9 ms·

A hidden world, growing beyond control

193 points by jamesbritt 14y ago

danboarder 14y ago
From the article: * Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. * An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. Is there a central place were one can get a list of the mentioned agencies and who they are accountable to? If the Washington Post did all this research it would be great to see them create an online resource with their findings.
- dfc 14y ago
  Did you check out the "search the data" link? http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/gov-orgs/ http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/gov-or... The above link lists all the high level gov organizations. I am not sure where you can get a list of the 1,271 smaller organizations. As far as who each organization is accountable to that is pretty easy...
- bennyg 14y ago
  It's not very difficult to nab top-secret clearance, you just have to work on the right projects. One of my buddies, a recent grad, has a top-secret clearance because of the project he's on at Lockheed. In Huntsville, AL almost everyone has a security clearance of some form and fashion.
dfc 14y ago
If you found this article enjoyable you should check out the book: http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/dp/0316182206 http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/d... This article is from a while back and in the intervening time the journalists came out with a book that goes into more detail.
coldcode 14y ago
And not one of these people identified the Boston pair before they blew up the Marathon. Yes, the FBI interviewed the older brother but never followed up. If you can't catch the amateur "terrorists" how will you catch the pros?
- srl 14y ago
  I resent (and reject the need for) the growth of the "security" apparatus as much as (almost) anybody else, but it's worth pointing out that what works for catching the "pros" is quite different from what works for catching amateurs. Pros are capable of inflicting greater damage, and are therefore a greater threat in that respect, but tend to organize in order to get access to larger resources. That means there's a larger target to "hit" when probing for information, and it makes picking up on plots much easier. An amateur can't inflict as much damage, but can do so practically undetected, and there's really not much that can be done about it AFAIK. Thought experiment: suppose you wanted to kill as many people and cause as much chaos as you could. How would you go about it? And how easy would it be for the security apparatus to catch you? Would you be able to, evading capture, perform another attack a week later? How long could you go on? It's really quite fortunate that the sort of people who want to do large amounts of violence, are exactly the sort of people who tend not be very good at it.
  - 6d0debc071 14y ago
    > Thought experiment: suppose you wanted to kill as many people and cause as much chaos as you could. How would you go about it? I was about to answer this and then realised how stupid it would be to give people ideas on how to kill vast numbers of people with off the shelf equipment. I will say that it doesn't seem like a hard problem to me, and I can see ways you could achieve rates in the hundreds of people a month. > And how easy would it be for the security apparatus to catch you? Pretty much impossible beforehand. Depending on what one did and where, it wouldn't necessarily be that hard. Some of the ideas I had seem long-term viable though - the sort of thing you could repeat with little chance of getting caught. > Would you be able to, evading capture, perform another attack a week later? How long could you go on? Some currently vulnerable infrastructure would probably harden over time but I've put like five seconds thought into this, I'm sure there are other things that one could do as well. And even if the number of deaths might not be huge - 20 people here, 20 people there, maybe a few hundred with a higher concentration target - the fact that you could strike many targets at once, and how difficult it would be to secure against you.... I think you could do very significant damage. The fear you'd induce in people, every day knowing that, for instance, if their kids go to school, maybe they never come home again. Or if they go shopping, or.... It's a horrible thing to think about. If that sort of crap was going on, and the police weren't catching this guy, I'm not sure I could bring myself to send my daughter out in public even knowing that statistically the risk per person would still be very low. I'm not sure that people could get used to the idea that every month a few hundred of them were going to die. Maybe we'd just learn to live with it but it'd require a major shift in how we reacted to visible risks.
