
A hidden world, growing beyond control  - jamesbritt
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/
======
dj2stein9
This is what bureaucracies do, they grow, more complex, more political, more
expensive, and exponentially harder to dismantle. Everyone knew that once
Homeland Security was created it would become a sprawling, pervasive, and
never-ending drain on the country. Eliminating it now is probably out of the
question because it would be substantially more costly (politically and
economically) than keeping it running.

Basically they've taken the script of the TV series "24" and used it to turn
the entire government into a giant anti-terrorism organization that cannot
locate or defend the country against any terrorists. But year after year the
programs are always "underfunded" and so the bureaucracy grows and gets worse
at doing its job... It's a perfect storm of stupidity and ignorance that has
no benefits other than keeping the system going for no reason whatsoever.

~~~
sybhn
this is completely of topic, i know. But could not not think about Obamacare
when reading about "This is what bureaucracies do, they grow, more complex,
more political, more expensive, and exponentially harder to dismantle. " ... I
would also add to that: undemocratic.

~~~
ewoodrich
Yes, conflate healthcare policy (that in many ways is fundamentally different)
with Homeland Security. I apologize for my sarcasm, but this just seems like
knee jerk partisanship.

In addition, we are not a democracy (per se), but a constitutional republic,
and as such, our elected representatives decide public policy. In the case of
Obamacare, Democrats had been overwhelmingly elected the prior year (and Obama
ran with healthcare reform as a campaign pledge). So, I don't quite see how it
is "undemocratic" either.

~~~
john_b
I think the analogy is perfectly valid. Regardless of the _goals_ of a policy,
its _implementation_ via bureaucracy can still be so hopelessly complicated
that it's a net drain on society.

It reminds me of a quote I once heard, possibly by Ron Paul (though I am not
sure), that went along the lines of "Politicians mention 'tax reform' all the
time. But unless they're talking about simplifying the tax code, they're not
talking about tax reform."

The DHS and Obamacare both tacked on additional rules to an already
overcomplicated and opaque set of systems, rather than streamline the
underlying systems and their interactions. Our political process makes adding
bureaucratic complexity easier than removing it. For under-regulated areas
(like anti-trust laws in the early 20th century), this can solve problems. But
otherwise it's more likely to make the underlying problems worse.

~~~
Retric
Obamacare and DHS removed plenty of regulations streamlining many things. What
people really complain about is regulating new things not the overall
complexity.

------
rayiner
Some of these criticisms are utterly stupid:

> * 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.

Without a mention of how much work these people do on terrorism, it's
meaningless. Homeland security is a cross-cutting concern. So Excelon in
Illinois might have a program in place to harden their nuclear power plants
against potential terrorist attack. Should they be counted as part of this
"hidden world" "growing beyond control?"

> * An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in
> Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

There are a ton of reasons to have top-secret security clearances that have
nothing to do with counterterrorism or intelligence gathering. Anyone doing
sensitive military research, for example, will often have a top secret
clearance.

> * 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.

Again, homeland security is a cross-cutting concern.

> * 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.

50,000 intelligence reports in a year is 136 per day, in a country of 300
million people.

~~~
DanBC
You're right, some of the criticisms don't make much sense.

But we're going to hear a lot more like this now we know that intelligence was
aware of the alleged boston bomber at least a year ago.

~~~
johnvschmitt
When I hear that the FBI interviewed the Boston bomber a year ago, I don't
immediately think of FBI incompetence. No, rather, I think, "Hey, the bomber
had many experiences & changes of mind, & is truly a different person a year
hence".

I mean, are personalities & motivations & intentions truly permanent? C'mon,
haven't we all changed as life goes on?

It's a fallacy to think you can ever 99.9% predict the future regardless of
how much "big data" & "army of experts" you have.

That approach hasn't predicted the stock market within 70% accuracy, so how
can we expect it to predict security issues any better?

