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Exposing the Black Budget

PostPosted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 9:44 pm
by chlamor
Exposing the Black Budget

The Cold War is over. So why, Paul McGinnis wanted to know, are major CIA, NSA, and Department of Defense programs still being kept secret from Congress and US taxpayers?

By Phil Patton


It's the world's wildest high-tech toy catalog, the Pentagon's annual Dear Santa letter. It includes secret weapons programs with baffiing code names such as Elegant Lady, Tractor Rose, Forest Green, Senior Citizen, Island Sun and Black Light, White Cloud and Classic Wizard. These are the "black budget" programs that pay for spy satellites, invent stealth cruise missiles, tinker with Ladar - laser radar - and experiment on aircraft that change color and helicopters that evade tracking systems. Covering expenditures for intelligence and weapons research, the Pentagon's black budget is the most titillating portion of the massive classification program that has swelled almost unabated since World War II.

The black budget is the government's illusory and tangled accounting of what it spends on intelligence gathering, covert operations, and - less noticeably - secret military research and weapons programs. It admits to no easy calculation, but by estimates of those who watch it, the black budget may hit US$30 billion a year - a figure larger than current federal expenditures for education. It includes spending by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and military R&D.

Documented - vaguely - in funding requests and authorizations voted on by select committees of the US Congress, the black budget is published with omitted dollar amounts and blacked-out passages. It hides all sorts of strange projects, not just from enemies, foreign and domestic, but from the public and elected officials as well. Last year, for instance, it was revealed that the National Reconnaissance Office had for several years used the black budget to hide from Congress the cost and ownership of a $300 million office building, even though the structure was plainly visible from Route 28 west of Washington, DC.

With "program element" numbers, obscured figures, and code names that read like dadaist poetry, the details of the black budget are revealed to only a few select Congressional committee members - and sometimes not even to them. There are several different types of black budgets buried, for example, within the Pentagon's procurement budget and Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation budget - the tab for the toy testers. Others cover defense intelligence and research. An internal Pentagon memo from August 1994, which was accidentally leaked and showed up in Defense Week, revealed some hard numbers: the National Security Agency spends $3.5 billion a year; the Defense Intelligence Agency $621 million; and the Central Imagery Office $122 million for spy-satellite work.

A code name not mentioned in black budgets but well known to those who watch them is Trader. It is familiar to readers of such Net mailing lists as the skunk-works digest (majordomo@mail.orst.edu, subscribe: skunk-works in message body) or the newsgroup alt.conspiracy.area51. The code name Trader belongs to Paul McGinnis, who assembles and correlates public information to create a detailed estimate of items in the real budget. Several years ago, McGinnis became fascinated with all the code names and turned himself into a one-man truth squad: collector, interpreter, collator, and online publicizer of the black budget and its associated "special access programs."

McGinnis is one of a growing number of private citizens who have made a second career of tracking the military budget. His research complements traditional Washington watchers of government - the public-interest muckrakers, if you will.

One of the most respected is Steve Aftergood, who writes the Secrecy and Government Bulletin for the Federation of American Scientists, a public-interest group founded in the wake of the first A-bomb. Exposing weapons boondoggles and cost overruns, Secrecy and Government has helped formulate a fundamental critique of classification policy. What Ralph Nader was to Detroit, the federation has been to the Pentagon. (Aftergood's Bulletin appears on IntelWeb, a site for spy buffs at http://awpi.com/IntelWeb/.) Another famed watcher is Steve Douglass, the Amarillo, Texas, publisher of Intercepts, a newsletter for military-monitoring buffs (see "StealthWatchers," Wired 2.02, page 78). Douglass reads Lockheed in-house publications and local newspapers near Air Force bases for, say, reports of public-school expansion, which indicates the arrival of a new military unit.

Some of these investigators are merely curious. Some are ideologically opposed to black budgeting, arguing that it is wasteful and futile, that revealing the cost of a stealth fighter tells no more about how to build one than the cost of a Cadillac does. Black budgeting, its opponents argue, is more about hiding from Congress and the public than from any foreign enemies. Many black programs, such as the B-2 stealth bomber and the Milstar satellite system, ended up costing far more than anticipated. Others failed to work as advertised. The Bush administration, for example, killed the Navy's A-12 stealth carrier aircraft before it was unveiled to the public. Aren't there better things we could be doing with our money?