futhey 14y ago
"publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored" - I would contend this. It's simply an assumption. Many of their sources seem to be very junior to their respective organizations.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
WestCoastJustin 14y ago
On a related note, PBS had an episode called "Top Secret America" in 2011 [1] - it's pretty good. Overview: "A two-year examination into the massive, unwieldy, top-secret world the government has created in response to 9/11". [1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/topsecretamerica/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/topsecretamerica/
- caycep 14y ago
  IT's the same authors, I think. They also published this in a book a couple years ago.
gshubert17 14y ago
This article was written in 2010 as part of a series. Also, for a single-page view, http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/print/ http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articl...
- morpher 14y ago
  Thanks. I figured this was the case given the sentence "After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, ..." I wonder why the didn't include a date on the linked page. Seems like an important piece of information for any news article / investigative journalism.
rayiner 14y ago
Some of these criticisms are utterly stupid: > * Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. Without a mention of how much work these people do on terrorism, it's meaningless. Homeland security is a cross-cutting concern. So Excelon in Illinois might have a program in place to harden their nuclear power plants against potential terrorist attack. Should they be counted as part of this "hidden world" "growing beyond control?" > * An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. There are a ton of reasons to have top-secret security clearances that have nothing to do with counterterrorism or intelligence gathering. Anyone doing sensitive military research, for example, will often have a top secret clearance. > * Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks. Again, homeland security is a cross-cutting concern. > * Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored. 50,000 intelligence reports in a year is 136 per day, in a country of 300 million people.
- DanBC 14y ago
  You're right, some of the criticisms don't make much sense. But we're going to hear a lot more like this now we know that intelligence was aware of the alleged boston bomber at least a year ago.
  - cmstoken 14y ago
    But they always say that kind of stuff afterwards. How is this time any different?
  - johnvschmitt 14y ago
    When I hear that the FBI interviewed the Boston bomber a year ago, I don't immediately think of FBI incompetence. No, rather, I think, "Hey, the bomber had many experiences & changes of mind, & is truly a different person a year hence". I mean, are personalities & motivations & intentions truly permanent? C'mon, haven't we all changed as life goes on? It's a fallacy to think you can ever 99.9% predict the future regardless of how much "big data" & "army of experts" you have. That approach hasn't predicted the stock market within 70% accuracy, so how can we expect it to predict security issues any better? We need to just realize that we're far more likely to die from causes other than terrorism, & just treat it like other crimes.
dj2stein9 14y ago
This is what bureaucracies do, they grow, more complex, more political, more expensive, and exponentially harder to dismantle. Everyone knew that once Homeland Security was created it would become a sprawling, pervasive, and never-ending drain on the country. Eliminating it now is probably out of the question because it would be substantially more costly (politically and economically) than keeping it running. Basically they've taken the script of the TV series "24" and used it to turn the entire government into a giant anti-terrorism organization that cannot locate or defend the country against any terrorists. But year after year the programs are always "underfunded" and so the bureaucracy grows and gets worse at doing its job... It's a perfect storm of stupidity and ignorance that has no benefits other than keeping the system going for no reason whatsoever.
- sybhn 14y ago
  this is completely of topic, i know. But could not not think about Obamacare when reading about "This is what bureaucracies do, they grow, more complex, more political, more expensive, and exponentially harder to dismantle. " ... I would also add to that: undemocratic.
