7 ms·

U.S. spy network’s successes, failures and objectives detailed in ‘black budget’

144 points by shakes 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
olefoo 13y ago
"Enterprise IT" and "Enterprise Management" are broken out as two separate categories for both the CIA and the NSA. Is one of those the asset spend ( software, hardware etc. ) for non-mission-tasked items and the other the personnel spend for people who keep the place going? And it would interesting to see a breakdown by category of how much is spent on outside contractors ( like Booz Allen Hamilton ) vs. how much is spent in direct personnel costs ( federal employees with benefits and pensions etc. ).
- samstave 13y ago
  It was reported that Booz revenue is ~$5.5 BILLION, most of which is direct defense contracting. >As of 2013, 99% of the company's revenue comes from the Federal government. --- >Key Facts Founded 1914 Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, USA NYSE: BAH Employees: More than 24,000 Revenue: $5.76 billion in fiscal year 2013 Chairman and Chief Executive Officer: Ralph W. Shrader, Ph.D. Web site: www.boozallen.com --- https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=booz+allen+5+billion&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=boo... --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen_Hamilton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen_Hamilton
  - olefoo 13y ago
    I wonder how much of a picture of the outsourced parts of the black budget could be assembled by going through EDGAR filings. http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?CIK=BAH&Find=Search&owner=exclude&action=getcompany http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?CIK=BAH&Find=Search&... I'm not that familiar with deciphering EDGAR filings, but if you correlated it to http://www.usaspending.gov/ http://www.usaspending.gov/ and other sources... Who knows what you might find out. It would make a neat data-journalism project for someone; would that I had the time.
    - samstave 13y ago
      The black budget is far far higher than 52B... I recall previous exposures on the black budget - and they were much higher... let me see if I can dig anything up..
mrt0mat0 13y ago
there is sooo much information in this one... i skimmed it three times... the article itself is long, then there's the infographics. geez. makes you wonder what other information he had. I also want to thank the post for turning the data into nice interactive infographics instead of posting "crayola quality" powerpoints, that the gov is known for using.
revscat 13y ago
> In words, deeds and dollars, intelligence agencies remain fixed on terrorism as the gravest threat to national security, which is listed first among five “mission objectives.” Why? I understand the tragedy of 9/11. With that in mind, it is a mistake is to treat terrorism as an existential threat to the state. Perhaps someone with a more formal background in history can speak to this, but I do not think there is an example of a nation falling because of terrorism. Point: there is a widespread purported belief in western democracies, particularly the United States and Great Britain, that one or more terrorist attacks could cause institutional collapse. This is ridiculous, however well-intentioned it might have started out as being.
- ihsw 13y ago
  Terrorism is vague enough that you can define it as "anything that opposes the advancement of the state," which is why it appeals so much to policy-makers, war hawks, and anybody invested in ever-expanding government budgets. It's also why it frightens and disturbs libertarians so much in that "terrorism" can be used to justify any and all expenditures, including the curtailment of individual rights and freedoms. The USG will be undergoing modernization of national infrastructure over the next 3.5 years and they will be quite forceful about capturing control over critical infrastructure (regardless of whether it's privately owned or not).
- jivatmanx 13y ago
  Indeed, the current threat from terrorism has no significant differences from that of 19th century violent anarchism. Those who argue that "9/11 changed everything" play upon an ignorance of history to achieve their own purposes.
  - astrobe_ 13y ago
    It changed everything in US people minds. Hollywood and TV shows were presenting the US victorious always. 9/11 showed that the homeland isn't safe from everything. That was the second shock wave that is still propagating more than one decade after. Compare and contrast with European countries (France, GB, Spain) that experienced throughout the end of the 20th century terrorist attacks, including bombings, on their own ground. Truth is, we don't know what would happen if they strike again. And maybe, perhaps, that's what the US government and its agencies want to avoid at any cost. Does the end justify the means?
ihsw 13y ago
All of this points directly to the US Government's continued rivalry with the Chinese Government, especially the emphasis on secrecy and authoritarianism. One has to wonder if this is the same strategy used to bring down the Soviets, namely a war of attrition where one tries to out-spend an opponent through consistent escalation -- until the opponent runs out of resources to maintain the escalation. We know how that ended.
