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Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State
The top-secret world that the government created in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks has become so enormous, so unwieldy, and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or exactly how many agencies duplicate work being done elsewhere. The result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe may be putting us in greater danger. In Top Secret America, award-winning reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin uncover the enormous size, shape, mission, and consequences of this invisible universe of over 1,300 government facilities in every state in America; nearly 2,000 outside companies used as contractors; and more than 850,000 people granted "Top Secret" security clearance.
A landmark exposé of a new, secret "Fourth Branch" of American government, Top Secret America is a tour de force of investigative reporting-and a book sure to spark national and international alarm.
A landmark exposé of a new, secret "Fourth Branch" of American government, Top Secret America is a tour de force of investigative reporting-and a book sure to spark national and international alarm.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
70 people are currently reading
1274 people want to read
About the author
Dana Priest
8 books16 followersDana Priest is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post. She has won numerous awards, including the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for public service for "The Other Walter Reed" and the 2006 Pulitzer for beat reporting for her work on CIA secret prisons and counterterrorism operations overseas. She is the author of The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military.
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April 6, 2017
Surprised by the news about NSA surveillance? Read this book!
Note: This review first appeared here on September 11, 2011 (yes, 9/11/11). In view of the recent news about the NSA’s Prism program and other widespread and long-standing efforts to amass personal information about the American public, I’m posting it again. This superb book deserves a far wider audience than it received in 2011.
If you treasure your freedom as an American . . . if you’re concerned about how the U.S. Government spends your tax money . . . or if you simply want to understand how our country is managed . . . you owe it to yourself to read this brilliant book. Alternately mind-boggling and blood-curdling, Top Secret America is the most impressive piece of investigative journalism I’ve read in years. Dana Priest and Bill Arkin have written a book that, in a rational world, would usher in an orgy of housecleaning through the far reaches of the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and every other department, agency, or office that pretends to be involved in strengthening our national security.
Even then — even if we somehow reined in the known alphabet agencies — we would only be scratching the surface. Here’s Priest writing about the work of her co-author: ”After two years of investigating, Arkin had come up with a jaw-dropping 1,074 federal government organizations and nearly two thousand private companies involved with programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in at least 17,000 locations across the United States — all of them working at the top secret classification level.” There is an additional three thousand “state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions.”
Perhaps there’s one saving grace in this brouhaha of activity. Priest again: ”Post 9/11, government agencies annually published some 50,000 separate serialized intelligence reports under 1,500 titles, the classified equivalent of newspapers, magazines, and journals. Some were distributed daily; others came out once a week, monthly, or annually.” There is so much “information” generated by the counterterrorism establishment that senior managers frequently ignore it all and instead ask their aides to talk to people to find out what’s really meaningful.
Don’t be mollified by the belief that all this activity is carried out by designated intelligence agencies. The nation’s warriors have their own alphabet-soup of agencies, departments, and units devoted to the same ends. The Pentagon created a major new entity called the Northern Command headed by a four-star general (the military’s highest rank) to protect the “homeland.” However, the Northern Command has no troops of its own and, to take any action, must ask permission from the leaders of each state’s National Guard and other agencies on whom it depends for personnel.
Priest and Arkin clearly take a dim view of all this:
** Many, if not all, of the Federal Government’s most closely guarded secrets are vulnerable to theft through simple file-sharing software installed on 20 million computers.
** The Director of National Intelligence, a new position created in 2004 to coordinate the work of the 16 major U.S. intellgence agencies, possesses no power to do so and is frequently ignored by them. But his staff numbers in the thousands, and they hold forth from a new, 500,000-square foot office building.
** The degree of duplication in the national security world is chilling. “Each large organization [engaged in counterterrorism] started its own training centers, supply depots, and transportation infrastructure. Each agency and subagency manned its own unit for hiding the identities of undercover employees and for creating cover names and addresses for them and for their most sensitive projects. Each ecosystem developed a set of regional and local offices.”
Duplication of effort runs so deep that there are three separate lists of “High Value Targets,” one each for the CIA, the Pentagon, and the super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (the people who killed Bin Laden). And “at least thirty-four major federal agencies and military commands, operating in sixteen U.S. cities, tracked the money flow to and from terrorist networks.”
The depth and quality of Priest and Arkin’s research is unexcelled, and their writing is brisk and easy to read. The book benefits from the straightforward, first-person approach Priest adopted. It’s written largely from her point of view, with Arkin’s contributions as a researcher noted in the third person.
Dana Priest has reported for the Washington Post for more than 20 years. She won the George Polk Award in 2005 for reporting on secret CIA detention facilities and the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for uncovering black sites prisons. Her exposure of the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed Army Hospital helped the Washington Post win another Pulitzer in 2007. She deserves another Pulitzer for this illuminating book.
Bill Arkin served in U.S. Army intelligence in 1974 to 1978 and had worked as a consultant, political commentator, blogger, activist, and researcher for a number of progressive organizations before teaming up with Priest to write the widely-acclaimed series of Washington Post articles on which this book was based.
Note: This review first appeared here on September 11, 2011 (yes, 9/11/11). In view of the recent news about the NSA’s Prism program and other widespread and long-standing efforts to amass personal information about the American public, I’m posting it again. This superb book deserves a far wider audience than it received in 2011.
If you treasure your freedom as an American . . . if you’re concerned about how the U.S. Government spends your tax money . . . or if you simply want to understand how our country is managed . . . you owe it to yourself to read this brilliant book. Alternately mind-boggling and blood-curdling, Top Secret America is the most impressive piece of investigative journalism I’ve read in years. Dana Priest and Bill Arkin have written a book that, in a rational world, would usher in an orgy of housecleaning through the far reaches of the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and every other department, agency, or office that pretends to be involved in strengthening our national security.
Even then — even if we somehow reined in the known alphabet agencies — we would only be scratching the surface. Here’s Priest writing about the work of her co-author: ”After two years of investigating, Arkin had come up with a jaw-dropping 1,074 federal government organizations and nearly two thousand private companies involved with programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in at least 17,000 locations across the United States — all of them working at the top secret classification level.” There is an additional three thousand “state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions.”
Perhaps there’s one saving grace in this brouhaha of activity. Priest again: ”Post 9/11, government agencies annually published some 50,000 separate serialized intelligence reports under 1,500 titles, the classified equivalent of newspapers, magazines, and journals. Some were distributed daily; others came out once a week, monthly, or annually.” There is so much “information” generated by the counterterrorism establishment that senior managers frequently ignore it all and instead ask their aides to talk to people to find out what’s really meaningful.
Don’t be mollified by the belief that all this activity is carried out by designated intelligence agencies. The nation’s warriors have their own alphabet-soup of agencies, departments, and units devoted to the same ends. The Pentagon created a major new entity called the Northern Command headed by a four-star general (the military’s highest rank) to protect the “homeland.” However, the Northern Command has no troops of its own and, to take any action, must ask permission from the leaders of each state’s National Guard and other agencies on whom it depends for personnel.
Priest and Arkin clearly take a dim view of all this:
** Many, if not all, of the Federal Government’s most closely guarded secrets are vulnerable to theft through simple file-sharing software installed on 20 million computers.
** The Director of National Intelligence, a new position created in 2004 to coordinate the work of the 16 major U.S. intellgence agencies, possesses no power to do so and is frequently ignored by them. But his staff numbers in the thousands, and they hold forth from a new, 500,000-square foot office building.
** The degree of duplication in the national security world is chilling. “Each large organization [engaged in counterterrorism] started its own training centers, supply depots, and transportation infrastructure. Each agency and subagency manned its own unit for hiding the identities of undercover employees and for creating cover names and addresses for them and for their most sensitive projects. Each ecosystem developed a set of regional and local offices.”