  - ewoodrich 14y ago
    Yes, conflate healthcare policy (that in many ways is fundamentally different) with Homeland Security. I apologize for my sarcasm, but this just seems like knee jerk partisanship. In addition, we are not a democracy (per se), but a constitutional republic, and as such, our elected representatives decide public policy. In the case of Obamacare, Democrats had been overwhelmingly elected the prior year (and Obama ran with healthcare reform as a campaign pledge). So, I don't quite see how it is "undemocratic" either.
    - sybhn 14y ago
      Don't jump to conclusion, both side of the establishment have been contributing to bloated bureaucracies, Obamacare is just one of the latest (and the one I last read of). My undemocatric comment was around bureaucracies in general, not obamacare specifically.
sfx 14y ago
>"More is often the solution proposed by the leaders of the 9/11 enterprise. After the Christmas Day bombing attempt, Leiter also pleaded for more - more analysts to join the 300 or so he already had. >"The Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals, more body scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can't find nearly enough qualified people to fill its intelligence unit now. Obama has said he will not freeze spending on national security, making it likely that those requests will be funded." and this scares me the most: >"Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the DHS has broken ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. DHS, in existence for only seven years, already has its own Special Access Programs, its own research arm, its own command center, its own fleet of armored cars and its own 230,000-person workforce, the third-largest after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs." More more more, funny how all this makes me far more uneasy then any terrorist threat. At least I can fight off a terrorist, lord help you if you try to say no to the SWAT team wanting to search your home for a teenager who made a homemade explosive.
- rayiner 14y ago
  DHS isn't an organic entity that sprung up from 0 to 230,000 in the wake of 9/11. It is just an amalgam of a bunch of agencies that already existed. It includes the Coast Guard, INS, Customs, FEMA, TSA, and Secret Service, along with a bunch of smaller agencies. Of those, the only new thing is TSA, which is 56,000 employees. And while annoying, TSA is mostly doing the same job private companies used to do under contracts with airlines.
  - sfx 14y ago
    That's an excellent point, though it still is relatively scary. Such as the powers the DHS has in "constitutional free zones"[1]. It makes me nervous having 230,000 people having this much power because they're under the umbrella of "DHS". [1] http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/homeland-security-assuming-broad-powers-turning-vast-swaths-us http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/homeland-sec...
    - twoodfin 14y ago
Afforess 14y ago
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
- pjbrunet 14y ago
  Maybe it's a self-referential, insular sense of what's a reasonable rate of expansion? Pensions for them, while the free market searches its sofa for spare change. How do we compete with India, Philippines and the rest of the world? Telecommuting, Bitcoins, the Internet, are we blind to what's coming? Ocean moats become puddles. It's an open playing field, yet we spend like the next Zuckerberg will save our ass. What if Zuck moves to China? http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2012/02/20/facebook-and-dreamworks-make-moves-for-growth-in-china/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2012/02/20/facebook-an...
guard-of-terra 14y ago
The real danger there is that security apparatus tend to replace government as a decision making center. Nazi Germany towards the end or Russia today, you will see security apparatus contributing most of people who has real political weight. They have clearances nobody else does, they think of themselves as defenders, they never trust anyone outside their circle, and once they're in - nobody else gets to decide anything that can't be overriden by them.
np422 14y ago
