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Top Secret America
mahiskali writes "The Washington Post published an immense interactive website today, detailing the companies and government agencies currently doing top secret work in the United States. Everything from counter-IED operations to human intelligence is touched upon. Citing various interviews with 'super users' and through exhaustive analysis of public records for over two years, this interactive site allows users to peer into the guarded world of top secret intelligence. With more than 854,000 people currently holding a TS clearance, has the defense and intelligence world grown too big, too fast? Or has this large growth served us well, exemplified by no successful terrorist acts on US soil since 9/11? How can we judge the success of these programs, when much of it will never be known by the general public?"
How can we judge the success of these programs, when much of it will never be known by the general public?
I thought the effectiveness of intelligence and homeland security spending were periodically reported on and covered by the GAO? Then you'd get congressional hearings on bad years and large contracts like the FBI's Virtual Case File System (complete failure)?
Seems to be a lot of hype. Yeah, we know the contractors soak up a lot of your tax dollars. Yeah, I know you can use black and white footage to make it look evil and interview your own reporters to sell newspapers and ads. You might be correct saying that there has been too much spending since 9/11 on this stuff but how does revealing contracts and small businesses associated with the government help this situation?
Also, I'd like to point out that this appears to be a three part story running Mon-Tues-Wed with a PBS Frontline one hour special on it. Evidently, PBS and the WP think the little stuff you know about national security is going to aid you in your decision to determine whether or not your tax dollars are being appropriately spent. Good luck.
My work here is dung.
FTFY
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"Or has this large growth served us well, exemplified by no successful terrorist acts on US soil since 9/11?"
The day after 9/11 I found a rock. I've kept this rock with me every day since then. Could it be more that this rock prevents terrorism?
Will people ever learn that correlation does not imply causation?
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
That number mey be exaggerated; it's possible it includes me, as I held a TS clearance in the USAF almost 40 years ago. It may even be likely. Just because a person holds a clearance doesn't mean they actually know anything, even with a clearance you're only briefed on a "need to know" basis. If it does include me, it includes anyone who was ever stationed at Utapao, Thailand during the Vietnam war, since some secret recon gear was there. It also likely includes anyone who was ever stationed at a SAC base.
If this is so, 854k people doesn't seem quite so outrageous; it may sinply be the people still living who were investigated, cleared, and trained (you have to get training to get a TS clearance).
Free Martian Whores!
Having the clearance doesn't immediately give you the access. You can't complete the certification process, and then stroll into FBI headquarters and ask for a list of undercover agents. TS clearance has been added as a necessity for many IT positions that don't actually access the data they're responsible for maintaining or retrieving, for example.
Are we 'safer'? Maybe. Thomas Jefferson once said, “Those who would trade safety for freedom deserve neither.”
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
Or has this large growth served us well, exemplified by no successful terrorist acts on US soil since 9/11?
Is the submitter a complete idiot? remember those little letters full of Anthrax much?
Why do people keep saying this? its a completely weird oversight, especially as it was never credibly settled.
I'd hate to be an imprisoned Russian spy right about now.
The site statistics and information are incredibly misleading. Simply because 1m hold TS clearance, or the right to gain TS clearance for an SCI level job, does not mean 1m people are actively working in the industry.
With so many contractors such as Lockheed, CSC, OAO, etc... you have thousands which may hold clearance but they are not at the moment on a project. When I was working for CSC, in the span of a few years, I was on a dozen different projects. Some non-classified, some were. Not all were for the Gov't. I still had to hold a clearance.
Some were for the Gov't but totally benign in terms of what was worked on.
There is a massive amount of infrastructure to run all Gov't ops, bases, local and state Gov't. Even if you want to be a janitor in many places, you have to qualify for a clearance.
If you want to run fiber or copper cabling between buildings which house classified projects, you need to have a clearance.
To be a receptionist at many facilities, you need to have a clearance.
The information leads the reader to think that all 1m with TS clearance are working at the moment on nefarious projects for an evil government. While the reality is, most are simply support staff doing work that if it were any other customer, would be easily overlooked and thought down on.
This is just another Washington Post scaremongering article by someone who makes their living off of the people she is claiming are too many in number.
Or has the meaning of "top secret" been diluted by overuse?
Yes, and they've threatened to attack other dates at random until we change our calendar.
Blank until
If you consider back in 2002/3 the 'intelligence' gained turned out spurious in crucial places - this, during one of the fastest periods of 'top secret america's' growth - then no I'd say it isn't serving us ordinaries in the West very well at all. Info gathering for matters as big as what Colin Powell put forth at that time was pitiful, but did serve the ulterior motives that have been discussed at length here on Slashdot and elsewhere.
Since intelligence gathering was tied in with those two conflicts which still are ongoing, expect intel to be more along the lines of PR in favour of a given government's goals rather than anything factual or geniune. Assuming more wars follow, those employed want to keep it their paycheques coming: If you knew your government was angling to begin a war...does it make sense to trust most or even a fraction of the work that the intelligence community they pay and control produces?
