Latest Snowden Leaks Detail The 'Black Budget' And How Much The Gov't Wastes On Useless Surveillance

Politics

from the i-could-use-me-a-black-budget-too dept

Thu, Aug 29th 2013 10:43am — Mike Masnick

Barton Gellman and Greg Miller over at the Washington Post have the latest scoops from the Ed Snowden leaks, in which it appears they've been able to go through the details of the infamous "black budget," detailing the money that is spent on intelligence operations. Apparently, the total budget is around $52.6 billion this year (which actually is a bit lower than I would have expected, but is apparently twice what the budget was back in 2001). There's also another $23 billion spent on "intelligence programs that more directly support the U.S. military."

Not surprisingly, the Post agreed to leave most of the document unpublished and is careful not to reveal anything really damaging (i.e., sources and methods), but the results are still quite revealing. Of course, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is still angry, arguing that any info from the budget "could provide insight for foreign intelligence services to discern our top national priorities, capabilities and sources and methods." Blah, blah, blah. Someone doesn't like being held accountable. Others point out that discussing the budget seems quite reasonable. The post quotes Lee Hamilton, the former chair of the 9/11 commission (and former chair of the House Intelligence Committee), who argues that having this info public is important to having an informed public debate on the surveillance state. That's the only way that the intelligence community can be held accountable.

And, actually, what the budget reveals is a rather stunning lack of accountability for the budget -- much of it going to the CIA. While many people had assumed that the CIA had been diminishing in power and authority within the intelligence community (especially in relation to the NSA), it turns out that its budget has been growing and growing, and is much more than the NSA's. Furthermore, the CIA has basically been transformed from an "intelligence" agency into a "paramilitary force."

And for all this funding, with so little accountability, it should come as no surprise to find out that much of this money appears to be wasted, and not particularly effective.

Throughout the document, U.S. spy agencies attempt to rate their efforts in tables akin to report cards, generally citing progress but often acknowledging that only a fraction of their questions could be answered — even on the community’s foremost priority, counter-terrorism.

In 2011, the budget assessment says intelligence agencies made at least “moderate progress” on 38 of their 50 top counterterrorism gaps, the term used to describe blind spots. Several concern Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, an enemy of Israel that has not attacked U.S. interests directly since the 1990s.

Other blank spots include questions about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear components when they are being transported, the capabilities of China’s next generation fighter aircraft, and how Russia’s government leaders are likely to respond “to potentially destabilizing events in Moscow, such as large protests and terrorist attacks.”

A chart outlining efforts to address key questions on biological and chemical weapons is particularly bleak. U.S. agencies set themselves annual goals of making progress in at least five categories of intelligence collection related to these weapons. In 2011, the agencies made headway on just two gaps; a year earlier the mark was zero.

So, we're spending all of this money (our money) on top secret operations, including spying on pretty much every American... and so far it's been almost entirely useless against the actual threats we face. Well, that's comforting. Oh, and if you wondered about the failure to connect the dots on the Boston Marathon bombings? It's because the intelligence community and all that money have no idea how to figure out those kinds of attacks.

The intelligence community seems particularly daunted by the emergence of “home grown” terrorists who plan attacks in the United States without direct support or instruction from abroad, a threat realized this year, after the budget was submitted, in twin bombings at the Boston Marathon.

The National Counterterrorism Center has convened dozens of analysts from other agencies in attempts to identify “indicators” that could help law enforcement understand the path from religious extremism to violence. The FBI was in line for funding to increase the number of agents surreptitiously tracking activity on jihadist Web sites.

But a year before the bombings in Boston the search for meaningful insight into the stages of radicalization was described as one of “the more challenging intelligence gaps.”

Also, the NSA is swimming in so much information that it asked for nearly $50 million to cope with the problem of having too much information. We've pointed out for years that the trick to finding the needles in haystacks isn't to build bigger haystacks, but that's long been the NSA's approach. However, those haystacks have become so big that the NSA asked for $48.6 million designated for "coping with information overload." Here's a simple, and cheaper, plan: don't collect so much irrelevant data. You can ship me half of the $48.6 million and keep the rest for something that's actually useful.

Also, there's this:

The agencies had budgeted for a major counterintelligence initiative in fiscal 2012, but most of those resources were diverted to an all-hands, emergency response to successive floods of classified data released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

For this year, the budget promised a renewed “focus . . . on safeguarding classified networks” and a strict “review of high-risk, high-gain applicants and contractors” — the young, nontraditional computer coders with the skills the NSA needed

The budget, obviously, was submitted before Snowden absconded with it and gave it to the Post, so I would imagine that there have been some revisions to create yet another "all-hands, emergency response" to Snowden-like situations.