For many who track it, the black budget is more symbol than substance. In it, they hope to unearth a Rosetta stone that might decypher the mountain of secret information the Pentagon and intelligence agencies have amassed in recent decades. McGinnis, like many others, discovered the black budget through his passion for airplanes - spy planes and stealth fighters in particular. Like film or rock stars, these planes have their own fan clubs and groupies who post in AOL's aviation section or subscribe to the skunk-works mailing list, which provides information and lore about Lockheed Advanced Development Co.'s famous Skunk Works research center. Skunk Works created the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, the F-117 Stealth fighter, and numerous weapons it won't admit to making. The company generally ranks as a triumph of the black budget world. It, of course, has had its share of failures - which black budgeting hides.

Fascinated by programs such as Aurora, a putative hypersonic spy plane that has been rumored for so long it is now almost legendary, McGinnis distinguished himself from other black budget watchers by filing Freedom of Information Act requests about programs whose names suggested they might be aircraft. The name Aurora, for example, first showed up in the 1986 Pentagon budget request as a mysterious line-item code name. The size of the appropriation for Aurora rose from $8 million in 1986 to $2.3 billion for 1987. The next year it vanished. Watchers soon suspected it was a successor to the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.

McGinnis lives in Huntington Beach, California, and works long hours as a test engineer specializing in satellite data communications for a company whose name he would rather not drag into his private obsession. When he's not working, he goes through thousands of pages of government documents, most of them provided free by the issuing agencies, others picked up at the local library. In years of work, he has learned to read between the lines, discovering that the "Virginia Procurement Office" is really the CIA and that the "Maryland Procurement Office" is the National Security Agency. He can cite chapter and verse of such Pentagon reports as "Critical Technologies for the '90s." And he casts a trained eye on curious proposals in the Commerce Business Daily, the standard reference for federal contracts. He even consults with archaeologists for the Department of Energy - they were called in when a road for a mysterious black budget project at the Nevada nuclear test site 70 miles northwest of Las Vegas impacted a Native American settlement.

Any delight or pride McGinnis takes in the chase is masked by a clipped and effi-cient tone of voice. Yes, he says, his work is "about causing some kind of change," but he is no fervid ideologue. He works behind the scenes, feeding information to politicians pushing for reform in classification policies. He speaks of "people inside government who are on our side," implying that most are not, but his comments hardly demonize the Pentagon or the intelligence agencies.

When he does take some time off from his jobs, he's likely to be found hiking in the desert, enjoying the fiowers and the birds, though he'll end up near a place like TRW's classified radar site in the hills east of San Clemente, its three white radomes glowing in the sunlight behind the chain-link fence.

"I became interested in the subject of excessive military secrecy," McGinnis e-mailed me recently, "because it struck me as wrong that the US military was still acting as if the Cold War was happening. A turning point came with a September 1993 Freedom of Information Act case

I filed on the classified aircraft codenamed Senior Citizen (Program Element 0401316F) and Groom Lake."

McGinnis found himself exchanging letters with an Air Force colonel named Richard Weaver (then Deputy for Security and Investigative Programs for the Secretary of the Air Force). Reading the censored case files he received from his request, McGinnis became convinced that the Air Force (and other military services) had large numbers of senior officials who held arrogant attitudes toward the average American taxpayer.

"You can imagine the anger I felt when I saw censored internal Air Force memos from Colonel Weaver with lines like 'His appeal justification is the standard (blacked-out censored area) provided by almost everyone else who makes similar requests for this information. All have been turned down.' And 'Mr. McGinnis's rationale that he somehow should be allowed to perform those oversight functions of Congress, while novel, is not compelling.'"

This kind of response turned a mild-mannered inquirer into a much more fervent muckraker. "I was merely pointing out the Air Force's violations of US classification policy, contained in Executive Order 12356, and how secret spending violated Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the US Constitution," McGinnis argues with typical mastery of the obscure. He's referring to the requirement that Congress approve all federal spending. The black budget, McGinnis argues, violates that provision by hiding the purpose of expenditures.