(English is not my native language) I am very surprised by the very large amount of statism that seems to be present in USA in general and on hacker news in particular. The high level of support for GWOT and all the side dishes like TSA, mass surveillance etc is very surprising. Each and one of all the things that have been done in the post 9/11 world may partially or completely be justifiable on it's own. But please, take a step back and paint a picture of where we have come from and were we are going if this trend continues. If I may help you... http://i.imgur.com/tfPY1y0.jpg http://i.imgur.com/tfPY1y0.jpg , here is a picture of the subway in New York in the 80's, dirty and full of graffiti - with drugs and violence present and by all means also music, food vendors and a lot of people going to their jobs. http://i.imgur.com/AxWRPgl.jpg http://i.imgur.com/AxWRPgl.jpg , here is the Moscow subway from the same time. Clean, spotless and no one behaves disorderly without the police arresting them quickly, police officers with none of the ridiculous limitations that the western police had in their code of conduct at that time. In which of those two subways would you prefer to ride to work every day? With every new alfabet law designed to protect us that passes through the parliaments, with every new government agency we move closer to a society that looks more like the Moscow subway station. Not to long ago we were prepared for thermonuclear war to defend our ways. Today we are giving up our open and free society with a cheer so we can stay safe. Step by step, piece by piece. Why can't the otherwise so intelligent and educated crowd of hacker news see that our society is heading in the direction of a police state? We are not there yet, but it is where we will end up if we don't turn around soon.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  > Why can't the otherwise so intelligent and educated crowd of hacker news see that our society is heading in the direction of a police state? We are not there yet, but it is where we will end up if we don't turn around soon. We don't have much of a choice unless we want to regress into a pre-state hunter gatherer society (aka, a non-society). People live closely together, people don't want to get shot by their neighbor. Advanced society requires the right set of laws to protect our safety and our liberty. And the USA is not alone in trying to balance these concerns: look at western Europe, Japan, Aus, NZ, ..., they all have the same issues to consider. There is also no "right" solution, its not black or white, but rather there are many tradeoffs to be made.
chiph 14y ago
Rent-seeking is not limited to the private sector -- it happens within the government as well.
sophacles 14y ago
There is something not at all touched on in this article that I feel has a big impact on the growth of classified space. That is the classification system itself. Essentially "top secret" is a viral license. Information synthesized from N sources gets a secrecy level of at least max_level(sources). Frequently even more. Further, if someone with secret knowledge works on something that isn't at all in classified space, it may turn out that the new product/work needs to be classified, because classified knowledge may have gone into it. This is a very virulent license - worse than the most paranoid analyses of GPL. Countering this, the declassification process is slow, difficult, and a bit ridiculous. Lots of things remain classified not because they present a continuing issue, but because they make someone look bad. Or because they may be used to establish a pattern or MO that could endanger current operations. Even if that information is widely published. As an aside - one of the fun games you can play with your friends that have some sort of clearance is to ask them recent news related to their area of work. If they respond with vague statements "oh thats interesting" or "I don't know anything about that" and keep trying to change the subject, it generally means they saw a classified briefing about it, or expect to, and can't reveal or discuss anything about it, even if it is all over the news. Particularly if they're very resistant to such discussion. It's a nice way to screw with them. (It's a game because they figure out what you're doing and start screwing with you back, be careful tho, you don't want to get them in serious trouble, or yourself in trouble for pushing too hard). Anyway, the weird viral classified things is why I have rejected offers of work requiring a clearance. It is just too annoying to get interesting side projects and open source participation done when you're in the world of classified. That and I just like sharing cool and interesting things with people. I don't think I'd be happy not sharing.
- Nick_C 14y ago
  > things remain classified...because they make someone look bad I thought this was a felony in the US. (I wish it was in Australia.)
zby 14y ago
This is really worrisome - all I read about secret organizations shows how crazy they become with time.
snake_plissken 14y ago
when was this published? I read something very similar to this, maybe 1.5-2 years ago.

