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Classified US Intel Budget Revealed Via Powerpoint
Atario writes "In a holdover from the Cold War when the number really did matter to national security, the size of the US national intelligence budget remains one of the government's most closely guarded secrets. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the highest intelligence agency in the country that oversees all federal intelligence agencies, appears to have inadvertently released the keys to that number in an unclassified PowerPoint presentation now posted on the website of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). By reverse engineering the numbers in an underlying data element embedded in the presentation, it seems that the total budget of the 16 US intelligence agencies in fiscal year 2005 was $60 billion, almost 25% higher than previously believed."
These are not the budget numbers you are looking for..
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
This is good proof that security through obscurity doesn't work.
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I have always been saying that MS products have no place in government. This is a glaring example of why.
Well, they have to fund the Stargate program SOMEHOW don't they? Why not take the money from an agency that nobody would suspect of being involved? :)
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
HA! HA!
take that classified info!
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
http://www.dia.mil/contracting/briefs/Tuesday%20Ge neralSession%201130%20Everett.ppt
The intelligence community is so large and diverse, that it is literally quite possible that the government itself didn't know how much money was spent on "intelligence".
Not because of incompetence, corruption, waste, or secrecy - though all those are certainly elements to varying degrees - but in reality because of the wide variety of agencies and activities that fall under the guise of "intelligence".
The article itself notes, correctly:
This top line $60 billion figure is 25% above the estimated $48 billion budget for FY 08. It is quite probable that this total figure was not even known by the government until recently. Greater control and oversight of the Intelligence Community budget was a hallmark of the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 that created the position of the Director of National Intelligence and gave it the mandate to get an overview of the entire amount spent on intelligence government-wide. To this end, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has recently gathered all parts of the previously fragmented Intelligence Community budget together for the first time as part of its Intelligence Resource Information System (IRIS). In the report from the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence released last Thursday, the committee praised the Office of the Director of Intelligence for creating a "single budget system called the Intelligence Resource Information System." It also recognizes their efforts in helping create what "will be used for further inquiry by the Committee's budget and audit staffs and will be a baseline that allows the Congress and DNI to derive trend data from future reports."
Earlier, lower estimates were most likely only included what fell directly under the Director of Central Intelligence and which would have omitted parts of NSA, NRO. A total Intelligence Community number, with the Intelligence Community as defined by 50 U.S.C. 401a(4), would also now include the various military intelligence services (e.g. Army Intel, Navy Intel, etc.), each with its respective weapon technology intelligence exploitation shop. A total budget would also include a large portion of the budget of the Department of Homeland Security which was previously fragment across multiple government agencies. A $60 billion government-wide Intelligence Community budget is not at all out of line with the post 9/11 organizational reality. It seems that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is just now getting a clear picture of the fragmented intelligence community budget.
When you're dealing with sixteen separate agencies, including elements from the Department of Defense, to say something like "intelligence budget" is almost meaningless. What's pure intelligence? What's national defense? What is a mix? In fact, it often comes down to what some particular task or program is "anointed" by management. Different areas get reorganized and shuffled into different organizational structures. To say nothing of the fact that the addition of DHS to the Intelligence Community was the largest government reorganization in over a half-century, since the creation of the Department of Defense and CIA by the National Security Act of 1947.
Shuffle more, and you can probably make the "intelligence" budget appear lower. But the truth is that "it seems that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is just now getting a clear picture of the fragmented intelligence community budget."
And that should be a good thing.
On a different note, revealing classified or sensitive information by improper handling of technology solutions is a perennial problem, and it still floors me that the vetting and release process doesn't properly capture things like this (though they've gotten MUCH better).
60 billion huh?
Does anyone know how much that budget was back in 2000?
You can't take the sky from me...
With security this awesome we'll soon be reading their classified email courtesy of phf.cgi ...
I sort of feel like this is telling us stuff we ought to know anyway.
Yeah, that's no longer there.
It's now been posted by the Federation of American Scientists.
There are, however, a number of other contracting briefs and presentations posted here
Julius Levinson: You don't actually think they spend $20,000.00 on a hammer, $30,000.00 on a toilet seat do you?
u-bend
And what's happened to their AMD budget?
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
I'd hardly call this reverse engineering. The unclassified document was made so by simply removing the scale from a graph.
This is even worse than declassifying documents by putting a box on top of text in a PDF. How can people be so stupid?