McGinnis is not alone in his dogged pursuit of military secrets. He took inspiration from Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget, a 1990 book by reporter Tim Weiner. Now at The New York Times, Weiner covered the CIA's Aldrich Ames scandal and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his exposé of black budget programs for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

In Blank Check, Weiner argued that the black budget represented an entire culture of deception - "the realm of nukes and spooks," he called it.

Take a program such as element number 207248F. The program behind the number was called STUDS, for "special tactical unit detachments." It is hard to believe that any overtones of this acronym are other than intentional.

In one year this program went from $885,000 to $20 million. Budget readers know from the program number that STUDS is operational - not just a research project but a working unit, that it is tactical (rather than strategic), and that it is Air Force. More specifically, it is people fiying captured or purchased foreign planes in the desert north of Las Vegas. The testing program is no secret - an Air Force general died several years ago fiying a Russian fighter. But many of the aircraft have probably come into the country surreptitiously since the collapse of the Soviet Union and may include prototypes purchased from renegade generals or engineers. For fiscal 1995, the program number persists, sans its infiammatory acronym, but its budget has risen - to $118 million, according to McGinnis.

Looking at other program numbers in a similar fashion, McGinnis took the work of Weiner and other reporters much further. He began assembling his own rendition of the black budget using Congressional and Department of Defense documents and made it available by ftp and on mailing lists through commercial online services. The Internet, thanks to McGinnis and others, has emerged as a new tool for black budget watchers trying to change policy in the secret world. McGinnis is amused by the irony that the Internet, based on the original Arpanet created with Pentagon R&D money, provides a medium for revealing the secrets of the Department of Defense.

McGinnis spends much of his time analyzing such government documents as the House and Senate versions of the "National Defense Authorization Acts," scrutinizing both the reports and the supporting testimony to Congress. He consults the Pentagon's own guide to reading the budget, Department of Defense Handbook DoD 7045.7-H. He spends hours poring over publications with names like "FYDP Program Structure," "Supporting Data for Fiscal Year 1994 - Budget Estimate Submission - Descriptive Summaries - Research, Development, Test and Evaluation," and "Critical Technologies Plan for the Committees on Armed Services - United States Congress."

These are not exactly light reading: the plots are slow and hard to decipher. From his own reading of these texts, McGinnis believes there are misleading or meaningless nomenclatures, blank cost figures, and even phony line items in any code names that include the characters r 1 and p 1. And sometimes, he says, black projects are twinned, like binary stars, with "white," or open, projects. The Orient Express superplane program, announced publicly with great fanfare by Ronald Reagan in 1986, is widely thought to have been at least partially a cover for black research into a hypersonic reconnaissance craft or a pulse-jet engine.

McGinnis has posted his sketch of the black budget, a dinosaur skeleton with conjectural plaster bones filling in the gaps, on his ftp site (ftp.shell.portal.com in the/pub/trader directory). He began an electronic newsletter, Neon Azimuth - a designation mocking the code names the Pentagon gives to its secret programs - and now has a Web page (http://www.portal.com/~trader/home.html). The site includes a novel directory of sources of satellite imagery, from the USGS EROS Data Center to Russian satellite pictures.

McGinnis also posts the results of his various Freedom of Information Act inquiries and makes available back issues of The Groom Lake Desert Rat newsletter, published online by Glenn Campbell, the self-appointed watchdog of the secret Groom Lake Air Force base in Nevada.

McGinnis often quotes from Candide and claims Voltaire as a hero. But for all his Voltairean skepticism toward power and government, McGinnis and other black budget watchers may also share Candide's naïveté, which sometimes verges on self-righteousness.

After all, can one reasonably expect the Pentagon to be wholly open about how much it spends on death rays or manta-shaped drones? Can anyone who's spent time watching C-Span fail to share the Pentagon's fear of leaks from the fairly piebald cast of Congressional characters known as our duly elected representatives?

