A hidden world, growing beyond control | Hacker News Reader

A hidden world, growing beyond control

projects.washingtonpost.com

193 pointsjamesbritt69 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Don't jump to conclusion, both side of the establishment have been contributing to bloated bureaucracies, Obamacare is just one of the latest (and the one I last read of). My undemocatric comment was around bureaucracies in general, not obamacare specifically.

Why stop at Obamacare? It's much, much smaller than Medicare, Social Security, the US armed forces, DHS (+ all the related bureaus), the Federal Reserve, IRS, US Treasury... essentially the entire US government is a collection of dysfunctional bureaucracies that extract wealth from citizens in the form of taxes, give it back to corporations in the form of subsidies and tax refunds, and give citizens next to nothing in return.

You're obviously generalizing quite a bit. When you say "Homeland Security" do you mean ALL of these components: http://www.dhs.gov/department-components

That's quite a lot to "eliminate". Granted there seems to be quite some overlap there. Where and what programs would we want to specifically cut? Doesn't congress appropriate a budget for DHS? They should be able to make changes long term, right?

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.

OK, but look at the growth after 9/11. Are all of those simply hardening/defensive mechanisms?

BTW: I firmly believe that the best defense against a possible attack from ~7B+ people is:

A) in cyberspace: to simply build better security rather than counter-attack those that attack us, as there are countless attackers from anyone with internet, often with nothing to lose, so counter attacks are futile.

B) In physical space: deal with attacks as criminals, not state or stateless organizations that require sacrificing civil liberties & core morals. There are not 7B+ people who can physically attack a structure, so standard policing suffices. Giving them more attention than that is playing directly into their goals, & counter-productive.

C) Nobody likes a police state. Jefferson famously said, that all governments creep towards tyranny, so we must remain vigilant towards increased power for our "safety".

I wonder how many items a large newspaper publishes in a typical year? Probably a lot; some of them are short and trivial, not everyone reads everything, they focus on topics that are interesting to them. Seems like the same might apply to intelligence reports.

Edit: To answer my own question, it looks like in the past 365 days the New York Times published over 200,000 articles

http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/#/*/365days/artic...

If you include blog posts as well it is over 400,000 so by comparison 50k doesn't seem outrageous.

It seems beyond outrageous to me. 200k news articles is the amount of news that is produced by 7 billion people in 200 countries worldwide. Those 50k reports is what comes out of counter terrorism by one just of those countries. That's not including the usual declassified military or police reports. There is 1 person for every 400 Americans producing and/or reading these reports. That is more than the total amount of law enforcement officers in the entire US. Tracking every email in and out of the US which seemed impossible before, seems rather trivial now.

> 200k news articles is the amount of news that is produced by 7 billion people in 200 countries worldwide. Those 50k reports is what comes out of counter terrorism by one just of those countries.

Right, but those 50k reports are about the activities happening among those 7 billion people in 200 countries. And many of those 200k news articles published by the NYT have a corresponding intelligence angle that is covered in the report. Remember, NYT only covers major world news, and a lot of intelligence reports are mundane things like "what is the intelligence impact of this new Russian oil pipeline?"

> There is 1 person for every 400 Americans producing and/or reading these reports.

Where do you get that number? That 830,000 number from the article is for people with top secret clearance. That includes everyone from intelligence analysts to military officers to scientists working on sensitive research.

Unless you're in intelligence an officer's basic clearance is only Secret.

But the point stands. One of the people I've provided personal references for a TS/SCI first did work for the National Reconnaissance Office (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office):

"The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), located in Chantilly, Virginia, is one of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies and considered, along with the CIA, NSA, DIA and NGA, to be one of the "big five" U.S. Intelligence agencies. It designs, builds, and operates the spy satellites of the United States government, and coordinates the analysis of aerial surveillance and satellite imagery from several intelligence and military agencies."

