U.S. spy network’s successes, failures and objectives detailed in ‘black budget’
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
->>> 1) Chester PA has a homicide rate of 62 per 100,000. Camden NJ is almost as bad. US male suicide rate has soared to 19.9 per 100,000. Black unemployment has averaged 15% for the past 5 years and the real median income for black households has collapsed to barely above what it was in 1970.
The most deadly threat to many Americans is not foreign terrorists -- it is the corruption of our ruling elites in Washington DC. They have long shown that they serve the agendas of the billionaires --not the national interest of the American People.
If you want to look at "preventable" deaths instead then lack of exercise and smoking are far more existential threats still: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_preventable_causes_of_d...
Basically: all the huffing being done on both sides of the argument is (if you really care about keeping people out of graves) just statistical noise.
Which of course brings up the much deeper point: people don't so much care about the "death" thing, really. It's just a convenient hat hanger for whatever agenda they want to push. The anarchists do it just as badly as the authoritarians.
Eat your veggies, people.
You want bikes, light rail and walkable cities? You adorable little euro-commie wannabe!
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-...
Why?
I understand the tragedy of 9/11. With that in mind, it is a mistake is to treat terrorism as an existential threat to the state. Perhaps someone with a more formal background in history can speak to this, but I do not think there is an example of a nation falling because of terrorism.
Point: there is a widespread purported belief in western democracies, particularly the United States and Great Britain, that one or more terrorist attacks could cause institutional collapse. This is ridiculous, however well-intentioned it might have started out as being.
It's also why it frightens and disturbs libertarians so much in that "terrorism" can be used to justify any and all expenditures, including the curtailment of individual rights and freedoms. The USG will be undergoing modernization of national infrastructure over the next 3.5 years and they will be quite forceful about capturing control over critical infrastructure (regardless of whether it's privately owned or not).
Compare and contrast with European countries (France, GB, Spain) that experienced throughout the end of the 20th century terrorist attacks, including bombings, on their own ground.
Truth is, we don't know what would happen if they strike again. And maybe, perhaps, that's what the US government and its agencies want to avoid at any cost. Does the end justify the means?
Maybe you could make an argument for the Reichstag Fire, but I feel that is probably stretching it in a few ways.
Had we scaled back the military after the Wall came down, we might not have been tempted to fight optional wars (not to say wars of aggression) that cost trillions of dollars and have yielded literally zero benefit in security.
The only plausible theory of institutional collapse I can think of is the end of the petrodollar, and that will happen anyway. There is no cruise missile that can blow up that threat. It might have been handy to have those trillions spent on war to build our economy in other ways so as to withstand the end of the Oil Age.
I wonder what is going to replace the petrodollar. InfoTechnodollar, energydollar, dnadollar, water-dollar, fooddollar ?
I wish the article had more detail on "offensive cyber operations". AFAIK there's very little known in public about US active cyberwarfare.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ord...
We'd noticed but making unofficially official is indeed a significant step, especially given that it kind of blunts the complaints about Chinese offensive operations.
Indeed, one might imagine that a year ago, an NSA official might get a "top of the world" feeling from both mobilizing major offensive capability and getting the propaganda victory of appearing to be on the defensive from Chinese attacks.
We hadn't had a catastrophic terrorist attack even approaching 9/11 prior to that date. And I'm guessing we've spent more in the past 12 on "preventing terrorism" than we had in the 225 years prior to 9/11.
My point: we may have overreacted.
Meanwhile millions died from heart disease, auto accidents, kidney disease, pneumonia, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, lung disease, and cancer, just last year.
More people died of heart disease in this country alone last year than have died by airline hijacking since the invention of manned flight.
So you don't want anyone to look at your metadata?
One has to wonder if this is the same strategy used to bring down the Soviets, namely a war of attrition where one tries to out-spend an opponent through consistent escalation -- until the opponent runs out of resources to maintain the escalation. We know how that ended.
Your sentence right at the end of the quoted paragraph from your comment prompts me to check whether you are writing ironically or at face value. Do you think the United States succeeded in bringing down the Soviet Union by outcompeting it?
According to "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy" (great book) this was the result of a paper written in the 1970s where this strategy was conceived, which was then adopted by the US military as its main strategy against the Soviet.
That certainly isn't the whole story, but it's part of it.
He would have had to surf deeper into the system for this kind of information I assume. I can't even imagine what else is on those hard drives.
Snowden appears to be have acted brilliantly. We couldn't have asked for a better protagonist here. Personally, I think that, since he knew what he was going to do, he took everything within his grasp. Especially since he knew he had nothing to lose.
Assuming that each insider threat corresponds to one employee, and that the total number of employees in the intelligence community is 107,035, this would suggest that at least 1 out of every 27 employees has been considered a possible insider threat. And if you were to only consider the employee count of the NSA itself (which we don't know), it would be considerably higher.
This is... pretty staggering.
It may also explain some of the institutional rigidity we see in the IC's response to events. If questioning certain assumptions may get you not just fired, but jailed; and you value your career and your freedom, those assumptions become very hard to question. (e.g. the same assumptions that Mr. Snowden started questioning )
And it would interesting to see a breakdown by category of how much is spent on outside contractors ( like Booz Allen Hamilton ) vs. how much is spent in direct personnel costs ( federal employees with benefits and pensions etc. ).
>As of 2013, 99% of the company's revenue comes from the Federal government.
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>Key Facts Founded 1914 Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, USA NYSE: BAH Employees: More than 24,000 Revenue: $5.76 billion in fiscal year 2013 Chairman and Chief Executive Officer: Ralph W. Shrader, Ph.D. Web site: www.boozallen.com
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https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=boo...
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http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?CIK=BAH&Find=Search&...
I'm not that familiar with deciphering EDGAR filings, but if you correlated it to http://www.usaspending.gov/ and other sources...
Who knows what you might find out.
It would make a neat data-journalism project for someone; would that I had the time.
Ostensibly their mission is to advise the President, head some panels, oversee some stuff, and some stuff about whistleblowers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_National_Intellige...
I also want to thank the post for turning the data into nice interactive infographics instead of posting "crayola quality" powerpoints, that the gov is known for using.
Not just "enemy" systems. But "targets'" systems, which include a lot more allies than "enemies". Then again, US seems to have a very Cold War-like mentality these days (even though Obama accused Russia of that), and sees everyone as a potential "enemy".
As Bruce Schneier said a couple of years ago, if you think "cyber-war" is imminent, then you must think war against US is imminent (which seems pretty unlikely right now, but they keep pushing the fear of cyber-war anyway, to increase their budgets).