If this is what the community involved with top secret work gives us in public and it on such an egregiously poor level in terms of wrongness, then all that points to is the possibility that the work that is kept secret is all the more unsavory, ethically questionable and downright terrifying whether it be torture, war crimes, kidnapping, assassination or anything other illegal practice the agencies in 'top secret America' have historically carried out or encouraged. These agencies do do good work at times, but I think this pace of growth, or growth at all, isn't necessary
november, 2011? Wasn't it supposed to be on 2012?
Well, as predictions go, the USA vs. England match on the FIFA world cup was a total failure!
> Or has this large growth served us well, exemplified by no successful terrorist acts on US soil since 9/11?
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm!
Lisa: That’s specious reasoning, dad.
Homer: Why thank you, honey.
Lisa: By your logic, I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Hmm. How does it work?
Lisa: It doesn’t work; it’s just a stupid rock!
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don’t see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: Hmm... Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
I first heard about this site through an email from work. We handle a lot of government contracts, some of which are probably secret (though I'm not involved in any of that). The email was instructing us not to visit the site. That way we could more convincingly "neither confirm nor deny" anything from that site.
For most Americans, the day after 9/11 they found Iraq.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Huge terrorist plots bringing down buildings are rare. The PETN bomber, for example, needed a steel detonator that could compress a sizable charge of PETN significantly, otherwise PETN just burns; but getting that kind of thing into airport security is hard, even pre-9/11, since they're bulky and steel and complex and obviously bombs. Taking over a plane is hard, too; seriously, box cutters aren't necessary when you can turn a shoe lace into a strangling tool and take a stewardess hostage.
Really, they were rare before 9/11; remember the Oklahoma thing, ad the 2 prior attempts on the new york trade centers. They're rare now.
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They're kind of like the TSA... the "war on terrorism" provided an excuse for a grandstanding president with little intelligence to look like a "great statesman" by creating more, bigger government agencies that will have limited usefulness and will never shrink on their own. After all, their creation was an opportunity for elected officials to both appear to be "doing something" about terrorism and to spend a lot of money on their constituents, helping ensure their re-election.
It's a natural human impulse to think "more is better" or "bigger is better"... I'm starting to think it's biologically rooted. At any rate, combining all the intelligence agencies into one big organization only works if all the people involved are egoless, if they all are willing to work together, and if they all don't care if they have a job tomorrow. Most people can't do this, and the folks in charge at these agencies are the ones least likely to be able to do so, especially since many of them are government appointed or union.
The worst part is that many of the people involved with these efforts truly believe that they are doing the Right Thing, that they are the best defense against "another 9/11" and that they must be allowed to continue regardless of whether the US has the money or whether our existing laws stand in their way.
Submitted for your consideration: Which was worse for our country... the 9/11 attack and the aftermath, or the wars, restrictions, loss of freedoms, and problems created by our own government in response to it?
I never believed that 9/11 was anything but a horrible crime. No less than that, but certainly no more than that...
PS: Taco, this beta release of the comments editing software needs finishing...
what makes you think almost 1 million can
There have been numerous terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11, two successful (e.g., Fort Hood, Little Rock) and the rest foiled only by the attackers' own incompetence (e.g., Shoebomber, Pantybomber, Times Square).
I would argue that SECRECY was more profound during eras like World War II when things like the "Loose Lips Sink Ships" posters were in public areas like commercial shopping places and the general public was warned about not communicating ANY info about local projects like scrap drives to anyone they didn't trust.
As a note, I hold a clearance and most of the stuff that is classified is just ridiculous. Of course, there is the problem of classification due to aggregation of info, but seriously, most people would not believe what the majority of classified information encompasses.
How do you measure effectiveness indeed? An attack that never occurs can never be proven to have been prevented, only attacks that actually occur can be reviewed by civilians. So that might skew the perception, but it's the only way to rate effectiveness.
The most recent example of a terrorist attack on US soil would be 9/11, and we know some things about the involvements of government agencies there:
- First of all they (CIA) funded, armed and trained the people responsible (although decades before, it had a measurable influence)
- After that their 'betrayal' and international covert operations (or more in general US involvement abroad) are mentioned by terrorist organizations as a mayor reason for their war on the US
- And last but not least these agencies knew of an impending attack prior to 9/11 and failed to protect the civilians
So according to my score they failed miserably! Given the absence of proof to the contrary it looks like the larger the (counter)intelligence in a country is the more likely that country will become involved in international terrorism and other unwanted unintended consequences. I'm really glad the Netherlands where I live does not have such massive covert operations, if the US is the example to go by it would probably cause more problems for us than it would ever solve...
I'm seeing people posting on Twitter that this was done with the help of Wikileaks. Can't seem to find verification though...
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
Yes, the terrorists attack the number 0.81818181818181818181818181818182 all the time. I rounded it up to prevent any real damage to the poor little thing.
Free Martian Whores!
exemplified by no successful terrorist acts on US soil since 9/11?
So we're the anthrax attacks no terrorist acts?
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november, 2011? Wasn't it supposed to be on 2012?
Its like Christmas in a shopping mall, you were expecting it to turn up in December but it arrives two months ahead of time.
And yet the haven't found Osama bin Laden or the Anthrax killer and still don't seem to have any clue who really killed JFK! Obviously, more money has to be spent on national security in order to solve these mysteries!