But the forces that favor classification reform are growing, even as the strength and prestige of the intelligence community declines. Now that we know the CIA grossly overestimated the economic resolve of the former Soviet Union and, even worse, overestimated the allegiance of the agency's own employees such as Aldrich Ames, now that a succession of less and less satisfactory actors have played James Bond, even an ordinary citizen may be inspired to believe he can do a better job of spying than the professionals.

The political legitimacy - or lack thereof - of the black budget remains an important issue to many who watch it. McGinnis has political convictions, to be sure: he supplies reform-minded politicians with inside information. But the black budget is the tip of an iceberg of secret government records dating back to before World War II and increasingly exposed as the Cold War thaws. The list of odd numbers and funny words that constitute the budget stands for something more: a mountain of information that belongs to the American taxpayer. Gradually, that information is beginning to leak out.

Now that many KGB files are open, the mass of US classified information looms as a huge target for open-records activists, as well as for the curious. There is a sense that strange wonders await discovery, bizarre, yet-undocumented programs from mind-control experiments to the half-revealed effort in the '70s to develop the "autonomous land vehicle," a giant walking tank reminiscent of the lumbering war machines in The Empire Strikes Back. There are hints of a program called Iris, still underway, to create an aircraft that changes color, and of Black Horse, a next-generation jet. There is

Brilliant Pebbles, smart munitions in which hundreds of tiny dart-like missiles are fired at incoming ICBMs as part of Star Wars, which, McGinnis argues, "never really went away."

In Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed, published last year by Little, Brown, the late Ben Rich, former head of Lockheed's advanced development division, complained of the burden of doing black business: finding engineers who could pass security checks (and waiting six months for these to be completed), as well as suffocating and compartmentalized design processes, uninformed Washington inspectors, and many other constraints. He estimated that working in the black added about 25 percent to the cost of a weapons system (many estimates are higher). He cited the absurd case of a urinal-tube heater he designed in the late '50s for spy-plane pilots confronting the rigors of peeing at high altitude. The device was immediately classified, presumably so Russian pilots could not use American know-how to avoid frostbitten members.

Rich advocated a two-year "sundown" rule that would automatically abolish secret classification unless other action was taken. But for half a century now, classification has continued, propelled by its own momentum.

Classification can be viewed as the information equivalent of the national debt. Information we put off releasing is like debt we put off paying. Like the fiscal deficit, it costs a lot to service and maintain. Keeping things secret requires guards, vaults, background checks. A General Accounting Office study placed the cost at $2.2 billion, but the office pointedly noted that its calculations had been hampered by the refusal of the CIA to cooperate. Private industry spends an estimated $13 billion more adhering to government security standards.

There is evidence that the secrecy structure may collapse of its own weight before anything is done to fix it. Says Steve Aftergood, "The more secrecy you have, the thinner your security resources are spread, and there is a loss of respect for the system. That promotes leaks. It's hard to keep things secret. It's work. People have to sit and read boring hearing records and black things out. It's easy to imagine they would miss stuff."

Aftergood believes that accidental disclosure has been growing. Part of the reason is incompetence, part is semi-official policy. He wrote in the Bulletin that "'accidental' disclosure has the great advantage that it does not require anyone to exercise leadership or to take responsibility. It has now become the preferred policy particularly since classification reform is not working. If current trends are taken to the limit, everything may eventually be classified - but nothing will be secret."

Aftergood concludes the leaks are a sign of institutional decadence. "The government has found it easier to let the classification system disintegrate than to establish new standards that command respect and loyalty," he writes.

There are signs of reform. The Clinton administration has split the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which developed vital weapons (and the Internet) in the past, from the Pentagon and charged that its research should now focus on dual-use technologies with both civilian and military applications.

And after years of heaving and groaning, a new policy seems to be arriving. Late last spring, President Clinton issued a long-awaited executive order on secrecy reform. Effective this last month, the order will declassify hundreds of millions of pages of Cold War documents. Under the new policy, most current secret documents will be automatically declassified after 25 years, and classification from now on will automatically expire after a decade - approximately the same length of time that has passed since government officials began drafting the new order.

There are loopholes, however, that will keep many sensitive documents under lock and key, including those relating to the president and to foreign government involvement. And it will be the unenviable task of something called the Information Security Oversight Office to handle the laborious duty of declassification.

