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."

Comments

Link to the actual PowerPoint slideshow

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.dia.mil/contracting/briefs/Tuesday%20Ge neralSession%201130%20Everett.ppt

Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy

[dave1791]

From TFA, it soundly like somebody forgot to strip the hidden data.

It's been taken down though, slashdotted before the first post even...

Outdated link

[daveschroeder]

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

Re:Outdated link

[JonathanR]

The reason why the editing time is so high (and probably why so much interesting data embedded) is because people never start from a fresh template copy. They pick up from the last job and hack it to suit the next.

This happens all the time, and in badly checked documents, you can often find whole paragraphs that are entirely unrelated to the subject. I see it all the time in purchase specifications and requisitions that get created in the industry that I work in.

A good reason to abandon formatted word-processing documents and return to plain text files.

Re:Name that quote

[nbritton]

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constituti on.articlei.html

RTFA !

[alexhs]

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%.

Re:Quote from ID4

[u-bend]

Couple of points on your post:
1. How right you are about the no-bid, money-wasting thing--it's happening right now in Iraq, where millions have been wasted and in many cases, little reconstruction to show for it (sorry about the Coastal Post link--it was in major news publications a couple of weeks ago, but this is the most relevant recent hit in a Google News "Bechtel Iraq" search).
2. Isn't it sad that you have to say "probably," because in so many cases, it seems like these huge taxpayer decisions are made without anyone knowing about them?

Re:Important information from the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

Question is, does it include the recent trend of outsourcing intelligence work ?
I'm thinking of Vanity Fair's interesting article about SAIC.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/0 3/spyagency200703?printable=true&currentPage=all

Re:Important information from the article...

[daveschroeder]

Question is, does it include the recent trend of outsourcing intelligence work ?

Um, yes, that's what this entire issue is about.

The blog that contains this article is called "The Spy Who Billed Me: Outsourcing the War on Terror", and the presentation itself is titled "Procuring the Future", and is entirely dedicated to contractors and contract acquisition, and the fact that the IC couldn't function or do its job without the variety of speciality contractors and services. The way the IC budget was "deduced" was by seeing dollars spent on contractors, and the knowledge that constituted "70%" of spending.

Yeah, the contract issue in general is one of concern, but, like all things, it's not simply "good" or "bad"; it has benefits, drawbacks, advantages, and problems, and the key is proper management of such resources. Keep in mind that all contractor issues aren't "outsourcing" in the way some like to think: it includes all manner of acquisition of capabilities and services, which also necessarily includes labor.

Not really

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy

[lessthan]

You are going too deep. PowerPoint provides a tool in which you enter the data into an Excel spreadsheet (contained in PowerPoint) and PowerPoint generates a pretty graph. The spreadsheet is hidden after you finish with it, both in display mode and in edit mode. It remains though, accessible to a user for editing. The only way around leaving the data behind is taking a screenshot and using that in the actual presentation and posting for all the world to see. Otherwise, a quick double click and all you data is exposed.

Assumption being that the Cold War is indeed over

[Anonymous Coward]

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.