- tokenadult 13y ago
  One has to wonder if this is the same strategy used to bring down the Soviets, namely a war of attrition where one tries to out-spend an opponent through consistent escalation -- until the opponent runs out of resources to maintain the escalation. We know how that ended. Your sentence right at the end of the quoted paragraph from your comment prompts me to check whether you are writing ironically or at face value. Do you think the United States succeeded in bringing down the Soviet Union by outcompeting it?
  - Zigurd 13y ago
    The Space Shuttle figures prominently in one such competition. I don't think it's been fully revealed what the payload at the heart of that competition was. But the Soviets were pretty impressed that the Shuttle worked. That certainly isn't the whole story, but it's part of it.
    - pavel_lishin 13y ago
      Impressed enough to build their own: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)
  - ryanhuff 13y ago
    http://www.amazon.com/Victory-Administrations-Strategy-Hastened-Collapse/dp/0871135671/ref=pd_sim_b_2 http://www.amazon.com/Victory-Administrations-Strategy-Haste...
  - swombat 13y ago
spoiledtechie 13y ago
I like the first comment in the info graph... ->>> 1) Chester PA has a homicide rate of 62 per 100,000. Camden NJ is almost as bad. US male suicide rate has soared to 19.9 per 100,000. Black unemployment has averaged 15% for the past 5 years and the real median income for black households has collapsed to barely above what it was in 1970. The most deadly threat to many Americans is not foreign terrorists -- it is the corruption of our ruling elites in Washington DC. They have long shown that they serve the agendas of the billionaires --not the national interest of the American People.
- astrange 13y ago
  The most deadly threat to many Americans is car crashes.
  - frank_boyd 13y ago
    For a more complete list: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-people-stupid.html http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-...
  - ajross 13y ago
    That's the number one cause of "accidental" death (and hoo boy does it outweigh "the corruption of our ruling elites"). If you want to look at "preventable" deaths instead then lack of exercise and smoking are far more existential threats still: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_preventable_causes_of_death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_preventable_causes_of_d... Basically: all the huffing being done on both sides of the argument is (if you really care about keeping people out of graves) just statistical noise. Which of course brings up the much deeper point: people don't so much care about the "death" thing, really. It's just a convenient hat hanger for whatever agenda they want to push. The anarchists do it just as badly as the authoritarians. Eat your veggies, people.
    - olefoo 13y ago
      Given that the automobile industry was a major source of wealth for most of the past century; it's safe to say that it's cultural primacy is part and parcel of the corruption of our elites. Automobile deaths in this country are predictably higher than in Germany an equally wealthy country. And they are so because we have a number of entrenched interests (construction, auto sales and manufacturing, lawyers, trauma surgeons; etc. ) that get and stay rich because the status quo is car oriented. You want bikes, light rail and walkable cities? You adorable little euro-commie wannabe!
devx 13y ago
>The CIA and NSA have launched aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as “offensive cyber operations.” Not just "enemy" systems. But "targets'" systems, which include a lot more allies than "enemies". Then again, US seems to have a very Cold War-like mentality these days (even though Obama accused Russia of that), and sees everyone as a potential "enemy". As Bruce Schneier said a couple of years ago, if you think "cyber-war" is imminent, then you must think war against US is imminent (which seems pretty unlikely right now, but they keep pushing the fear of cyber-war anyway, to increase their budgets).
NelsonMinar 13y ago
This leak may be the most significant from Snowden yet. As the article notes, until 2007 even the total amount of the budget was considered a secret. There's no precedent for American journalists having access to all this detail on our intelligence spending. I wish the article had more detail on "offensive cyber operations". AFAIK there's very little known in public about US active cyberwarfare.
- fossuser 13y ago
  We do know a lot about stuxnet - I would guess that's one of the major ones. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ord...
  - yk 13y ago
    And Flame [1] and Duqu [2]. There is of course a lot of technical discussion, but not much about the organizational side of things. So we do not know for example, how the NSA obtains 0days. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_%28malware%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_%28malware%29 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duqu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duqu
    - milkshakes 13y ago
