The U.S. will spend $52.6 billion in fiscal year 2013 on intelligence efforts, according to documents obtained from Edward Snowden by
The Washington Post. That
budget summary and report reveals that the U.S. intelligence agencies "remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats."
The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013 [...] 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. [...]
Among the notable revelations in the budget summary:
•Spending by the CIA has surged past that of every other spy agency, with $14.7 billion in requested funding for 2013. The figure vastly exceeds outside estimates and is nearly 50 percent above that of the National Security Agency, which conducts eavesdropping operations and has long been considered the behemoth of the community.
•The CIA and NSA have launched aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as “offensive cyber operations.”
•The NSA planned to investigate at least 4,000 possible insider threats in 2013, cases in which the agency suspected sensitive information may have been compromised by one of its own. The budget documents show that the U.S. intelligence community has sought to strengthen its ability to detect what it calls “anomalous behavior” by personnel with access to highly classified material. [...]
The NSA was projected to spend $48.6 million on research projects to assist “coping with information overload,” an occupational hazard as the volumes of intake have increased sharply from fiber optic cables and Silicon Valley Internet providers.
Here's some free advice: stop vacuuming up so much random data, and use that $48.6 million to figure out how to target better so you don't have information overload. The budget also details how little success the intelligence community has had in two particular areas: North Korea, where it details five "critical gaps," and "the emergence of 'home grown' terrorists who plan attacks in the United States without direct support or instruction from abroad [...]."
Tim Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire points out where a huge percentage of the money has gone:
ODNI confirmed that 70% of the intel budget goes to contractors. With the new WaPo numbers, that's $36.8 billion in 2013 to BOOZ SAIC et al.
— @TimothyS
It's sustaining the intelligence/industrial complex, much like the grift that made plenty of millionaires out of the Iraq war. As with so many of the military contractors in Iraq, this is happening with very little oversight from Congress and—until now—no scrutiny from the public.