To follow up on this comment a bit, it's not like these aren't all elements that weren't already being paid for out of some budget. They were. It's just that a lot of the pieces in the past were probably considered part of the "defense" budget as opposed to the "intelligence" budget. It's a semantic distinction when it comes to the dollars, but I'll agree it is interesting for people to know from an organizational perspective, especially since the Intelligence Community budget has traditionally been officially secret.
The "intelligence budget" is just a matter of definitions.
Heckuva job, Negroponte and McConnell.
Or, should I say, Bush has shown his contempt for intelligence once again, and will yet again when he doesn't fire anyone for this serious secrecy breach. Of course, Bush will continue to keep more secrets than all previous American governments combined, and illegally invade Americans' privacy all day with wiretaps and the datamining that Orwell described. America serves at the president's pleasure.
I guess terrorists must have infiltrated the government's Powerpoint training program, because they're always the culprits, and Bush's divine right is never wrong.
--
make install -not war
Trying to be optimistic here .... I hope they are spending the money well. That kind of cash could solve a lot of school budget problems where I come from.
The only people this was a secret from was the American people.
Every government on earth (and the "bad guys" as well), knew the size of the budget. Or did someone think Putin was going to look at this powerpoint, smack his forehead with his hand and say "ah ha! now I know!"?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
"...a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time."
Only $60B ???!!!
Personally, I'd rather see us spend $120B on intelligence and get it RIGHT than only spend $60B and get it WRONG and end up going to war based on that faulty intelligence at a price tag of $82B up-front and more annually!
Politics and loss of life aside, it's just better economics!
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Whenever the government gives us information, we assume deception. Whenever we "discover" information, we assume truth. Perhaps I'm the only individual who realizes this, and no one would ever betray the public's trust by purposefully planting misinformation which would lead the public to believe they have uncovered truth. Or perhaps not.
On Slide #6, "Megatrends" and how that the "old hotness" for "non-core functions" was "in-house" but now that we are in the 21st century, the new hotness is "OUTSOURCED"! I wonder if they outsourced the making of this presentation :) Also, if you note the "Work Environemnt" row, you will see the transition from "Dedicated" to "Virtual, Telecommuting" which means more DIA laptops will be floating around, getting ripped off, and exposing the DIA to even more leaks. With this DIA strategy and demonstrated incomptence, China's expanded cyberweapons programs will have the information in hand before the President/Congress get to hear it in their briefings. Security is an illusion.
I guess there weren't any basic tutorials on computer security in that budget
-- lol pwned
"This is even worse than declassifying documents by putting a box on top of text in a PDF. How can people be so stupid?"
Umm... That's classified.
Back in the 60s there was a popular story (probably an urban legend, but still a good story) about a realtor in McLean, VA, who needed to do a report on how many people worked in the area. That would include CIA headquarters. The CIA refused to release any figures — it's a national secret! So the guy called up the Soviet embassy, which was happy to provide the data he needed.
Secrecy, often as not, is less about keeping the bad guys in the dark than about avoiding public scrutiny.
For great justice.
If you only watched politics for a few years, you know that it's better to spend 60b bucks to get it wrong than to spend 120b bucks to get it wrong. Getting it right is almost never an option, no matter how much money you pour into it.
Not trying to bash our government officials, but you rarely if ever get the "good" people to work there. A lot of people working there do it for a comfortable job with almost infallable job security. There's also rarely any kind of reward for putting more effort into a fed job than necessary to work to spec. Actually, self initiative is rarely encouraged and can even lead to severe problems, since you may intrude into someone elses field.
So why bother doing more than you're told to do?
Whether you spend more money on that doesn't matter to quality. Quality doesn't increase if bureaucracy, infighting and jealous watchfulness (that people don't overstep their boundaries and hunt in "my" turf) keep it in check. No matter how much money you pump into it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
70 % of the budget from FY95 to FY06 (up to August 31), in tens of millions of dollars,
third column for 100% :
95 1850 2643
96 1950 2786
97 1800 2571
98 1775 2536
99 2150 3071
00 1754 2506
01 2170 3100
02 3140 4486
03 4203 6004
04 4049 5784
05 4200 6000
06 3964 5663
So, from 1995 to 2005, an increase of 227%, correspondig to an annual increase of 8,5%.
