Osama bin Laden spoke often of a strategy of “economic warfare” against the United States, a low-level war aimed at bankrupting the world's economic superpower. A decade after the 9/11 attacks, it's hard to argue that bin Laden's strategy was ineffective. The attacks themselves, according to the September 11 commission, cost Al Qaeda between $400,000 and $500,000 to execute. They have cost America, by our estimate, more than $5 trillion – a “return on investment” of 10,000,000 to one.
The posting of Jim Bamford’s Politico article on today’s Public Intelligence Blog or rather the accompanying comment on it by Robert Steele [Jim Bamford: How 9/11 Fearmongering Grew NSA Into a Very Expensive Domestic Surveillance Monster] identifies the principal problem with the outrageously expensive NSA. His comment is directly related to earlier comments he made on a Wall Street Journal article written by General Jim Clapper (USAF ret.) the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) [David Isenberg: Jim Clapper Claims Transformation — Robert Steele Comments on Each Misrepresentation] Steele did a brilliant job of refuting the claims that General Clapper advanced in this article about how much the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) has improved since 9/11. Yet the article really wasn’t serious to begin with because it obviously was written with the purpose of telling the American people what the General wanted them to know. I am sure it was vetted carefully by his staff and possibly CIA as well.
In the interests of clearing the air a bit I would like to add a couple of comments of my own to supplement those that Steele has made.
In the wake of 9/11 people, who did not know what they were talking about, had a good deal to say concerning the “lack of sharing” within the IC. In point of fact NSA and its technical counterpart the National Geo-spatial [Intelligence] Agency (NGA) are required by law to make their products available to analysts holding the proper clearances in entire IC as well as the President and his National Security Staff. The real lack of sharing was and is between the FBI and CIA. The FBI is unwilling to share because its agents fear damaging ongoing investigations while CIA is unwilling to share because its intelligence officers fear compromising sensitive sources. Had this issue been approached with integrity and directly between the two agencies it could have been resolved years ago.
General Clapper argued that the changed “culture” within the intelligence community had made its members much more efficient at dealing transnational terrorist and criminal organizations. Neither CIA nor NSA has a clue on how to deal with widely dispersed networked type of organizations. Indeed CIA has yet to build a realistic model of the organizational structure or personnel staffing of al Qaeda. CIA’s current methodology of using ‘targeters’ to find and track individual al Qaeda members is simply doing what the original CIA Counter Terrorism Center (CTC) was doing in the 1990s. Indeed their analytic approach is the same as used during the Cold War with “Soviet Type Armed Forces” (the actual name of a class that many of us attended).
Finally there are Bamford’s article and Steele’s comments on it. Steele in his comments went right to the heart of the matter by noting that NSA was incapable of processing more than a small percentage of the material it collects on a 24/7 basis. This goes directly to an issue that General Clapper clearly did not wish to discuss in his article: for all the money being poured into NSA specifically and the IC more broadly, how much return in enhanced security are we really getting? It would not seem to make much sense to continue to spend even more money for collection systems to collect ever more traffic if what is being gathered now can’t be adequately processed.
Robert David STEELE Vivas
Robert Steele: Emphasis added above. Richard Wright (Retired Reader at Amazon) focuses on the longest largest divide in the US intelligence community itself, as well as the complete abject failure of analysis as a whole and analysis in relation to crime and terrorism, but it bears mention that other divides are equally unattended to by the current leadership:
1) The secret world ignores 90% of the full-spectrum threat to obsess on counter-terrorism (badly).
2) The secret world ignores 90% of the Whole of Government customer base, while badly serving the President and a few senior national security officials. It is worthless on strategy, acquisition, campaign planning, and tactical real-time actionable intelligence in 183 languages.
3) The secret world ignores 90% of the relevant sources (in 183 languages) and methods (modern human and machine processing that is commonplace within major insurance and financial companies).
On a scale of 100%, ten years after 9/11, the US secret intelligence world earns a grade of 10% (not just failing, but a dishonorable discharge and shame for all eternity). The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) are been impotent since their inception, and appear content to continue in that fashion.
Somewhere between Sept. 11 and today, the enemy morphed from a handful of terrorists to the American population at large, leaving us nowhere to run and no place to hide.
