boggles the mind

the washington post this week published the results of its 2-year investigation into the post 9-11 security apparatus that has grown up in the last 9 years. it's a fucking tome, but the paper will be running it as a series. all the info had to be gleaned from public records and sifted out of the dizzying complexity of overlay, redundancy and confidentiality. there is NO WAY to accurately ballpark what this is costing. even the guys in the thick of it, who wear pounds of medals and ribbons everyday on their uniforms, are disgusted by the inefficiency and buried by the sheer amount of data. there are head honchos with 6 or more computers in their offices because there is no compatibility standard of hardware/software between supposedly communicating divisions. never mind the guys who won't play in the sandbox.


this is just a snip:

*some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

*an estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in washington, dc., hold top-secret security clearances.

* in washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since september 2001. together they occupy the equivalent of almost three pentagons or 22 us capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. for example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

let's just for a second remind that the last remotely close call, the underpants bomber at christmas? was foiled by a seat-mate who saw smoking trousers. the nigerian and yemeni chatter being monitored by all the best and brightest had no proper filter and there were literally thousands of communications just souped in with everything else, everyday.

lore of $300 hammers and $1000 toilet seats have inured us to expecting government efficiency, but this is one of the most aggressive cancers i have ever seen and nobody is talking about it.

george bush was right. be afraid.