The Growth of US Intelligence Agencies - Drowning in Information

[C. Flower]

Two striking articles on US intelligence in the last two days - Reuters says that the US, with 5% of the world's population, spends more than the rest of the world put together on intelligence.

The United States, with around five percent of the world’s population and 23 percent of its economic output accounts for almost two thirds of global spending on intelligence. This is more than at the height of the Cold War, when annual spending, a closely held secret at the time, was estimated at around $15 billion a year in today’s dollars.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debat...lue-for-money/

The Washington Post has spent two years researching US Intel and concludes

* 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

The damning conclusion is that there is no much information gathered that no one individual can possibly have an overall grasp of it and much of it is useless.

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/t...eyond-control/

Could the publication of the Washington Post project explain the very odd recent publicising of a group of Russian operatives collecting low level data that could have been picked up on the internet ?

The F.B.I, it appears, were getting in quick to make themselves appear useful.

[BrendanGalway]

Correct me if Im wrong but didnt a few Intelligence Agencies, including the FBI, have information that the 9/11 attacks were about to take place except there was not much Sharing of Information going on between the Agencies? And so some things slipped through because no one had a complete picture.

Reviewing your post, you dont keep and fund that many Agencies to Protect a Nation, you keep them to run an Empire.

[C. Flower]

Correct me if Im wrong but didnt a few Intelligence Agencies, including the FBI, have information that the 9/11 attacks were about to take place except there was not much Sharing of Information going on between the Agencies? And so some things slipped through because no one had a complete picture.

Reviewing your post, you dont keep and fund that many Agencies to Protect a Nation, you keep them to run an Empire.

Absolutely: every Empire has had a spy apparatus.