"no successful terrorist acts on US soil since 9/11?"
How the Anthrax attacks shortly after 9/11?
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
There has been no 9/11 since 9/11 BUT there also was no 9/11 BEFORE 9/11
The point is, terrorists are NOT like regular soldiers who are expected to keep up a steady attack to defeat the enemey. All a terrorist has to do is create terror. As long as you are afraid of a terrorist, the terrorist has done his job.
Or to turn the roles around, partisans who fought the germans were NOT judged on the number of germans they killed but on how many german soldiers they kept away from the front lines. The allies played this game to great effect, weakening the german army by forcing them to fight on all fronts at the same time. Every soldier that had to patrol "safe" ground was a soldier not fighting the allies. That is PART of the reason for city bombardments, every AA gun defending cities was not blowing up tanks.
So, how have terrorist managed to affect the US BEFORE 9/11 and AFTER 9/11?
There have been terror attacks before including on US targets, but the average US citizen failed to be afraid of them... well except for celebs being afraid to fly to europe from time to time.
Post 9/11 the average US citizen, or at least the people who claim to speak for them, have become afraid. Job done as far as the terrorists are concerned. No succesful new attacks are needed. They might even be counter productive. Shoe bomber and the nigerian just harm the cause because they look silly and you might get the Israel effect, were the population doesn't care anymore and just votes to have muslims shot on sight (move to far right in Israely politics). Last thing the terrorists want is to really piss of the US to the point that nukes start flying. Turn the desert to glass would solve the whole problem in one go.
To many attacks and terror looses its meaning, people just demand vengeance. See the total failure of city bombings in europe to demoralize the public. Nukes were needed in Japan to achieve it. 8 million vietnamese citizens killed by the US and the US still lost that war. Terror is overrated in volume. Small attacks that are rare but people still think could happen any moment are scary.
Think Doom 3. Yeah yeah, lights go out, I turn around and BOOM BOOM, dead enemy. Yawn.
There have been failed and successful attack before 9/11 and after. Most likely all the security isn't changing the numbers in any real way.
And it doesn't have to be in the US. If the madrid bombings stopped US citizens from travelling abroad: Mission accomplished.
That is way a handful of terrorists/freedom fighters can tie up a large army... and why armies fighting them often resort to killing civilians in retribution.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"With more than 854,000 people currently holding a TS clearance"
That is a lot of people.
Their is no way they keep much secret with that many people having access to it.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
What the hell are they talking about, no terrorist attacks on US soil?
Did the anthrax attacks not happen? Plane going into an IRS building not terrorism? Sniper attacks in DC not terrorism?
We cannot prove what cannot be theoretically disproved (falsified). So we cannot prove "no terrorist attacks because of Top Secret work" just because "no attacks occurred", for there is no evidence to challenge. If there were a direct link, there would be, and we would be able to.
This is an extremely powerful fake fact generating technique that politicians are all too well aware of, and what conspiracies are made of. No one can disprove UFOs, hence they exist. No, they don't exist because there is no proof. Unfalsifiable evidence is not proof, but conspiracy.
exemplified by no successful terrorist acts on US soil since 9/11?
So we're the anthrax attacks no terrorist acts?
I think what the OP meant was that there have been no successful terrorist attacks committed by terrorist groups or organizations. Groups imply that communications need to occur and support sought all of which are possible to detect and counter. The anthrax attacks and terrorist attacks like that of Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood were "lone wolf" attacks that are very difficult to detect or counter since they lack those communications or support channels that could be used to detect the planning of such an attack.
I see someone already brought up Virtual Case File. That's a great example of what's wrong with the federal government. The FBI selected SAIC, despite the fact that SAIC has a horrible reputation. I am not exaggerating when I say that their reputation is so bad that they make Microsoft look like it has the engineering reputation that NASA had in the mid 60s. I would sooner believe that Microsoft created a XBox that could reliably withstand combat conditions in Afghanistan in the middle of the summer with nothing more than its internal cooling (or that Windows 8 was actually fit now to be used as the weapons control system in our carrier battle groups) than someone saying that SAIC could deploy a $500M system that is the heart and soul of a major agency.
Yet... they're still getting contracts all the time, and no federal PM is thinking "sweet Jesus, if I accept their bid, my career is over" because they won't get axed for enabling the tax payer's pooch to get so screwed it can't sit for a year. The real problem is not that the feds fail spectacularly from time to time, it's that they reliably keep enabling the same fail over and over again by keeping the same civil servants and retaining the same contractors.
Listen, USA spends more than how many nations combined on "defense" ?
It's time to END THE MADNESS now. Call your senators, representatives, neighbors, priests, doctors, whoever you think may have a pulse and explain why we should cut our defense spending today.
America's infrastructure is crumbling, the top 1% are laughing, the rest of us are in trouble.
Not to mention massive spending and inconvenience that is security theatre. Remember, the aim of terrorism isn't necessarily to cause physical harm, it's just to spread terror. If they can do that without lifting a finger, that's a major win. A nation in fear, or being forced to jump through security hoops, is already suffering the effects of terrorist actions, regardless of when the last real attack took place.
854,000 people can keep a secret, if 853.999 of them are dead.
