Dana Priest: "Top Secret America"

''Dana Priest visits Google's San Francisco office to present her book ''Top Secret America''. This event took place on September 15, 2011, as part of the Authors@Google series.''

''Washington Post's Dana Priest discusses intelligence industry''

"The aftermath of 9/11 saw national security become a boom industry with the emergence of a massive “military intelligence complex” and no end to taxpayer-funded growth in sight, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest told a large University of Delaware Global Agenda speaker series audience Wednesday night at Mitchell Hall.

Priest, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of the book Top Secret America, said the national security apparatus – both the government bureaucracy and the huge number of private contractors on which it has come to rely – is so enormous that even the federal government is unsure how many contractors work for it."

from udel........

Top Secret America

The 'Top Secret America' Created After Sept. 11

"Top Secret America" now in book form.............from npr.......

"On today's Fresh Air, Washington Post national security reporter Dana Priest, the co-author of both the Post's investigative series and the book Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, joins Terry Gross for a discussion about how the "terrorism industrial complex" created in response to the Sept. 11 attacks grew to be so big.


"The government said, 'We're facing an enemy we don't understand, we don't have the tools to deal with it, here's billions ... of dollars and a blank check after that for anybody with a good idea to go and pursue it,' " she says. "Not only does the government find it difficult to get its arms around itself, [but now] it doesn't know what's inside, it doesn't know what works, it doesn't know what doesn't work. And nobody still, 10 years later, is really in charge of those questions."

More than 800,000 people now hold top-secret security clearances. And now an entire industry has sprung up to provide those clearances, says Priest.

"The government is now contracting contractors to do the security clearances for other contractors," she says. "The contractors, in the beginning, were just supposed to be supplemental to the federal employees. ... But now, they are everywhere. And some agencies ... could not exist without them"...........LISTEN TO AUDIO INTERVIEW AND READ MORE HERE

'Monitoring America'

from wapo.......

"Nine Ten years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.

Other democracies - Britain and Israel, to name two - are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny.

This localized intelligence apparatus is part of a larger Top Secret America created since the attacks. In July, The Washington Post described an alternative geography of the United States, one that has grown so large, unwieldy and secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or how many programs exist within it.

Today's story, along with related material on The Post's Web site, examines how Top Secret America plays out at the local level. It describes a web of 3,984 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions. At least 934 of these organizations have been created since the 2001 attacks or became involved in counterterrorism for the first time after 9/11"................READ MORE