193 points by jamesbritt 14y ago

From the article: * Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. * An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. Is there a central place were one can get a list of the mentioned agencies and who they are accountable to? If the Washington Post did all this research it would be great to see them create an online resource with their findings.

dfc 14y ago
Did you check out the "search the data" link? http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/gov-orgs/ http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/gov-or... The above link lists all the high level gov organizations. I am not sure where you can get a list of the 1,271 smaller organizations. As far as who each organization is accountable to that is pretty easy...
bennyg 14y ago
It's not very difficult to nab top-secret clearance, you just have to work on the right projects. One of my buddies, a recent grad, has a top-secret clearance because of the project he's on at Lockheed. In Huntsville, AL almost everyone has a security clearance of some form and fashion.

dfc 14y ago

If you found this article enjoyable you should check out the book: http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/dp/0316182206 http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/d... This article is from a while back and in the intervening time the journalists came out with a book that goes into more detail.

coldcode 14y ago

And not one of these people identified the Boston pair before they blew up the Marathon. Yes, the FBI interviewed the older brother but never followed up. If you can't catch the amateur "terrorists" how will you catch the pros?

srl 14y ago
I resent (and reject the need for) the growth of the "security" apparatus as much as (almost) anybody else, but it's worth pointing out that what works for catching the "pros" is quite different from what works for catching amateurs. Pros are capable of inflicting greater damage, and are therefore a greater threat in that respect, but tend to organize in order to get access to larger resources. That means there's a larger target to "hit" when probing for information, and it makes picking up on plots much easier. An amateur can't inflict as much damage, but can do so practically undetected, and there's really not much that can be done about it AFAIK. Thought experiment: suppose you wanted to kill as many people and cause as much chaos as you could. How would you go about it? And how easy would it be for the security apparatus to catch you? Would you be able to, evading capture, perform another attack a week later? How long could you go on? It's really quite fortunate that the sort of people who want to do large amounts of violence, are exactly the sort of people who tend not be very good at it.
- 6d0debc071 14y ago
  > Thought experiment: suppose you wanted to kill as many people and cause as much chaos as you could. How would you go about it? I was about to answer this and then realised how stupid it would be to give people ideas on how to kill vast numbers of people with off the shelf equipment. I will say that it doesn't seem like a hard problem to me, and I can see ways you could achieve rates in the hundreds of people a month. > And how easy would it be for the security apparatus to catch you? Pretty much impossible beforehand. Depending on what one did and where, it wouldn't necessarily be that hard. Some of the ideas I had seem long-term viable though - the sort of thing you could repeat with little chance of getting caught. > Would you be able to, evading capture, perform another attack a week later? How long could you go on? Some currently vulnerable infrastructure would probably harden over time but I've put like five seconds thought into this, I'm sure there are other things that one could do as well. And even if the number of deaths might not be huge - 20 people here, 20 people there, maybe a few hundred with a higher concentration target - the fact that you could strike many targets at once, and how difficult it would be to secure against you.... I think you could do very significant damage. The fear you'd induce in people, every day knowing that, for instance, if their kids go to school, maybe they never come home again. Or if they go shopping, or.... It's a horrible thing to think about. If that sort of crap was going on, and the police weren't catching this guy, I'm not sure I could bring myself to send my daughter out in public even knowing that statistically the risk per person would still be very low. I'm not sure that people could get used to the idea that every month a few hundred of them were going to die. Maybe we'd just learn to live with it but it'd require a major shift in how we reacted to visible risks.

futhey 14y ago

"publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored" - I would contend this. It's simply an assumption. Many of their sources seem to be very junior to their respective organizations.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

WestCoastJustin 14y ago

On a related note, PBS had an episode called "Top Secret America" in 2011 [1] - it's pretty good. Overview: "A two-year examination into the massive, unwieldy, top-secret world the government has created in response to 9/11". [1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/topsecretamerica/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/topsecretamerica/

caycep 14y ago
IT's the same authors, I think. They also published this in a book a couple years ago.

gshubert17 14y ago

This article was written in 2010 as part of a series. Also, for a single-page view, http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/print/ http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articl...

morpher 14y ago
Thanks. I figured this was the case given the sentence "After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, ..." I wonder why the didn't include a date on the linked page. Seems like an important piece of information for any news article / investigative journalism.

rayiner 14y ago

Some of these criticisms are utterly stupid: > * Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. Without a mention of how much work these people do on terrorism, it's meaningless. Homeland security is a cross-cutting concern. So Excelon in Illinois might have a program in place to harden their nuclear power plants against potential terrorist attack. Should they be counted as part of this "hidden world" "growing beyond control?" > * An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. There are a ton of reasons to have top-secret security clearances that have nothing to do with counterterrorism or intelligence gathering. Anyone doing sensitive military research, for example, will often have a top secret clearance. > * Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks. Again, homeland security is a cross-cutting concern. > * Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored. 50,000 intelligence reports in a year is 136 per day, in a country of 300 million people.

DanBC 14y ago
You're right, some of the criticisms don't make much sense. But we're going to hear a lot more like this now we know that intelligence was aware of the alleged boston bomber at least a year ago.
- cmstoken 14y ago
  But they always say that kind of stuff afterwards. How is this time any different?
- johnvschmitt 14y ago
  When I hear that the FBI interviewed the Boston bomber a year ago, I don't immediately think of FBI incompetence. No, rather, I think, "Hey, the bomber had many experiences & changes of mind, & is truly a different person a year hence". I mean, are personalities & motivations & intentions truly permanent? C'mon, haven't we all changed as life goes on? It's a fallacy to think you can ever 99.9% predict the future regardless of how much "big data" & "army of experts" you have. That approach hasn't predicted the stock market within 70% accuracy, so how can we expect it to predict security issues any better? We need to just realize that we're far more likely to die from causes other than terrorism, & just treat it like other crimes.

