(2010-07-20) Wash Post Top Secret America

The Washington Post has a series on the growth of the Security Theater industry since the World Trade Center.

• *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, D.C., 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 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.*

Jul19 update: Glen Greenwald summarizes and opines. "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency (NSA) intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications."... "By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and aid organizations, it's almost like they're making the haystack bigger and it's harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful to somebody. You're actually hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security."

Jul23 update: Glen Greenwald on the lack of reaction. He sees the PoliticalClass as the corrupted Oligarchy.