

"Top Secret America": The Washington Post's contracting investigation - jakevoytko
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/map/

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david927
The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as
a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret
oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of
excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the
dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in
opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary
restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of
our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave
danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by
those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship
and concealment. --JFK

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balding_n_tired
See: Bay of Pigs, the unfortunate matter of the Diem family; etc.

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rbanffy
You are confusing the fallible person who delivered the speech with the
principles a country was founded upon.

And, BTW, Ngô Ðình Diêm's family name was Ngô, not Diêm.

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balding_n_tired
I stand corrected on the family name.

One can appeal, with Abraham Lincoln, to the better angels of our nature, but
it is as well to be realistic about the worse ones.

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philk
You can get to the full text of the first article "A Hidden World, Growing
Beyond Control" here:

[http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-
america/articl...](http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-
america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/print/)

It paints the national security apparatus as the expensive, bureaucratic
clusterfuck one would expect it to be.

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thebigshane
Elsewhere in these comments I have defended secrets and secret keeping but I
should make it clear that the security world is one HUGE, expensive, wasteful,
overly bureaucratic, total clusterfuck. But that doesn't mean it is useless or
even worse... "evil".

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jokull
What's the easiest way to create clusters like that on a map? I worked on
something that required clustering at a zoomed-out level and then being broken
down into smaller clusters, eventually singular entities on the map. I look at
scipy/numpy and some clustering algorithms but most of them required you to
define the number of clusters up front.

Any idea what they're using here?

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fname
Not sure what they're using, but I like ClusterMarker

[http://googlemapsapi.martinpearman.co.uk/articles.php?cat_id...](http://googlemapsapi.martinpearman.co.uk/articles.php?cat_id=1)

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dieterrams
Also see the trailer for Frontline's documentary, based on this investigation:

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

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adbge
Unfortunately, the map seems to be limited to "there are some 'top secret'
things in this general area." I was hoping for something more comprehensive,
although I realize that in some instances there may not be a whole lot of
information.

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tseabrooks
For the companies one of the tabs will last all* of the companies. You can do
searches with the state or city name. The result has info on what the company
does and how many employees.

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bd
So this explains Palantir's massive funding [1]. Even in a normal environment
what they do is lucrative, but in a current state of affairs this must be a
gold mine.

[1] <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/palantir-technologies>

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anigbrowl
Interesting though this is in terms of infographics and data accessibility, I
am not very exercised about the 'secret' part of it. Of course I was not
expecting to discover anything truly secret, but the presentation seems to
inclusive that anything upwards of cafeteria supply to a federal government
office counts as 'secret'.

I do like it as a way of browsing a large quantity of disparate tabular
information. It would be good to have this sort of interface available for
research on government or business in general - for example, I'd quiet like to
have this interface available (and ideally, $ weighted) for learning more
about my city & county government.

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sesqu
The article states that they only considered top secret facilities, because
they would get swamped even worse by the merely secret ones.

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mortenjorck
I get what appears to be a JavaScript redirect to a 404 on Mobile Safari.
Disabling JavaScript made the page viewable.

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chasingsparks
Same here. Redirect to: [http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-
america/map/[o...](http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-
america/map/\[object%20Object\])

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known
"If you don't read a newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read a newspaper,
you are misinformed." Mark Twain

~~~
Ardit20
The only option then it seems is to use your common sense

and read books

humans do not change that much.

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Charuru
850,000 people have top secret clearance? It doesn't feel that secret...

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hugh3
I know plenty of people with top secret clearance. Each knows very few
secrets. (Or at least, so I assume. I don't know what they know, it's a
secret.)

Even _I_ used to have a lower-grade US government security clearance, and I'm
a dirty foreigner.

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buzzblog
Spending all of this money and having an allegedly free society subjected to
this level of government secrecy would be difficult to justify under the best
of circumstances. Given that no one knows if it's helping -- or even necessary
-- nudges difficult pretty darn close to impossible.

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yock
OT: Seriously? They embedded a Google Map in a Flash app? How revolting...

