http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/a-look-at-the-washington-posts-top-secret-america/

July 19, 2010, 1:58 PM

A Look at The Washington Post’s ‘Top Secret America’

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Washington Post published the opening installment of its Top Secret America project, a two-year investigation into the national security buildup in the United States that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In a series of articles by the Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, a host of interactive graphics and a searchable database, the series details the unintended downside of ballooning governmental financing for agencies and departments that have been unable to spend the massive influx of money responsibly, the inevitable turf battles that emerged as spending and responsibilities shifted and overlapped, and the near-impossible task of determining the effectiveness of a system that has grown so massive so quickly and with so little transparency.

Here are just a few of the investigation’s findings included in the online report:

* 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.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

Bloggers and the intelligence community have been quick to react to the series and we encourage you to take a look at it.

Again, the Media tells us that the Nigerian would-be terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, made on to the Northwest Airlines' plane by accident. Even when the CIA acknowledges that they knew about him and allowed him to enter the plane. On January 27, the Detroit News reported how the State Department refused to revoke Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s visa despite the fact that he was on a terror watch list and allowed him to board the plane, allegedly in order to avoid tipping off a wider investigation.

After weeks of stonewalling, authorities quietly reversed the official story behind the aborted attack and acknowledged that an accomplice was involved, despite weeks of denial and derision of eyewitness Kurt Haskell’s description of a sharp-dressed man who helped Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab board Flight 253 in Amsterdam.

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http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2004876,00.html?xid=rss-mostpopular#ixzz0uDNxEvsO

Time to Tame Washington's Intelligence Beast

By ROBERT BAER Monday, Jul. 19, 2010 Time Magazine

I asked a former colleague who retired from the CIA not long ago what he thought about the Washington Post article Monday, July 19, on the explosion of contractors in the intelligence community. "It's a horror," he said, "my tax money blowing around Washington like confetti." But he reserved his angriest comments for the contractor-driven bureaucracy that allowed a Nigerian would-be suicide bomber — as alleged by a resulting federal indictment — to board a Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit in December. In spite of the billions and billions of dollars we've showered on contractors, consultants and corporate contracts since 9/11, no one managed to disseminate a warning from the Nigerian's father that his son had reportedly become a terrorist.

The raw numbers in the Post tell the story. Since 9/11, America's intelligence budget has more than doubled, to $75 billion. The number of people working at the Defense Intelligence Agency has gone from 7,500 to 16,500. The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces have trebled in number, rising from 35 to 106. Personnel at the National Security Agency has doubled. There are 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances, including contractors — almost 1½ times the population of Washington. It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that the Nigerian slipped through the cracks: there are so many more cracks now.

(See pictures of the CIA's misadventures.)

But we shouldn't reduce the problem to our having become a country saddled with a bureaucratic Frankenstein of timeservers and people cashing in on 9/11. Recently I've been giving talks at government agencies working on counterterrorism. With almost no exceptions, I've found my audiences, including contractors, better informed, more dedicated and better educated than the generation I served with in the CIA. (As I've said elsewhere, if I were applying to the CIA today, I wonder whether I'd make it in.) The problem is that I came away from these talks with the impression that the post-9/11 workforce is bored and even adrift — at least in the sense that there are too many people chasing too little hard intelligence.

(See pictures from the life of the underwear bomber.)

It's a tooth-to-tail problem. CIA Director Leon Panetta has gone on the record as saying there are only a couple hundred al-Qaeda dead-enders in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan, most of whom are dormant, hiding in caves. With a prey so small and elusive and a bureaucracy so Washington-bound, it shouldn't come as a surprise that we're tripping over ourselves. Nor should it come as a surprise that more money and more contractors aren't a problem of diminishing returns but rather one of adding to the risk.

It would be considerably different if we could put this new workforce in the field — for instance, in Afghanistan, a country that demands years and years of on-the-ground experience for a young American intelligence officer to understand it. But our bases there are already overflowing with combat forces, and anyhow, it's too dangerous for Americans to get outside the wire to meet Afghans. Not unlike in Washington, they're stuck behind desks and forced to look at the country from a distance.(See the top 10 CIA movies.)

No one intended to create a monster bureaucracy after 9/11 — Washington has always thrown money and people at a problem rather than good ideas. But now someone has to seriously calculate the damage the outsourcing of intelligence is causing. The story I keep hearing over and over is that the bright young people who came to Washington to fight terrorism — civil servants and contractors alike — have become disillusioned, and they will soon turn away from idealism and begin to transform their jobs into comfortable careers. In the case of the contractors, it means more contracts and more contractors. It's all the worse because there are now contractors writing their own contracts.

For Washington to retake control of intelligence, it needs to remember that intelligence is inherently a governmental function, no different from the courts, the police or legislation. I wish Washington good luck in taking back ground from the contractors, and I hope it can move faster than the next would-be suicide bomber.

Baer, a former Middle East CIA field officer, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3652494.ece

The Sunday Times

March 31, 2008

CIA enlists Google's help for spy work

US intelligence agencies are using Google's technology to help its agents share information about their suspects

Jonathan Richards

Google has been recruited by US intelligence agencies to help them better process and share information they gather about suspects.

Agencies such as the National Security Agency have bought servers on which Google-supplied search technology is used to process information gathered by networks of spies around the world.

Google is also providing the search features for a Wikipedia-style site, called Intellipedia, on which agents post information about their targets that can be accessed and appended by colleagues, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The contracts are just a number that have been entered into by Google's 'federal government sales team', that aims to expand the company's reach beyond its core consumer and enterprise operations.

In the most innovative service, for which Google equipment provides the core search technology, agents are encouraged to post intelligence information on a secure forum, which other spies are free to read, edit, and tag - like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Depending on their clearance, agents can log on to Intellipedia and gain access to three levels of info - top secret, secret and sensitive, and sensitive but unclassified. So far 37,000 users have established accounts on the service, and the database now extends to 35,000 articles, according to Sean Dennehy, chief of Intellipedia development for the CIA.

"Each analyst, for lack of a better term, has a shoe box with their knowledge," Mr Dennehy was quoted as saying. "They maintained it in a shared drive or Word document, but we're encouraging them to move those platforms so that everyone can benefit."

The collection of articles is hosted by the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, and is available only to the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence agencies.

Google's search technology usually rates a website's importance by measuring the number of other sites that link to it - a method that is more problematic in a 'closed' network used by a limited numbr of people. In the case of Intellipedia, pages become more prominent depending on how they are tagged or added to by other contributors.

As well as working with the intelligence agencies, Google also provides services to other US public sector organisations, including the Coast Guard, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Often, the contract is for something as simple as conducting earch within an organisation's own database, but in the case of the Coast Guard, Google also provides a more advanced version of its satellite mapping tool Google Earth, which ships use to navigate more safely.

There is no dedicated team promoting sales of Google products to the British Government, but a Google spokesperson said the company did target public sector organisations such as councils, schools and universities through the team that run AdWords, its internet advertising platform.