Duplication of effort runs so deep that there are three separate lists of “High Value Targets,” one each for the CIA, the Pentagon, and the super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (the people who killed Bin Laden). And “at least thirty-four major federal agencies and military commands, operating in sixteen U.S. cities, tracked the money flow to and from terrorist networks.”
The depth and quality of Priest and Arkin’s research is unexcelled, and their writing is brisk and easy to read. The book benefits from the straightforward, first-person approach Priest adopted. It’s written largely from her point of view, with Arkin’s contributions as a researcher noted in the third person.
Dana Priest has reported for the Washington Post for more than 20 years. She won the George Polk Award in 2005 for reporting on secret CIA detention facilities and the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for uncovering black sites prisons. Her exposure of the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed Army Hospital helped the Washington Post win another Pulitzer in 2007. She deserves another Pulitzer for this illuminating book.
Bill Arkin served in U.S. Army intelligence in 1974 to 1978 and had worked as a consultant, political commentator, blogger, activist, and researcher for a number of progressive organizations before teaming up with Priest to write the widely-acclaimed series of Washington Post articles on which this book was based.
August 11, 2022
Renditions started under President Clinton, first with his questionable rendition of My Funny Valentine on saxophone and then behind the back of the American people when targeted humans were sent by the CIA to Egypt or Saudi Arabia where “trials for terrorist subjects were rare and torture was routine.” 854,000 US citizens have top secret clearances. The US spends $10 billion per year “just to keep secrets secret.” There are over 23 million newly classified documents since 2001. Regular American soldiers aren’t allowed to enter the detention site at Bagram Airfield. Fact: no one in detention there looks like Vinnie Barbarino or from the Breakfast Club.
The President uses the CIA to overthrow governments; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The US failed with Cuba, North Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Angola, but the US hit the rogue state jackpot with Chile, Guatemala, Congo and twice in Afghanistan. CIA’s Greystone covert action program used fake names for overseas secret prisons. In top secret secure reading rooms you sit alone and can’t take notes. One guy’s job was fabricating stories in order to bring down Saddam Hussein and he was proud it.
“A BIGOT list is the list of specific individuals who have access to each compartment. Anyone not on the list, no matter how highly cleared, must not be told what’s inside.” Under Operation Mountain Storm, the US began detecting campfires from satellites. I read a few years ago spy satellites could see the red ash of your joint/cigarette if in a field at night, but this book says now they can see people and equipment under heavy tree cover. This image shows people with heavy equipment; my God, its Ben Affleck and Jay-Z!
Difference between Covert & Clandestine: Clandestine means your actions are concealed but if you get caught or exposed US sponsorship can be acknowledged. Covert means concealed, but if you are caught or exposed, it’s plausible deniability time with a delicious shade of rogue state immunity. Covert CIA prisons are called black sites and part of Greystone, intended to never be found. Greystone reminds me of Treadstone and Jason Bourne. A lieutenant general told the author his men captured CIA informants 40-50 times. One CIA officer told the author, “We’ve become bounty hunters.”
“Why not bring the detainees to trial? Because they would get lawyered up, and our job, first and foremost, is to get information from them.” This book’s message is that in the US, we need more transparency and debate here if we are to really fight terrorism. I’d add Noam’s desire, that if we want less terrorism, stop creating it. Dana says Terrorism = indiscriminate violence + “instilling paranoia and profound anxiety.” The US not only personally creates indiscriminate violence, it has for decades trained Jihadists to brew more of it as well from the other side. As for “instilling paranoia and profound anxiety” note that we are told every year there is a new Hitler who must be stopped at great expense: Putin, Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Sukarno, Milosevic, Castro, Trujillo, yadda, yadda…
The over-stuffed US Intelligence Community is comprised of Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, Coast Guard Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Energy’s intelligence arm, the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence arm, the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Department of Treasury’s intelligence arm, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Marine Corps Intelligence, the national Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency, and Navy Intelligence. All that “intelligence” in everyone’s title and yet comically not one agency had the intelligence to know what to do on 9/11 except wait until the bad guys had finished, and then intentionally attack the wrong countries, spend a trillion of taxpayer’s money creating more terrorists, and create rules that bring all US citizens one step closer to fascism and a police state. This only qualifies as “intelligence” if that was the plan all along.
When you are inaugurated as President, your retinas are scanned, blood drawn, your voice scanned, and DNA officially catalogued. After 9/11 Vice-President Cheney flew into action and hid himself in an underground bunker; the perfect secure location to try on wigs, fishnets and heels.
There are over a thousand organizations at 17,000 locations across the US operating at a top-secret classification level. This is a system of redundancy seldom seen. Redundancy has “a way of multiplying”, and left-in-the-dark taxpayers have a way of paying for that. Robert Gates told the Senate Armed Service Committee that “one of the greatest dangers we continue to face is the toxic mix of rogue nations; terrorist groups: and nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.” No doubt Gates meant first the most toxic rogue state, the United States, and the well-documented releasing of its own nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
The US has 6,000 drones and it has over twenty kinds of UAVs. In the military you are now told to euphemize by replacing the old terms intelligence, surveillance or reconnaissance with “incident awareness and assessment”. I swear officer, I’m neither a stalker, nor a Gladys Kravitz! I’m an incident awareness and assessment supervisor. The NSA is the “nation’s eavesdropper” and is delightfully 1.3 times the size of the Pentagon. A few blocks away is the large National Business Park complex filled with many of the corporations that live to suck taxpayer cash from the NSA.
Top Secret Security clearances mean financial security and permanent employment for the morally challenged. Who doesn’t love hiding what you do, or who you really are from everyone, Divine… the lying daily to best friends and family, and don’t forget assuming false identities in order to intentionally deceive others for cash and more hidden power. And who can’t wait to be paid well to lose all one’s intimate friends just so you can prop up a dying empire with your own lack of transparency, lies and omissions? Yum.
See all those Facebook memes saying if you don’t trust (corporate) science, you are a fool? Did you know the NSA” employs the largest number of mathematicians in the world?” “I wish I could let my friends know how I’m helping usher in the future fascist surveillance state through my mathematical expertise. Darn.” “According to the US Census Bureau, six of the ten wealthiest, best educated counties in the United States are found in the geographic heart of Top-Secret America.” It’s official: you can make a killing in killing. Loudoun County, and Fairfax County, Virginia are ranked the two wealthiest counties in the country despite having otherwise little appeal after you’ve seen the slave quarters at Mount Vernon.
A medic can point a laser from a vibrometer at a fallen soldier’s boot in an occupied land from ninety feet away and pickup vibrations indicating if he is alive or dead. The biggest customer by far of General Dynamics, is the US government. In 2009, it alone reported $31.9 billion in revenue. The US government itself does not know how many federal contractors it has on the federal payroll. A senior military official said, “The Department of Defense is no longer a war fighting organization, it’s a business enterprise. There is so much money being made off of this place (Afghanistan).” A top professor at Stanford said that the counterterrorism industry “is like cancer research, it supports more people than [cancer] kills.” “In the [drone] sanctuary, a person managing a kill in the morning can be a soccer mom in the evening or Boy Scout troop leader on the weekend.” Normalizing war crimes as democracy dies.
Not wishing to appear a pussy like Jesus would have been, the US stance is to maintain three separate kill lists: NSC has one, CIA has one JSOC has one. I picture the FBI whining, but what about Fred Hampton? Don’t forget about us! “JSOC has the rare authority to decide which individuals to add to a kill list, and then to kill them.” The CIA General Counsel opens envelopes and reads two-to-five-page dossiers on who the CTC wants to kill without a hearing. He reads them and then acts as judge and jury. CIA drones are for places the US isn’t supposed to be, like Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. Isn’t being a rogue state fun?