      Endgame Systems https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/US-13-Hanif-Binarypig-Scalable-Malware-Analytics-in-Hadoop-Slides.pdf https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/US-13-Hanif-Binarypig-Scala...
  - ajross 13y ago
    It's hard to believe a simple worm (an exercise in pure software development) would qualify as a "major operation" in the context of the article, which is talking about budget. Surely Stuxnet was better funded than script kiddie IRC hacks, but it's not a fundamentally different task -- just throw a team of smart hackers at it.
- joe_the_user 13y ago
swalsh 13y ago
I don't imagine this is the kind of thing that shows up in a System Administrators inbox every Tuesday. Origionally I was just assuming that Snowden was publishing the information he himself received. He would have had to surf deeper into the system for this kind of information I assume. I can't even imagine what else is on those hard drives.
- arcadeparade 13y ago
  At first I thought he just had a basic overview of what the NSA does, but if he's getting down into the specifics of what the USA specifically does in other countries he will truly have fucked the USA over diplomacy wise.
- pvnick 13y ago
  Looks like he actually impersonated officials with higher access: http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/29/20234171-snowden-impersonated-nsa-officials-sources-say http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/29/20234171-... Snowden appears to be have acted brilliantly. We couldn't have asked for a better protagonist here. Personally, I think that, since he knew what he was going to do, he took everything within his grasp. Especially since he knew he had nothing to lose.
Zelphyr 13y ago
> The United States has spent more than $500 billion on intelligence during that period, an outlay that U.S. officials say has succeeded in its main objective: preventing another catastrophic terrorist attack in the United States. We hadn't had a catastrophic terrorist attack even approaching 9/11 prior to that date. And I'm guessing we've spent more in the past 12 on "preventing terrorism" than we had in the 225 years prior to 9/11. My point: we may have overreacted.
- marshray 13y ago
  In my lifetime there have been plenty of plane hijackings and bombings that killed hundreds of Americans. They just mostly weren't on continental US soil.
  - Zelphyr 13y ago
    "hundreds of Americans" Key point here. Hundreds of Americans over the course of decades. Meanwhile millions died from heart disease, auto accidents, kidney disease, pneumonia, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, lung disease, and cancer, just last year. More people died of heart disease in this country alone last year than have died by airline hijacking since the invention of manned flight.
- frank_boyd 13y ago
  Imagine all that money going into education and research. The 2 most important things for humanity to live happier lives.
csmatt 13y ago
“Our budgets are classified as they could provide insight for foreign intelligence services to discern our top national priorities, capabilities and sources and methods that allow us to obtain information to counter threats” So you don't want anyone to look at your metadata?
- marshray 13y ago
  They're just business records after all, often with nongovernmental corporations. No expectation of privacy there, nope.
marshray 13y ago
So combining this with Wikipedia, it seems that Clapper and his 1749 underlings at ODNI cost us an average of $971,000 a year EACH. Ostensibly their mission is to advise the President, head some panels, oversee some stuff, and some stuff about whistleblowers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_National_Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_National_Intellige...
peterkelly 13y ago
"The NSA planned to investigate at least 4,000 possible insider threats in 2013, cases in which the agency suspected sensitive information may have been compromised by one of its own" Assuming that each insider threat corresponds to one employee, and that the total number of employees in the intelligence community is 107,035, this would suggest that at least 1 out of every 27 employees has been considered a possible insider threat. And if you were to only consider the employee count of the NSA itself (which we don't know), it would be considerably higher. This is... pretty staggering.
- olefoo 13y ago
  The side effect of that level of paranoia is that office politics becomes an extreme sport. If you can make it look like the guy angling for the same promotion as you has a secret; or is actively selling out the country... It may also explain some of the institutional rigidity we see in the IC's response to events. If questioning certain assumptions may get you not just fired, but jailed; and you value your career and your freedom, those assumptions become very hard to question. (e.g. the same assumptions that Mr. Snowden started questioning )
rthomas6 13y ago
Why is this information useful? I get the whistleblowing about the NSA spying on US citizens. I don't understand the purpose of exposing the US's intelligence budget. What is Snowden whistleblowing on by publishing this information? What does it add to the discussion about the government abusing its power or infringing upon civil liberties?

