Top Secret America

[Peter Lemkin]

Hmmm....after D.C. inside and just outside the beltway, Tampa would not seem to be a healthy place for a psyche to be (among many others) :hmpf: :goodnight: :creep:

[Ed Jewett]

The Post Covers Spy Town

Jul 22 2010, 12:05 PM ET | Comment
And I thought I wrote long!

This week, the Washington Post showered its readers with 20,000 words, hundreds of statistics, and dozens of pie-charts -- not to mention a database of the 1,931 contractors doing top-secret work for the government -- that paint a dazzling, mind-boggling picture of a 21st-century intelligence-industrial complex that is out of control and out of reach of government and congressional oversight.

Cable news shows and the networks, led by Post ally NBC, went nuts, declaring before the paper even hit the streets that official Washington was "reeling" from the disclosures. The series' reporters, Dana Priest and Bill Arkin, were all over the airwaves, declaring their amazement at the enormity of the secret surveillance state and warning that America was faced with a "hidden" black world of analysts and operatives so massive that "its effectiveness is impossible to determine."

Well, after three days of blanket coverage, it's safe to say the Post was right: it was indeed impossible for its team to get its arms around this story or explain the political significance of the secret world it uncovered. The Post never delved into the troubling matter of what it means to have private, for-profit corporations and their executives operating at the highest levels of national security and sharing the government's most sensitive secrets. And much of the series was old news -- fancied up with snazzy graphics and amusing photo spreads -- that could have been told years ago if the paper had been up to the job of covering the massive growth of national security capitalism since 2001.

To be sure, the Post did the public a huge favor by showing, in excruciating detail, just how massive our secret government has become since 9/11, how far it spreads geographically across the country, and how many citizens are involved in its highly classified work: 854,00 people, or 1.5 times the size of DC. In fact, its reporting on the sheer size of the security monolith made the lead-off story one of its best of the year. Plus it was intriguing to learn all that insider stuff, such as the existence of "Super Users" at the Pentagon -- a highly select few with access to all black programs in the military -- and to read one of them comment that he won't "live long enough to be briefed on everything."

But the Post should have stopped after Part One and given it a rest. Looking beyond the numbers and the choice quotes from Bob Gates, Leon Panetta and other high-ranking officials, the series is filled with the most pedestrian of reporting and reveals very little that is actually new about the privatized part of our national security state. It ended on Wednesday with an acutely boring piece about secret installations around DC that could have appeared in the real estate section (and will certainly not impress the Pulitzer judges looking for context and meaning). And when it came to reporting on intelligence contractors, the Post did not advance the story one iota. Indeed, I'm shocked at the paucity of new information and anecdotes about contracting in a story that was supposed to reflect the Post at its investigative best.

For starters, Priest and Arkin offer an incredibly simplistic explanation for how the contracting bandwagon took off under President Bush, who they say manipulated "the federal budget process" to make it easier for agencies to hire contractors. Is that why Blackwater suddenly appeared on the scene in Afghanistan days after 9/11, signed up by counterterrorism official named Cofer Black who later joined the company? Is that how CACI International, a favorite of Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, got the interrogation work at Abu Ghraib prison through an "IT" contract outsourced to the Interior Department? The Post also completely ignored the huge growth of contracting during the Clinton administration, which "reinvented" government by downsizing and outsourcing the federal workforce -- including spies and surveillance teams in places like Bosnia. Many of the companies that are big wheels today got some of their first contracts during the late 1990s.

Worse, there is virtually nothing in the series about the deeper political questions raised by privatization, including the obvious issue of the revolving door. Unbelievably, Priest and Arkin don't even mention that President Bush's DNI, Mike McConnell, and President Obama's counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, were both prominent contractors before taking their jobs. Why is that relevant? Well, McConnell came directly from Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the IC's top contractors and an adviser to the NSA (and he's back at Booz now). Brennan was an executive at The Analysis Corporation, which built a key terrorist database for the National Counterterrorism Center (which Brennan used to run).