dj2stein9 14y ago

This is what bureaucracies do, they grow, more complex, more political, more expensive, and exponentially harder to dismantle. Everyone knew that once Homeland Security was created it would become a sprawling, pervasive, and never-ending drain on the country. Eliminating it now is probably out of the question because it would be substantially more costly (politically and economically) than keeping it running. Basically they've taken the script of the TV series "24" and used it to turn the entire government into a giant anti-terrorism organization that cannot locate or defend the country against any terrorists. But year after year the programs are always "underfunded" and so the bureaucracy grows and gets worse at doing its job... It's a perfect storm of stupidity and ignorance that has no benefits other than keeping the system going for no reason whatsoever.

sybhn 14y ago
this is completely of topic, i know. But could not not think about Obamacare when reading about "This is what bureaucracies do, they grow, more complex, more political, more expensive, and exponentially harder to dismantle. " ... I would also add to that: undemocratic.
- ewoodrich 14y ago
  Yes, conflate healthcare policy (that in many ways is fundamentally different) with Homeland Security. I apologize for my sarcasm, but this just seems like knee jerk partisanship. In addition, we are not a democracy (per se), but a constitutional republic, and as such, our elected representatives decide public policy. In the case of Obamacare, Democrats had been overwhelmingly elected the prior year (and Obama ran with healthcare reform as a campaign pledge). So, I don't quite see how it is "undemocratic" either.
  - sybhn 14y ago
    Don't jump to conclusion, both side of the establishment have been contributing to bloated bureaucracies, Obamacare is just one of the latest (and the one I last read of). My undemocatric comment was around bureaucracies in general, not obamacare specifically.

sfx 14y ago

>"More is often the solution proposed by the leaders of the 9/11 enterprise. After the Christmas Day bombing attempt, Leiter also pleaded for more - more analysts to join the 300 or so he already had. >"The Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals, more body scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can't find nearly enough qualified people to fill its intelligence unit now. Obama has said he will not freeze spending on national security, making it likely that those requests will be funded." and this scares me the most: >"Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the DHS has broken ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. DHS, in existence for only seven years, already has its own Special Access Programs, its own research arm, its own command center, its own fleet of armored cars and its own 230,000-person workforce, the third-largest after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs." More more more, funny how all this makes me far more uneasy then any terrorist threat. At least I can fight off a terrorist, lord help you if you try to say no to the SWAT team wanting to search your home for a teenager who made a homemade explosive.

rayiner 14y ago
DHS isn't an organic entity that sprung up from 0 to 230,000 in the wake of 9/11. It is just an amalgam of a bunch of agencies that already existed. It includes the Coast Guard, INS, Customs, FEMA, TSA, and Secret Service, along with a bunch of smaller agencies. Of those, the only new thing is TSA, which is 56,000 employees. And while annoying, TSA is mostly doing the same job private companies used to do under contracts with airlines.
- sfx 14y ago
  That's an excellent point, though it still is relatively scary. Such as the powers the DHS has in "constitutional free zones"[1]. It makes me nervous having 230,000 people having this much power because they're under the umbrella of "DHS". [1] http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/homeland-security-assuming-broad-powers-turning-vast-swaths-us http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/homeland-sec...
  - twoodfin 14y ago

Afforess 14y ago

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

pjbrunet 14y ago
Maybe it's a self-referential, insular sense of what's a reasonable rate of expansion? Pensions for them, while the free market searches its sofa for spare change. How do we compete with India, Philippines and the rest of the world? Telecommuting, Bitcoins, the Internet, are we blind to what's coming? Ocean moats become puddles. It's an open playing field, yet we spend like the next Zuckerberg will save our ass. What if Zuck moves to China? http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2012/02/20/facebook-and-dreamworks-make-moves-for-growth-in-china/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2012/02/20/facebook-an...

guard-of-terra 14y ago

The real danger there is that security apparatus tend to replace government as a decision making center. Nazi Germany towards the end or Russia today, you will see security apparatus contributing most of people who has real political weight. They have clearances nobody else does, they think of themselves as defenders, they never trust anyone outside their circle, and once they're in - nobody else gets to decide anything that can't be overriden by them.

