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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?"
"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
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.
Brilliant. You've highlighted the paradox. We can't judge the effectiveness of security programs because they rely on secrecy to be effective, and knowing enough to judge their effectiveness destroys their effectiveness.
A cruel and unusual system for which there is no obvious solution, and which there is really no one to blame.
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.
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.
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
They hand them out like candy too, esp to direct family. :)
Mommy or daddy walks home with a bag and family has to be trusted on paper.
They never get to see anything or do anything but they are cleared.
The unofficial collaborator list would be huge but well blended over state and federal agencies
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 think the prevailing attitude is that if you don't have the clearance to know who has that clearance, then you probably don't actually need people with that clearance.
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.
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.
The shoebomber, pantybomber and times square incident WERE SUCCESSFUL ATTACKS. The goal of terrorism is to incite fear and terror in our populace causing our country to waste money (damaging our economy) and restrict our freedoms more and more. All three achieved the larger goal. Killing people is just one of the methods to get there.
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.
okay, so the issue here is that top secret is a requirement for a lot of things that might not be top secret. Say you're doing some kind of database for the gov't? It could be as basic as library of congress but they might require someone with top secret clearance at some level of the company.
It's the wrong issue to focus on if you simply look at "are top secret jobs productive/worthwhile or not", essentially.
While I am sure there are some positions that are overpaid and won government contracts for more money than the minimal BS they're doing, the bigger issue should be : why do we need this many programs top secret?
Terror attacks will come again from other sources. It doesn't matter how much money you spend. Maybe if you spend enough to create the situation that existed in former East Germany. But do anybody really want to go there?
And are all these measures able to take care of a terrorist like the Una Bomber anyway?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Is it possible yet to filter out Slashdot stories sourced from certain press channels? That would be a great feature - I'd like to vote my disapproval for these kinds of dismal journalistic practices by filtering _any_ stories based on these rotten apples as a source.
"Turn the desert to glass would solve the whole problem in one go. "
Somehow I think if the US exterminated over a billion people overnight it would only be the start of their problems.
Think the world hates the US now?
I've heard people speculating that the most successful campaign the IRA ever pulled off was one with very few casualties.
They bombed a few train stations after giving warnings (someone was killed though) and then phoned in similar warnings (with no bombs) for months.
When there's bombs exploding and people dying people rally around their government for protection.
When there's no bombs exploding but the train stations keep getting closed and people keep getting delayed and being late for work they get angry at their government.
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.
And there are those that would use this information to conclude that the best approach is to just watch Fox News and read right-wing blogs because you can't trust anything in the big liberal newspapers.
Here's a news flash: Newspapers have never been fully trustworthy. You think the Hearst papers were being honest in the way they dealt with the early part of the 20th century? You believe the Wall Street Journal was being impartial when they reported on the Viet Nam War?
There has never been a time when you can accept news from any source without taking the source itself into account. Critical thinking has always been necessary.
Yet, even with their faults and stumbling efforts at transparency through the years, when the Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers despite their being classified, they allowed citizens to make more informed decisions about the behavior of their government. When the NYT revealed the CIA assassinations in South America and elsewhere, should they have held those stories back because there had been scandals where certain reporters had fabricated stories?
We'll never have a fully independent and reliable press in the US until they are subsidized by the government. Yes, you read that correctly. SUBSIDIZED BY THE GOVERNMENT. The same way newspapers were subsidized by the government in the period immediately following the ratification of the US Constitution. Did you know that the Founding Fathers approved government subsidized for a free press? That's exactly what the early postal subsidies were. At a time when the biggest operating expense of most newspapers was their distribution, the Founding Fathers, Madison, Jefferson, et al, subsidized their delivery via US Post. That's how important they believed the Press was to our existence as a free people.
Now you would say that the solution is to do away with any standards because the national press can't keep those standards, and get all our news from bloggers. You may not have noticed by some of the most reliable online journalists ARE print journalists. The same guys who write the stories in the papers are writing them online, only online we have absolutely no way of knowing where their funding is coming from. That's not a recipe for a reliable Press.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
We'll never have a fully independent and reliable press in the US until they are subsidized by the government. Yes, you read that correctly. SUBSIDIZED BY THE GOVERNMENT.