With this order and with John Deutch, the newly installed head of the CIA, promising both a fresh look at classification policy and a new spirit of openness, it might seem that the work of McGinnis and other black budget watchdogs has come to an end. But it is far from clear that the new openness is real. A Congressional committee on secrecy policy, which brings together such unlikely allies as New York Democratic Senator Pat Moynihan and North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms (both share a concern over excess security), has yet to produce specific recommendations for bringing the black budget out of the shadows. And the panic reaction that followed the arrest of Aldrich Ames has created a thick and swirling atmosphere of fear that dims the prospects of secrecy reform.

But the current administration has already declassified a huge number of documents - from World War II, the '50s, and the '60s. Many of these represent what the black budgets of the past really meant. They are the meat on the bones of old numbers. And, emerging like fiickering images from some time machine's screen, they seem almost surreal: they represent in effect the government's first admission of things that every history book already records. The mass of newly declassified paper will supply McGinnis and others with all sorts of nuggets of information. And their role will increase in importance: it has been left to private citizens, not government professionals, to poke through the rubble and make sense of it all.

One thing they have found is details of how, in the early '60s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded a program under the name Corona to find out if there was indeed a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union. Orbiting spy satellites snapped high-resolution photos (video was not good enough) and then ejected the exposed film in reentry pods aimed at convenient oceans. There, the plan went, C-130 cargo planes trailing great drag lines would snare the capsules and return them for processing and analysis. It took many tries before the somewhat improbable system worked.

In the official budget, Corona was advertised as a civilian space effort under the name Discoverer. In fact, the pictures from the secret project proved that the threat of Russian bombers and missiles was far less than had been feared. Recently, some 800,000 images from 1960 to 1972 were made available, with sample images online at http://edcwww.cr.usgs.gov/dclass/dclass.html. Looking at them today is to see laid out, with Kodak clarity, just how misguided the defense buildups of the '50s and '60s were.

These images mark the arrival of the news from past decades, like light from distant galaxies. To see spy-satellite photos from the once supersecret Corona program, snapshots of the Cuban missile crisis, and close-ups of Russian airfields and ICBM pads makes clear how widely divergent are the time tracks of the black world and the real world. In a sense, the black budget is the last legacy of the old Soviet threat: a mirror in which a now vanished Medusa of nuclear holocaust becomes, we hope, forever fossilized.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.11/patton_pr.html

PostPosted: Sat Sep 26, 2009 8:25 am
by chlamor
U.S. Intelligence Budget: $75 Billion, 200,000 Operatives. Fusion Centers Will Have Access to Classified Military Intelligence
Speaking at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club September 15, Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis C. Blair, disclosed that the current annual budget for the 16 agency U.S. "Intelligence Community" (IC) clocks-in at $75 billion and employs some 200,000 operatives world-wide, including private contractors.

In unveiling an unclassified version of the National Intelligence Strategy (NIS), Blair asserts he is seeking to break down "this old distinction between military and nonmilitary intelligence," stating that the "traditional fault line" separating secretive military programs from overall intelligence activities "is no longer relevant."

As if to emphasize the sweeping nature of Blair's remarks, Federal Computer Week reported September 17 that "some non-federal officials with the necessary clearances who work at intelligence fusion centers around the country will soon have limited access to classified terrorism-related information that resides in the Defense Department's classified network." According to the publication:

Under the program, authorized state, local or tribal officials will be able to access pre-approved data on the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. However, they won't have the ability to upload data or edit existing content, officials said. They also will not have access to all classified information, only the information that federal officials make available to them.

The non-federal officials will get access via the Homeland Security department's secret-level Homeland Security Data Network. That network is currently deployed at 27 of the more than 70 fusion centers located around the country, according to DHS. Officials from different levels of government share homeland security-related information through the fusion centers. (Ben Bain, "DOD opens some classified information to non-federal officials," Federal Computer Week, September 17, 2009)


Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has encouraged the explosive growth of fusion centers. As envisaged by securocrats, these hybrid institutions have expanded information collection and sharing practices from a wide variety of sources, including commercial databases, among state and local law enforcement agencies, the private sector and federal security agencies, including military intelligence.