And, from 2000 to 2005, an increase of 239%, corresponding to an annual increase of 19,1%.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Ladies and gentlemen, for the good of our nation, for our security..we must outlaws Powerpoint. Then, only criminals will use it in order to bore each other to tears. Two birds with one stone!
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Your argument assumes that the widely publicised "intelligence failures" in the United States can be solved by supplying additional funds. Since some of the most important "failures", those with the greatest consequences, were actually the result of policy failures (or perhaps worse, manipulation of the evidence at a policy level), and were not failures in data collection or analysis, I suspect that doubling the funds might actually be dangerous. Perhaps we could spend half as much money, and the consequences of "failure" would be reduced. Impossible to build a solid case for this argument without at least some amount of detailed data about how the money is spent of course, but worth pondering.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The number never mattered except to hide it from the electorate. An itemised list of what it was spent on, now, that would have been an issue of national security.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Note all the photos of the Whitehouse draped in snow - it's to subliminaly make us think Global Warming is a myth by showing us snow when we're all fired up thinking we're reading secret stuff. Sneaky guys those polticians.
The only people this was a secret from was the American people.
It's important to remember that $60BN doesn't spend itself, and it doesn't spend itself in small numbers. A whole lot of Americans knew that a whole lot of money was being spent on (essentially) nothing. It's also important to remember that this money mostly goes to defense contractors, and most of that goes to the upper management. Make no mistake: the rich don't spend in proportion to their income. They hoard. This money is being turned into silver spoons for a whole lot of terrorism-profiteers.
Fun trivia: $60BN is enough to give *every* child and adult in the US $200; about half a week's wages for people working minimum wage (before the roughly 1/3rd that goes to taxes, of course.)
It's enough to employ (are you sitting down?) one point two MILLION people in $50k/year jobs.
Now sit there and explain to me why New Orleans is still a disaster area, why 10 million kids in the US don't get enough food to eat, ~1% of the population (3.5 million people) is homeless (third of those are children), and why poor residents living in New England have their federal assistance for home heating cut.
This nation's spending priorities are so out of whack it is abhorrent.
Please help metamoderate.
This is just as good as releasing redacted data in the undo history of an MS-Office file. I would laugh if it weren't my government doing this.
News organizations constantly report million and billion dollar budgets without providing context. On the radio and on TV, for example, the announcer usually takes exceptional care to pause, then spit out the word as if it's a death-defying number: billion.
No one even *knows* what a billion is. Can you conceptualize one billion things? I don't know what a billion is. I can't even fathom it. Anyone who tells you they can is lying. All we know is that a billion is more than a million and less than a trillion.
So, for context, that $60,000,000,000 dollars that was mentioned was for the USA 2005 budget, which was about $2,400,000,000,000.* That's only 2.5% of the budget, and if you're a citizen of the US you'd better hope and pray that your country is spending at least 2% of the budget on intelligence in these times.
* See, you had to think about it for a second to figure out how big that number is. (In newsspeak, that's $2.4 TRILLLLLIIIIONNNN)
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Because spending more money always makes things better and not worse.
Deleted
Don't let them fool you! They did it on purpose so that we would believe exactly that.
That is a hell of a lot of bake sales!
where's the *fine* haha tag when you need it?
Sure you can, you just have to put it in the right context.
A million bytes is (approximately) a Megabyte. A billion bytes is (approximately) a Gigabyte.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Can you conceptualize one billion things?
A billion things is a thousand millions of things. The decimal orders of magnitude, scientific notation and other notation systems have been developed precisely to represent such large numbers. This is sufficient to allow for some pretty significant conclusions to be drawn about a billion in relation to other numbers.
When you say conceptualize, I think you mean count.
illegitimii non ingravare
They would need a lot of money to fake all those events.
The article mentions VoWiFi quality as poor, which makes me believe that the writer is handling the truth somewhat irresponsibly.
I work for one leading VoWiFi company that currently installs a lot of systems at US hospitals. Do you think the hospital administrations should accept anything than perfect performance?
A MOS of 4.2 using ETSI's own measurements and seamless handover is what we are talking about. Not FUD about dropped calls etc. Our i75 passed Cisco's own certification program before their own product and has won a number of prices for best product.
Y.T.
