say hello to....THE SURVEILLANCE INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

Swiffness!

"The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."

- 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.

- 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.

- Every one of these buildings has at least one of these rooms, known as a SCIF, for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. Some are as small as a closet; others are four times the size of a football field. SCIF size has become a measure of status in Top Secret America, or at least in the Washington region of it. "In D.C., everyone talks SCIF, SCIF, SCIF," said Bruce Paquin, who moved to Florida from the Washington region several years ago to start a SCIF construction business. "They've got the ? envy thing going. You can't be a big boy unless you're a three-letter agency and you have a big SCIF."

- Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

- Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000+ intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

- The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.

- In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.

"The complexity of this system defies description."

The result, he added, is that it's impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. "Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste," Vines said. "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."



In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work.

"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ''Stop!" in frustration.

"I wasn't remembering any of it," he said.





^^^ new DoD office being built


Remember when Ron Paul got laughed at by Conservative Republicans because he said anti-terror stuff like the Department of Homeland Security would only make the Gov't bigger and the bureaucracy worse? All those "small government" dudes laughed at him.

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/

Tomorrow they'll expose how dependent this system is on PRIVATE CONTRACTORS....this is ? journalism ladies and gentlemen.

phantom0900

Big Brother is watching, but he forgot where he put the tape.

LONDON!

crazy ? , you can't make it up

Shuffington

Hi !!.........