We need to just realize that we're far more likely to die from causes other
than terrorism, & just treat it like other crimes.

~~~
danielweber
If we drag the FBI over the coals for interviewing this guy and failing to
stop him, we are shooting ourselves in the foot.

Either the FBI is going to stop interviewing people, or they are going to
start putting lots of innocent people in jail.

------
np422
(English is not my native language)

I am very surprised by the very large amount of statism that seems to be
present in USA in general and on hacker news in particular.

The high level of support for GWOT and all the side dishes like TSA, mass
surveillance etc is very surprising.

Each and one of all the things that have been done in the post 9/11 world may
partially or completely be justifiable on it's own.

But please, take a step back and paint a picture of where we have come from
and were we are going if this trend continues.

If I may help you...

<http://i.imgur.com/tfPY1y0.jpg> , here is a picture of the subway in New York
in the 80's, dirty and full of graffiti - with drugs and violence present and
by all means also music, food vendors and a lot of people going to their jobs.

<http://i.imgur.com/AxWRPgl.jpg> , here is the Moscow subway from the same
time. Clean, spotless and no one behaves disorderly without the police
arresting them quickly, police officers with none of the ridiculous
limitations that the western police had in their code of conduct at that time.

In which of those two subways would you prefer to ride to work every day?

With every new alfabet law designed to protect us that passes through the
parliaments, with every new government agency we move closer to a society that
looks more like the Moscow subway station.

Not to long ago we were prepared for thermonuclear war to defend our ways.

Today we are giving up our open and free society with a cheer so we can stay
safe. Step by step, piece by piece.

Why can't the otherwise so intelligent and educated crowd of hacker news see
that our society is heading in the direction of a police state? We are not
there yet, but it is where we will end up if we don't turn around soon.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
> Why can't the otherwise so intelligent and educated crowd of hacker news see
> that our society is heading in the direction of a police state? We are not
> there yet, but it is where we will end up if we don't turn around soon.

We don't have much of a choice unless we want to regress into a pre-state
hunter gatherer society (aka, a non-society). People live closely together,
people don't want to get shot by their neighbor.

Advanced society requires the right set of laws to protect our safety and our
liberty. And the USA is not alone in trying to balance these concerns: look at
western Europe, Japan, Aus, NZ, ..., they all have the same issues to
consider. There is also no "right" solution, its not black or white, but
rather there are many tradeoffs to be made.

~~~
crusso
_We don't have much of a choice unless we want to regress into a pre-state
hunter gatherer society_

Yikes, so we become a police state or we go roll things back 5000 years.
Amazing.

It's like the United States wasn't a world power and thriving before the New
Deal.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
What part of rising population densities do you not get? We will become more
urbanized, you just can't support 4 or 500 million Americans rurally. As we
live more closely together, issues that would otherwise be benign or
insignificant become significant. Couple that with globalization, and what are
otherwise local problems have become global ones.

From the libertarian perspective, we've been going downhill ever since the
first city state kings appeared. People during the 30s were probably bitching
about how it was much better in the 1870s, and so on.

------
WestCoastJustin
On a related note, PBS had an episode called "Top Secret America" in 2011 [1]
- it's pretty good. Overview: _"A two-year examination into the massive,
unwieldy, top-secret world the government has created in response to 9/11"_.

