Top secret America: A hidden world, growing beyond control

Top secret America: A hidden world, growing beyond control

projects.washingtonpost.com

Every day across the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate.

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[edit on 19/7/2010 by Mirthful Me]

What a disappointment all 16 pages of this complete fluff piece was.

It's unbelievable. This will not shock anyone. Everything in this article is common knowledge for the most part. No damming evidence just fluff.

All the hoopla about this story for nothing at all.. Read it for yourself but it's 16 pages of tip toeing around real issues.

projects.washingtonpost.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Mod Edit: Breaking News Forum Submission Guidelines – Please Review This Link.

[edit on 19/7/2010 by Mirthful Me]

reply to post by navione


I read and went through the entire thing and it has the feel of being there only in hopes to create the news for today and overshadow something more serious going on or going to happen.

I mean come on now... Two years of research taken from sources that are readily accessible and completely public...

People comparing this to wikileaks or suggesting this was msm releasing wikileaks info to the public were way off the mark on this one.

It's sad to think I actually believed that maybe just possibly we would see a catalyst for actual change this morning in the Washington post...

Fool me once shame on you

Fool me twice shame on me

Shame shame on me...again.

I concur, it's a pretty sad article. To boot, they still have to push the terrorist buttons when we(at least here on ATS) know it's a load of crap.

Seriously, wasn't it the C.I.A. that put the Christmas day bomber on the plane? I forget the exact details but that's close enough. I'm tired - haven't slept well in this heat - but I think I have the right story.

Lies spread through fear. What a world we live in when our government has to pull this kind of crap against us. The Post did us no favors with this "information", they are only spreading fear that our government can't keep up with all of it's intelligence(misnomer) and that the terrorists will get us.


I'm not afraid of their big boogeyman, I'm afraid of THEM as THEY are the ones taking our freedoms away, crashing the economy, not guarding our borders, ruining our food supply with chemicals, putting us into a increasing state of surveillance, etc. etc. and on and on.

Did anyone seriously expect the Washington post to reveal anything of value? They've been a mouthpiece for the administration since Bush I took office. Now wonder nobody reads newspapers any more.

To sum up the article:

We've spent incredible amounts of money to produce incredible amounts of information that no one can effectively analyze or get to the people who need it.
And they do it redundantly, each agency producing basically the same thing.

Just how many terrorist acts has all this money and resources managed to prevent? Probably zero.

Here's my favorite quote from the article:

When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. "I told him that after 4 1/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!"

There you go, straight from the horse's mouth. "Never produced one shred of info that helped"

National security has become a sad joke. In the name of security you have destroyed our economy, our standing in the free world, our freedoms and our hopes for the future. Way to go guys!

YOU PEOPLE IN WASHINGTON ARE THE GREATEST COLLECTIVE FAILURE IN HISTORY!!

The saddest thing is that you cannot admit to your own uselessness so the madness continues and WE GET TO PAY FOR IT!!
At what point does the parasite (government) become too big for the host (we the people)?

What the article truly points to is how inept the Government is in thinking the war on terrorism can be solved by money. Wasting billions on duplicating or triplet of work, while producing nothing of value except the perception of safety to the sheep.

Privacy invasion has become the norm, and they just don't get it. Right's be damned...

Hopefully, this opens a few more people's eyes too see where the Government is wrong.

Are any of you in the intelligence field? I can judge by your respsonses here that you are not.

From the outside, it's very easy to criticize and speculate about something that none of you really understand.

I'm a 10 year veteran of the US Intel community. You know, the group that all of you here on ATS love to blame for your loss of freedoms, the wiretaps on your landline phones, the satellite that is camped out over your house, etc., etc.

NEWSFLASH:

You are all off-base, and wrong. GEN Custer was wrong as well... he was special forces, and people in that fraternity tend to always blame 'intel weenies' when things don't go exactly how they think they should. You should also note that GEN Custer was never Commander, CENTCOM... he was the deputy commander under GEN Abizaid, and a primadonna at that.

To begin to understand what we in the community have to work around, I suggest that you do some research into the FISA Amendment and the FAA/PAA acts.

Everyone seems to think they can watch "Enemy of the State" and they know the capabilities/limitations of the NSA. Or you can watch any number of movies and know how the CIA operates. Does watching the "X-Files" make you an impromptu member of the FBI.

No, no, and no.

Is our current architecture unwieldy? Absolutely, I know this and feel the pain every day, but I work through it to do a job that I know is thankless, but necessary. I know at the end of the day, when I lay my infant son down to sleep at night, that I've done the best I can to protect innocent lives, both American and foreign, and that I can sleep with a clear conscience because of it.

So before you go villifying everything and everyone in the United States government, perhaps you should take a step back, take a deep breath, and realize that there are still amazing, intelligent, patriotic, loyal Americans who work for Uncle Sam and give our all in belief of the Constitution and this nation.

GBD

They were probably stopped from printing anything of significance for reasons of national security. And probably rightly so. That or they were full of hot air to begin with. There may be more on this in the future.

to theories either this wasn't what orginaly was supposed to be the story or b this was just bs to make us by their paper. i feel that if washington post was going to try to post names and locations of topsecret facilities that goverment would squash story like a bug.

I'm thinking they may be only laying the foundations at the moment.

