There are few organizations in this world which collects 100,000 intelligent motivated young men and women and focuses them.
Otherwise the
collection of all the data is not too important by itself. No one is going to read it unless they have a
clear target and no one is going to use it for legal ends simply because it is
not legally obtained. For this to be of
concern, you have to be a target. That
then narrows it down pretty quickly.
In fact it is pretty
well those in ‘public’ life who are targeted as a matter of course, both here
and abroad.
After all it really
matters if senator Coonskin suddenly begins to treat his recent flame to a lot
of expensive living. It also matters
just what key folks care doing and thinking and who is trying to influence
them. Again, having all the data makes
it pretty easy to eliminate a lot of false leads. It takes a lot more that a quiet conversation
to launch a serious security threat.
And again, evidence of
outright crimes, gathered this way is useless to the state. Intelligence that someone is a criminal is
useful, but who wants those creeps to have cover anyway.
'Black
Budget' Revealed: A Detailed Look at US 'Espionage Empire'
Latest revelations made
possible by Edward Snowden give unprecedented view of how taxpayer funds are
use to "collect it all"
-
Jon Queally, staff writer
August
29, 2013
In the latest revelation made possible by NSA whistleblower
Edward Snowden, the Washington Post on Thursday published an investigative analysis and interactive map of America's
so-called "Black Budget" which details the $52.6 billion allotment of
taxpayer money that funds the government's "intelligence-gathering
colossus" that has previously remained insulated from the eyes of the
American public.
Though a series of revelations have flowed from the
Snowden leaks over recent months, this is the first detailed financial picture
of how public monies are used to fund programs that Americans still know very
little about. Critiqued as a
"collect it all" strategy by those concerned about Constitutional and
privacy violations, the vast surveillance network has been slammed at home and
abroad.
According to the Post, the
"Black Budget," maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that
has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually
released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not
divulged how it uses those funds or how it performs against the goals set by
the president and Congress.
The 178-page
budget summary for the National Intelligence Program details the successes,
failures and objectives of the 16 spy agencies that make up the U.S.
intelligence community, which has 107,035
employees.
The summary describes cutting-edge technologies, agent
recruiting and ongoing operations. The Washington Post is withholding some
information after consultation with U.S. officials who expressed concerns about
the risk to intelligence sources and methods. Sensitive details are so
pervasive in the documents that The Post is publishing only summary tables and
charts online.
A
view into what the newspaper terms the US "espionage empire," the blueprint
and summary documents obtained by the Post "provides a detailed look
at how the U.S. intelligence community has been reconfigured by the massive
infusion of resources that followed the Sept. 11 attacks" in 2001.
According
to the reporting, the $52.6 billion far-exceeded estimates about the amount of
money being spent on clandestine spying and surveillance operations and that
figure does not even include an additional $23 billion specifically geared to
CIA and NSA operations done in direct support of the U.S. military.
In
addition to providing what is repeatedly referred to as an
"unprecedented" look inside the financial operations of the both the
CIA and the NSA, the summary report leaked by Snowden also shows the enormous
rate of operational growth at the CIA in the last decade, including a
"surge in resources for the agency funded secret prisons, a
controversial interrogation program, the deployment of lethal drones and a huge
expansion of its counterterrorism center."
In an additional and ironic twist, the documents trace
the development of internal counterterrorism efforts at the NSA and how to
prevent sensitive leaks from occurring "from within" the US
intelligence system. As the Post reports:
The document
describes programs to “mitigate insider threats by trusted insiders who seek to
exploit their authorized access to sensitive information to harm U.S.
interests.”
The agencies had
budgeted for a major counterintelligence initiative in fiscal 2012, but most of
those resources were diverted to an all-hands, emergency response to successive
floods of classified data released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
For this year,
the budget promised a renewed “focus . . . on safeguarding classified networks”
and a strict “review of high-risk, high-gain applicants and contractors” —
the young, nontraditional computer coders with the skills the NSA needed.
Among them was Snowden, then a 29-year-old contract
computer specialist who had been trained by the NSA to circumvent computer
network security. He was copying thousands of highly classified documents at an
NSA facility in Hawaii, and preparing to leak them, as the agency embarked on a
security sweep.
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