[1] <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/topsecretamerica/>

~~~
caycep
IT's the same authors, I think. They also published this in a book a couple
years ago.

------
guard-of-terra
The real danger there is that security apparatus tend to replace government as
a decision making center.

Nazi Germany towards the end or Russia today, you will see security apparatus
contributing most of people who has real political weight. They have
clearances nobody else does, they think of themselves as defenders, they never
trust anyone outside their circle, and once they're in - nobody else gets to
decide anything that can't be overriden by them.

------
sfx
>"More is often the solution proposed by the leaders of the 9/11 enterprise.
After the Christmas Day bombing attempt, Leiter also pleaded for more - more
analysts to join the 300 or so he already had.

>"The Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals, more body
scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can't find nearly enough
qualified people to fill its intelligence unit now. Obama has said he will not
freeze spending on national security, making it likely that those requests
will be funded."

and this scares me the most:

>"Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the DHS has broken
ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. DHS, in
existence for only seven years, already has its own Special Access Programs,
its own research arm, its own command center, its own fleet of armored cars
and its own 230,000-person workforce, the third-largest after the departments
of Defense and Veterans Affairs."

More more more, funny how all this makes me far more uneasy then any terrorist
threat. At least I can fight off a terrorist, lord help you if you try to say
no to the SWAT team wanting to search your home for a teenager who made a
homemade explosive.

~~~
rayiner
DHS isn't an organic entity that sprung up from 0 to 230,000 in the wake of
9/11. It is just an amalgam of a bunch of agencies that already existed. It
includes the Coast Guard, INS, Customs, FEMA, TSA, and Secret Service, along
with a bunch of smaller agencies. Of those, the only new thing is TSA, which
is 56,000 employees. And while annoying, TSA is mostly doing the same job
private companies used to do under contracts with airlines.

~~~
sfx
That's an excellent point, though it still is relatively scary. Such as the
powers the DHS has in "constitutional free zones"[1]. It makes me nervous
having 230,000 people having this much power because they're under the
umbrella of "DHS".

[1] [http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/homeland-
sec...](http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/homeland-security-
assuming-broad-powers-turning-vast-swaths-us)

~~~
twoodfin
That's a rather loaded term to describe a tradeoff between individual rights
and the government's legitimate interests. Moreover, it's a balancing that has
survived Supreme Court scrutiny, IIRC.

~~~
wiml
It's a funny "balancing" that means that 2/3 of the population does not have
the right to be secure in their persons or papers, freedom of movement, the
requirement of due process, warrants, and probable cause before being
handcuffed or cavity-searched, and so on.

~~~
rayiner
That's a huge exaggeration to the point of verging on an outright lie. See:
[http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6933260753627774...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6933260753627774699)

~~~
wiml
I'm not sure what assertion you're claiming is a huge exaggeration? The
Federal government claims a 100-mile region in which the border-crossing
exceptions to the Constitution apply. The court judgment you cite says that's
BS and the government does not have that much leeway. The comment to which I
was replying appears to argue that the 100-mile rule is a tradeoff/balance
that has survived scrutiny.

------
gshubert17
This article was written in 2010 as part of a series. Also, for a single-page
view, [http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-
america/articl...](http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-
america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/print/)

~~~
morpher
Thanks. I figured this was the case given the sentence "After nine years of
unprecedented spending and growth, ..." I wonder why the didn't include a date
on the linked page. Seems like an important piece of information for any news
article / investigative journalism.

------
dfc
If you found this article enjoyable you should check out the book:

[http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-
Security/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-
Security/dp/0316182206)

This article is from a while back and in the intervening time the journalists
came out with a book that goes into more detail.

------
Afforess
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

~~~
pjbrunet
Maybe it's a self-referential, insular sense of what's a reasonable rate of
expansion? Pensions for them, while the free market searches its sofa for
spare change. How do we compete with India, Philippines and the rest of the
world? Telecommuting, Bitcoins, the Internet, are we blind to what's coming?
Ocean moats become puddles. It's an open playing field, yet we spend like the
next Zuckerberg will save our ass. What if Zuck moves to China?
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2012/02/20/facebook-
an...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2012/02/20/facebook-and-
dreamworks-make-moves-for-growth-in-china/)

------
coldcode
And not one of these people identified the Boston pair before they blew up the
Marathon. Yes, the FBI interviewed the older brother but never followed up. If
you can't catch the amateur "terrorists" how will you catch the pros?