But early on, fusion centers like the notorious "red squads" of the 1960s and '70s, morphed into national security shopping malls where officials monitor not only alleged terrorists but also left-wing and environmental activists deemed threats to the existing corporate order.

It is currently unknown how many military intelligence analysts are stationed at fusion centers, what their roles are and whether or not they are engaged in domestic surveillance.

If past practices are an indication of where current moves by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will lead, in breaking down the "traditional fault line" that prohibits the military from engaging in civilian policing, then another troubling step along the dark road of militarizing American society will have been taken.

U.S. Northern Command: Feeding the Domestic Surveillance Beast

Since its 2002 stand-up, U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and associated military intelligence outfits such as the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the now-defunct Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) have participated in widespread surveillance of antiwar and other activist groups, tapping into Pentagon and commercial databases in a quixotic search for "suspicious patterns."

As they currently exist, fusion centers are largely unaccountable entities that function without proper oversight and have been involved in egregious civil rights violations such as the compilation of national security dossiers that have landed activists on various terrorist watch-lists.

Antifascist Calling reported last year on the strange case of Marine Gunnery Sgt. Gary Maziarz and Col. Larry Richards, Marine reservists stationed at Camp Pendleton in San Diego. Maziarz, Richards, and a group of fellow Marines, including the cofounder of the Los Angeles County Terrorist Early Warning Center (LACTEW), stole secret files from the Strategic Technical Operations Center (STOC).

When they worked at STOC, the private spy ring absconded with hundreds of classified files, including those marked "Top Secret, Special Compartmentalized Information," the highest U.S. Government classification. The files included surveillance dossiers on the Muslim community and antiwar activists in Southern California.

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune which broke the story in 2007, before being run to ground Maziarz, Richards and reserve Navy Commander Lauren Martin, a civilian intelligence contractor at USNORTHCOM, acquired information illegally obtained from the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet). This is the same classified system which fusion centers will have access to under the DoD's new proposal.

Claiming they were acting out of "patriotic motives," the Marine spies shared this classified counterterrorism information with private contractors in the hope of obtaining future employment. Although they failed to land plush private sector counterterrorism jobs, one cannot rule out that less than scrupulous security firms might be willing to take in the bait in the future in order to have a leg up on the competition.

So far, only lower level conspirators have been charged. According to the Union-Tribune "Marine Cols. Larry Richards and David Litaker, Marine Maj. Mark Lowe and Navy Cmdr. Lauren Martin also have been mentioned in connection with the case, but none has been charged." One codefendant's attorney, Kevin McDermott, told the paper, "This is the classic situation that if you have more rank, the better your chance of not getting charged."

Sound familiar? Call it standard operating procedure in post-constitutional America where high-level officials and senior officers walk away scott-free while grunts bear the burden, and do hard time, for the crimes of their superiors.

Fusion Centers and Military Intelligence: Best Friends Forever!

Another case which is emblematic of the close cooperation among fusion centers and military intelligence is the case of John J. Towery, a Ft. Lewis, Washington civilian contractor who worked for the Army's Fort Lewis Force Protection Unit.

In July, The Olympian and Democracy Now! broke the story of how Towery had infiltrated and spied on the Olympia Port Militarization Resistance (OlyPMR), an antiwar group, and shared this information with police.

Since 2006, the group has staged protests at Washington ports and has sought to block military cargo from being shipped to Iraq. According to The Olympian:

OlyPMR member Brendan Maslauskas Dunn said in an interview Monday that he received a copy of the e-mail from the city of Olympia in response to a public records request asking for any information the city had about "anarchists, anarchy, anarchism, SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), or Industrial Workers of the World." (Jeremy Pawloski, "Fort Lewis investigates claims employee infiltrated Olympia peace group," The Olympian, July 27, 2009)


What Dunn discovered was highly disturbing to say the least. Towery, who posed as an anarchist under the name "John Jacob," had infiltrated OlyPMR and was one of several listserv administrators that had control over the group's electronic communications.

The civilian intelligence agent admitted to Dunn that he had spied on the group but claimed that no one paid him and that he didn't report to the military; a statement that turned out to be false.

