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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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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
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...
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
Funnily enough for the first few seconds I read it as Intel computers, bit of a bad choice of abbreviation for a Tech website, next story will be "EU bans AMD", referring to acid mine drainage no doubt.
My little Linux and tech blog
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.
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.
*Sigh*.
So, the Director of National Intelligence should be fired because a PowerPoint presentation reveals something that is so broad and vague, given the that fact that the "intelligence" budget is "secret" has been a joke for the last decade?
The reason the intelligence budget has been secret has been so adversaries can't see how much you're spending on any one agency, which can imply underlying operations or technologies and techniques depending on how granular budget breakdowns were. It's never been that the total number has been "secret"; it's been that many of the constituent elements have been correctly kept secret, which necessarily means that the total amount can't be known exactly.
What is or isn't "intelligence" is a matter of definition, and as the article notes, it's just a matter of the fact that the DNI is now getting ahold of the fragmented budgets of the thousands of fragmented components and programs in the sixteen Intelligence Community components, many of which are in DOD, that currently fall under the operational guise of "intelligence", including massive chunks of NSA and entire agencies managing assets in space, like NRO.
Even this number doesn't likely accurately represent the "intelligence" budget, since so many areas are a mix of other disciplines, especially national security.
(Way to get in an off-topic post that manages to rant about conspiracy theories, Orwell (can we have a Godwin's Law for Orwell references at some point?), religion, and Hurricane Katrina all in one, though. America does not "serve at the president's pleasure" (nice US Attorney firing reference, though! Bravo!), no one thinks terrorism is to blame for everything or even most things (except for the things for which it is to blame, and some choose willful ignorance about the scope and nature of the problem), and Bush himself routinely has said that he has made mistakes and bad decisions, and no one except complete idiots would think anyone of any political stripe is "never wrong". And Katrina. Ugh. Fastest federal response ever to a disaster of that size and scope, and the local and state agencies knew about this for several, several days, and DID have the capability to do a lot more, and didn't. So, what, you want more federal control over states and localities? Maybe a law to allow domestic use of the military in natural disasters? Oh, wait...that is really Bush's secret attempt to declare martial law, right? I can't keep up.)
I guess there weren't any basic tutorials on computer security in that budget
-- lol pwned
Because government people are still people and they, and you and I -- and everyone -- are stupid.... I try to be careful in my old age anymore with judging, blaming and thinking others are stupider. I've got waaay too many screwups on my record to talk. It is simply a matter of time before you (or me) has our next big stupid moment in finances, love, work, etc. Just because they work for the government doesn't mean they are different or better or worse. Probably one of the best arguments against vast and complex conspiracies is simply that: that people in any conspiracy are just stupid people like me and you.
To quote Bullet Tooth Tony:
"Never underestimate the predictability of stupidity...."
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Bush may do alot of things wrong... but are you really trying to blame him for some low level moron releasing a powerpoint presentation? This is not an offense that requires big heads to roll. This is a problem that requires (possibly) one or two grunts to be fired. Shit happens, you can't stop every mistake. The important thing is how it's handled and frankly, I don't think it SHOULD be a matter of public knowledge how this is handled. Maybe the guy gets a mark on his record, maybe he gets fired, maybe they change the clearing policy. Either way... please drop your Bush is responsible for every little thing that goes wrong. Ultimately yes, the buck stops at his door, but lets be realistic... I'm sure someone is going to get hammered for this... lets make sure it's the person that ACTUALLY screwed up.
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.
I have always been saying that MS products have no place in government
Yes, because this is all Microsoft's fault. It has nothing to do whatsoever with the incompetence of the person/people who created this Powerpoint show and left classified data in the version that was released to the public.
If only the Feds were using an open-source solution. An open-source slide show program would have been smart enough to realize that they left classified data in the document and would have alerted them prior to the document being released to the public.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
Maybe not, but an OSS program would have allowed them to modify the source so "invisible" classified data CANNOT be included in a report that leaves the system. Ya know, they do have pretty good proggers...
MS is notorious for leaving too much information in the document without being visible to the plain eye.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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"
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.
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make install -not war
No, while I'd usually agree with you, this is a glaring example of why more people in government should use MS products. Can we get PowerPoint installed on more desktops in the Justice Department?
This is a plain, simple and well-known feature of MS Office that frankly is very useful. If you copy a spreadsheet graph across, the data also gets copied across so you are able to modify it later.
So what would the advantage of OSS software give? They could modify the program so that this data doesn't get released? Great. So we have a program that magically knows what data is classified, or we have a classified flag that can be added (or forgotten to be added by clerical staff). Would you allow classified data to be used to create a graph? Probably not.
As far as i remember OOo implements graph and data copying between various OOo applications in exactly the same way too. This is simply the poor sod that had to make the slideshow either not realising or forgetting that this happens.
This is why documents like this PowerPoint should be distributed in some format like a PDF, there is no reason to be able to modify the slideshow publically or see the source behind any of the graphics, charts or diagrams.
That's funny, because I can open up PowerPoint and select "Remove Hidden Data", which coincidentally enough is a feature I pulled from Microsoft's site. It does a fantastic job of removing all that hidden data, too. This is pure user error in not using this function; it has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft versus OSS.
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.
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)
That is a hell of a lot of bake sales!
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
Does it really do it though? I'm not saying that it doesn't, but past experience would not lead me to trust that it would work as advertised.
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.
.. 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
Moderation -2
50% Troll
50% Overrated
TrollMods think I'm a terrorist, because they can debate as well as Bush can fight terrorism.
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make install -not war