There was not even a hint that Lt. Gen. James Clapper (ret.), who appeared before the Senate for his DNI confirmation hearing on the second day of the series, once had close ties to major contractors. Clapper once directed the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. which has extensive contracts with a satellite firm contracted by the government; after leaving the NGA, he joined its board. Nor was there mention of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the largest association for NSA and CIA contractors, for which McConnell, Brennan, and Clapper have all served as chairman. That's not part of the story? Could Clapper's experience have influenced his strong defense of contractors during his testimony? Or would mentioning such ties hurt the Post's access to the ODNI and the White House?

Despite Arkin's much-vaunted reputation in collecting data, not even the charts are very good. The Post's enormous database of contractors will be a useful tool for researchers and journalists, and certainly reveals the incredible scope of the industry (nothing new there though). But it does little to inform the public about what private corporations such as Lockheed Martin, SAIC, and Northrop Grumman actually do for the CIA and the dozens of intelligence units within the Pentagon. That's partly because -- as the authors admit in a note to readers -- they removed certain "data points" at the suggestion of intelligence officials.

Therefore, you can look up a company like Booz Allen and see which agencies it holds contracts with and what kind of counter-terrorism, intelligence, or homeland security work it does; but you can't learn what special tasks it carries out for specific agencies. Now some may applaud the Post for the omission, but I just see a failure to disclose. After all, this kind of information can be found in public documents or through ordinary reporting (on this point, see this article by the excellent Marcy Wheeler, which appeared on the first day of the Post series).

Now, as many readers know, I have a professional beef with the Post. As I've pointed out in several interviews and as bloggers have been noting on Twitter and other outlets all week, Priest and Arkin completely ignored my book, Spies for Hire, as well as my reporting on intelligence contractors over the past five years. They also ignored the massive body of work by Jeremy Scahill, P.W. Singer, and others on the privatization of national security. What the Post did do was lay an an enormous overlay of detail over our collective work, but with very little fresh information (by making this complaint, I'm not just grousing at the Post: Jeff Stein, now the Post's blogger on intelligence, gave Spies for Hire an excellent review in the Post's now-defunct Book World in 2008. And years ago, the Post's Jeff Smith wrote a long piece about a major story I'd broken in another newspaper about U.S. ties with South Korea).

So the real issue is not that the Post should give credit or even cite key findings by journalists like me who "beat" them to this story: more important is why the Post hasn't been covering this industry from the start. For example, there's a lot of information in the series about the money sloshing around at contractor events. One photo spread portrays a DIA contractor conference in Virginia; some of the shots are funny, some a little weird, and they show that, yes, the Pentagon and its contractors are a tight and jolly crew. Another shows the enormous growth of the National Business Park around the NSA in suburban Maryland, where dozens of contractors have their signals intelligence headquarters for their work with the world's largest surveillance agency.

Thing is, all this is very familiar to me and those who have read my work. For example, one chapter of Spies for Hire, "Intelligence Disneyland," is all about one of the contractor organizations and its fancy conferences. The NSA Business Park was the heart of a story I wrote for Mother Jones in 2005 -- a piece that began with me walking through a contracting recruitment event in Northern Virginia. My point is not to boast of past achievements, but to say that there's nothing terribly original here; and just because the Post says it's news doesn't make it news. More to the point, these photos and their accompanying reportage could have popped up in the Post anytime in the last eight years if the newspaper had been covering this beat as it should have: a combination of capitalism and national security that had virtually no precedent in American history.

For the most part, the Post covered intelligence contracting as a business story about the upward growth of area companies, with little attempt to understand what the private monolith was about. Intelligence contracting rose to unimaginable degrees in the years after 2001, yet the Post was content with little bits about the industry here and there (an item about DIA contracting one day, an expose of outsourcing at DHS on another); but with no larger thematic or enterprise stories to show their readers that this was growth of historic proportion. Then, suddenly, it's July 2010 and we have a monstrosity on our hands and it's unbelievable and my God, we better do something about it. It just doesn't ring true, and sounds a bit like Chicken Little. Sorry, guys, but we already knew this.

Tuesday's piece, "National Security Inc.," a 5,000-word take on the rise of intelligence contractors, was particularly disappointing from a news standpoint. It included some interesting vignettes of several companies, but for the most part reported information that was already widely known. For example, the Post reported that 110 companies control most of the contracted work in intelligence; I had said 100 in my book, two years ago. They did quantify the actual number of contractors (265,000), and that's newsy -- alarming even. But how much of the budget do contractors actually receive?