Joseph Piek, a Fort Lewis spokesperson confirmed to The Olympian that Towery was a contract employee and that the infiltrator "performs sensitive work within the installation law enforcement community," but "it would not be appropriate for him to discuss his duties with the media."

In September, The Olympian obtained thousands of pages of emails from the City of Olympia in response to that publication's public-records requests. The newspaper revealed that the Washington Joint Analytical Center (WJAC), a fusion center, had copied messages to Towery on the activities of OlyPMR in the run-up to the group's November 2007 port protests. According to the paper,

The WJAC is a clearinghouse of sorts of anti-terrorism information and sensitive intelligence that is gathered and disseminated to law enforcement agencies across the state. The WJAC receives money from the federal government.

The substance of nearly all of the WJAC's e-mails to Olympia police officials had been blacked out in the copies provided to The Olympian. (Jeremy Pawloski, "Army e-mail sent to police and accused spy," The Olympian, September 12, 2009)


Also in July, the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks published a 1525 page file on WJAC's activities.

Housed at the Seattle Field Office of the FBI, one document described WJAC as an agency that "builds on existing intelligence efforts by local, regional, and federal agencies by organizing and disseminating threat information and other intelligence efforts to law enforcement agencies, first responders, and key decision makers throughout the state."

Fusion centers are also lucrative cash cows for enterprising security grifters. Wikileaks investigations editor Julian Assange described the revolving-door that exists among Pentagon spy agencies and the private security firms who reap millions by placing interrogators and analysts inside outfits such as WJAC. Assange wrote,

There has been extensive political debate in the United States on how safe it would be to move Guantánamo's detainees to US soil--but what about their interrogators?

One intelligence officer, Kia Grapham, is hawked by her contracting company to the Washington State Patrol. Grapham's confidential resume boasts of assisting in over 100 interrogations of "high value human intelligence targets" at Guantánamo. She goes on, saying how she is trained and certified to employ Restricted Interrogation Technique: Separation as specified by FM 2-22.3 Appendix M.

Others, like, Neoma Syke, managed to repeatedly flip between the military and contractor intelligence work--without even leaving the building.

The file details the placement of six intelligence contractors inside the Washington Joint Analytical Center (WAJAC) on behalf of the Washington State Patrol at a cost of around $110,000 per year each.

Such intelligence "fusion" centers, which combine the military, the FBI, state police, and others, have been internally promoted by the US Army as means to avoid restrictions preventing the military from spying on the domestic population. (Julian Assange, "The spy who billed me twice," Wikileaks, July 29, 2009)


The Wikileaks documents provide startling details on how firms such as Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), The Sytex Group and Operational Applications Inc. routinely place operatives within military intelligence and civilian fusion centers at a premium price.

Assange wonders whether these job placements are not simply evidence of corruption but rather, are "designed to evade a raft of hard won oversight laws which apply to the military and the police but not to contractors? Is it to keep selected personnel out of the Inspector General's eye?" The available evidence strongly suggests that it is.

As the American Civil Liberties Union documented in their 2007 and 2008 reports on fusion center abuses, one motivation is precisely to subvert oversight laws which do not apply to private mercenary contractors.

The civil liberties' watchdog characterized the rapid expansion of fusion centers as a threat to our constitutional rights and cited specific areas of concern: "their ambiguous lines of authority, the troubling role of private corporations, the participation of the military, the use of data mining and their excessive secrecy."

And speaking of private security contractors outsourced to a gaggle on intelligence agencies, investigative journalist Tim Shorrock revealed in his essential book Spies For Hire, that since 9/11 "the Central Intelligence Agency has been spending 50 to 60 percent of its budget on for-profit contractors, or about $2.5 billion a year, and its number of contract employees now exceeds the agency's full-time workforce of 17,500."

Indeed, Shorrock learned that "no less than 70 percent of the nation's intelligence budget was being spent on contracts." However, the sharp spike in intelligence outsourcing to well-heeled security corporations comes with very little in the way of effective oversight.

