 years ago.

A hidden world, growing beyond control

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