Christian sissies complain that drone strikes deny the enemy a chance to surrender. But what would you rather watch with a beer: A video clip of guys squinting with their hands up? Or Kaboom! Napoleon Blownaparte? Lawyers told JSOC operators about legal complications of killing people and the response was, well the Navy SEAL’s totally snuffed Bin Laden and “the matter seems to have resolved itself.” The author says see the drone war as operators with years of experience attempting “to use some of the most sophisticated military technology ever created to kill a man in a mud hut.” Hellfire missiles have 150-pound warheads. But 150-pound warheads can “go through its target only to have people walk away.”
Sociopath’s quandary: If only there was real money to be made in negotiation, peace-making, transparency and diplomacy, like there is for the permanent security state and war. JSOC’s success rate is 50% and JSOC comically considers that a good rate. Who doesn’t swell with pride knowing at least 50% of your kills were guaranteed murder. Take out an innocent family in the US, get jailed for decades; take out an innocent family as a drone operator and you’re still on the links teeing off before sunset. Such “personal freedom and liberty” [at the expense of others] truly makes America “great”. And that 50% success rate leads to unrelieved and unexamined blowback which is well-known as the best recruitment tool for the other side. For example, in 2002, a JSOC AC-130 gunship takes out 48 civilians in Uruzgan province. Way to manufacture even more terrorism.
Posters at one black site said, “NO BLOOD, NO FOUL” meaning you couldn’t be prosecuted if your prisoner wasn’t visibly bleeding.” To his credit, Stanley McChrystal while touring Baghdad’s illegal dungeons said, “This is how we lose. This is our Achilles Heel.” ICE is the second largest federal law enforcement group in the US. The US lost track of $21 billion of its own money in “less than a decade”. That takes talent. Killing Bin Laden was a war crime, can’t have him talking and telling the world what crimes he was told to commit while he was on the US payroll. Bin Laden’s death did nothing to stop terrorism or al-Qaeda, it just stopped one person from talking publicly.
Tiversa is a company which protects individuals from info floating in cyberspace that can be used against them as a weapon. A rewritable CD with Lady Gaga’s music was used to take 250,000 diplomatic cables and get them to Wikileaks. This book says Obama changed nothing for the better after Bush when taking office; just promises unfulfilled. The author says Obama “made sure it [Top Secret America] continued to receive more and more taxpayer money.” Good book, some really interesting stuff.
The President uses the CIA to overthrow governments; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The US failed with Cuba, North Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Angola, but the US hit the rogue state jackpot with Chile, Guatemala, Congo and twice in Afghanistan. CIA’s Greystone covert action program used fake names for overseas secret prisons. In top secret secure reading rooms you sit alone and can’t take notes. One guy’s job was fabricating stories in order to bring down Saddam Hussein and he was proud it.
“A BIGOT list is the list of specific individuals who have access to each compartment. Anyone not on the list, no matter how highly cleared, must not be told what’s inside.” Under Operation Mountain Storm, the US began detecting campfires from satellites. I read a few years ago spy satellites could see the red ash of your joint/cigarette if in a field at night, but this book says now they can see people and equipment under heavy tree cover. This image shows people with heavy equipment; my God, its Ben Affleck and Jay-Z!
Difference between Covert & Clandestine: Clandestine means your actions are concealed but if you get caught or exposed US sponsorship can be acknowledged. Covert means concealed, but if you are caught or exposed, it’s plausible deniability time with a delicious shade of rogue state immunity. Covert CIA prisons are called black sites and part of Greystone, intended to never be found. Greystone reminds me of Treadstone and Jason Bourne. A lieutenant general told the author his men captured CIA informants 40-50 times. One CIA officer told the author, “We’ve become bounty hunters.”
“Why not bring the detainees to trial? Because they would get lawyered up, and our job, first and foremost, is to get information from them.” This book’s message is that in the US, we need more transparency and debate here if we are to really fight terrorism. I’d add Noam’s desire, that if we want less terrorism, stop creating it. Dana says Terrorism = indiscriminate violence + “instilling paranoia and profound anxiety.” The US not only personally creates indiscriminate violence, it has for decades trained Jihadists to brew more of it as well from the other side. As for “instilling paranoia and profound anxiety” note that we are told every year there is a new Hitler who must be stopped at great expense: Putin, Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Sukarno, Milosevic, Castro, Trujillo, yadda, yadda…
The over-stuffed US Intelligence Community is comprised of Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, Coast Guard Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Energy’s intelligence arm, the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence arm, the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Department of Treasury’s intelligence arm, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Marine Corps Intelligence, the national Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency, and Navy Intelligence. All that “intelligence” in everyone’s title and yet comically not one agency had the intelligence to know what to do on 9/11 except wait until the bad guys had finished, and then intentionally attack the wrong countries, spend a trillion of taxpayer’s money creating more terrorists, and create rules that bring all US citizens one step closer to fascism and a police state. This only qualifies as “intelligence” if that was the plan all along.
When you are inaugurated as President, your retinas are scanned, blood drawn, your voice scanned, and DNA officially catalogued. After 9/11 Vice-President Cheney flew into action and hid himself in an underground bunker; the perfect secure location to try on wigs, fishnets and heels.
There are over a thousand organizations at 17,000 locations across the US operating at a top-secret classification level. This is a system of redundancy seldom seen. Redundancy has “a way of multiplying”, and left-in-the-dark taxpayers have a way of paying for that. Robert Gates told the Senate Armed Service Committee that “one of the greatest dangers we continue to face is the toxic mix of rogue nations; terrorist groups: and nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.” No doubt Gates meant first the most toxic rogue state, the United States, and the well-documented releasing of its own nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
The US has 6,000 drones and it has over twenty kinds of UAVs. In the military you are now told to euphemize by replacing the old terms intelligence, surveillance or reconnaissance with “incident awareness and assessment”. I swear officer, I’m neither a stalker, nor a Gladys Kravitz! I’m an incident awareness and assessment supervisor. The NSA is the “nation’s eavesdropper” and is delightfully 1.3 times the size of the Pentagon. A few blocks away is the large National Business Park complex filled with many of the corporations that live to suck taxpayer cash from the NSA.
Top Secret Security clearances mean financial security and permanent employment for the morally challenged. Who doesn’t love hiding what you do, or who you really are from everyone, Divine… the lying daily to best friends and family, and don’t forget assuming false identities in order to intentionally deceive others for cash and more hidden power. And who can’t wait to be paid well to lose all one’s intimate friends just so you can prop up a dying empire with your own lack of transparency, lies and omissions? Yum.
See all those Facebook memes saying if you don’t trust (corporate) science, you are a fool? Did you know the NSA” employs the largest number of mathematicians in the world?” “I wish I could let my friends know how I’m helping usher in the future fascist surveillance state through my mathematical expertise. Darn.” “According to the US Census Bureau, six of the ten wealthiest, best educated counties in the United States are found in the geographic heart of Top-Secret America.” It’s official: you can make a killing in killing. Loudoun County, and Fairfax County, Virginia are ranked the two wealthiest counties in the country despite having otherwise little appeal after you’ve seen the slave quarters at Mount Vernon.
A medic can point a laser from a vibrometer at a fallen soldier’s boot in an occupied land from ninety feet away and pickup vibrations indicating if he is alive or dead. The biggest customer by far of General Dynamics, is the US government. In 2009, it alone reported $31.9 billion in revenue. The US government itself does not know how many federal contractors it has on the federal payroll. A senior military official said, “The Department of Defense is no longer a war fighting organization, it’s a business enterprise. There is so much money being made off of this place (Afghanistan).” A top professor at Stanford said that the counterterrorism industry “is like cancer research, it supports more people than [cancer] kills.” “In the [drone] sanctuary, a person managing a kill in the morning can be a soccer mom in the evening or Boy Scout troop leader on the weekend.” Normalizing war crimes as democracy dies.