Well, to report that, Priest and Arkin would have had to quote me, because I broke that story back in 2007, when I obtained and published an unclassified ODNI document in Salon showing that 70 percent of the intelligence budget was spent on private contractors. That figure has become the norm in describing the privatized intelligence community. But the Post didn't mention it at all (even though they quote from the ODNI press conference where my figure was finally confirmed). That's a pity: by applying that 70 percent figure to today's intelligence budget of $75 billion, Priest and Arkin could have informed readers that spying for hire is now a $53-billion industry. And -- to use the kind of comparison they like -- they could have said $53 billion is about the size of India's huge outsourcing industry. A missed opportunity, shall we say.

Other areas where the Post's findings fall short are in its roundup of contracting at the key agencies. For example, the National Reconnaissance Office, we're told, "cannot produce, launch or maintain its large satellite surveillance systems ... without the four major contractors it works with." OK. But again, the obvious question is, so how much work do the contractors do?

The answer's in my book, where I quote Donald Kerr, a former director of the NRO, saying that "ninety-five percent of the resources over which we have stewardship in fact go out on a contract to our industrial base" -- a stunning figure by any stretch. The NSA, the Post reports, "hires private firms to come up with most of its technological innovations." But, specifically, what? Wasn't the Post interested in informing the American public, which learned in 2005 that the NSA was eavesdropping on domestic calls without warrants, about the companies that are collaborating on these tasks that many citizens and lawmakers believe violate the law? Apparently not. Again, you have to go elsewhere for this story.

What's most disappointing about this project is the lack of specific anecdotes that illustrate the corrupting side of contracting. At the top of its story on Tuesday, the Post states: "What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest." But the story never documents any instances in which shareholders -- and dollars -- trump the national interest.

The only mention of misconduct is that of the contractor MZM's bribes that sent a congressman to prison and the scandal over the ArmorGroup's security detail at the Kabul Embassy -- stories that were reported by other outlets and organizations. Despite Priest's amazing work on the CIA's rendition program, which won her her first Pulitzer (for public service) in 2006, she shockingly failed to develop the contractor side of this sordid tale. Bits of that story were told by New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer in the magazine and in her brilliant book The Dark Side. Boeing, it turns out, has a subsidiary that arranged the flights and was deeply involved in the program; and recently, Boeing has greatly expanded its reach in intelligence by buying Narus, Inc. and Argon ST, two important NSA contractors. There's a story there, I suspect.

And surely Priest, with her vast network of sources in intelligence (many of them undoubtedly contractors), has heard tales, as I have, of contractors exaggerating threats in Iraq and elsewhere to obtain new contracts from agencies, or of certain high-level intelligence agencies where the senior staff are all employees of one of the big contractors. Such fleshing out of the story of contracting is completely missing from the Post and would have made this series a true blockbuster.

Instead, we have a series that's long on numbers, short on analysis, unwieldy as hell, and offering technology as a panacea for understanding -- kind of like the intelligence community itself. If you want the real story, read my book.

Tim Shorrock - Tim Shorrock is an investigative journalist and author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arch...own/60225/

[Ed Jewett]

Friday, Jul 23, 2010 08:24 ET Why has the Post series created so little reaction?