Within weeks of the attacks, the giant ears of the National Security Agency, always pointed outward toward potential enemies, turned inward on the American public itself. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established 23 years before to ensure that only suspected foreign agents and terrorists were targeted by the NSA, would be bypassed. Telecom companies, required by law to keep the computerized phone records of their customers confidential unless presented with a warrant, would secretly turn them over in bulk to the NSA without ever asking for a warrant.
. . . . . .
So much intercepted information is now being collected from “enemies” at home and abroad that, in order to store it all, the agency last year began constructing the ultimate monument to eavesdropping. Rising in a remote corner of Utah, the agency’s gargantuan data storage center will be 1 million square feet, cost nearly $2 billion and likely be capable of eventually holding more than a yottabyte of data — equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
. . . . . .
A surveillance system capable of monitoring 10 million people simultaneously this year will be able to monitor 100 million the next year — at probably half the cost. And every time new communications technology appears on the market, rest assured that someone at the NSA has already found a way to monitor it. It’s what the NSA does.
What Church likely never anticipated was the rise of the security-industrial complex, a revolving door between those generating the fears and those profiting from them.
Phi Beta Iota: NSA leadership is blatantly corrupt (this is the same person who destroyed ABLE DANGER rather than share the information with the FBI). The only good news is that NSA is also inept–it processes less than one percent of what it captures, and is essentially cheating the taxpayer at the same time that it is spying on the taxpayer. The time has come to create a whole new cadre of ethical leaders who actually understand the new craft of intelligence as decision support (outputs) instead of budget share (inputs), and to slam it back from $90 billion a year toward $20 billion a year. With the savings the next President can afford to give all displaced personnel a year's salary and a year's re-training toward education, infrastructure, and information-era jobs.
Ten years after 9/11, top cops in the nation's biggest cities feel there
are still significant gaps in the intelligence and analysis they receive
about terrorism, even as the homegrown terror threat looms larger.
A survey of intelligence commanders from America's 56 biggest cities conducted by the Homeland Security Policy Institute found the police chiefs believe the nation's intelligence enterprise is less robust than it could be, and that 62 percent of the chiefs felt this lack left them “unable to develop a complete understanding of their local threat.”
Phi Beta Iota: The “top cops” are great people, they just do not understand that the terror threat is fradulent and that the homeland security industrial complex is working precisely as intended, wasting hundreds of billions on fraudulent dysfunctional white and white-collar employment while channeling hundreds of billions in unearned profits to the homeland security industrial complex.
It's no longer about ‘need to know.' Our guiding principle is ‘responsibility to share.'
By James R. Clapper
It has been a decade since our nation suffered the greatest strategic surprise on American soil since the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the aftermath of September 11, as the country sought to understand how such a complex attack could go undetected, much attention was focused on the intelligence community. Pundits, scholars, commentators and others quickly labeled 9/11 an intelligence failure.
Phi Beta Iota: General Clapper means well, but his Op Ed is utterly disingenous and completely out of touch with reality. Below the line is a safety copy of his Op Ed with inserted commentary.
The shift in the CIA mission's has been reflected in the spectacular growth of its Counter-terrorism Center (CTC) from 300 employees in September 2001 to about 2,000 people today – 10 percent of the agency's entire workforce, according to the Post report.
The agency's analytical branch, which had been previously devoted entirely to providing intelligence assessments for policymakers, has been profoundly affected.
More than one-third of the personnel in the agency's analytical branch are now engaged wholly or primarily in providing support to CIA operations, according to senior agency officials cited by the Post. And nearly two-thirds of those are analysing data used by the CTC drone war staff to make decisions on targeting.
WASHINGTON — In what amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central Intelligence Agency is demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former F.B.I. agent who spent years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda.
. . . . . .
Starting in May, F.B.I. officials reviewed Mr. Soufan’s 600-page manuscript, asking the author for evidence that dozens of names and facts were not classified. Mr. Soufan and Mr. Freedman agreed to change wording or substitute aliases for some names, and on July 12 the bureau told Mr. Soufan its review was complete.
In the meantime, however, the bureau had given the book to the C.I.A. Its reviewers responded this month with 78-page and 103-page faxes listing their cuts.