Not wishing to appear a pussy like Jesus would have been, the US stance is to maintain three separate kill lists: NSC has one, CIA has one JSOC has one. I picture the FBI whining, but what about Fred Hampton? Don’t forget about us! “JSOC has the rare authority to decide which individuals to add to a kill list, and then to kill them.” The CIA General Counsel opens envelopes and reads two-to-five-page dossiers on who the CTC wants to kill without a hearing. He reads them and then acts as judge and jury. CIA drones are for places the US isn’t supposed to be, like Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. Isn’t being a rogue state fun?
Christian sissies complain that drone strikes deny the enemy a chance to surrender. But what would you rather watch with a beer: A video clip of guys squinting with their hands up? Or Kaboom! Napoleon Blownaparte? Lawyers told JSOC operators about legal complications of killing people and the response was, well the Navy SEAL’s totally snuffed Bin Laden and “the matter seems to have resolved itself.” The author says see the drone war as operators with years of experience attempting “to use some of the most sophisticated military technology ever created to kill a man in a mud hut.” Hellfire missiles have 150-pound warheads. But 150-pound warheads can “go through its target only to have people walk away.”
Sociopath’s quandary: If only there was real money to be made in negotiation, peace-making, transparency and diplomacy, like there is for the permanent security state and war. JSOC’s success rate is 50% and JSOC comically considers that a good rate. Who doesn’t swell with pride knowing at least 50% of your kills were guaranteed murder. Take out an innocent family in the US, get jailed for decades; take out an innocent family as a drone operator and you’re still on the links teeing off before sunset. Such “personal freedom and liberty” [at the expense of others] truly makes America “great”. And that 50% success rate leads to unrelieved and unexamined blowback which is well-known as the best recruitment tool for the other side. For example, in 2002, a JSOC AC-130 gunship takes out 48 civilians in Uruzgan province. Way to manufacture even more terrorism.
Posters at one black site said, “NO BLOOD, NO FOUL” meaning you couldn’t be prosecuted if your prisoner wasn’t visibly bleeding.” To his credit, Stanley McChrystal while touring Baghdad’s illegal dungeons said, “This is how we lose. This is our Achilles Heel.” ICE is the second largest federal law enforcement group in the US. The US lost track of $21 billion of its own money in “less than a decade”. That takes talent. Killing Bin Laden was a war crime, can’t have him talking and telling the world what crimes he was told to commit while he was on the US payroll. Bin Laden’s death did nothing to stop terrorism or al-Qaeda, it just stopped one person from talking publicly.
Tiversa is a company which protects individuals from info floating in cyberspace that can be used against them as a weapon. A rewritable CD with Lady Gaga’s music was used to take 250,000 diplomatic cables and get them to Wikileaks. This book says Obama changed nothing for the better after Bush when taking office; just promises unfulfilled. The author says Obama “made sure it [Top Secret America] continued to receive more and more taxpayer money.” Good book, some really interesting stuff.
October 22, 2011
-850,000 Americans now have top security clearances
-250,000 Private contractors operate in the security sector
-1,200 Government agencies deal with issues of national security
-2,000 Private companies keep tabs on national security
-10,000 This is the number of locations for Intelligence installations
-50,000 Number of reports gleaned in a single year; some overlooked
No single government agency, private company, or single individual knows the total cost of these services. And, local law enforcement agencies are using techniques developed in The War On Terror to investigate political activities of private citizens and political groups. Any form of oversight is clearing lacking.
It seems to me, after reading this thought provoking book, that while 'business is booming' in this particular sector of the economy, America is being held hostage to a very expensive, inefficient, and potentially corrupt national policy.
-250,000 Private contractors operate in the security sector
-1,200 Government agencies deal with issues of national security
-2,000 Private companies keep tabs on national security
-10,000 This is the number of locations for Intelligence installations
-50,000 Number of reports gleaned in a single year; some overlooked
No single government agency, private company, or single individual knows the total cost of these services. And, local law enforcement agencies are using techniques developed in The War On Terror to investigate political activities of private citizens and political groups. Any form of oversight is clearing lacking.
It seems to me, after reading this thought provoking book, that while 'business is booming' in this particular sector of the economy, America is being held hostage to a very expensive, inefficient, and potentially corrupt national policy.
September 11, 2011
So here is the disclaimer first off *I received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads*. Top Secret America came off as a pretty straight forward and an easy read especially for the casual reader that do not read alot of works on the military, intelligence, or current world events. What it lacked in in depth material it made up for it in a nice flow from subject to subject, rarely getting off topic like many similar books do when they spend too much time referencing sources.
I do wish that more detail could have been provided because frankly much of the information discussed could be digested while watching the evening news. The author and main contributor are both writers for the Washington Post and I must say that I didnt feel that the piece was that slanted as one could assume. Instead it was a generalized overview of the last ten years of the intelligence state that our country has buried itself in. I feel confident when I say that many citizens today look back and feel that far too much money has been spent on funding our military ventures over the last decade and the intelligence community has grown too big for its own good. I have to agree but only to a point.
What many do not realize and this book only touches on it briefly at various points is the idea that the government was not prepared to enter a period such as this, one that would require something else more than simple military dominance. It can be argued that being there wasnt a precedent already established, that the intelligence community as well as the military had to function on a trial and error basis. Is our intel experts more attuned than they were ten years ago? Most definately, however the road that it had to take was obscenely treacherous, expensive, and bordered on legality.
I will acknowledge that I am far from being politically correct, so I have a knowledge and acceptance understanding that the CIA, NSA, JOSC etc. all at times have to do ugly things to get their work done. Yes, the public is usually better off not knowing what they do because the truth is never pretty. I have to say that im actually more dissappointed that these organizations that are supposed to be based on secrecy so often allowed such things to be leaked to the media and general public, but that is a tangent that I dont feel like going off on right now.
I will say that the main problem facing Top Secret America is primarily two-fold. One, throwing money at a problem with the hope that the best results will present themselves will never work...just ask the Washington Redskins and New York Yankees (most of the time). This is why the intelligence community in many ways couldnt get out of its own way after more than quadrupling in size. The other, and this isnt merely an intelligence or federal government issue but rather a societal issue in the United States. WE HAVE TOO MUCH INFORMATION AT OUR FINGER TIPS! As brought up in this book numerous times, the CIA and all the others were constantly doubling their efforts along with various other entities and departments based on their compartmentaliztion of their inner structure and methodologies. They simply lose or even forget all the data they possess because as the author states, an intelligence agency acts as a dresser. Open up a drawer and you will find various compartments, however due to protocol...only the owner of the drawer knows whats going on in each compartment, but he doesnt know whats going on in the drawer below, or in the next dresser over.
I tend to be the type of person who looks to deeply at things alot. Whether im at work reviewing a project I worked on, driving home trying to remember everything I compiled for that project or in bed, wondering if I included everything in it. Now if I had the over abundance of data to work with as intel agents do as they are being fed reports and photos by analysts from all over the world, how can they move on something? Its not as simple as it sounds. Not to mention we as a society now daily increase their workload. How? By spending every waking minute social networking, blogging, texting etc. We put so much data and info out there that analysts spend an eternity having to sift through everything to find that one minute piece of info with the hope that it may turn out to be justified. It isnt just social networking either, the media has multiplied like rabbits which is also studied. Never before has the public been able to find out information, news, scandals, or anything else before the press gets to feed it to us? Much of it unfiltered. How powerful is this? Well according to the authors sources...that is where the intelligence war will be fought starting this year...just ask Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iran, and all the other countries that were in, are in, or almost in a state of revolution...all fueled by excessive information and social networking.
For as glamorous as some make out the lifestyle of those in Top Secret America, one should ask themselves if they really think that is true, and if they still do, this book is a good place to start to familiarize how challenging their path can be, whether it be trying to do the impossible, or just trying to overcome the intel communities self defeating nature...they still must find a way to overcome and complete their task. Its not easy.