144 points by shakes 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

"Enterprise IT" and "Enterprise Management" are broken out as two separate categories for both the CIA and the NSA. Is one of those the asset spend ( software, hardware etc. ) for non-mission-tasked items and the other the personnel spend for people who keep the place going? And it would interesting to see a breakdown by category of how much is spent on outside contractors ( like Booz Allen Hamilton ) vs. how much is spent in direct personnel costs ( federal employees with benefits and pensions etc. ).

samstave 13y ago
It was reported that Booz revenue is ~$5.5 BILLION, most of which is direct defense contracting. >As of 2013, 99% of the company's revenue comes from the Federal government. --- >Key Facts Founded 1914 Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, USA NYSE: BAH Employees: More than 24,000 Revenue: $5.76 billion in fiscal year 2013 Chairman and Chief Executive Officer: Ralph W. Shrader, Ph.D. Web site: www.boozallen.com --- https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=booz+allen+5+billion&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=boo... --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen_Hamilton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen_Hamilton
- olefoo 13y ago
  I wonder how much of a picture of the outsourced parts of the black budget could be assembled by going through EDGAR filings. http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?CIK=BAH&Find=Search&owner=exclude&action=getcompany http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?CIK=BAH&Find=Search&... I'm not that familiar with deciphering EDGAR filings, but if you correlated it to http://www.usaspending.gov/ http://www.usaspending.gov/ and other sources... Who knows what you might find out. It would make a neat data-journalism project for someone; would that I had the time.
  - samstave 13y ago
    The black budget is far far higher than 52B... I recall previous exposures on the black budget - and they were much higher... let me see if I can dig anything up..

mrt0mat0 13y ago

there is sooo much information in this one... i skimmed it three times... the article itself is long, then there's the infographics. geez. makes you wonder what other information he had. I also want to thank the post for turning the data into nice interactive infographics instead of posting "crayola quality" powerpoints, that the gov is known for using.

revscat 13y ago

> In words, deeds and dollars, intelligence agencies remain fixed on terrorism as the gravest threat to national security, which is listed first among five “mission objectives.” Why? I understand the tragedy of 9/11. With that in mind, it is a mistake is to treat terrorism as an existential threat to the state. Perhaps someone with a more formal background in history can speak to this, but I do not think there is an example of a nation falling because of terrorism. Point: there is a widespread purported belief in western democracies, particularly the United States and Great Britain, that one or more terrorist attacks could cause institutional collapse. This is ridiculous, however well-intentioned it might have started out as being.

ihsw 13y ago
Terrorism is vague enough that you can define it as "anything that opposes the advancement of the state," which is why it appeals so much to policy-makers, war hawks, and anybody invested in ever-expanding government budgets. It's also why it frightens and disturbs libertarians so much in that "terrorism" can be used to justify any and all expenditures, including the curtailment of individual rights and freedoms. The USG will be undergoing modernization of national infrastructure over the next 3.5 years and they will be quite forceful about capturing control over critical infrastructure (regardless of whether it's privately owned or not).
jivatmanx 13y ago
Indeed, the current threat from terrorism has no significant differences from that of 19th century violent anarchism. Those who argue that "9/11 changed everything" play upon an ignorance of history to achieve their own purposes.
- astrobe_ 13y ago
  It changed everything in US people minds. Hollywood and TV shows were presenting the US victorious always. 9/11 showed that the homeland isn't safe from everything. That was the second shock wave that is still propagating more than one decade after. Compare and contrast with European countries (France, GB, Spain) that experienced throughout the end of the 20th century terrorist attacks, including bombings, on their own ground. Truth is, we don't know what would happen if they strike again. And maybe, perhaps, that's what the US government and its agencies want to avoid at any cost. Does the end justify the means?

ihsw 13y ago

All of this points directly to the US Government's continued rivalry with the Chinese Government, especially the emphasis on secrecy and authoritarianism. One has to wonder if this is the same strategy used to bring down the Soviets, namely a war of attrition where one tries to out-spend an opponent through consistent escalation -- until the opponent runs out of resources to maintain the escalation. We know how that ended.