3,000 direct employees, plus many contractors like the above mentioned friend. Is the NRO any bigger because of 9/11 et. al.? Probably somewhat, but not all that much I suspect given how much they were doing before it. What he was doing was just supporting their general efforts. (His following jobs? Well, as usual I can tell you what technology they used, but nothing about them, they're more sensitive, so maybe he became part of this growing post-9/11 "hidden world".)

> cross-cutting concern

Does this mean - they are doing stuff they would have been doing anyway; but with 10X the budget, and 1/10th the efficiency? (Yes, the minute a project gets a security clearance it loses efficiency - mostly because oversight and transparency is now heavily restricted).

> There are a ton of reasons to have top-secret security clearances that have nothing to do with counterterrorism or intelligence gathering.

Agreed. I held TS clearance in the Marines for a job that was, bottom-line, 'security guard'.

Yeah, one might be tempted to think that if that many people have "top-secret" clearance then stuff probably isn't really very "secret." However having a top-secret clearance doesn't mean you are privy to any and all top-secret classified stuff... you still have to pass the "need to know" hurdle on any specific information.

However, if they can e.g. allow a black hat access to the seriously classified stuff, they need the high clearance. Be it a Marine "security guard", the janitor, from top to bottom they need to be as trustworthy as we can determine.

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.

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.

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.

But they always say that kind of stuff afterwards. How is this time any different?

(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.

There is a lot of growing evidence that most autoimmune disorders from allergies on up are caused by living in an environment that is too clean. I'm starting to think we are seeing the same effect when it comes to safety. Most of us now come into so little violence in our daily lives, we can't stop thinking about violence happening thousands of miles away to people we've never met. We can somehow ignore all the real problems all the "protection" is causing us in order to protect ourselves from problems we don't have, that no one we know has.

> 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.

Almost all of the things that I consider to be "excessive policing" and taking us in the wrong direction has happened since the the late 1980-ish, with a very strong acceleration after 9/11.

I don't think reversing to a state comparable to the mid 1980'ies would put us in a hunter gatherer society.

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.

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.

The United States wasn't a world power or thriving before the New Deal. It was in the middle of the Great Depression and a growing wave of isolationism. Of course, it was in pretty much the same place after the New Deal as well- World War II was required to take care of both.

That picture of the Moscow subway is absolutely not from the same time period. It may have looked like that at the time, but the picture is from 2009: http://www.flickr.com/photos/waldenpond/4021913253/

Please forgive for painting a picture with a broad brush.

I wasn't really talking about subways, they only served as a metaphor for the society at large.

"and no one behaves disorderly without the police arresting them quickly"

This isn't true, early 80-s is a peak of alchoholisation in USSR, there will be a lot of drunkards and police won't be able to do much.

(USSR didn't have nearly as much police as modern Russia does)

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/

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

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.

>"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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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

http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/d...

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

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

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...

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?

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.

"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...

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

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

> Thought experiment: suppose you wanted to kill as many people and cause as much chaos as you could. How would you go about it?

I was about to answer this and then realised how stupid it would be to give people ideas on how to kill vast numbers of people with off the shelf equipment. I will say that it doesn't seem like a hard problem to me, and I can see ways you could achieve rates in the hundreds of people a month.

> And how easy would it be for the security apparatus to catch you?

Pretty much impossible beforehand. Depending on what one did and where, it wouldn't necessarily be that hard. Some of the ideas I had seem long-term viable though - the sort of thing you could repeat with little chance of getting caught.

> Would you be able to, evading capture, perform another attack a week later? How long could you go on?

Some currently vulnerable infrastructure would probably harden over time but I've put like five seconds thought into this, I'm sure there are other things that one could do as well. And even if the number of deaths might not be huge - 20 people here, 20 people there, maybe a few hundred with a higher concentration target - the fact that you could strike many targets at once, and how difficult it would be to secure against you.... I think you could do very significant damage.

The fear you'd induce in people, every day knowing that, for instance, if their kids go to school, maybe they never come home again. Or if they go shopping, or.... It's a horrible thing to think about. If that sort of crap was going on, and the police weren't catching this guy, I'm not sure I could bring myself to send my daughter out in public even knowing that statistically the risk per person would still be very low.