Sure thing. We'll have a government subsidized entity as a watchdog for the government. What could possibly go wrong?
Did you know that the Founding Fathers approved government subsidized for a free press?
[Citation needed]
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
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.
I do agree that Newspapers have never been fully trustworthy, however the research links posted above do quantify just how low the so called credible press sources have fallen in just the last decade vs ~a century of history. In any case, there is no reason to excuse this kind of behavior anymore as you appear to be doing, even despite the few and far between shining moments you picked out. Yes critical thinking is always important with everything we read and there is no substitute for it, however if you catch a person lying to you repeatedly - do you keep listening to their stories and take extra effort to discern the lies/manipulation from the truth - or do you simply stop associating with them, at most tell them clearly that this behavior will not be tolerated?
We live in a global communication age, and the internet allowing us to collectively take our eyeballs elsewhere away from the traditional news cartels. The more we all do so, the quicker our "Free Press" will get the message that these shenanigans are not going to be tolerated anymore - after which they might lose the arrogance and up their game.
Partly wrong on the first, correct on the second.
Clearances expire if you exceed the periodicity requirements for renewal (though I forget the length of the period). This can happen even if you're currently cleared at that level - my submarine got dinged hard because one guy's paperwork slipped through the cracks at the end of a yard period resulting in his clearance expiring without the command realizing it.
Once you have a TS clearance, you always have a TS clearance so long as you keep up the paperwork, even if you don't currently have TS access. Your current access is determined by your current command. For example, when I was attached to a submarine I had a TS clearance *and* TS access as it was required for my duties, and that access expired when I detached from the command. At my next command, a shore facility, I still has a TS clearance - but only S access because S was the highest material used in my job at that command. Had I gone back to sea, regaining a TS would have been a matter of a little paperwork on the boat and nothing more.
Yes, becasue the BBC never puts out any stories critical of the British government.
Who do you think has more fiscal power in the US - the government, or the businesses? Now say a paper wants to run a story that would make it's biggest advertiser look bad - do you think the story will run? You won't run into that if a paper isn't relying on advertising dollars to keep it running.
"But this one goes to 11!"
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
Same here. I can't find any evidence that this delivery was subsidized; in fact, John Jay, the first Chief Justice, recommended to Washington that the post office not even deliver newspapers at all. At the time, even letter delivery was not subsidized in any way-- if you wanted it delivered to your door, this was done for an extra charge that was split between the post office and an independent contractor.
Why is there so much clamor about maintaining a "wall of separation" between church and state, but we're so eager to knock down the flimsy one that exists between the state and the media?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
We'll never have a fully independent and reliable press in the US until they are subsidized by the government. Yes, you read that correctly. SUBSIDIZED BY THE GOVERNMENT.
That's all it takes? So Pravda was fully independent and reliable because it was subsidized by the government? What if I decide to publish a newspaper promoting communist/fascist/racist or whatever unpopular views? Will I get the subsidy as well? Who decides, and by what criteria, which newspapers will be the good boys who get the subsidy and a pat on the head by the government and which ones don't? The truth is the exact opposite of what you said. It is impossible to have free and independent press if it receives even one penny from the government.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
As the American experience has shown in regard to the free press, there's a difference between being subsidized by the government and being operated by the government.
So you disagree with the Founding Fathers and over two centuries of US history? Why do you hate America?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Much of the anti-terrorist hysteria reminds me of the tiger repelling rock. The fact is that terrorist attacks were few and far between before 9/11 and probably would have remained so after. The tactics used on 9/11 didn't even remain effective for the entire duration of the attack simply due to the civilian response. Evidence suggests that it wouldn't have been effective at all but for the bad advice from our government that the first few plane's worth of passengers followed.
Locks on cockpit doors make sense, and no longer telling civilians that passivity works make sense. The rest including the war on clean hair and proper hydration as well as the color coded chart telling us how terrified to be need to be scrapped.
It's too bad all the airport security crap can't be re-purposed as medical scanners so we could address an actual problem (expensive healthcare) that actually causes people to die.
Most of the stuff is marked top secret so they can severely punish anyone who points out that they're naked.