By Glenn Greenwald
(updated below)
Remember how The Washington Post spent three days documenting on its front page that we basically live under a vast Secret Government -- composed of military and intelligence agencies and the largest corporations -- so sprawling and unaccountable that nobody even knows what it does? This public/private Secret Government spies, detains, interrogates, and even wages wars in the dark, while sucking up untold hundreds of billions of dollars every year for the private corporations which run it. Has any investigative series ever caused less of a ripple than this one? After a one-day spate of television appearances for Dana Priest and William Arkin -- most of which predictably focused on the bureaucratic waste they raised along with whether the Post had Endangered the Nation by writing about all of this -- the story faded blissfully into the ether, never to be heard from again, easily subsumed by the Andrew Breitbart and Journolist sagas.
Any doubt about whether there'd be any meaningful (or even cosmetic) changes as a result of the Post exposé (it was really more a compilation of already known facts) was quickly dispelled by the reaction of the political class: not just one of indifference, but outright contempt for the concerns raised by this story. On Tuesday -- 24 hours after the first installment appeared -- the Senate's Homeland Security Intelligence Committee removed a provision from the Intelligence Authorization Act which would have provided some marginally greater oversight over the Government's secret intelligence programs, because Obama was threatening to veto any bill providing for such oversight. Then, Obama's nominee to be the next Director of National Intelligence, Ret. Lt. Gen. James Clapper, all but laughed at the Post's work, dismissing it during his Senate confirmation hearing as "sensationalism," praising the bureaucratic redundancies as "competitive analysis," and insisting that the National Security and Surveillance State are perfectly "under control." The Post's Jeff Stein today documents how Congressional Democrats can barely rouse themselves to the pretense that they intend to do anything to impose any restraints or accountability on Top Secret America. And it was revealed this week by McClatchy that our vaunted "withdrawal of all combat troops from Iraq" will be accomplished only by assembling a privatized militia that will serve as the State Department's "army in Iraq" long after our actual army "withdraws."
Political elites don't even feel compelled to pretend to be able or willing to do anything about this. Just think about this: on Monday, the Post documents a vast Secret Government bequeathed with unimaginable secrecy and unaccountability, and the rest of the week is filled with stories of the administration's blocking greater oversight and plans to escalate the privitization of our National Security and Surveillance State. That's why there was so little government angst over the Post's "revelations": aside from the fact that it revealed little that wasn't already known (Priest and Arkin withheld substantial amounts of information at the Government's request), even the impact of having the Post trumpet these facts was not a threat to much of anything, since there's nobody in a position to do much about this even if they wanted to. And few people seem to want to.
It's not hard to understand why. Why would the political class possibly want to subvert or weaken their ability to exercise vast spying, detention, and military powers in the dark? They don't. Beyond that, as the Post series highlights, Top Secret America provides not only the ability to exercise vast power with no accountability, but also enables the transfer of massive amounts of public wealth to the private national security and surveillance corporations which own the Government. Very few people with political power have the incentive to do anything about that. It's probably best not to hold your breath waiting for Dianne Feinstein -- the Democratic Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who lives in lavish wealth as a result of her husband's investments in the National Security State (and whose Senate career has a way of oh-so-coincidentally bolstering their wealth) -- to meaningfully address any of the issues raised by the Post series. Despite Feinstein's rhetoric to the contrary, doing so is decidedly not in her interests for multiple reasons.
What ties together virtually every political issue is the one highlighted in this new article in The Nation by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Entitled "No to Oligarchy," it documents with an array of facts how America's wealth is rapidly becoming more concentrated in a tiny number of families while the middle class essentially disappears. As Sanders emphasizes, the outcome is not only the destruction of the "American dream," but serious threats to the very concept of a republican form of government:

Today, because of stagnating wages and higher costs for basic necessities, the average two-wage-earner family has less disposable income than a one-wage-earner family did a generation ago. The average American today is underpaid, overworked and stressed out as to what the future will bring for his or her children. For many, the American dream has become a nightmare.
But, not everybody is hurting. While the middle class disappears and poverty increases the wealthiest people in our country are not only doing extremely well, they are using their wealth and political power to protect and expand their very privileged status at the expense of everyone else. This upper-crust of extremely wealthy families are hell-bent on destroying the democratic vision of a strong middle-class which has made the United States the envy of the world. In its place they are determined to create an oligarchy in which a small number of families control the economic and political life of our country.
The 400 richest families in America, who saw their wealth increase by some $400 billion during the Bush years, have now accumulated $1.27 trillion in wealth. Four hundred families! During the last fifteen years, while these enormously rich people became much richer their effective tax rates were slashed almost in half. While the highest-paid 400 Americans had an average income of $345 million in 2007, as a result of Bush tax policy they now pay an effective tax rate of 16.6 percent, the lowest on record.
Last year, the top twenty-five hedge fund managers made a combined $25 billion but because of tax policy their lobbyists helped write, they pay a lower effective tax rate than many teachers, nurses and police officers. As a result of tax havens in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and elsewhere, the wealthy and large corporations are evading some $100 billion a year in U.S. taxes. . . .
But it's not just wealthy individuals who grotesquely manipulate the system for their benefit. It's the multinational corporations they own and control. In 2009, Exxon Mobil, the most profitable corporation in history made $19 billion in profits and not only paid no federal income tax—they actually received a $156 million refund from the government. In 2005, one out of every four large corporations in the United States paid no federal income taxes while earning $1.1 trillion in revenue.