I do wish that more detail could have been provided because frankly much of the information discussed could be digested while watching the evening news. The author and main contributor are both writers for the Washington Post and I must say that I didnt feel that the piece was that slanted as one could assume. Instead it was a generalized overview of the last ten years of the intelligence state that our country has buried itself in. I feel confident when I say that many citizens today look back and feel that far too much money has been spent on funding our military ventures over the last decade and the intelligence community has grown too big for its own good. I have to agree but only to a point.
What many do not realize and this book only touches on it briefly at various points is the idea that the government was not prepared to enter a period such as this, one that would require something else more than simple military dominance. It can be argued that being there wasnt a precedent already established, that the intelligence community as well as the military had to function on a trial and error basis. Is our intel experts more attuned than they were ten years ago? Most definately, however the road that it had to take was obscenely treacherous, expensive, and bordered on legality.
I will acknowledge that I am far from being politically correct, so I have a knowledge and acceptance understanding that the CIA, NSA, JOSC etc. all at times have to do ugly things to get their work done. Yes, the public is usually better off not knowing what they do because the truth is never pretty. I have to say that im actually more dissappointed that these organizations that are supposed to be based on secrecy so often allowed such things to be leaked to the media and general public, but that is a tangent that I dont feel like going off on right now.
I will say that the main problem facing Top Secret America is primarily two-fold. One, throwing money at a problem with the hope that the best results will present themselves will never work...just ask the Washington Redskins and New York Yankees (most of the time). This is why the intelligence community in many ways couldnt get out of its own way after more than quadrupling in size. The other, and this isnt merely an intelligence or federal government issue but rather a societal issue in the United States. WE HAVE TOO MUCH INFORMATION AT OUR FINGER TIPS! As brought up in this book numerous times, the CIA and all the others were constantly doubling their efforts along with various other entities and departments based on their compartmentaliztion of their inner structure and methodologies. They simply lose or even forget all the data they possess because as the author states, an intelligence agency acts as a dresser. Open up a drawer and you will find various compartments, however due to protocol...only the owner of the drawer knows whats going on in each compartment, but he doesnt know whats going on in the drawer below, or in the next dresser over.
I tend to be the type of person who looks to deeply at things alot. Whether im at work reviewing a project I worked on, driving home trying to remember everything I compiled for that project or in bed, wondering if I included everything in it. Now if I had the over abundance of data to work with as intel agents do as they are being fed reports and photos by analysts from all over the world, how can they move on something? Its not as simple as it sounds. Not to mention we as a society now daily increase their workload. How? By spending every waking minute social networking, blogging, texting etc. We put so much data and info out there that analysts spend an eternity having to sift through everything to find that one minute piece of info with the hope that it may turn out to be justified. It isnt just social networking either, the media has multiplied like rabbits which is also studied. Never before has the public been able to find out information, news, scandals, or anything else before the press gets to feed it to us? Much of it unfiltered. How powerful is this? Well according to the authors sources...that is where the intelligence war will be fought starting this year...just ask Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iran, and all the other countries that were in, are in, or almost in a state of revolution...all fueled by excessive information and social networking.
For as glamorous as some make out the lifestyle of those in Top Secret America, one should ask themselves if they really think that is true, and if they still do, this book is a good place to start to familiarize how challenging their path can be, whether it be trying to do the impossible, or just trying to overcome the intel communities self defeating nature...they still must find a way to overcome and complete their task. Its not easy.
October 4, 2011
That people don't know about the size and intrusiveness of the Surveillance State is partly by design. Thankfully, William Arkin and Dana Priest have made it a point to try and end that problem.
This book is essentially an expansion of Arkin and Priest's investigative series for the Washington Post that goes by the same title. Much like the newspaper pieces, this book is very well done.
The authors examine, question, and shine a light on many of the different aspects of the National Security/Surveillance apparatus within the United States, including its economic effects. The authors particularly focus on the massive enlargement of the National Security/Surveillance State that has taken place since 2001. For those wanting to take a critical look into this Top Secret world that's been created in the last 10 years, I know of no better place to start.
This book is essentially an expansion of Arkin and Priest's investigative series for the Washington Post that goes by the same title. Much like the newspaper pieces, this book is very well done.
The authors examine, question, and shine a light on many of the different aspects of the National Security/Surveillance apparatus within the United States, including its economic effects. The authors particularly focus on the massive enlargement of the National Security/Surveillance State that has taken place since 2001. For those wanting to take a critical look into this Top Secret world that's been created in the last 10 years, I know of no better place to start.
May 13, 2012
Excellent book. I started reading a library copy and quickly switched to Kindle version so I could take notes. William M. Arkin is a master of open source data collection and analysis. Dana Priest is an excellent author and did an excellent job gaining access to a world that is male dominated. I believe they had a point to make and attempted to support this point with facts. Ironically, shortly after finishing the book I read that a Drone had been used out West by a sherriff's department to arrest cattle rustlers.
January 16, 2013
It's everything you should know about what's going on behind the curtain. Just because you happen to be paranoid doesn't mean you're not being followed. Keep looking over your shoulder and checking those reflections in the store window.
And just so ya know, cell phones with GPS can be tracked, even when the phone is OFF.
See y'all at Cheyenne Mountain in March.
And just so ya know, cell phones with GPS can be tracked, even when the phone is OFF.
See y'all at Cheyenne Mountain in March.
January 3, 2013
It gets a little dry and disconnected at times, but this is a book that every American should read. It's a frank look at the world we've created since 9/11. One critique is that by the end you're left with a mountain of problems and not much in the way of proposed solutions or even empowerment, but
Read
May 16, 2013Staggering revelations on nearly every page. I went in from a civil liberties angle, but the sheer opaque bulk of the surveillance state, unaccountable, unintegrated, inefficient and drowning in raw data is a formidable policy failure in its own right.
October 28, 2011
Well written, well researched. Just makes me SO ANGRY at all the money the country is wasting while not making us any safer!!!!
February 17, 2021
This book was a real eye-opener when it came out 10 years ago. Published on the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 and expanding upon a series of articles in the Washington Post, the authors examine the exponential spread of the surveillance state, from the nearly million people with Top Secret clearance to the 1,200 Top Secret govt entities with city-sized facilities hidden from public view. Some info may be out of date, and we do a pretty good job surveilling ourselves these days, but it's still a relevant topic and very well researched and written. I'd be very interested in reading an updated version on how things have changed in the wake of Snowden and the rollback of clearances.
June 14, 2020
Superb book regarding our post 9/11 world that puts many attributes of government, fear, power and money into perspective. While the book was written in 2012, I can only believe that things are worse now than ever.
June 26, 2024
Although the writing may be a bit breathless and even overwrought in places, this book does contain some useful information and insights about the extraordinary expansion of the United States Intelligence Community in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
May 19, 2017
Excellent investigative reporting; less than excellent storytelling.
January 20, 2018
The chapter on JSOC was fascinating. I imagine the Snowden leaks would have been a great addition to the book.
March 12, 2024
Too dry, but I should have known before picking this up. dnf-ed at ~70 pages
April 6, 2016
On the whole, Priest gives a remarkable look into the network of corporations, governments agencies, special forces and clandestine services that have grown and been created since 2001. The latter parts on operational details behind the information and surveillance nets as well as details of the classified drone program and JSOC activities are excellent. If I had written the book, I might have featured those closer to the beginning of the book.
The first part, which contains extremely interesting material, might have benefitted by focusing more on visualization and analogy to establish the expanse of the top-secret programs Arkin uncovered. In places it feels a bit like a very long grocery list of alphabet soup type organizations. Many of the footnotes in these sections add little to the text, and I found them better to ignore. In any case, the first chapters describing the ecosystem of intelligence and defense corporations which are swallowing defense spending by the truckload are eye opening.