Wikileaks posted a tweet regarding the Wash' Post on the 17th of July about how they were getting rid of the 'rats'

I'm wondering if wikileaks will be teaming up with the post in the near future.

If they have been working on this for 2 years, can someone please ask them what they did with the other year and 355 days?

Beyond redundancy, secrecy within the intelligence world hampers effectiveness in other ways, say defense and intelligence officers. For the Defense Department, the root of this problem goes back to an ultra-secret group of programs for which access is extremely limited and monitored by specially trained security officers.

These are called Special Access Programs - or SAPs - and the Pentagon's list of code names for them runs 300 pages. The intelligence community has hundreds more of its own, and those hundreds have thousands of sub-programs with their own limits on the number of people authorized to know anything about them. All this means that very few people have a complete sense of what's going on.

Any of the relevant information is contained within the above references. We had an ATS member discuss the importance of SAP's a few months ago...

Aside from what information lies in those areas, the article reads more of focus on the amount of money spent within our intelligence community and the lack of efficiency produced in the mountains of redundancy and irrelevant information gathered.

Good things to know for someone who is unfamiliar with our website but certainly beyond what we know here on ATS.

Disappointing...I want to hear about the psychotronics...that is when I may be able to go into overdrive with some communication...

Edit for spelling.

[edit on Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:24:39 -0500 by MemoryShock]

While I am personally disappointed...all the stuff in the article is stuff that most on ATS already have knowledge of. I am glad though that it is published. It gives us an official source to reference and facts and figures that I surely would have never looked up.

Do not discount the impact of this piece just quite yet though. There are many people blind at just the amount of money being spent on our intelligence programs. This could make them question a bit more. Any progress is good progress.

Here's a sneak peak into the coming documentary called 'Top Secret America', pretty interesting I would say.



They talk about secret buildings, that no one knows about, that are four stories high, but another ten stories bellow the ground. There's definitely much information in this documentary that will probably surpise alot of people.

[edit on 19/7/10 by Droogie]

I worked as a drywall contractor on house in Vera Florida where one of these secret intelligence communities were built. The whole town is basicly tied to military work so I see more in the story then most. Toll Brothers Construction a home builder one of the largest in the country was putting in communities in all these areas across the country. So I see it as a Manhattan Project of intelligence industry. And one person in 300 has top secret clearance in the US. How secret could it be than. And just to think thats the number with top secret clearance not everybody who works in the intellagence industry.

reply to post by JBA2848


I would venture to say that if a million people work inside this intelligence apparatus...10's of millions probably do support work for these organizations.

The interesting and disturbing part of this article is the search function they have for the companies involved. Some like symantec, google, cysco systems and qualcomm are just a little bit disturbing...

projects.washingtonpost.com...

Also, staffing and temp agencies? There are a lot of companies in here that make me a bit scared, to be honest.

What the hell is going on?

This type of story is exactly what ATS is all about. Why isn't this on the homepage? This article was rumored over the weekend, and has since been confirmed. I was going to submit it myself, but my wife finally found this thread by DIGGING FOR IT and SEARCHING for it.

Really?

REALLY?

This is exactly the crap Assange was talking about -- the release of information like this is exactly how you get policy reform without violence -- and I'm hearing virtually nothing about it.

My wife and I printed out the whole story as a hardcopy and I've got half a mind to start going out on the streets and stapling this god damn story all over the city.

I'm also seeing references to this story disappear from other MSM homepages as well -- I do not like how this story is panning out. Where are the pitchforks and torches???

I, for one, will NOT let this one get swept under the carpet -- even if I have to dedicate my personal resources to an entire website dedicated to the preservation and distribution of this information.

If this story doesn't light a fire under your ass, then, I guess nothing will. Just roll over and take it folks...I guess that's all that's expected of us by now.

I'm sorry, I'm just so damned angry about all this right now, so I apologize for my vitriol.

Originally posted by guavas
What the hell is going on?

This type of story is exactly what ATS is all about. Why isn't this on the homepage? This article was rumored over the weekend, and has since been confirmed. I was going to submit it myself, but my wife finally found this thread by DIGGING FOR IT and SEARCHING for it.

Really?

REALLY?

This is exactly the crap Assange was talking about -- the release of information like this is exactly how you get policy reform without violence -- and I'm hearing virtually nothing about it.

My wife and I printed out the whole story as a hardcopy and I've got half a mind to start going out on the streets and stapling this god damn story all over the city.

I'm also seeing references to this story disappear from other MSM homepages as well -- I do not like how this story is panning out. Where are the pitchforks and torches???

I, for one, will NOT let this one get swept under the carpet -- even if I have to dedicate my personal resources to an entire website dedicated to the preservation and distribution of this information.

If this story doesn't light a fire under your ass, then, I guess nothing will. Just roll over and take it folks...I guess that's all that's expected of us by now.

I'm sorry, I'm just so damned angry about all this right now, so I apologize for my vitriol.

Seriously? This is public knowledge, you can find most of this information on the web. I thought everyone knew this was going on... Go look on a Job search engine and you will see most jobs available are in the defense sector.... I assumed everyone was looking for jobs and knew that there was an explosion in defense.... hmmm guess some are more ignorant than I thought....

-Kdial1