With respect, you're talking out of your arse:
Even I did that it would be purely my opinion. To one guy 50% correct would constitute the border between 'success' and 'failure', to another 20%, and some on our diverse globe believe that if any crucial intelligence is incorrect then regardless of anything else it's a failure.
Not to mention how complex intelligence gathering is, how it applies to countless things. In the end you can't just do 'a ratio' and draw conclusions from everything because the quantity of important stuff is irrelevant to the sheer diversity of it: You could have a majority wrong, but still have enough right to allow those on the ground to pull something off with a resounding success and vice versa. Even whether something went well or not is up for debate. Simple ratio is just not a way to analyze such an intricate thing as this.
Reminds me of the following scene from The Simpson's:
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol is working like a charm!
Lisa: That’s specious reasoning, dad. By your logic, I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Hmm. How does it work?
Lisa: It doesn’t work, it’s just a stupid rock!
Homer: Uh-huh.
Homer (after a moment's thought): Lisa, I want to buy your rock
It could well be that the ridiculous sums of money spent on "Homeland Security" (a phrase that creeps the fuck out of me) is indeed money well spent. But please allow me to posit that the terrorist threat is actually McCarthy-esque bogeyman. Nevertheless, if the people of the US truly want to be (as opposed to feel) more safe, the best policy just might be to refrain from meddling in other countries' affairs quite so much...
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Or the plane that was flown into the IRS building. Or the shooting in Fort Hood. Or U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello's brother's gas line being cut.
Then again, I thought 9/11 wasn't supposed to count either, because it happened while George W. Bush was president and we're supposed to pretend that things were better back then.
What about the Atlanta Olympic bombing in 1996 (1 killed/111 injured)? What about the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (168 killed/680 injured)? What about the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 (6 killed/1000 injured)?
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Actually, all this focus on "it must have worked because there were no attacks after" ignores a crucial point: there haven't actually been foreign terror attacks in the USA _before_ 9/11 for a very long time. You know, _before_ all those idiotic constitution violations in the name of security.
Even looking at it dispassionately, I'd want basically to see someone disprove the null hypothesis if they sell me some miracle solution for anything. What is the situation with and _without_ their miracle cure? The before and after?
The last major terror attack _before_ 9/11 was the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995. (It also wasn't done by islamists, arabs, heathens, illegal immigrants, or the other scarecrows, but by two all-American nutters with a crazy right wing agenda. And I don't mean "right wing" as in "nazi", but the kind that goes "OMG, government is evil, gun control is evil, law enforcement is evil, load your guns and run for the hills!!!eleventeen")
The only things happening in between, and most of the stuff before 1995 too, were attacks abroad, which still haven't been stopped by the USA's giving up civil rights to stop the terrorists.
The main major terror show before that was the unabomber, who pretty much was the main show for the USA between 1978 and 1995, though not immediately and only managing to cause 3 fatalities. (And again it actually was a lone nutter who had no accomplices, belonged to no organization, and hadn't even told anyone about it. And he was a third-generation American at that. So neither much to infiltrate there, nor any profiling that would have helped.)
Look, when talking about events that rare, making a big fuss out of a short interval without them is stupid. (Although it's also false that there were none afterwards.)
I'm given the mental image of a couple of peasants who discover an elephant run away from a circus on their land. So they make up a stupid and inconvenient ritual for keeping elephants away, and unsurprisingly they never see an elephant on their land for 9 years straight. So they conclude that the ritual obviously works, and they must keep doing it every day. But the fact that they had also never seen an elephant on their land _before_ that ritual even existed, is lost on them.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Wow, simple criteria like 'what hasn't been done' really don't prove much do they.
Other posters have mentioned 3 attacks (not by dinosaurs) that must mean they're even MORE affective against extinct reptiles!
Even secret service needs public accountability.
I learned everything I need to know 'bout the government's secret stuff from Burn Notice. That show speaks the truth!
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/companies/microsoft-enterprise-services/
The "Where-do-your-files-want-to-go-today" company is listed as one of the government top-secret contractors.
You can all now sleep better, knowing how safe your secrets are.
"Or has this large growth served us well, exemplified by no successful terrorist acts on US soil since 9/11?"
There has been many successful acts of terrorism in the US. None of them has had any muslims involved. I guess killing school children or turning up at work with an AK47 is just your average American day. Or, if you count number of violently killed americans regardless of perpetrator there hasnt been ANY improvement.
The 9/11 was the odd happening, a break of the routine and not something that happens or has happened historically. Now take it like a biatch US people, defend being taken up the poop chute :D
HTTP/1.1 400
I shall point out to you that you wrote your post in English. No need to thank my country or my ancestors for that, you're welcome! Or perhaps you are of the sort that would prefer the world to speak German?
Russia is probably owed as much for the defeat of the Nazis as the Americans.
I shall also point out that Islam seeks power and money, and that I am not sure one would find either in any of the "countries" you listed.
Islam seeks submission to God. That's what the word Islam means. People seek power and money. For instance, Saudi Arabia is a theocracy, but it's a US Ally, because it's leaders seek money and power. (Remember GW Bush holding hands with the Saudi Crown Prince?)
