> * 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.