~~~
srl
I resent (and reject the need for) the growth of the "security" apparatus as
much as (almost) anybody else, but it's worth pointing out that what works for
catching the "pros" is quite different from what works for catching amateurs.
Pros are capable of inflicting greater damage, and are therefore a greater
threat in that respect, but tend to organize in order to get access to larger
resources. That means there's a larger target to "hit" when probing for
information, and it makes picking up on plots much easier. An amateur can't
inflict as much damage, but can do so practically undetected, and there's
really not much that can be done about it AFAIK.

Thought experiment: suppose you wanted to kill as many people and cause as
much chaos as you could. How would you go about it? And how easy would it be
for the security apparatus to catch you? Would you be able to, evading
capture, perform another attack a week later? How long could you go on?

It's really quite fortunate that the sort of people who want to do large
amounts of violence, are exactly the sort of people who tend not be very good
at it.

~~~
uptown
"The federal government added the name of the dead Boston Marathon bombing
suspect to a terrorist database 18 months before the deadly explosions, U.S.
officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday."

[http://bigstory.ap.org/article/officials-dead-bomber-name-
te...](http://bigstory.ap.org/article/officials-dead-bomber-name-terrorism-
database)

~~~
wisty
> About a year ago, there were some 745,000 people listed in the database.

Wow. Suspected terrorists outnumber the Army and Marines, put together!

------
danboarder
From the article:

* 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.

Is there a central place were one can get a list of the mentioned agencies and
who they are accountable to? If the Washington Post did all this research it
would be great to see them create an online resource with their findings.

~~~
dfc
Did you check out the "search the data" link?

[http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/gov-
or...](http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/gov-orgs/)

The above link lists all the high level gov organizations. I am not sure where
you can get a list of the 1,271 smaller organizations. As far as who each
organization is accountable to that is pretty easy...

------
sophacles
There is something not at all touched on in this article that I feel has a big
impact on the growth of classified space. That is the classification system
itself. Essentially "top secret" is a viral license. Information synthesized
from N sources gets a secrecy level of at least max_level(sources). Frequently
even more.

Further, if someone with secret knowledge works on something that isn't at all
in classified space, it may turn out that the new product/work needs to be
classified, because classified knowledge may have gone into it.

This is a very virulent license - worse than the most paranoid analyses of
GPL.

Countering this, the declassification process is slow, difficult, and a bit
ridiculous. Lots of things remain classified not because they present a
continuing issue, but because they make someone look bad. Or because they may
be used to establish a pattern or MO that could endanger current operations.
Even if that information is widely published.

As an aside - one of the fun games you can play with your friends that have
some sort of clearance is to ask them recent news related to their area of
work. If they respond with vague statements "oh thats interesting" or "I don't
know anything about that" and keep trying to change the subject, it generally
means they saw a classified briefing about it, or expect to, and can't reveal
or discuss anything about it, even if it is all over the news. Particularly if
they're very resistant to such discussion. It's a nice way to screw with them.
(It's a game because they figure out what you're doing and start screwing with
you back, be careful tho, you don't want to get them in serious trouble, or
yourself in trouble for pushing too hard).

Anyway, the weird viral classified things is why I have rejected offers of
work requiring a clearance. It is just too annoying to get interesting side
projects and open source participation done when you're in the world of
classified. That and I just like sharing cool and interesting things with
people. I don't think I'd be happy not sharing.

~~~
Nick_C
> things remain classified...because they make someone look bad

I thought this was a felony in the US. (I wish it was in Australia.)

------
futhey
"publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that
many are routinely ignored" - I would contend this. It's simply an assumption.

Many of their sources seem to be very junior to their respective
organizations.

------
zby
This is really worrisome - all I read about secret organizations shows how
crazy they become with time.

------
chiph
Rent-seeking is not limited to the private sector -- it happens within the
government as well.

------
snake_plissken
when was this published? I read something very similar to this, maybe 1.5-2
years ago.