If you wanted to knock terrorism into last century, you'd have to do two things: leave Iraq and Afghanistan, and form a new Manhattan style project to harvest energy directly to the sun to end our oil addiction. Of course, those things are nearly impossible for the US to do, since it only seeks power and money.
Here you go.
Richard Clarke, the White House counter-terrorism coordinator at the time, has revealed details of a meeting the day after the attacks during which officials considered the US response. Already, he said, they were certain al-Qa'ida was to blame and there was no hint of Iraqi involvement. "Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq," Mr Clarke said. "We all said, 'No, no, al-Qa'ida is in Afghanistan.'"
But Mr Clarke, who is expected to testify on Tuesday before a federal panel reviewing the attacks, said Mr Rumsfeld complained in the meeting that "there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq." A spokesman for Mr Rumsfeld last night said he could not comment immediately.
As a guy who works in one of the companies on the website and has a TS clearance, I can't help but wonder how accurate the website is. My work, which accounted for a couple of hundred million dollars in contracts last year, isn't even listed. There are things listed that I know we are working on. There are also things listed that I'm pretty certain (but admitedly not completely certain) that we're not. The gross numbers of people and income are about right, but I'm skeptical about the breakdown.
Andrew Joseph Stack killed 2 IRA agents in his attack on a Texas IRS office. I guess the 12 dead at Fort Hood were not truly the result of a "Terrorist" attack. Then there are at least 3 other attacks by actual terrorists that were not successful. How is it you don't count those? Anyway even if we had cameras on every corner I don't think the gov would have stopped them.
Actually, Hassan's attack could have and should have been stopped. The man got moral support from people overseas, and worse, he repeatedly made statements to the effect that a good Moslem should actively resist the goals of the United States Army. Hassan was far less the "lone wolf" than the Anthrax research guy. If his fellow officers weren't such weenies, afraid to challenge him directly, Hassan would have been booted out of the army years ago.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Jefferson misquoted Franklin? Fail!
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
Paranoid terrorism is US foreign policy in a nutshell. The only difference between Osama bin Laden threatening to destroy America and the United States threatening to destroy Iran is that we can actually do it.
Islamic fundamentalists love the US War on Terror. They get to train against our soldiers, drum up support from places where they had none before, like Iraq, and use our degraded moral standards in their propaganda. The moment we kidnapped and tortured a single human being, we lost the war on terror. We proved that we are no different from any other totalitarian state. We may claim to support human rights and democracy, but if your vote includes someone we don't approve of, we've got no problem with assassinations, economic warfare, or outright war.
"But, that's the only thing 'these people' understand!" Yeah, right.
In response to the OP's question :
I would like to pose a counter-question :
Since 9/11 the Christian community in the US has been praying for protection from terrorist acts. Given the apparent lack of successful terrorist acts on US soil since 9/11, can you argue that the tech investment was more likely to have been successful than the power of prayer?
- "Why are you clapping?"
- "To scare away the elephants."
- "But there aren't any elephants here!"
- "See how well it's working?"
Banning liquids and putting toddlers on the no-fly list has certainly prevented dozens of potential terrorist attacks, and so has the enormous budget the military pours into its intelligence community.
Actually, it is all cover up for the massive alien war going on in outerspace... I'm still sad that Pres. Obama has not admitted to Area 51 yet and all that goes on there. Probably the last time I'll vote for an earthling.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Terrorism doesn't have to have the bomb explode. It's mere presense makes for a successful attack. Was the "Times Square Bomber" successful? The answer is YES, HE WAS -- because it created a sense of "terror" to the population. The "bomb" didn't have to explode. In fact, the bomb couldn't have "exploded" because it was so poorly built, the best it could have done was burn brightly. It would have been a car-fire and nothing more, the kind you see on the Cross-Bronx expressway almost every day and ignore.
But because it was reported as a "bomb", the populace was scared. Job done. Terror is created. The Media and the Government create more "Terror" than the actual terrorists do.
Successful attack? It doesn't matter if the 'bomb' explodes or not. Frankly, it doesn't matter if there's even a bomb at all. Just the "act" of terrorism in any way that gets the population to be scared, change their travel plans, worry about their homes, run out and buy duct-tape and plastic sheeting, build bomb shelters, yadda-yadda, is a *successful attack* because it's done the job intended.
And the job is to CHANGE OUR BEHAVIOR. Spend money on security theater. Waste our time fearing the bogeyman.
Job done. Successfully. Every time.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
exemplified by no successful terrorist acts on US soil since 9/11?
So we're the anthrax attacks no terrorist acts?
I think what the OP meant was that there have been no successful terrorist attacks committed by terrorist groups or organizations.
I think the OP was parroting a convenient lie that fits the story we're being sold.
You can try to add clauses to what he said 'till you've explained the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs if it amuses you, but you should know when you're being bullshitted.
You can't take the sky from me...
Or the shoe bomber, or the Times Square bomber, the list goes on. I don't find huge competing bureaucracies very good at being effective as intelligence organizations. I wish they would spend more money on root causes for terrorism (ideologies, diplomacy, poverty, etc.) than on big government intelligence agencies.
