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

Guess the DoD changed their security policy

[jeffs72]

This is good proof that security through obscurity doesn't work.

Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy

[turing_m]

Obviously you've never heard of Operation Mincemeat then. You know, the one where the Allies put fake landing plans on a dead guy left to wash up on a Spanish beach.

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

If they can successfully go to those lengths, how hard is it to accidentally-on-purpose leave some bogus figures in a Powerpoint presentation?

Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that most conspiracies would require a huge amount of people spread amongst many agencies, yet somehow they all remained silent and no one made a mistake. The odds of any group of people that size pulling that off once is astronomical, numerous times it inconceivable. Hell, with the moon landing people all over the world cooperated, key monitoring stations were civilians were manned by Australian civilian scientists.

Yet somehow the government is also incompetent and inept.

Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy

[LWATCDR]

I don't use PowerPoint so I wonder. Is there a command to "strip the hidden data"?
Do you have to go into a binary editor and see the data?
Seems to me that this shows the dangers of a proprietary file format.
Will the US Government now have to comb through nasty binary formats to check what data is retained and what data isn't?
It would be nice if these file formats where open and documented wouldn't? Sure would make doing security checks on the files a lot simpler.
Just some food for thought.

Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy

[arieswind]

you might think this.. but in the company i work at, we have to have training sessions every few months because people forget how to use word over time if they arent continuously retaught (these are all people that are 25-50)

Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy

[ericlondaits]

No, it's not a problem with office programs, it's a problem with the idea that "What you see is all there is". I remember a while back someone attempted to blank out portions of a PDF document by giving lines of black text a black background... which of course didn't remove the confidential data from the file, just prevented naive users from seeing it.

Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy

[Frosty Piss]

I don't do the hireing, but I've assumed that people who put that on their resume lack real stuff to put there. Guess I'm wrong. I'll have to put it back on my resume.

Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy

[J'raxis]

Really faulty logic there. Just because a government is capable of making incredibly mind-boggling mistakes, does not mean the same government is not capable of conducting other activities extremely well. Let's remember that the US government:

• has to track, in order to collect taxes, the incomes of over a million Americans down to the nearest dollar,
• is responsible for running the biggest military system in the world,
• is apparently able to wiretap many if not all Internet users in the country,
• has the largest prison system in the world (2.2 million Americans in prison),
• has a law enforcement apparatus to enforce the war on drugs worth about $40 billion,
• and has an intelligence-gathering infrastructure worth $60 billion dollars according to this very story.

Those are just a few data points to get you thinking about what they can do. Yes, the system is rife with corruption and inefficiency at all levels, but it works. If your government can do all of the above, on a yearly basis, what makes you think that coordinating a single strike on three buildings with three airplanes would be impossible?

[Footnote: I don't think the US government is "behind" 2001-09-11. My own theory is that they intentionally let it happen, but that's beside the point. My point here is that they are clearly capable of committing such an action.]

Here's something to consider...

[tkrotchko]

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!"?

Re:Stargate

[fm6]

I thought the Stargate program pays for itself (indeed, even turns a profit) by selling off all the technology they brought back.

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. The amusing thing is that the TV show makes the same people who were the evil conspirators in the book into the good guys!

Re:No One Will Be Fired

[Doc Ruby]

I didn't say the DNI should be fired. I just said that no one will be fired. Your rumsfeldian denial of the extreme opposite is exactly the kind of Republican nonsense that protects everyone doing all these important government activities wrong.

And all you can do is "sigh".

The budget is secret. Publishing it is a crime. The total number has indeed been secret, and the conventional estimates have been $15B, 25%, too low. Which means that even in just 2005, the "Intelligence" operations were over 30% larger than previously believed.

I guess you sigh over the big deal everyone makes about the Bush gang exposing a secret CIA agent, Valerie Plame, who worked to keep Iraq and Iran from going nuclear, to protect Bush/Cheney lies about nukes to send us to war in those countries. You'll probably claim that she wasn't covert, that the Bush gang didn't expose her, that they didn't know, that mistakes were made, that Bush will fire anyone involved in the leak... Spare me your horrendous BS.

Only denial junkies can appear to think your way though keeping separate massive administration failures like Katrina, exposed intel secrets, and Bush's failed, faithy government. Your massive coincidence theory doesn't fool anyone. You (dwindling) Republican apologists do indeed insist that terrorists are the reason Bush's government does anything wrong. You Bush worshippers don't even need to hear Bush say "I made a mistake" - "mistakes were made" is enough, and no one gets fired.

You've even got the insanity to defend Bush's Katrina response. You are too sick to try to cure with facts and overwhelming evidence. I'm replying only because it's so easy, and because there are indeed still others who can be fooled by your shoddy lies and denial.

Re:RTFA !

[Scrameustache]

70 % of the budget from FY95 to FY06 (up to August 31), in tens of millions of dollars,
third column for 100% : So, between 25 to 30 before 9-11, and then between 55 and 60 after.

Basically, their budget doubled as a result.
Thanks for RTFA and giving me the bit I wanted :)

There's something creepy

[nightfire-unique]

.. 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?

Re:Outdated link

[d474]

It took 110 hours to complete this PowerPoint presentation, according to the stats in properties. That's almost 14 days at 8 hours a day. No wonder their budget is so fucking high. I'd hate to see how long it takes for them to actually DO something.

Re:Outdated link

[The One and Only]

The Federation of American Scientists was formed during the early atomic era, in the belief that scientists had a social responsibility to participate in the political process. It was apparently founded by scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project.