Category: Collaboration Zones

A SPOTLIGHT ON “TOP SECRET AMERICA”

Most people can vaguely recall that there was once no U.S. Department of Homeland Security and that there was a time when you didn't have to take your shoes off before boarding an airplane or submit to other dubious security practices.

But hardly anyone truly comprehends the enormous expansion of the military, intelligence and homeland security bureaucracy that has occurred over the past decade, and the often irrational transformation of American life that has accompanied it.

The great virtue of the new book Top Secret America by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin (Little Brown, September 2011) is that it illuminates various facets of our secret government, lifting them from the periphery of awareness to full, sustained attention.

Top Secret America, which builds on the series of stories the authors produced for the Washington Post in July 2010, delineates the contours of “the  new American security state.”  Since 9/11, for example, some 33 large office complexes for top secret intelligence work have been completed in the Washington DC area, the equivalent in size of nearly three Pentagons.  More than 250,000 contractors are working on top secret programs.  A bewildering number of agencies – more than a thousand — have been created to execute security policy, including at least 24 new organizations last year alone.  And so on.

But the vast scale of this activity says nothing about its quality or utility.  The authors, who are scrupulous in their presentation of the facts, are critical in their evaluation:

“One of the greatest secrets of Top Secret America is its disturbing dysfunction.”

Continue reading “Steven Aftergood: Top Secret America–Totally Dysfunctional”