Seriously. This entire apparatus now seems to exist merely to sustain itself, and in spite of the warnings against it by great men, specifically Ben Franklin and Dwight Eisenhower.
If the government is capable of colluding with the Big Three to destroy Preston Tucker in 1948, what is it capable of now, with all the advancements since then?
(For those who don't know what Setec Astronomy is, watch the movie Sneakers)
I bought a magic talisman that prevents tiger attacks, it must work cause I have no been attacked by any tiger yet for the 10 years I have worn it.
The Washington Post decided to create an entire web site to publish all of the information in this expose. Beyond the usual articles, the site includes interactive maps, interactive infographics, a search engine and an online database. All of this material is delivered via a Flash-based applet, and serves as a good, real-world example of what a rich internet client can do when there is a lot of data to be conveyed, and not just multimedia.
Herewith The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
The Good
The articles are properly paginated for the screen, which makes reading online so very much easier. Each page spans two columns, which are fitted in about 600px of vertical space, which eliminates the need for scroll bars. The sides of the columns have click regions to navigate forward and back through the poages, like on a mobile reader. Perfect.
The interactive maps and infographics are very polished, but not as useful as they could be. As Prof. Tufte taught us, every graphic is supposed to make a point and tell a story. The purpose of these graphics seem to be to help us visually sort the data. While sorting is useful, it's not really telling a story; I think they could have done better. A key point in the article, for example, was that no one really knows who's doing what, and there are surely massive areas of overlap. It'd be nice to have an infographic that really made that point in a visual way.
The Bad
For some reason, many Flash developers insist on messing about with utterly standardized widgets such as the scroll bar. In this case, the UI designers chose to use a middling-grey rectangle for the scrollbar pointer, and a lighter-middling-grey line for the scrollbar background; very difficult to see, much less to click upon. Worse yet, the standard scrollbar behaviors were not supported, and the Page Down/Page Up keys were not active. The upshot is that one has to click and drag the small scrollbar pointer up and down just to move the page. Bad designer! Bad!
The Ugly
There are no words that can convey the ugliness that is the Comments interface. A complete UI failure. See it for yourself at
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/COMMENTSLINK
All in all, I think the Washington Post deserves an A+ for effort, and a B for execution. The only really sour note is the Comments interface. But delivering the entire expose as a web site shows just how fast and how far the Post has gone towards leveraging the web as an information resource.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Top Secret is not a very high level of clearance anymore. It hasn't been for a while. TS is essentially the entry level of clearance.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
You can think of Top Secret as a governmental NDA. Breaking this one will land you in jail instead of a fine or other penalties. Worst case senario is that you will be charged with treason and all that could possibly imply.
Not all people who have Top secret work for projects related to terrorism.
Mostly it's a requirement to interact with that particular agency.
it's regular FUD journalisim.
If we weigh the cost, in lives and dollars, of our "War on Terror", against the benefit of preventing one 9/11 a year, how would that expenditure compare with what we spend to prevent death and property damage from things like highway accidents, hurricanes, cancer, pollution, earth threatening asteroids, etc. Is it just me, or on that basis does it seem the "War on Terror" consumes way too much resources.
I'd love to see numbers on this if anyone knows of any.
Just see what happens when funding is cut. The government is not the most efficient just like large companies, but they have done a successful job at protecting us. We don't hear about the many attempts of terrorism in the media. Trust me...
Or the shoe bomber, or the Times Square bomber, the list goes on.
...the DC snipers...
The problem with asserting that this is the thinking that underlies the idea that "no terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11" can be the proof of the validity of any policy that is supposedly credited with this effect, is that unlike the "magic talisman" that prevents tiger attacks, there have been several terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11.
There were, for instance, the anthrax attacks. Since those have been blamed on a domestic source, the claim is sometime phrased as "no foreign terrorist attacks since 9/11".
But even that's problematic, since the LAX airport counter attack was carried out by a foreign (and, according to government reports at the time, al-Qaeda-linked) terrorist. Though it appears to have been a lone-wolf operation, not an organized one.
So, really, the whole claim on post-9/11 terror prevention not only requires magic talisman thinking, it also requires ignoring the actual occurrences of the event that the talisman supposedly protects against.
It's a common error to say that correlation does not imply causation. In fact, correlation need not imply causation. There's a subtle difference here, because sometimes correlation does imply causation--that is, when there is a reasonable causal link. A better way to put it is that correlation doesn't prove causation. At best, it gives you a clue that can then be followed up on. But it's the height of foolishness to say that trillions of dollars spent on the suppression of terror has no link whatsoever to ... ahem ... the suppression of terrorist attacks. The two are correlated, and the two might be causally linked. The correlation gives us a clue to look for a causal link. It doesn't prove the causal link, by itself, but it is one piece of evidence that points in that direction. And, more importantly, if there was no correlation, it could disprove it.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Did you have to work hard at becoming a moron, or did it just sort of come naturally for you?
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
Except for the facts that there's a reason you won't see most of those on a timeline of actual terror attacks. Perusing your links in no particular order, it turns out that:
- the Palo Verde incident is not actually believed to be an actual terror attack, and nobody ever heard of that "Sons Of Gestapo" organization before or after. It's believed to be actually a train robbery, with the whole pretend terror attack being just a smoke screen. (If you thought it was stupid in Die Hard that the "mastermind" tried to disguise a simple robbery as an international terror attack and add kidnapping and murder to the charges too if caught, was stupid, these guys actually did it IRL.)