[Quick: look over there at Pakistan, exclaims The New York Times: "Pakistan's Elite Pay Few Taxes, Widening Gap"]. Sanders quotes Teddy Roosevelt in 1910 explaining why a graduated estate tax was not only economically just but -- more important -- crucial to maintaining basic democratic values:

The absence of effective state, and, especially, national restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.

What was once a word that only the most UnSerious of people would utter as applied to the U.S. -- "oligarchy" -- is today one that can't be avoided if one wants accurately to describe our political culture. Sanders warns of an "oligarchy in which a handful of wealthy and powerful families control the destiny of our nation." The second-ranking Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin, extraordinarily confessed last year that it is Wall Street banks which "frankly own" the Congress. In virtually every area, the subservience of Government to large business interests is so complete that it's impossible to find the line where government ends and corporate power begins. It's a full-scale merger. That's the central fact of our political life. Most everything else is a distraction.
That's why it's simultaneously so astounding and so unsurprising to watch the obscene spectacle unfold that is inevitably leading to cuts in Social Security. In his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman accurately observes that Republicans are attempting to rehabilitate Bush because they are the same GOP with the same platform as prevailed throughout the last decade, just decorated with some re-branding. That's all clearly true, but what isn't quite true is this paragraph:

In recent weeks, G.O.P. leaders have come out for a complete return to the Bush agenda, including tax breaks for the rich and financial deregulation. They've even resurrected the plan to cut future Social Security benefits.

It is absolutely beyond the Republicans' power to cut Social Security, even if they retake the House and Senate in November, since Obama will continue to wield veto power. The real impetus for Social Security cuts is from the "Deficit Commission" which Obama created in January by Executive Order, then stacked with people (including its bipartisan co-Chairs) who have long favored slashing the program, and whose recommendations now enjoy the right of an up-or-down vote in Congress after the November election, thanks to the recent maneuvering by Nancy Pelosi. The desire to cut Social Security is fully bipartisan (otherwise it couldn't happen) and pushed by the billionaire class that controls the Government.
The secret, omnipotent National Security State highlighted by The Washington Post will endure and expand as is because those who control the Government (or, as Dick Durbin put it, who "own" the Government) benefit endlessly from it. Major scandals or citizen-infuriating crises can sometimes lead to some modest and easily circumvented restraints being placed on this power (as just happened with the recently enacted Financial Regulation bill), largely to placate public rage, but it's simply impossible to conceive of the political class taking any meaningful steps to rein in a limitlessly powerful and unquantifiably profitable National Security and Surveillance State -- at least in the absence of serious citizen revolts against it. That Post series produced so little reaction because what it describes -- a Secret Government bestowed with the most extreme powers yet accountable to nobody -- is something to which the nation, as part of our State of Endless War, has apparently acquiesced as a permanent and tolerable condition.

UPDATE: This is an extraordinary graph, showing the explosion in the rich-poor gap in the U.S. over the last 30 years, by illustrating what has happened to the average household income for the Top 1% versus those in the middle 60% and bottom 20% (h/t Matt Yglesias):

Several more equally glaring charts and facts are here.
Relatedly, Sen. Feinstein's spokesman, Gil Duran, emailed me today to claim that my two sentences about her in this post contain "unfair, untrue and inaccurate accusations." I've published the entire exchange here, and am content to allow everyone to assess the issues for themselves. I will append to that post any further responses from Sen. Feinstein's office.