Enabled by a sought after security clearance, you can really make a fortune on the fears of politicians that cannot find a defense budget too big. The amount of sheer bureaucrat driven thinking in the intelligence communities is impressive. Multiple government agencies tasked with the same goal... but each of them hiring the same exact contractors to bring ideas to the table. Not exactly leveraging redundancy! Small projects turning into small intel shops turning into intel shops with their own air force turning into billion dollar sub-compartments of the DIA, DoD, CIA or elsewhere. Tons of inter-agency pissing matches to the detriment of budgets and security. Ballooning use of private contractors that prove to be more expensive than the agency analysts that were trained by the agency but then moved to the contractor to draw a bigger salary from work they sell to the agency that trained them. Hilarious soirees in fantastic vacation destinations like Phoenix, Las Vegas, etc. where government regulators literally explain to contractors what they need to do to get more funding. The CIA and the Polish GROM commandos were on the ground for Operation Iraqi Freedom as early as July 2002 (evidenced by awards signed by administration officials for meritorious service during that time) despite the war officially beginning in March 2003 and a vote not coming til later in fall 2002.
The parts on JSOC, what's next for JSOC, the drone program and how these are all handled in scope of the Constitution are ultimately depressing and leave you wondering nervously about where the country is headed.
In one passage, discussing John Rizzo, the CIA in-house lawyer charged with reviewing assassination targets for the CIA kill list, says something to the effect that he has trouble remembering the difference between various targeted individuals because "their names all sound the same." Some of this stuff is truly unbelievable.
The level of detail Arkin is able to divine regarding clandestine activities on Monster.com, accessing drone bases in Qatar, etc. is inspiring. He is some kind of genius.
I'd highly recommend this book with the mentioned reservation about presentation in the first sections.
The first part, which contains extremely interesting material, might have benefitted by focusing more on visualization and analogy to establish the expanse of the top-secret programs Arkin uncovered. In places it feels a bit like a very long grocery list of alphabet soup type organizations. Many of the footnotes in these sections add little to the text, and I found them better to ignore. In any case, the first chapters describing the ecosystem of intelligence and defense corporations which are swallowing defense spending by the truckload are eye opening.
Enabled by a sought after security clearance, you can really make a fortune on the fears of politicians that cannot find a defense budget too big. The amount of sheer bureaucrat driven thinking in the intelligence communities is impressive. Multiple government agencies tasked with the same goal... but each of them hiring the same exact contractors to bring ideas to the table. Not exactly leveraging redundancy! Small projects turning into small intel shops turning into intel shops with their own air force turning into billion dollar sub-compartments of the DIA, DoD, CIA or elsewhere. Tons of inter-agency pissing matches to the detriment of budgets and security. Ballooning use of private contractors that prove to be more expensive than the agency analysts that were trained by the agency but then moved to the contractor to draw a bigger salary from work they sell to the agency that trained them. Hilarious soirees in fantastic vacation destinations like Phoenix, Las Vegas, etc. where government regulators literally explain to contractors what they need to do to get more funding. The CIA and the Polish GROM commandos were on the ground for Operation Iraqi Freedom as early as July 2002 (evidenced by awards signed by administration officials for meritorious service during that time) despite the war officially beginning in March 2003 and a vote not coming til later in fall 2002.
The parts on JSOC, what's next for JSOC, the drone program and how these are all handled in scope of the Constitution are ultimately depressing and leave you wondering nervously about where the country is headed.
In one passage, discussing John Rizzo, the CIA in-house lawyer charged with reviewing assassination targets for the CIA kill list, says something to the effect that he has trouble remembering the difference between various targeted individuals because "their names all sound the same." Some of this stuff is truly unbelievable.
The level of detail Arkin is able to divine regarding clandestine activities on Monster.com, accessing drone bases in Qatar, etc. is inspiring. He is some kind of genius.
I'd highly recommend this book with the mentioned reservation about presentation in the first sections.
October 30, 2013
This book was a difficult read primarly due to the amount of acronyms for the various governmental and privately run organizations. This type of book is one that shows one of the disadvantages of reading in eBook format. While there is a glossary in the back one can reference, doing so on a eReader is quite cumbersome. Aside from that the book was very approachable and provided a lot of primary sources, albeit aliases intact for most, to flush out the Author's arguement that "Top secret America has become an institution that by it's very nature is an unmanagable mess."
A bit of history is presented to set the stage for what would become the explosion of survelience and covert military action post 9/11. An overall is presented of how this military industry kicked into high gear in reaction to 9/11 and then the book breaks down to exploring specific facets of Top Secret America including electronic survelience, drones, and secret prisions, and special forces. Most of this information is pretty mainstream today but what I find a bit disturbing overall is that while nation was shocked into awareness over the Snowden leaks, what Dana Priest was collecting and reporting on for the past 10 years was exactly what those leaks revealed. It is a wakeup call that collectively we have had our heads in the sand for far too long and let this monster run without fetters for too long.
What really hit home to me was the magnitude of the military industrial complex surrounding Top Secret America. The enormous amounts of money that goes into funding and the number of jobs it creates. Most of the money is going to contractors, private industry which in turn creates demand to steal away qualified individuals who were once employed by government institutions. As those employees leave the government sector for private employment demand for qualified personnel increases thus raising the reliance on private companies. The CIA, NSA, FBI, etc all become training grounds for these private corporations to pillage from. Cost increases and allegiance is no longer to the government but to the share holders.
Add in this increasing population of Top Secret America and what was once a specialized group is becoming more and more diverse. There is a monster of beauracracy in place defining levels of secrecy to the point that information is not shared effectively. Former chains of command are broken and confusion permeates the entire industry. You have multiple groups producing the same information in different ways and not sharing or working together. The amount of information is more overwhelming than effective that often the needle is lost in the many haystacks.
This is a very thought provoking book. How do we reign in this beast when there is so much money involved?
A bit of history is presented to set the stage for what would become the explosion of survelience and covert military action post 9/11. An overall is presented of how this military industry kicked into high gear in reaction to 9/11 and then the book breaks down to exploring specific facets of Top Secret America including electronic survelience, drones, and secret prisions, and special forces. Most of this information is pretty mainstream today but what I find a bit disturbing overall is that while nation was shocked into awareness over the Snowden leaks, what Dana Priest was collecting and reporting on for the past 10 years was exactly what those leaks revealed. It is a wakeup call that collectively we have had our heads in the sand for far too long and let this monster run without fetters for too long.
What really hit home to me was the magnitude of the military industrial complex surrounding Top Secret America. The enormous amounts of money that goes into funding and the number of jobs it creates. Most of the money is going to contractors, private industry which in turn creates demand to steal away qualified individuals who were once employed by government institutions. As those employees leave the government sector for private employment demand for qualified personnel increases thus raising the reliance on private companies. The CIA, NSA, FBI, etc all become training grounds for these private corporations to pillage from. Cost increases and allegiance is no longer to the government but to the share holders.
Add in this increasing population of Top Secret America and what was once a specialized group is becoming more and more diverse. There is a monster of beauracracy in place defining levels of secrecy to the point that information is not shared effectively. Former chains of command are broken and confusion permeates the entire industry. You have multiple groups producing the same information in different ways and not sharing or working together. The amount of information is more overwhelming than effective that often the needle is lost in the many haystacks.
This is a very thought provoking book. How do we reign in this beast when there is so much money involved?
October 9, 2012
I'm not a big fan of non-fiction because of the idea that it would be filled with stats and facts that would make reading it boring. At times this book was just like that. At first, I was drawn to the main theme of the book which has to do with the-ever growing secret America. Yet at times the book became repetitive and wordy. It's still an important considering what it has to say. It isn't something that is in the center of the news or even in politics, though it should be. The existence of top secret America is just as secret as the organizations that it's comprised of. The numbers are mind boggling. It also briefly alludes to how 9/11 may have been foreseen. I can trust that most of the facts in this book are true considering the history and work of the author. Dana Priest is the investigative reporter of the Washington Post and has received two Pulitzer Prizes for her work. It's therefore kind of unbelievable how this book or even the contents in it isn't getting the attention it deserves.