Break the sound barrier - bring the noise.
the good way to hide something that will be spotted s to purposely obscure it with all sorts of mis-information. Think about it. There is no way to encrypt a movie or a picture. But if you hide it in a bunch of mis-information, then it is possible to keep it hidden. Al Qaeda has long ago given up using human carriers or encrytion. They embed their information in various files all over. Then they use human carriers to say which set of files to look at. This is called Steganography.
That is also how the DOD, CIA, and NSA works. There is so much information, that it is impossible to hide it all. This is no different than the "slip-up" that occured in the 80's concerning project aurora. It never was. But it kept the USSR and our free press (it was relatively free back than; now it is censored.) looking for it, rather than at our space birds.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Never underestimate the stupidity of government.
Seriously? How do you know?
Unless you have access to the source code, and know how the app interprets data, you CAN'T know that.
> Just like saying someone working for one company screwed up, so all companies must be incompetent, and have been for 40 years? Do you not think that sounds screwy as well?
No kidding! It's been that way for way more than 40 years...
(On a more serious note, the larger the team, the more incompetent people there will be in it. Just one incompetent person is enough to screw up any given conspiracy. Given the number of people required for any of the big conspiracies, it is beyond belief that no one has leaked the details.)
And we still aren't safe from terrorists. I really wonder how anyone could argue that this isn't a massive waste of money?
I think someone turned off the oxygen to your space suit that you're wearing - your brain is hallucinating... Make no mistake: the rich don't spend in proportion to their income. Yeah, they don't invest it, either. Rich people's money just utterly disappears. Now sit there and explain to me why New Orleans is still a disaster area Ray Nagin and the dumbasses who elected and RE-ELECTED him.
Why aren't southern Mississippi and southern Alabama still disaster areas? why 10 million kids in the US don't get enough food to eat Fatuous stupidity. How many people are actually starving in the US? Why does the UN use separate standards for "hunger" in the US when compared to the rest of the world?
I well remember the calls that changed from "feed the starving" to "fight malnutrition". Now twits like you can't decide whether to bash the US for being fat or for having too much hunger. ~1% of the population (3.5 million people) is homeless (third of those are children) Once again, why do I have the nagging suspicion that statistic originates in a region inside Uranus? This nation's spending priorities are so out of whack it is abhorrent. You're entitled to your opinion.
But you support it like you've been bukkaked with stupid.
Why is this important to post on SD? Oh thats right, undermining.
I've always had more of a chuckle over what Napoleon told his bigwig Talleyrand: Vous êtes de la merde dans un bas de soie!
...laura
Nice trick... none the less.
and yet.. its still only HALF of what we've been spending annually on the war in Iraq.
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
Washington idiocy aside, the worst assumption that this story makes is that the Cold War is over... http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/geo/pasta nalysis/main.html. Read up. There is a world chess game going on and Americans are not paying attention.
...instead of burying a "Remove Hidden Data" option somewhere in a menu as a CYA move (so that when users inevitably fail to use them, you can comfortably refuse to admit your responsibility by citing an obscure feature of your program designed precisely to allow you to disclaim responsibility), what about engineering the product so that the file format only keeps the information actually displayed in the document? You know, as in, engineering the program so as to make it possible to use the way the document is visually represented in the screen as a source of inferences about what information will be revealed to document recipients or concealed from them.
This isn't rocket science, you know. It's just standard user interface design. With WYSIWYG, the UI is inviting people to use paper documents as a metaphors for understanding the screen display. If something isn't showing in a paper document, then the paper document simply doesn't contain that information; the paper is only surface. The idea that when you send somebody a document, it may contain more information than what you can see, is in contradiction with the WYSIWYG principle the software's UI was designed to make us use. Have you even sat down to think how to solve this problem?
There's another obstacle: most software's handling of files is not built around a distinction between "master" files (used to edit the document, and which may legitimately need to contain more information than what is displayed in any one view) and "distribution" files (used to hand out to people who only need to read the document). Master files potentially do need to include information that should not be revealed in the corresponding distribution files; distribution files do not need to support editing of their main content. So, design the UI to support users' reasoning about this problem. Use a metaphor of a "workspace" where you assemble "scraps" of information from many sources to produce a "finished" document, which is the thing you send to a recipient, and respects the assumption that its information content is transparent from how it looks.
That is, instead of building the whole UI around the metaphor of a finished document (WYSIWYG), build it around the metaphor of creating a document, which involves elements and tasks that are not visible in the finished outcome.
