A hidden world, growing beyond control

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* 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.

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/

[IndigoSkies 168]

It only makes sense that a system that's meant to monitor the entire world to protect Americans would get this big and this convoluted. Anyone who has worked in large data driven organization knows that there is no fixing this. It will chug along as it is for as long it can until it becomes unnecessary to continue chugging it along. The only thing that can be done is individual organization can modernize and become more efficient and start sharing data in a more universal form. When this happens across the board people will realize who is doing what twice over. Then hopefully, duplicated tasks and be delegated to one entity with promise that they satisfy everyone who needs the data/information.

I’m a data #######. Love playing with data.

Edited July 19, 2010 by IndigoSkies