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?"

Comments

beware the military industrial compost

[Anonymous Coward]

we slept through that one. this must be what we wanted?

the corepirate nazi illuminati is always hunting that patch of red on almost everyones' neck. if they cannot find yours (greed, fear ego etc...) then you can go starve. that's their (slippery/slimy) 'platform' now. see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder

never a better time to consult with/trust in our creators. the lights are coming up rapidly all over now. see you there?

greed, fear & ego (in any order) are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of our dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes. nobody ever mentions the real long term costs of those debacles in both life & any notion of prosperity for us, or our children. not to mention the abuse of the consciences of those of us who still have one, & the terminal damage to our atmosphere (see also: manufactured 'weather', hot etc...). see you on the other side of it? the lights are coming up all over now. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be your guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. we now have some choices. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on your brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.

"The current rate of extinction is around 10 to 100 times the usual background level, and has been elevated above the background level since the Pleistocene. The current extinction rate is more rapid than in any other extinction event in earth history, and 50% of species could be extinct by the end of this century. While the role of humans is unclear in the longer-term extinction pattern, it is clear that factors such as deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change have reduced biodiversity profoundly.' (wiki)

"I think the bottom line is, what kind of a world do you want to leave for your children," Andrew Smith, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, said in a telephone interview. "How impoverished we would be if we lost 25 percent of the world's mammals," said Smith, one of more than 100 co-authors of the report. "Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live," added Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN director general. "We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives."--

"The wealth of the universe is for me. Every thing is explicable and practical for me .... I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born." --emerson

no need to confuse 'religion' with being a spiritual being. our soul purpose here is to care for one another. failing that, we're simply passing through (excess baggage) being distracted/consumed by the guaranteed to fail illusionary trappings of man'kind'. & recently (about 10,000 years ago) it was determined that hoarding & excess by a few, resulted in negative consequences for all.

consult with/trust in your creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritdead personal gain motives), whilst badtolling unprecedented evile, using an unlimited supply of newclear power, since/until forever. see you there?

"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land." )one does not need to agree whois in charge to grasp the notion that there may be some assistance available to us(

boeing, boeing, gone.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in the Post's RIA

[davide marney]

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.