Cbjb fy13 v1 Extract (PDF)Cbjb fy13 v1 Extract (Text)

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Filed Under: black budget, budget, cia, intelligence community, nsa, surveillance

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Dark Helmet (profile), 29 Aug 2013 @ 10:55am

JFK
"Furthermore, the CIA has basically been transformed from an "intelligence" agency into a "paramilitary force.""

In other words, exactly what Kennedy was fighting against during his brief time in office. My, how nothing's changed....
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- art guerrilla (profile), 29 Aug 2013 @ 11:29am
  
  Re: JFK
  too bad he didn't make it past dallas to 'break the cia into a million pieces' as he famously threatened to do...
  
  pretty sure that had nothing to do with his assassination...
  pretty sure...
  
  art guerrilla
  aka ann archy
  eof
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Aug 2013 @ 11:06am

Money is no object to the government. If they want something, they'll get it regardless the cost, circumstances, or consequences.
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out_of_the_blue, 29 Aug 2013 @ 11:07am

Add tens of billions for its self-funding "commercial" fronts.
Kind of random items 'cause I'm too lazy to keep up with Masnicking only 35 minutes apart.

http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/yahoo-to-users-let-us-read-your-emails-or-goodbye/3 8190/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-inter net-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_print.html

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/264685-googles-data-collecting-habits-drawing-more -scrutiny

Complete with howling lies from Eric Schmidt:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/23/schmidt_on_colbert/

http://www.washingtonpost.c om/world/national-security/chinese-hackers-who-breached-google-gained-access-to-sensitive-data-us-of ficials-say/2013/05/20/51330428-be34-11e2-89c9-3be8095fe767_print.html

Guess that's enough. If you haven't got the picture by now that it's all ONE surveillance state, it's only because you resist facts.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Aug 2013 @ 11:11am

"The intelligence community seems particularly daunted by the emergence of �home grown� terrorists who plan attacks in the United States without direct support or instruction from abroad..."

This is either bullshit of the highest grade or an alarming admission of their incompetence.

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_terrorism_in_the_United_States

Hom e grown terrorism is not a recent development. They've had plenty of time to learn to cope with it.
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- Anonymous Coward, 29 Aug 2013 @ 11:20am
  
  Re:
  They rightfully don't know how to deal with it b/c it's not their responsibility. Domestic, not foreign. It's the FBI's job.
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  - Anonymous Coward, 29 Aug 2013 @ 12:21pm
    
    Re: Re:
    They apparently want a more targeted domestic spying program that what they have today. It is pretty scary when you think about it. NSA seems to collect work from other government agencies along with their far too big haystacks of data. Meanwhile they are rated horribly by the employees.
    
    I wonder if anyone in government is brave enough to reduce NSA funding and increase research funding, to help alleviate the mentioned lack of research? It would be the most reasonable way to solve this worry, but the drama that would ensue...
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- Greg (profile), 29 Aug 2013 @ 12:25pm
  
  Re:
  Well, you gotta admit that it's a tough problem to solve. Many people to keep track of, with only a few liable to really go off the rails. They're simply throwing money at the problem to see what sticks. They're hoping that by gathering everything they can find good indicators in all that data. They then run into other very difficult problems because of simple data volume issues, so they need more money, etc. etc. They are desperate for solutions because the higher-ups know it's their ass if there's a terrorist strike on their watch. So, they spend your money and trample your rights because that's the lesser of two evils in their opinion and there are huge incentives to lean that way. Standard government reaction to difficult problems, unfortunately.
  
  If anyone had a solution acceptable to the government, (i.e. that does not involve significant foreign policy changes) you'd probably have heard of them by now. In other words, they want to destroy the threat without addressing the true cause. The hard line wins, but is ultimately only partially effective.
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  - TaCktiX (profile), 29 Aug 2013 @ 2:00pm
    
    Re: Re:
    NSA used Massive Data Trove! It's not very effective...
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  - Hephaestus (profile), 29 Aug 2013 @ 3:28pm
    
    Re: Re:
    Ask a mathematician about this, the more data you collect, the more false positives and false negatives you can expect. You end up flagging a ton of people who shouldn't be flagged, and investigating them and wasting resources. Plus you miss more of the people that are about to do no good. In the end this sort of surveillance makes us less safe.
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    - Greg (profile), 29 Aug 2013 @ 4:26pm
      