And again, even if you take the note at face value, those would be some home-grown wackos protesting the siege of Waco. It's not the kind of people you'd get at by attacking some Arab countries or trying to data-mine the Arab-Americans' grocery lists and telephone calls like happened under Bush.
- the Centennial Olympic Park bombing killed a total of 2 (yeah, major terror attack that, and totally worth giving up your freedoms to prevent;)) and again was the work of a lone nutter working alone, without an actual organization, without having told anyone about it, and generally without anything you can infiltrate or where an oppressive surveillance state would have helped. Short of actually monitoring every minute of the life of every single citizen, so you can just rewind the tape and see who placed a bomb at any given point and time, there is no way for oppressive stupid government policies and agencies to prevent a lone deranged guy from doing it. You can't find this kind of thing by waterboarding a few Arabs to make them tell you (what they think you want to hear about) who'll place the bomb and where, because he simply had no ties to Al Qaeda or Hamas or any other terror organization.
And again rather the kind of nutter the GOP tries to woo, rather than the kind you'd pen as having dangerous radical ideas, even if you profiled him. His peeve at the Summer Olympics was that he thought they promote global Socialism, and that it also somehow had something to do with abortions on demand. Or at least he thought that it would somehow shame America for allowing abortions. Don't ask _me_ how that would work. It's practically the poster child for their mid-west bigotted, right-wing, bible-thumping voter, rather than someone you'd single out for dangerous islamist or commie inclinations.
- Ressam is not mentioned, for the sole reason that an actual terror attack didn't actually happen there. He was caught without all the post-9/11 brouhaha anyway. You know, without actually waterboarding anyone, nor suspending any civil liberties, nor anything.
- The Empire State Building Shooting was again not even as much what most people would think of as a "terror attack", as just someone pulling a .380 handgun and opening fire on a bunch of people. (And managing to actually kill one before killing himself.)
Again, we're talking a lone nutter deciding to go out with a bang, rather than any kind of organized international terrorism. Really no different than any other case where a nutter decides to shoot up a school or abortion clinic, to make a point.
At any rate, again it's not the kind of thing that would have been discovered by waterboarding a bunch of suspected Al Qaeda members or anything. The guy worked alone, and no organization claimed credit for his shootings. In fact the palestinian organizations tried to distance themselves from it, an told his widow to deny that there was any political motivation behind it. (His widow had only learned of it when she received a copy of a note found on his body after the attack.) It was an attack that wasn't actually sponsored or wanted by anyone except the demented old guy that did it, and again nobody knew about it until after the fact. There was no organization to infiltrate, nor telephone calls to Hamas to data-mine or intercept, nor any accomplices to tortur
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So if you're asking if we were the anthrax attacks, and not terrorist acts then I would have to say WTF are you smoking. And maybe no. If you're asking were the anthrax attacks not terrorist acts then I would have to say that I think they were, but others might disagree. Hope that clears things up for everyone.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
...to undermine our nation's security. I'm sure the Obama admin. will do nothing...
Also, that same high-octane gas was the one Standard Oil of New Jersey was still delivering to Nazi Germany as late as 1941, even after the Nazis had bombed London.
http://ww2f.com/wwii-general/9798-lend-lease-major-supplies-western-allies-russia.html
Soviet net imports and GNP (in 1937 rubles):
1941: imports 0.3 billion; GNP 218.7 billion
1942: imports 7.8 billion; GNP 166.8 billion
Note that this are all imports.
Soviet Defense outlays (in 1937 rubles):
1941: 61.8 billion (July-Dec. 41: 44.3)
1942: 101.4 billion
(sources: Mark Harrison: Accounting for War, 1996)
Or the D.C. area sniper shootings (Malvo I think it was?)
No terrorist attacks have happened because no one with enough money, patience, planning and possible personal death have had a desire to do it. The CIA, FBI and DHS might have stopped the simple attacks (truck full of home depot fertalizer, sure) but if someone was determined, there is nothing they can do.
Ok, after watching the sensationalistic article and perusing the website, I call BS. Many of the installations on the map are military bases. To work on certain planes, you must hold Top Secret clearance. I don't recall whether the article showed whether or not the number of "almost a million" included persons within the military, but with many in the military holding TS clearances, I wouldn't be surprised.
No kidding that there are a lot of people out there with TS clearances. Would you want someone to be building a satellite to NOT have been heavily investigated? I wonder how many of those 800,000+ people received their clearance from the military (ie served in the military).
They say that there are 45 agencies that fall into "Top Secret America." Of those, 20 are primarily military agencies/commands/armed forces. NSA/CIA/NRO/NGA/DNI all have a significant military presence.
Just more BS because people don't have the transparency they want.
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
People like William Cooper warned many of the misdoings of government yet was shrugged by many as a waco. Funny that most of what he said came to pass, yet the majority still do not want to believe even the smallest of conspiracies. It seems to be a false hope people want to cling too that our government wouldn't really subvert the will and justice of the people for their own gain regardless of instance after instance that proves such.