Top secret America has grown and is growing at a rapid pace since 9/11. The numbers are quite unbelievable. With numbers like that one would think that the world would be a safer place to live in but in fact the numbers may be what is hindering the anti-terrorism effort. There is a lack of coordination and communication between groups/agencies. Many agencies are so focused on the small picture that they aren't able to piece together the bigger one, much like how they didn't see the Arab Spring coming.
Reading through this book made me think of the Cold War Era yet somehow the numbers say that present day America is more extreme than the Cold War Era. Technology has allowed agencies and private organizations to literally track anyone anywhere through satellites without anyone's knowledge. People can kill and participate in a war in some desert thousands of miles away from a remote control somewhere in suburban America. There is so much attention and money put into stopping terrorism than any other criminal activity. This is so even though more people die from drug related violence than that die in terrorist related violence.
But no one wants to be the one who says to stop funding anti-terrorist related activities for fear that reducing such funding could have disastrous outcomes. More than anything people need to stop being fed this fear and the notion that we need to spend so much on something that isn't working. There needs to be a level of transparency so as to allow things that work to continue and to discontinue what doesn't work. If we drown ourselves in fear and become bankrupt in the attempt to keep ourselves safe, then the terrorists will win.
Top secret America has grown and is growing at a rapid pace since 9/11. The numbers are quite unbelievable. With numbers like that one would think that the world would be a safer place to live in but in fact the numbers may be what is hindering the anti-terrorism effort. There is a lack of coordination and communication between groups/agencies. Many agencies are so focused on the small picture that they aren't able to piece together the bigger one, much like how they didn't see the Arab Spring coming.
Reading through this book made me think of the Cold War Era yet somehow the numbers say that present day America is more extreme than the Cold War Era. Technology has allowed agencies and private organizations to literally track anyone anywhere through satellites without anyone's knowledge. People can kill and participate in a war in some desert thousands of miles away from a remote control somewhere in suburban America. There is so much attention and money put into stopping terrorism than any other criminal activity. This is so even though more people die from drug related violence than that die in terrorist related violence.
But no one wants to be the one who says to stop funding anti-terrorist related activities for fear that reducing such funding could have disastrous outcomes. More than anything people need to stop being fed this fear and the notion that we need to spend so much on something that isn't working. There needs to be a level of transparency so as to allow things that work to continue and to discontinue what doesn't work. If we drown ourselves in fear and become bankrupt in the attempt to keep ourselves safe, then the terrorists will win.
August 13, 2013
I'm a little more than halfway through this book, and my two-word takeaway from everything that I've read so far is "We're f***ed." Although the authors' goal is to describe "the rise of the new American security state," what they've really done, in my mind, is describe the constraints, both self-imposed and not, that prevent our government from effectively fighting terrorism and preventing terrorist attacks. The aforementioned constraints: a lack of institutional knowledge regarding terrorist groups due to private companies luring experienced intelligence officers away from government work into contracting positions; constant bureaucratic infighting and outmaneuvering amongst the various government agencies involved in intelligence; a lack of knowledge by Congress and the American people as to just how effective these various agencies are at fighting terrorism....and many, many more. The great thing about this book is that it's not coming at this issue from a partisan angle; rather, the authors are identifying trends and what are really boring problems embedded in those trends. In other words, this isn't a Jeremy Scahill/Glenn Greenwald screeching screed in which we learn that we are the most evil nation on earth and if we stopped doing anything to go after terrorists they'd just go away; this is a book where the authors are posing the questions "what are we doing to fight terrorism?" "what trends have come about as a result of our war on terrorism?" and "are our methods of fighting terrorism working and/or feasible?" Yes, some chapters are more boring and involve a lot of number-reciting than others, but if you just plow through it you'll get to the good stuff. A great book and indeed a necessary book after all of the Snowden stuff.
September 4, 2012
This is a well-written and comprehensive look at the growth of the USA military-industrial complex since September 11th, 2001. The authors detail not only the growth in the military and other organizations that deal with terrorism (like DHS, etc), but it specifically looks at how the growth has been in creating organizations, data, etc that have been classified as top secret. They examine the growth of top secret-related organizations, operations, etc. While people of different political backgrounds may agree/disagree with some of the premises in this book what I found interesting and particularly relevant to the current political climate is that the growth in the top secret USA has lead to an explosion in money being spent that is not being tracked, being spent with organizations that are essentially doing the same work, and no one is figuring out the effectiveness of a variety of programs, operations, etc that have come into existence. It is the lack of accountability that really amazes me. I hope that with the wars in Iraq and Afgahnistan winding down that the higher-ups in the government can scrutinize the spending, the programs, the use of expensive contractors, etc and figure out a way to be more effective and more efficient with money. And I bet if they could figure out what programs were actually working and eliminated the programs that are a waste of money, there would be savings that could be used for the deficit or something. Anyway, this book really makes you think and poses a lot of interesting questions and topics to think about.
I won this copy in one of the Goodreads giveaways.
I won this copy in one of the Goodreads giveaways.
January 9, 2012
A very interesting look at the explosive growth of the security industry since 9/11, both in the government (DHS, CIA, FBI, the military, etc.) and the large number of private companies that are hired by the government. The amount of money that has been spent is staggering, and it isn't clear how much good it has done.
There are now large number of secret installations, many in office buildings that look just like ordinary commercial ones, mostly around Washington D.C. but also in many other areas. It was very interesting to learn how the authors discovered where many of them are. Once they would find one, they would examine nearby buildings (they tend to cluster, with private companies opening offices very close to the government offices that are their clients) to look for clues such as high security or a lack of signage (e.g. no external signs or a building directory with few or no entries). Building permits, job offer listings and requests for bids (e.g. installation of a fiber optic line) also gave clues.
Not unexpectedly there is a lot of duplication and overlap. The sheer amount of data that is now accumulated is also staggering and worrisome. If you take a picture of infrastructure (bridge, train, etc.) there is a reasonable chance it will be reported and end up in a database somewhere. And it still isn't clear how many domestic phone calls, e-mails, etc. are intercepted.
There are now large number of secret installations, many in office buildings that look just like ordinary commercial ones, mostly around Washington D.C. but also in many other areas. It was very interesting to learn how the authors discovered where many of them are. Once they would find one, they would examine nearby buildings (they tend to cluster, with private companies opening offices very close to the government offices that are their clients) to look for clues such as high security or a lack of signage (e.g. no external signs or a building directory with few or no entries). Building permits, job offer listings and requests for bids (e.g. installation of a fiber optic line) also gave clues.
Not unexpectedly there is a lot of duplication and overlap. The sheer amount of data that is now accumulated is also staggering and worrisome. If you take a picture of infrastructure (bridge, train, etc.) there is a reasonable chance it will be reported and end up in a database somewhere. And it still isn't clear how many domestic phone calls, e-mails, etc. are intercepted.
September 24, 2012
Dana Priest and William Arkin have assembled an incredible accounting of the rise of America's security state, what they call, "Top Secret America". The number of people with top secret clearance is astounding, even more so is the number of those who are not government employees, but private contractors. Priest and Arkin have uncovered a vast community that not even government insiders seem to have a handle on. Thanks are owed to each of them, as well as their various sources and the staff who helped to compile and, when possible, make sense of this monstrosity. They have produced a book that is fascinating and enjoyable to read, even though it uncovers something that should be of grave concern to all Americans.
As an aside, if short on time, one should, at least, read their reporting for the Washington Post and view the excellent Frontline documentary on PBS by the same name. Both are outstanding previews of what is described, in detail, in their book.