      Re: Re: Re:
      Sure, more data means more resources are needed to process it & take care of it (human & computer). Not to mention the opportunities for less scrupulous folks to abuse said data. I'm definitely not defending the idea of grabbing every scrap of data you can lay your hands on. I'm a software guy and I can't count the number of times I've heard "Just capture everything. You might as well since we just might need it and there's little additional cost." There's always additional costs & complexities & the additional "bad" data just tends to obscure the "good" and/or make the good harder to dig out. Bad design based on lazy thinking by the business side, usually.
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    - Jonathan, 29 Aug 2013 @ 4:51pm
      
      Don't your mathematicians know about complex numbers?
      Do you think that a payment card fraud detection system gets less reliable with more data? Does Pandora get stupider the more you scratch its ears or scold it? Does it even *need* to be 100% accurate?
      
      One enabling trick is to assign an uncertainty metric to each item of intelligence. You then know not only the consensus of the evidence, but of the relative quality of the confounding evidence, all of which can be valuable inputs into the uncertainty metric of the answer to the question asked.
      
      The other enabling trick is to recognize you're in intelligence, not in court. 100% accuracy is pointless and unachievable in the real world, so you work with what you got. 50%+1 constitutes probable cause, which is what you're looking for if you want authorization to watch someone more specifically/closely and aren't just playing tin-pot Kibo and grepping the Internet.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Aug 2013 @ 11:16am

Am wondering if this article is just a lot of hooey/misdirection:

http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/29/20234171-snowden-impersona ted-nsa-officials-sources-say?lite
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- Anonymous Coward, 29 Aug 2013 @ 11:32am
  
  Re:
  Possible, but the main problem I see with using other user's accounts to hide his trail is that he'd still have to know the password. He could reset it, and enter a new password, but that would leave people unable to log in and in need of resetting their password every time he did so. Not exactly the most subtle of things
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  - Jonathan, 29 Aug 2013 @ 3:53pm
    
    Passwords, lol
    You're fighting the last war... instead, imagine yourself in possession of a CA key or signing device trusted by the entirety of IC IT, and see where that takes you.
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- Anonymous Coward, 29 Aug 2013 @ 12:07pm
  
  Re:
  Ever heard of Linux?
  
  Let's say that you have three users in your Linux system: "bob", "alice" and "charlie".
  
  Let's say that bob has root access, because...well...he's the sysadmin. "bob" needs to do some maintenance ("alice" messed up her settings, so "bob" needs to go fix them...or some other credible story), so he writes:
  
  su alice
  
  Wait, what's this? Now "bob" becomes "alice". OMG! "bob" is impersonating "alice"! What an f-king genius hacker!
  
  Now, for his next trick, "bob" will impersonate "charlie" for no reason at all:
  
  su charlie
  
  OMFGROFL! "bob" became "charlie"! How does he do that!? He's an computer hacker!
  
  Ahem...sorry.
  
  Moral of the story? Reporters are morons. If Snowden was a proper sysadmin, and had root (super user) access, he had the ability to "switch user", that is, change his current identity in the system to "become" another user. System administrators sometimes require this ability for maintenance and support reasons. So, what NBC news is celebrating is the fact that Snowden had the capability to do what almost any Linux monkey is taught to do in his first lesson.
  
  This is pure propaganda for the ignorant masses.
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TasMot (profile), 29 Aug 2013 @ 11:25am

Oh, and if you wondered about the failure to connect the dots on the Boston Marathon bombings? It's because the intelligence community and all that money have no idea how to figure out those kinds of attacks.

Oh come on, sure they do! Just watch for the Terror Threats to be broadcast on Twitter. See:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100118/1051427801.shtml
and
http://www.techdirt.com/ar ticles/20130627/18205323645/yet-another-teen-making-stupid-jokes-social-media-now-faces-years-jail.s html

See, you can catch all of the terrorists just by watching for their pre-announcement on Twitter.......... /SARC
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Aug 2013 @ 11:31am

Your utopian dream of accountability is quite funny to say the least.
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art guerrilla (profile), 29 Aug 2013 @ 11:31am

oh noes, al qaeda knows how many billions ? ? ?
'cause before, when they didn't know, al qaeda budgeted $7621 for counter-espionage, but know that they 'know', they'll probably double their budget to $15 000 ! ! !
oh noes !! !

what a crock of shit clapper is....
or all spooks...

art guerrilla
aka ann archy
eof
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Namel3ss (profile), 29 Aug 2013 @ 11:35am

Of course, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is still angry
Anything that makes Clapper angry is good in my book.
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lucidrenegade (profile), 29 Aug 2013 @ 11:45am

Clap on *clap clap*
Clap off *clap clap*
Clap on, clap off
The Clapper
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FM Hilton, 29 Aug 2013 @ 11:57am

Why should they care about accountability?
It's not their money, after all.