tokenadult 13y ago
One has to wonder if this is the same strategy used to bring down the Soviets, namely a war of attrition where one tries to out-spend an opponent through consistent escalation -- until the opponent runs out of resources to maintain the escalation. We know how that ended. Your sentence right at the end of the quoted paragraph from your comment prompts me to check whether you are writing ironically or at face value. Do you think the United States succeeded in bringing down the Soviet Union by outcompeting it?
- Zigurd 13y ago
  The Space Shuttle figures prominently in one such competition. I don't think it's been fully revealed what the payload at the heart of that competition was. But the Soviets were pretty impressed that the Shuttle worked. That certainly isn't the whole story, but it's part of it.
  - pavel_lishin 13y ago
    Impressed enough to build their own: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)
- ryanhuff 13y ago
  http://www.amazon.com/Victory-Administrations-Strategy-Hastened-Collapse/dp/0871135671/ref=pd_sim_b_2 http://www.amazon.com/Victory-Administrations-Strategy-Haste...
- swombat 13y ago

spoiledtechie 13y ago

I like the first comment in the info graph... ->>> 1) Chester PA has a homicide rate of 62 per 100,000. Camden NJ is almost as bad. US male suicide rate has soared to 19.9 per 100,000. Black unemployment has averaged 15% for the past 5 years and the real median income for black households has collapsed to barely above what it was in 1970. The most deadly threat to many Americans is not foreign terrorists -- it is the corruption of our ruling elites in Washington DC. They have long shown that they serve the agendas of the billionaires --not the national interest of the American People.

astrange 13y ago
The most deadly threat to many Americans is car crashes.
- frank_boyd 13y ago
  For a more complete list: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-people-stupid.html http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-...
- ajross 13y ago
  That's the number one cause of "accidental" death (and hoo boy does it outweigh "the corruption of our ruling elites"). If you want to look at "preventable" deaths instead then lack of exercise and smoking are far more existential threats still: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_preventable_causes_of_death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_preventable_causes_of_d... Basically: all the huffing being done on both sides of the argument is (if you really care about keeping people out of graves) just statistical noise. Which of course brings up the much deeper point: people don't so much care about the "death" thing, really. It's just a convenient hat hanger for whatever agenda they want to push. The anarchists do it just as badly as the authoritarians. Eat your veggies, people.
  - olefoo 13y ago
    Given that the automobile industry was a major source of wealth for most of the past century; it's safe to say that it's cultural primacy is part and parcel of the corruption of our elites. Automobile deaths in this country are predictably higher than in Germany an equally wealthy country. And they are so because we have a number of entrenched interests (construction, auto sales and manufacturing, lawyers, trauma surgeons; etc. ) that get and stay rich because the status quo is car oriented. You want bikes, light rail and walkable cities? You adorable little euro-commie wannabe!

devx 13y ago

>The CIA and NSA have launched aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as “offensive cyber operations.” Not just "enemy" systems. But "targets'" systems, which include a lot more allies than "enemies". Then again, US seems to have a very Cold War-like mentality these days (even though Obama accused Russia of that), and sees everyone as a potential "enemy". As Bruce Schneier said a couple of years ago, if you think "cyber-war" is imminent, then you must think war against US is imminent (which seems pretty unlikely right now, but they keep pushing the fear of cyber-war anyway, to increase their budgets).

NelsonMinar 13y ago

This leak may be the most significant from Snowden yet. As the article notes, until 2007 even the total amount of the budget was considered a secret. There's no precedent for American journalists having access to all this detail on our intelligence spending. I wish the article had more detail on "offensive cyber operations". AFAIK there's very little known in public about US active cyberwarfare.