I highly recommend this book to anyone with a passing interest on what has become of the new American security state since September 11, 2001. When Cofer Black famously told Congress, "All you need to know is that there was a before 9/11 and there was an after 9/11", he wasn't kidding. Read this book and find out why.
As an aside, if short on time, one should, at least, read their reporting for the Washington Post and view the excellent Frontline documentary on PBS by the same name. Both are outstanding previews of what is described, in detail, in their book.
I highly recommend this book to anyone with a passing interest on what has become of the new American security state since September 11, 2001. When Cofer Black famously told Congress, "All you need to know is that there was a before 9/11 and there was an after 9/11", he wasn't kidding. Read this book and find out why.
January 23, 2012
The authors state the book is intended to bring awareness to the fact that the Fed doesn't know how much it's spending in the IC community since 9/11 and the numerous redundant agencies.
The Fed overspending and operating inefficiently? Shocker!
Second, the latter third of the book speaks to the JSOC. About how quickly it's grown, created it's own intelligence analyst positions, own fleet of drones, etc, etc. Essentially eluding that JSOC wastes money because there are other agencies doing those things. Yet, then goes on to show that the JSOC has captured more terrorists than all other military branches combined, killed more terrorists then all other branches combined, conducted all the really, really hard operations (i.e. killed UBL), and operates well in numerous other countries working with that nation's military to pursue terrorists (e.g. Philippines).
Kind of conflicting messages.
Overall the book was an interesting read (mainly due to the stats) but I thought the authors did a poor job of making their case that the IC was operating poorly. Inefficiently, yes. But the whole Fed is inefficient - would have been good to see them compare and contrast the IC to other Federal agencies (e.g. Social Security, or other large agency).
The Fed overspending and operating inefficiently? Shocker!
Second, the latter third of the book speaks to the JSOC. About how quickly it's grown, created it's own intelligence analyst positions, own fleet of drones, etc, etc. Essentially eluding that JSOC wastes money because there are other agencies doing those things. Yet, then goes on to show that the JSOC has captured more terrorists than all other military branches combined, killed more terrorists then all other branches combined, conducted all the really, really hard operations (i.e. killed UBL), and operates well in numerous other countries working with that nation's military to pursue terrorists (e.g. Philippines).
Kind of conflicting messages.
Overall the book was an interesting read (mainly due to the stats) but I thought the authors did a poor job of making their case that the IC was operating poorly. Inefficiently, yes. But the whole Fed is inefficient - would have been good to see them compare and contrast the IC to other Federal agencies (e.g. Social Security, or other large agency).
February 6, 2016
I purchased this book several years ago. I saw a show on PBS in which the author was talking about government surveillance programs so I thought this book would be as interesting as the show. The intelligence community does seem to have bloated since 09/11. I would imagine that many entities would cause waste and duplication of services. Priest blames the failure to predict the Arab Spring uprisings as an intelligence failure. She also blames the intelligence community for failing to stop the "Underwear Bomber" on Christmas Day a few years ago.
These may have been intelligence failures but these events would be books in themselves. She gives both events a few sentences. I think its much more complicated than that. No report or individual is cited in these claims. I think she arrived at the conclusion before she had facts.
Also Priest starts fear mongering with 1984 claims such as its inevitable before the intel community starts spying on American citizens. There are many points that I agree with that Priest makes. Some of her observations are spot on. But her conjecture turns this investigative work into an opinion editorial.
These may have been intelligence failures but these events would be books in themselves. She gives both events a few sentences. I think its much more complicated than that. No report or individual is cited in these claims. I think she arrived at the conclusion before she had facts.
Also Priest starts fear mongering with 1984 claims such as its inevitable before the intel community starts spying on American citizens. There are many points that I agree with that Priest makes. Some of her observations are spot on. But her conjecture turns this investigative work into an opinion editorial.
October 1, 2013
Detailed account of how the security apparatus has grown in the U.S. since 9/11. Much of the growth took place rapidly with lots of duplication, waste, overreach and not much thought as to how this may affect our liberty and freedom. The authors detail the new technology developed and the way it is used to track terrorists, and in some or many cases, US citizens and others the government decides they want to track. It would be interesting to see how the authors would add to this based on the Snowden documents which are being released. These documents detail reading the President of Brazil's emails, tapping US civilians phones and data mining of US cell phone companies and social media sites.
The authors ask how much of our freedom, liberty and privacy are we willing to give up for security and safety, along with the question of how much are we willing to pay for our security. They suggest most Americans have given little thought to either question. The lack of questioning and the willingness to accept the burgeoning security apparatus are, they argue, a danger to democracy.
The authors ask how much of our freedom, liberty and privacy are we willing to give up for security and safety, along with the question of how much are we willing to pay for our security. They suggest most Americans have given little thought to either question. The lack of questioning and the willingness to accept the burgeoning security apparatus are, they argue, a danger to democracy.
November 22, 2011
A Disturbing Expose on Counter Terrorism. Gave it 5 Stars!
Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, have written an incredibly important book. “Top Secret America.” Bottom-line, they have unveiled JSOP, Joint Special Operations Command, the pentagon’s secret killing machine and the growth of America’s post 9/11 counter terrorism agencies. Frightening.
Priest is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and along with Arkin, they expose the secret buildings, unlimited funding in the billions and sadly how no one in Congress is accountable.
Some worry about surveillance by Goggle and Facebook! It’s nothing compared to what the government is doing in the name security. Not sure what we are getting for the vast dollar amount spent by Congress. Close to a trillion dollars has been spent!
The CIA, NSA and who knows how many other secret agencies involved missed the “Arab Spring.”
The book is a must read for anyone interested in where our nation is headed.
Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, have written an incredibly important book. “Top Secret America.” Bottom-line, they have unveiled JSOP, Joint Special Operations Command, the pentagon’s secret killing machine and the growth of America’s post 9/11 counter terrorism agencies. Frightening.
Priest is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and along with Arkin, they expose the secret buildings, unlimited funding in the billions and sadly how no one in Congress is accountable.
Some worry about surveillance by Goggle and Facebook! It’s nothing compared to what the government is doing in the name security. Not sure what we are getting for the vast dollar amount spent by Congress. Close to a trillion dollars has been spent!
The CIA, NSA and who knows how many other secret agencies involved missed the “Arab Spring.”
The book is a must read for anyone interested in where our nation is headed.
November 4, 2011
This is the most extraordinary book about the secret government that I have ever read. The depth of research is outstanding, and the story that it tells is very, very important. Incredibly, there are 850,000 people in the United States with security clearances. The intelligence system is no longer exclusively governmental, but rather intelligence gathering, analysis and so much else is being routinely outsourced to an impenetrable tangle of private companies. The system is unimaginably expensive, completely out of control, far beyond the ability of congress to oversee, and growing like a viral colony. Read it and weep for our Constitution, our freedom and our future. Probably 95% of all classification is unnecessary, and most of it conceals budgetary excess, not sensitive secrets.
August 31, 2014
An interesting read, slightly undercut by some journalistic license (eg, the phrase Top Secret America is a recurring one, as opposed to an eye-catching title). Most of the book is concerned with government bloat and the resulting inefficiencies; thus, my own reading and interpretation was greatly influenced by Wilson's classic Bureaucracy.
my favorite quote: "It seemed hypocritical, even contrary to U.S. long-term interests, for an administration that said its goal was to create democracies out of Iraq and Afghanistan now to be effectively undermining the legal system in Eastern Europe by cutting private deals with intelligence officials there in exchange for U.S. money and equipment that would make them more powerful."
my favorite quote: "It seemed hypocritical, even contrary to U.S. long-term interests, for an administration that said its goal was to create democracies out of Iraq and Afghanistan now to be effectively undermining the legal system in Eastern Europe by cutting private deals with intelligence officials there in exchange for U.S. money and equipment that would make them more powerful."
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