The House Intelligence Committee reported in 2007 that the Bush, and now, the Obama administrations have failed to develop a "clear definition of what functions are 'inherently governmental';" meaning in practice, that much in the way of systematic abuses can be concealed behind veils of "proprietary commercial information."

As we have seen when the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke in 2004, and The New York Times belatedly blew the whistle on widespread illegal surveillance of the private electronic communications of Americans in 2005, cosy government relationships with security contractors, including those embedded within secretive fusion centers, will continue to serve as a "safe harbor" for concealing and facilitating state crimes against the American people.

After all, $75 billion buys a lot of silence.

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com ... llion.html

PostPosted: Sat Sep 26, 2009 12:39 pm
by StarmanSkye
Citing last article Chlamor posted:

--quote--

The House Intelligence Committee reported in 2007 that the Bush, and now, the Obama administrations have failed to develop a "clear definition of what functions are 'inherently governmental';" meaning in practice, that much in the way of systematic abuses can be concealed behind veils of "proprietary commercial information."

As we have seen when the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke in 2004, and The New York Times belatedly blew the whistle on widespread illegal surveillance of the private electronic communications of Americans in 2005, cosy government relationships with security contractors, including those embedded within secretive fusion centers, will continue to serve as a "safe harbor" for concealing and facilitating state crimes against the American people.

--end quote--

:shock:

Something we haven't really BEGUN to get a handle on; Seems to be a more high-tech, professionalized Fascist version of Soviet-era snoops & snitchs, Big Brother hybrid military/corporate nexus incentives for paranoid-delusional trans-national neighborhood-watch franchises feeding and being fed by the booming Security/Prison industries. A self-regulating parasitic moebius-strip feedback-loop with few controls and oversight;

Looks like a corporate security state whose primary purpose is protecting itself, even against its own citizens whom it was originally intended to serve and rule by the consent of.

ie., The Octopus, new and improved.

Re: Exposing the Black Budget

PostPosted: Thu Aug 29, 2013 2:15 pm
by elfismiles
EDIT ... D'OH!! SLAD is on the job as usual ... viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37087

U.S. 'Black Budget' $52.6 Billion...
More than 107,000 intel employees...


U.S. spy network’s successes, failures and objectives detailed in ‘black budget’ summary
By Barton Gellman and Greg Miller, E-mail the writers

U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top secret budget.

The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses those funds or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.

MORE HERE:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat ... l_national



$52.6 billion - The Black Budget
Covert action. Surveillance. Counterintelligence. The U.S. “black budget” spans over a dozen agencies that make up the National Intelligence Program.Explore the top secret funding

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/sp ... ck-budget/


Re:

PostPosted: Fri Aug 30, 2013 11:48 am
by Wombaticus Rex
Looks like a corporate security state whose primary purpose is protecting itself, even against its own citizens whom it was originally intended to serve and rule by the consent of.

ie., The Octopus, new and improved.


Definitely. The private sector stuff is what really alarms me -- sure, gov surveillance is "out of control" in any conventional sense, but it is, at least, regulated by realpolitik considerations like publicity, pensions, procurement...wheras the Wal Mart Intelligence Bureau is not and never will be. And WMIB (not a real acronym, for anyone keeping score at home) is just one random example of thousands. The private sector nexus is totally out of control and they've got a strategic imperative to keep pushing the envelope further.

I think we're going to see, very shortly, corporate security forces pursuing unilateral police actions, backed by a chorus of ALEC & Cato castratos explaining that this is a good thing for Democracy, no doubt. After all, the arguments will go, General Motors shouldn't be fighting criminals with both hands tied behind their backs, and it's a net win for society if they're not being a burden on municipal, state and federal budgets, right? If GM is faced with a cyber attack, or vandalized by sophisticated terrorists like Earth Liberation Front (look for them to make a comeback in 2014), then GM should be free to respond with their own resources.

What is even more stunning, to me, is the nexus between "Big Data" services collating open source & black market information, credit bureaus, and the US Chamber of Commerce. It's a private intelligence agency with none of the limited controls that official NetSec operates within, and their scope and access is beyond John Singlaub's wildest Western Goals dreams.

I often wonder if the United States Edition of the Phoenix Program isn't already underway...