• Glenn Greenwald is a constitutional lawyer, the author of the political blog Unclaimed Territory and the author of a New York Times bestselling book on executive power, "How Would a Patriot Act: Defending American Values From a President Run Amok." More Glenn Greenwald
  

[Dawn Meredith]

This truly is nearly beyond comprehension. Who actually listens to all these calls, reads therse email I wonder. Obviously people who have taken an oath of silence. There needs to be a damn revolution in this country. And not the tea party type. Serious protectors of the Constitution.

Some "change" !

Dawn

[Ed Jewett]

This truly is nearly beyond comprehension. Who actually listens to all these calls, reads therse email I wonder. Obviously people who have taken an oath of silence. There needs to be a damn revolution in this country. And not the tea party type. Serious protectors of the Constitution.

Some "change" !

Dawn

Dawn, from what I understand of it [nota bene: my NSA certificates of completion of curriculum have been misplaced by the US Postal System], no person actually listens to all the calls or reads all the e-mails. Basically, if I am correct, in layman's terms, a huge high-volume vacuuum cleaner hose is attached to central processing points [the Echelon listening posts, the Verizon switching rooms, the ISP intra-nodal way points for Internet communciations etc.] and sucks out all the data. [Think of it as single stream recycling.] From there, filters [key-word algorithms, transmission and recipient indicators as highlighted, etc.] sort thropugh the stuff. Everything is filtered, but only a very very small amount of it gets "flagged" as a metter of interest. Lots of it gets logged so it can be re-retrieved in case a "person of interest" is found with exploded underwear. Only the very small percentage is diverted for further follow-up, again using filters with finer screening systems. At some point after at least three layers of screening, an actual human might be tasked to read or listen; then they have to check with their superiors. The whole thing is run with acres and acres of Cray super-computer "ganged" together in serial fashion, as well as those split off for different functionality.

[Peter Lemkin]

This truly is nearly beyond comprehension. Who actually listens to all these calls, reads therse email I wonder. Obviously people who have taken an oath of silence. There needs to be a damn revolution in this country. And not the tea party type. Serious protectors of the Constitution.

Some "change" !

Dawn

Dawn, from what I understand of it [nota bene: my NSA certificates of completion of curriculum have been misplaced by the US Postal System], no person actually listens to all the calls or reads all the e-mails. Basically, if I am correct, in layman's terms, a huge high-volume vacuuum cleaner hose is attached to central processing points [the Echelon listening posts, the Verizon switching rooms, the ISP intra-nodal way points for Internet communciations etc.] and sucks out all the data. [Think of it as single stream recycling.] From there, filters [key-word algorithms, transmission and recipient indicators as highlighted, etc.] sort thropugh the stuff. Everything is filtered, but only a very very small amount of it gets "flagged" as a metter of interest. Lots of it gets logged so it can be re-retrieved in case a "person of interest" is found with exploded underwear. Only the very small percentage is diverted for further follow-up, again using filters with finer screening systems. At some point after at least three layers of screening, an actual human might be tasked to read or listen; then they have to check with their superiors. The whole thing is run with acres and acres of Cray super-computer "ganged" together in serial fashion, as well as those split off for different functionality.

As I understand it, correct Ed, except many more layers than three. It was some years ago now, but I interviewed someone who worked there and tested/monitored the systems. 99.99% get stored forever and never used - but are accessible as needed/wanted. Some little amount gets sent to more high priority databases and a very little gets sent for humans or special computers to render into text or to analyze. The amount of data is now one Zettabyte of data - an almost incomprehensible amount of information....including your wishing your grandmother happy birthday last year.....and all of your emails, bank details, driving record...et al. ad nauseum.

A zettabyte (symbol ZB, derived from the SI prefix zetta-) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one sextillion bytes.
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes = or 10 to the 21st power. hakehands:

Hmmm....wonder how much a one ZB harddrive costs these days?......

[Ed Jewett]

Thanks, Peter, for your mathematical amplification. Yes, indeed, there are more than 3 layers. 10 to the 21st power and still climbing exponentially, as we keep adding population, and putting most of them on the "watch list" and the "do not fly" list. :trytofly:


added on edit: ... and the targeting systems for future predator-y or other special "treatments", sprays, vaccinations, or genetic modifications.