fossuser 13y ago
We do know a lot about stuxnet - I would guess that's one of the major ones. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ord...
- yk 13y ago
  And Flame [1] and Duqu [2]. There is of course a lot of technical discussion, but not much about the organizational side of things. So we do not know for example, how the NSA obtains 0days. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_%28malware%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_%28malware%29 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duqu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duqu
  - milkshakes 13y ago
    Endgame Systems https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/US-13-Hanif-Binarypig-Scalable-Malware-Analytics-in-Hadoop-Slides.pdf https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/US-13-Hanif-Binarypig-Scala...
- ajross 13y ago
  It's hard to believe a simple worm (an exercise in pure software development) would qualify as a "major operation" in the context of the article, which is talking about budget. Surely Stuxnet was better funded than script kiddie IRC hacks, but it's not a fundamentally different task -- just throw a team of smart hackers at it.
joe_the_user 13y ago

swalsh 13y ago

I don't imagine this is the kind of thing that shows up in a System Administrators inbox every Tuesday. Origionally I was just assuming that Snowden was publishing the information he himself received. He would have had to surf deeper into the system for this kind of information I assume. I can't even imagine what else is on those hard drives.

arcadeparade 13y ago
At first I thought he just had a basic overview of what the NSA does, but if he's getting down into the specifics of what the USA specifically does in other countries he will truly have fucked the USA over diplomacy wise.
pvnick 13y ago
Looks like he actually impersonated officials with higher access: http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/29/20234171-snowden-impersonated-nsa-officials-sources-say http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/29/20234171-... Snowden appears to be have acted brilliantly. We couldn't have asked for a better protagonist here. Personally, I think that, since he knew what he was going to do, he took everything within his grasp. Especially since he knew he had nothing to lose.

Zelphyr 13y ago

> The United States has spent more than $500 billion on intelligence during that period, an outlay that U.S. officials say has succeeded in its main objective: preventing another catastrophic terrorist attack in the United States. We hadn't had a catastrophic terrorist attack even approaching 9/11 prior to that date. And I'm guessing we've spent more in the past 12 on "preventing terrorism" than we had in the 225 years prior to 9/11. My point: we may have overreacted.

marshray 13y ago
In my lifetime there have been plenty of plane hijackings and bombings that killed hundreds of Americans. They just mostly weren't on continental US soil.
- Zelphyr 13y ago
  "hundreds of Americans" Key point here. Hundreds of Americans over the course of decades. Meanwhile millions died from heart disease, auto accidents, kidney disease, pneumonia, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, lung disease, and cancer, just last year. More people died of heart disease in this country alone last year than have died by airline hijacking since the invention of manned flight.
frank_boyd 13y ago
Imagine all that money going into education and research. The 2 most important things for humanity to live happier lives.

csmatt 13y ago

“Our budgets are classified as they could provide insight for foreign intelligence services to discern our top national priorities, capabilities and sources and methods that allow us to obtain information to counter threats” So you don't want anyone to look at your metadata?

marshray 13y ago
They're just business records after all, often with nongovernmental corporations. No expectation of privacy there, nope.

marshray 13y ago

So combining this with Wikipedia, it seems that Clapper and his 1749 underlings at ODNI cost us an average of $971,000 a year EACH. Ostensibly their mission is to advise the President, head some panels, oversee some stuff, and some stuff about whistleblowers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_National_Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_National_Intellige...

peterkelly 13y ago

"The NSA planned to investigate at least 4,000 possible insider threats in 2013, cases in which the agency suspected sensitive information may have been compromised by one of its own" Assuming that each insider threat corresponds to one employee, and that the total number of employees in the intelligence community is 107,035, this would suggest that at least 1 out of every 27 employees has been considered a possible insider threat. And if you were to only consider the employee count of the NSA itself (which we don't know), it would be considerably higher. This is... pretty staggering.

olefoo 13y ago
The side effect of that level of paranoia is that office politics becomes an extreme sport. If you can make it look like the guy angling for the same promotion as you has a secret; or is actively selling out the country... It may also explain some of the institutional rigidity we see in the IC's response to events. If questioning certain assumptions may get you not just fired, but jailed; and you value your career and your freedom, those assumptions become very hard to question. (e.g. the same assumptions that Mr. Snowden started questioning )

rthomas6 13y ago

Why is this information useful? I get the whistleblowing about the NSA spying on US citizens. I don't understand the purpose of exposing the US's intelligence budget. What is Snowden whistleblowing on by publishing this information? What does it add to the discussion about the government abusing its power or infringing upon civil liberties?