"Top Secret America": The Washington Post's contracting investigation | Hacker News Reader

"Top Secret America": The Washington Post's contracting investigation

projects.washingtonpost.com

109 pointsjakevoytko46 comments

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

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

Or just see: Allen Dulles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Welsh_Dulles

I don't think this is the same thing. You're conflating a bureaucracy and expenditure problem with the CIA. I mean it's hard to say which one is the bigger problem, but they're very clearly 2 different issues.

The problem with pointed out by the article is that there's a closed community within the security apparatus that has grown so big and extensive that it's difficult for the government to control, and could give us a situation where the tail wags the dog. Greater transparency there could be helpful.

On the other hand I don't see how the CIA could work without secrecy. It's nuts.

>On the other hand I don't see how the CIA could work without secrecy. It's nuts.

Whether the CIA is a net benefit to society is debatable.

>On the other hand I don't see how the CIA could work without secrecy. It's nuts

Names of agents in foreign countries secret = yes.

Existence of the CIA, the number of agents, the cost of operations, illegal operations, agents that have committed criminal offenses = no

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.

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.

I am not sure. I think I would like the red button to be kept very secret.

What does this even mean? The existence of the button? If you're talking about "secret codes" for using it, that's just an implementation of an authentication/authorization scheme.

The quote and the circumstances in which the quote was made, seems to be advocating a complete ban in regards to secrets from our government. I was pointing out that there are very good reasons at times for keeping certain things secret, such as the "red button" which rather than being a code, is the so called button which send off all the nukes.

I know that we as a society, civilisation even, are very adverse to secrets, especially from our government, and rightly so, but secrets in practice are necessary at times. It is their motive which is highly objected to and frankly we do not know what the motive of the secret activities in the United states are.

As I posted in another comment, apparently only 0.30% of the people of the United States are involved in such highly secret activities. That seems rather fare to me.

> I was pointing out that there are very good reasons at times for keeping certain things secret, such as the "red button" [...].

I'm sorry, I still don't understand what you're suggesting. What would it mean for the "red button" to be secret? Do you consider it to be secret today? Why or why not?

I assume that the OP was using "red button" as a synecdoche (wow, I finally found a use for that word) for the entire procedure by which the US nuclear arsenal is launched. Which may or may not involve an actual red button at some point. (If I were designing the system, it damn well would.)

Now, I assume that launching a nuclear missile is more difficult than ringing up NORAD and saying "Hi, this is the Preisdent, the launch code is XD8-3342-9982", but let's not take that chance, shall we?

(Man, I hope I didn't just guess a real launch code. That would be difficult to explain to the nice men in suits.)

Secrecy is more about keeping details hidden than protecting something completely. If China found out we were developing some new awesome missile defense system (ignore the fact that they never work...) that wouldn't be nearly as bad China getting access to the developers of the system, blueprints, source code, etc.

i'd prefer no nuke weapons

I'd like a pony.

that's fine. you work towards getting yourself a pony and I'll work towards a world without nuclear weapons.

You might well get it, but keep in mind that the only world without nuclear explosives would be a world in which we are technologically incapable of building them. Not saying that's an impossible dream, but it's sure not my idea of fun.

That all sounds very nice, but secrets are important. Without getting into Personal and Financial information, military secrets are essential to military operations. Security by obfuscation is never the best way to go but security WITH obfuscation is a very successful and practical approach to keep an edge over others. This edge helps us remain free and open (open in as many areas as practically possible).

There's a big difference between saying 'no secrets ever' and a situation where secrets are the norm. Those in power will always have the urge to increase secrecy, but it increases their power. We, the people, have to be always diligent to fight against secrecy, because to do so is to fight for democracy itself.

I agree that we should also be vigilant/diligent to preserve democracy, but that's not contradictory to secrecy being A norm in sensitive political or military circles. Although it is natural to doubt the sincerity of the checks and balances and oversight over these secrets, the fact is, they do exist. And they are pretty damn successful. Sure we have an occasional overstepping of secrecy but nothing that bad either.

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...

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

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".

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?

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

http://googlemapsapi.martinpearman.co.uk/articles.php?cat_id...

chapter 6 of Ben Fry's book Visualizing Data.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Same here. Redirect to: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/map/[o...

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

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

and read books

humans do not change that much.

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

Well America is 300 million. 850,000 then is about 0.30 percent of the population. Thus, it is secret to the 99.70% of the American population. That sounds very secret to me.

Bear in mind that you have to have a "need to know" in addition to your clearance. We can speculate that there are also levels beyond top secret. In particular, eyes-only for the most sensitive stuff [1], and (what I have seen called but can't find a reference for) code-word secrecy for particular projects/operations.

[1] Which is where the Bond film For Your Eyes Only gets its title.

The clearance levels that I can remember are: confidential secret top secret top secret ssbi -- "single scope background investigation" top secret sci -- "secured compartmentalized information" IIRC

There are probably others above that that I don't remember.

TS and TS/SSBI might be the same thing with different investigations. I'm not sure.

"SCI" (Secured Compartmentalized Information) is a separate clearance for some specific set of information. For instance, since my dad worked with tactical nukes in the Marine Corps, he had a Top Secret clearance with SCI authorization from the Atomic Energy Commission. So he was cleared to access any information classified Top Secret as well as any information protected by the AEC on a need-to-know basis.

Arbitrarily high levels of clearance can probably be implemented as separate SCI authorizations.

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.

A security clearance doesn't grant you access to all the information at that level of security, only specific things you need to know to do your job.

Most TS information is protected by SCI (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information) which means that these secrets are sectioned off into smaller groups so if one group is exposed/infiltrated other sections are more likely to be safe. This also means that being "read into" one section does not mean you have access to other sections. My point is that the TS clearance mostly describes the process to get information not the collection of information itself. I doubt there are more than a 100,000 people that know any one (actively guarded) secret.

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.

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

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