But most important of all, stop blaming the user for not knowing how to use badly designed software, and stop shirking off design flaws by putting in stopgap CYA features into software. Take responsibility for the fact that your software isn't as easy to use as it might be, and that it makes it easy to do many bad things.
Are you adequate?
.. about granting the state the right to keep secrets from taxpayers.
Can you imagine if your employees were allowed (and encouraged) to keep business secrets from you, their boss? Imagine if you hired a contractor and he refused to give you a breakdown, line by line, of his expenses. You'd fire him in a heartbeat, right?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
And the rest down a black hole where it does no good, anyway.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The government is just made up of, get this, people and they do fuck up from time to time, even on important shit. Well, for many of these conspiracies, you are talking about a whole shitload of people that would have to be involved. I mean think about the whole 9/11 thing. Think about the number of people it would take to quickly, covertly, plant explosives in the towers, direct a missile (no idea why they think it is a missile) at the Pentagon and then do all the subsequent coverup necessary is staggering. So you have all these people that need to be involved, and you have a very small pool that you can draw from. These people need to be ones that you can trust absolutely, and they also need to have essentially no morals at all. So it isn't like you get to be choosy and select only the very best in the world.
Given all that, it seems real likely that someone, somewhere along the line is going to fuck up and it is going to get noticed. It's not that the government is incompetent, it is that the government is made of people, and those people can and do fuck up. Thus it really stretches belief that they could successfully execute a conspiracy on the scale that is talked about and not have a single fuckup that reveals it.
This is precisely why the government works so hard to compartmentalize information and keep it on a "need to know" basis. It's not that people at that level aren't trusted, they have to be (or they wouldn't have clearance), it is that you want to keep fuckups to a minimum. Much better chance something stays secret if only 6 people know about it than if 60,000 do.
Yes, because OSS programs are all infinitely malleable, so that with very little effort, you can revise design and architectural decisions that influence the whole codebase, and modify the program to do something its creators never envisioned, while keeping its pristinely clean code just as clean as it was when you received it. Yeah, right.
OSS does not remove the problems of software engineering.
Are you adequate?
Consider the remote possibility that they revealed those numbers deliberately and that they routinely do that sort of thing to throw off foreign elements. Don't forget our D-Day counter-intel. Think about it - it's the perfect mechanism for slipping bits and pieces out that whoever looks at them might consider 100% genuine. Perfect distribution mechanism! No need to slip spies into organizations, just turn on track changes and "lose" USB keys every so often.
Of course my personal view is that they accidentally let information slip out more often than not.
Are you adequate?
Just change the font color to white on white.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Of course, I'd do that by slashing the total budget at an even greater rate than I'd slash the Minipax budget.
Show some love for Ron Paul.
Maybe this is a conspiracy theory, maybe not...
But this article links to thespywhobilledme.com which in turn has a link to Amazon where you can buy the thriller "Outsourced" which (coincidence or correlation? you decide) will be released TOMORROW! So it might just be a shameless plug. Maybe RJ Hillhouse (if that's her *real* name) discovered Taco's password (which probably isn't 'password') and posted the story on Slashdot's front page herself (if indeed she's really a woman). To recap:
1) write spy novel
2) get published
3) get slashdotted
4) click click click
5) profit!
never ask a question you don't want to know the answer to
Have a nice day.
They bought Albania.
Yeah that guy has his numbers wrong.
1.2 mil is nothing.
The metropolitan area, which includes Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, with a combined population of more than 5.4 million people
Which is where I live. So what's the purpose in having out for that many people? So you leave about 75% in the dark, support 25%, and in the end those people become accustomed to handouts and become a burden. Screw that.
In addition 50k does not include retirement benefits, health insurance etc. True cost of an employee is usually much higher than their annual wage.
I hate ignorant ppl.
$60 billion not enough, George?
Here's my standard deal.
You pay me $1 billion in advance and I'll deliver Osama bin Laden to you dead or alive - your choice! But dead is easier - in ninety days.
Such a deal I offer you! How much have you spent - or not spent - so far on this little project?
And I'll probably make a nine hundred million dollar profit on the deal - which is my motivation.
Better take me up on it - before someone else offers me the same deal. Because I don't care who pays me.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
If it's secret, they may have changed the numbers proportionally or however they wanted.
Oops, sorry, I meant an increase of 127% and 139% : 2005 budget is 227% of 1995 budget, that's a 127% increase. Idem for 2000 to 2005 budget.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
I don't understand how a "democratic" country can not leave these numbers into the citizens's hands.