I'm not sure that people could get used to the idea that every month a few hundred of them were going to die. Maybe we'd just learn to live with it but it'd require a major shift in how we reacted to visible risks.

I'm certain that people would get used to it.

They seem to live with the fact that every month hundreds of people are killed and maimed in car accidents.

The British got on fairly well during the Irish Troubles, with the fact that the IRA was fairly effective at striking against English targets.

You seem to forget that people have a very strong urge to believe that "it won't happen to me".

Well, that's true and I agree with you on the numbers thing -

125 people died in England during the troubles, after which the UK government effectively threw the towel in, and people generally seem to believe that they have some sort of control over their risks in the case of driving. ~ 194 people a month die from car accidents in the UK - which you could be competitive with.

I'm not sure at the moment that they'd respond the same way to a continual and chaotic threat of a higher magnitude than the troubles though.

I'm not saying that I think they wouldn't get over it, mind. I'm just not sure that there's enough data to choose one way or the other. It seems to me, if you could get a bunch of people to copy you - (and the first order of business if you just wanted to cause as much damage as possible would probably be anonymously mass mailing a guide that let other people do it too) - that a closer analogue would be somewhere like Mexico. But even there the killings aren't precisely random.

How many people were caught and not publicized?

I think it's fairly impressive, all things considered, that after two IEDs went off in a crowded civilian area, only 3 people died. And that in less than a week, those responsible were killed or apprehended.

Now, I'm not pushing for a surveillance state at all. I hate everything about that notion, and I believe that what we have now is plenty adequate - if not overkill - for doing the job that needs to be done to protect our own civilians. Again, all that said, America is in a much better place when it comes to domestic "terrorism" if you will (that connotation sucks, but they were terrorizing the populous after all) than say Syria or other countries.

> How many people were caught and not publicized?

I can see two conflicting issues here. One is the need for the agencies to justify their existence. If they exist to stop terrorists, and they feel there is public scrutiny of their budgets, they should publicize the hell out of every capture. "See, we are doing useful work, look! we captured these people red-handed with bombs about to go off!".

The other one is not giving away their methods, procedures and tactics by keeping it a secret who they captured. Say NSA is wiretapping everyone and someone calls their cousin and asks them to buy 2 tons of fertilizer and a detonator. Ok, now they are on a blacklist. But arresting them right there and then is a pretty sure giveaway of the surveillance capabilities and a lesson for other perhaps more real and dangerous bad guys to learn.

Now actually there is a third, and more disturbing issue at hand. And that is agencies going and conjuring terrorists where there are none. Think about it, their budgets, salaries and bonuses are based on capturing terrorists. If there are no terrorists, should we be surprised if they start "creating" them?

Take the example of Craig Monteilh, FBI informant that joins a mosque in Irvine, CA then goes ahead and starts recruiting radicals. "Recruiting" was more like inciting hatred. Eventually he was reported to FBI (oh the irony!), FBI was sued but lawsuit was thrown out based on "secrecy" claims.

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

Then there is a case where they caught "terrorists" about to blow a bridge up in Ohio. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/brandon-l-baxter All the details of it seems shady. There is a gray area between entrapment and undercover operations and I think with right type of people (read those who are mentally unstable) it doesn't take much effort to entrap them and still stay outside the legal definition of the word.

The point being that at some point we should not be surprised if agencies with hundred million dollar budgets that are told to look for terrorists (and remember according to the post 9/11 propaganda they are _everywhere_) will go start making terrorists were they are none.

What incentive does a department have to hide an attack they helped prevent? Publicizing it, on the other hand, brings massive clout and more bargaining power when it comes to budgets. Look at Canada's recent announcement, for example. Why would the US government be any different?

What incentive does a department have to hide an attack they helped prevent?

Operational security. Announcing that you've foiled a Bad Guy plot lets the bad guys know you're onto them. More to the point, it gives them valuable, actionable information on what parts of their operation you've likely compromised.