np422 14y ago

(English is not my native language) I am very surprised by the very large amount of statism that seems to be present in USA in general and on hacker news in particular. The high level of support for GWOT and all the side dishes like TSA, mass surveillance etc is very surprising. Each and one of all the things that have been done in the post 9/11 world may partially or completely be justifiable on it's own. But please, take a step back and paint a picture of where we have come from and were we are going if this trend continues. If I may help you... http://i.imgur.com/tfPY1y0.jpg http://i.imgur.com/tfPY1y0.jpg , here is a picture of the subway in New York in the 80's, dirty and full of graffiti - with drugs and violence present and by all means also music, food vendors and a lot of people going to their jobs. http://i.imgur.com/AxWRPgl.jpg http://i.imgur.com/AxWRPgl.jpg , here is the Moscow subway from the same time. Clean, spotless and no one behaves disorderly without the police arresting them quickly, police officers with none of the ridiculous limitations that the western police had in their code of conduct at that time. In which of those two subways would you prefer to ride to work every day? With every new alfabet law designed to protect us that passes through the parliaments, with every new government agency we move closer to a society that looks more like the Moscow subway station. Not to long ago we were prepared for thermonuclear war to defend our ways. Today we are giving up our open and free society with a cheer so we can stay safe. Step by step, piece by piece. Why can't the otherwise so intelligent and educated crowd of hacker news see that our society is heading in the direction of a police state? We are not there yet, but it is where we will end up if we don't turn around soon.

seanmcdirmid 14y ago
> Why can't the otherwise so intelligent and educated crowd of hacker news see that our society is heading in the direction of a police state? We are not there yet, but it is where we will end up if we don't turn around soon. We don't have much of a choice unless we want to regress into a pre-state hunter gatherer society (aka, a non-society). People live closely together, people don't want to get shot by their neighbor. Advanced society requires the right set of laws to protect our safety and our liberty. And the USA is not alone in trying to balance these concerns: look at western Europe, Japan, Aus, NZ, ..., they all have the same issues to consider. There is also no "right" solution, its not black or white, but rather there are many tradeoffs to be made.

chiph 14y ago

Rent-seeking is not limited to the private sector -- it happens within the government as well.

sophacles 14y ago

There is something not at all touched on in this article that I feel has a big impact on the growth of classified space. That is the classification system itself. Essentially "top secret" is a viral license. Information synthesized from N sources gets a secrecy level of at least max_level(sources). Frequently even more. Further, if someone with secret knowledge works on something that isn't at all in classified space, it may turn out that the new product/work needs to be classified, because classified knowledge may have gone into it. This is a very virulent license - worse than the most paranoid analyses of GPL. Countering this, the declassification process is slow, difficult, and a bit ridiculous. Lots of things remain classified not because they present a continuing issue, but because they make someone look bad. Or because they may be used to establish a pattern or MO that could endanger current operations. Even if that information is widely published. As an aside - one of the fun games you can play with your friends that have some sort of clearance is to ask them recent news related to their area of work. If they respond with vague statements "oh thats interesting" or "I don't know anything about that" and keep trying to change the subject, it generally means they saw a classified briefing about it, or expect to, and can't reveal or discuss anything about it, even if it is all over the news. Particularly if they're very resistant to such discussion. It's a nice way to screw with them. (It's a game because they figure out what you're doing and start screwing with you back, be careful tho, you don't want to get them in serious trouble, or yourself in trouble for pushing too hard). Anyway, the weird viral classified things is why I have rejected offers of work requiring a clearance. It is just too annoying to get interesting side projects and open source participation done when you're in the world of classified. That and I just like sharing cool and interesting things with people. I don't think I'd be happy not sharing.

Nick_C 14y ago
> things remain classified...because they make someone look bad I thought this was a felony in the US. (I wish it was in Australia.)

zby 14y ago

This is really worrisome - all I read about secret organizations shows how crazy they become with time.

snake_plissken 14y ago

when was this published? I read something very similar to this, maybe 1.5-2 years ago.