Seriously, u-bend, it's billions upon billions, I believe, with $12 billion in hard currency which disappeared a few years back with another $8.8 billion unaccounted for (total = $20.8 billion). Gee, do you think that 10-year, no-bid contract to Halliburton, and those single-source, no-bid contracts (over 4,000 total) for Hurrican Katrina clean up are part of the problem???
Sorry to be the one to break this to you guys, but democracy is dead and a criminal organization is running (make that bleeding) the ole US of A....(And what about that $2.3 trillion that's unaccounted for over at the Penta(costal)gon????
Heeeyyy, there's no T.I.A. on that post of yours - sooo that explains that $60 billion.....
$60 billion is an unbelievably large amount of money to give to the ding-dongs who run our intelligence services. There is little or no accountability or oversight for a lot of that money because everything is 'secret' but undoubtedly a lot of the money is going to enrich a relative few through slush funds and special contracts. Some of the graft and corruption could be forgiven if there were actually some results to show for all of that spending but the overall effectiveness of the US intelligence agencies is the worst among the G8 and probably also behind China, Russia, Ukraine, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Vietnam, etc. The result is that Congress and the executive branch know less about what is really happening in the world than any other comparable group anywhere, even though our spending is probably orders of magnitude more. One wonders where the CIA gets the money to fly their victims around the world to the secret prisons for torture and now we know...it just comes out of the slush fund and the amont spent on stuff like the torture flights is probably so small relative to the money being spent to fly friends and family around the world to swank resorts that no one even notices.
This is the fourth thread today where I've seen a detailed posting from you. You're going to think this is a troll, but you're my hero. I would need pictures of my boss screwing a farm animal to be able to put all my workplace info in my slashdot profile and leave a trail basically showing I spend all day on slashdot commenting extensively about my hobbies without immediately being fired. As it is, I'm forced to post fanmail like this one anonymously for fear of retribution ;) If you tell me all IT jobs are like this in academia, I'm leaving corporate America tomorrow! Seriously, I could commute to Madison from here...do you have any openings?
Oh fuck!!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"I've always been amused by the premise of this franchise. It comes from one a (supposedly) non-fiction book called The Stargate Conspiracy, which claims that a secret cabal is bringing back alien technology through a portal dug up in Egypt, and trading it for money and power."
Sorry, no. _Stargate_ the film was released in 1994. _The Stargate Conspiracy_ is a 2001 book. There is no way the book influenced the film unless the authors also invented time travel.
However, the general premise of aliens influencing ancient civilisations certainly did come at least indirectly from other speculative 'nonfiction' books in the astroarcheology genre. Erich von Daniken's _Chariots of the Gods_ (1968) and Zechariah Sitchin's _The 12th Planet_ (1976) and their numerous sequels and imitators. It's now a fertile subgenre with modern writers such as Graham Hancock. Whether there's any truth in it is another issue.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
"I think like a computer guy, and I don't see anything wrong with the way the computer demands that I interact with it."
Are you adequate?
oh come on now, it's not cheap to fly people to syria so they can be tortured while screaming at your own people how evil teh syrianz are is it?
The file can be found at RecordsQuest.org
Perhaps it's a good thing that the government's so resistant to open source formats. This way, the public gets to know what they're doing, without them even having to release it!
then it is a criminally negligent mistake.
Moved far too few troops in to Afghanistan for the job (and know to be too low because both the UK and Russians had found out how many troops are needed for that theatre) and then decided that moving most out halfway through and putting MORE troops than they bothered with the afghan problem in to invading Iraq (after their mar machine had been decimated earlier) shows either that they had no intent of winning in afghanistan or that they are criminally incompetent.
I have one, simple question regarding this powerpoint presentation:
Why should I believe that the source is valid?
Any one of us could come up with a realistic looking presentation, complete with spy-like obfuscated data... why should I believe that this is the real thing? Is there any additional, hard evidence (such as paper documentation) to back up the facts presented? Furthermore, what is the track record of the authors of "thespywhobilledme.com" regarding their factual, impartial representation of factual data? What are their sources, and are they credible?
Read any good book on professional typography, such as The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst.
;-)
The 'Net is no longer in high school typing class.
The only sure fire way to prep a document like this is to print it out and rescan into pdf.