It's "other people's money" and who cares how it gets wasted?

Spend all of your allotted budget or else it will be cut back.

Doesn't matter how you do it, either.
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Dirkmaster (profile), 29 Aug 2013 @ 12:47pm

Oh, so suddenly
the budget "metadata" is important.

huh.

I thought "it's just metadata", and it's not private or anything.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Aug 2013 @ 1:08pm

The Post should publish it ALL
It's all already been read in Beijing and Moscow and Tehran and Berlin and Tokyo and everywhere else anywhere. (Think about it: if the Washington Post can get it, don't you think that professional espionage agents can get it too?)

The only people who don't have it are the public.
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Mario U Morini, 29 Aug 2013 @ 1:26pm

Tax Evasion
Should Snowden revelations be true and trustworthy, hence US Tax Authority should investigate and indict all te possible responsable of the hugest tax fraud ans tax evasion of planet Earth!
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JH, 29 Aug 2013 @ 1:54pm

Do we think this really came from Snowden?
Or has he made it Liberty Hall for anyone (including anyone in Congress, who were on the circulation list for this doc) to give anything they like to the press about the NSA/CIA/Intelligence community, under the cover that "you got it from Snowden" ?
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- Mike Masnick (profile), 29 Aug 2013 @ 2:29pm
  
  Re: Do we think this really came from Snowden?
  Or has he made it Liberty Hall for anyone (including anyone in Congress, who were on the circulation list for this doc) to give anything they like to the press about the NSA/CIA/Intelligence community, under the cover that "you got it from Snowden" ?
  
  Yes, this came from Snowden. Barton Gellman was one of the original reporters who got the documents from Snowden.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Aug 2013 @ 2:07pm

They should have said the black budget was "upto" 5 trillion dollars, leaving the US government unable to confirm OR deny the figure....
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Brandt Hardin, 29 Aug 2013 @ 2:28pm

dystopia
The dystopian fantasies of yesteryear are now a reality. We�ve allowed the coming of an age where the civil liberties our forefathers fought so hard for are being eroded by the day. Freedom of Press, Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Assembly are mere ghostly images of their original intent. We�ve woken up to an Orwellian Society of Fear where anyone is at the mercy of being labeled a terrorist for standing up for rights we took for granted just over a decade ago. Read about how we�re waging war against ourselves at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2011/09/living-in-society-of-fear-ten-years.html
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Aug 2013 @ 2:54pm

A bigger haystack? more like...
It's not that they've gone off and tried to get a bigger haystack; they've decided to excavate the entire farm it sits on and then sift through that.
And it's more like multiple haystack... meaning more farms to sift through.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Aug 2013 @ 3:29pm

Fixing the Budget
Hey I have a great idea at how to save 52.6 billion dollars a year!
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- Anonymous Coward, 30 Aug 2013 @ 2:31am
  
  Re: Fixing the Budget
  Yeah, I had no idea we had so much spare money lying around. What a luck it was found just now as we need it so badly!
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  - Anonymous Coward, 30 Aug 2013 @ 7:19pm
    
    Re: Re: Fixing the Budget
    no doubt!
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Jim, 29 Aug 2013 @ 6:11pm

No informed debate needed
The constitution is being violated. The government is violating our constitutional rights. There is no debate over the violation of the constitution and our rights guaranteed under it. Stop trying to make this out like it is a debate. You can't debate the goodness of violating the constitution.
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reginald joe, 30 Aug 2013 @ 11:02am

black budgets
Go to the details of the Kennedy assassination and you will see that there was an intelligence coup in this country at that time. The governments trained killers and their bosses rule. Look at how they lied to congressmen like they were sissies. While turncoat republicans want to stop foodstamp money which are tax dollars we put in going back to ourselves intelligence has set up their way to become millionaires by unaccounted expenditures. This conspiracy also aids the ruin of the middle class by waste of their tax dollars. Hello Communism!
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- Pragmatic, 5 Sep 2013 @ 6:16am
  
  Re: black budgets
  Reginald, please look up "Communism." You clearly have no idea what it means. What we're facing here is "Facism."
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