What we need is a diversity of voices, which means diverse funding. Something ad funded is more hesitant to piss of their advertisers/their industries, something government funded is more likely to toe the government line, something run by a religious group... etc. There is no one unbiased source. We need to have many. Part of having many is blocking the mono-cultures by blocking the consolidation.
It doesn't matter how many people have a TS. Just because you have it doesn't mean you can see everything anyhow. Its all, "need to know" is what I'm saying. Intel is the only way to safely win a war these days anyhow. I say let it grow, let it grow, let it grow.
the article implies that you have done well to mitigate terrorist attacks before they happen since 9/11... which begs the question, how often did you get attaked before 9/11? i don't remember hearing much about you guys being under constant attack by terrorists? is it just me or did the americans create a problem where no problem existed? Is it also not likely that your security hasn't actually prevented anything, but rather no one has chosen to attack you? Seems to me that your (disgusting) country is just fear mongering and pissing away billions if not trillions in the process
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaB82ML3aGA&feature=related
His idea being that prolonged secrecy in technology inevitably leads to what he calls a "breakaway civilization".
I don't think that he's right in saying disclosure is inevitable. The information readily available to anybody with a vague level of interest has in fact proven very easy for people to willfully ignore despite its being in our faces. But he makes other good points.
-FL
"Do you know what destroys rocks? Paper covers rock. Spock vaporizes rock [samkass.com]." - by atomic-penguin (100835) writes: on Monday July 19, @10:24AM (#32950672) Homepage Journal
See subject line above (just busting your balls man, but, you have to admit the opening was there for it), lol!
>>I don't find huge competing bureaucracies very good at being effective as intelligence organizations
Or admitting that even with all the information in the world, they still can't stop a person from picking up a rock and throwing it through a window.
The fact that they pretend that they can - but just need more funding in order to do so - is telling.
"If you don't read a newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read a newspaper, you are misinformed." Mark Twain
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
8=H 1=A
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahb
No nation can call itself democratic when it dedicates resources to hiding activities from the people who empower that government.
This is what you get for not having compulsory voting.
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
You ask: why do we need this many programs top secret.
Often times your clearance isn't about what you are doing, but what someone is doing next to you. For instance you _might_ want to have an electrician have a Secret or Top Secret clearance because you want someone who can go into that room and replace the blown outlet next to the big rack of papers.
The various classification levels are _really_ about who can go where without constant supervision and whether, when some person enters, you have to stop working and wait for them.
So is is more expensive to clear one guy with a particular skill, or have one guy with a particular skill followed around by another guy, and requiring that everyone anywhere near that guy to stop working and close up shop because the one skilled guy will be in some compartment for minutes to hours.
It is often cheaper and better and more realistic to expand a web of trust rather than serialize massive operations.
All a clearance really is, is a way of determining how many people have to watch the watchers.
Meanwhile a classified operation may generate ream after ream of paper that doesn't really need to be classified, but the requirement to declassify that non-valuable paper is usually that several people have to read and understand that paper to certify that it doesn't contain the few things that _must_ be protected. Consider a classic core dump. Page after page of hex digits. Can you certify that none of those sequences represent classified info? Probably not. So you use it, you treat it as classified, and when you reach the control-or-destroy time limit you either put it under document control (stamp, register, file etc) or toss it into the classified disposal bin/box/device/etc.
You have to think about classified stuff the same way you would think about handling a large quantity of street drugs, gemstones, or toxic waste. You want to be able to know that it is okay to leave "the package" with anybody in the chain of custody, and you want to be able to say "if the package is not in the safe, you can know for sure who has it".
So the mechanism of classification, which looks all huge in this sort of expose, isn't what you think. And huge isn't always a waste anyway.
And I have seen things like forty people having to stop working and clean _everything_ off their respective workspaces because some uncleared big-wig wanted to walk through a classified area. Between clean up, visit, and resumption that was a loss of forty man hours. Who wants to have to go through that every time someone delivers water, or comes in to vacuum.
It can get byzantine, but you know what, without all those "proved trustworthy" cogs, there would be a huge amount of waste and destruction generated by a _tiny_ _tiny_ fraction of the total effort. It may not be uncommon for a multi-million dollar effort to go classified because a device smaller than a suitcase must be treated as classified but also "sometimes needs to be in near continual operation". etc. Without the classification being spread out, whenever the device was turned off all the computer hard drives would have to be collected up and stowed and so on. Easier to just classify the project than have two perfectly distinct sets of "everything that can store data" in one office.
So yeah, "Bob's T.S. Exterminators" sounds like a waste, until you have to set up somewhere specific and both get a job done and deal with a continuous influx of vermin.
But the fact is that dealing with classified _anything_ is an expensive, elaborate hassle. Anybody and everybody at every level of the government _hates_ it. You don't want to generate classified, you don't want to open classified containment, you _really_ don't want to have to ship classified material between installations. For reasons of pure ease of daily life and good old corporate greed, the bare minimum of stuff is classified, and at the last possible instant to boot.
Classified junk might as well be called "weaponized radioactive herpes
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press