Classified US Intel Budget Revealed Via Powerpoint 364
Atario writes "In a holdover from the Cold War when the number really did matter to national security, the size of the US national intelligence budget remains one of the government's most closely guarded secrets. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the highest intelligence agency in the country that oversees all federal intelligence agencies, appears to have inadvertently released the keys to that number in an unclassified PowerPoint presentation now posted on the website of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). By reverse engineering the numbers in an underlying data element embedded in the presentation, it seems that the total budget of the 16 US intelligence agencies in fiscal year 2005 was $60 billion, almost 25% higher than previously believed."
Important information from the article... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not because of incompetence, corruption, waste, or secrecy - though all those are certainly elements to varying degrees - but in reality because of the wide variety of agencies and activities that fall under the guise of "intelligence" [intelligence.gov].
The article itself notes, correctly:
This top line $60 billion figure is 25% above the estimated $48 billion budget for FY 08. It is quite probable that this total figure was not even known by the government until recently. Greater control and oversight of the Intelligence Community budget was a hallmark of the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 that created the position of the Director of National Intelligence and gave it the mandate to get an overview of the entire amount spent on intelligence government-wide. To this end, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has recently gathered all parts of the previously fragmented Intelligence Community budget together for the first time as part of its Intelligence Resource Information System (IRIS). In the report from the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence released last Thursday, the committee praised the Office of the Director of Intelligence for creating a "single budget system called the Intelligence Resource Information System." It also recognizes their efforts in helping create what "will be used for further inquiry by the Committee's budget and audit staffs and will be a baseline that allows the Congress and DNI to derive trend data from future reports."
Earlier, lower estimates were most likely only included what fell directly under the Director of Central Intelligence and which would have omitted parts of NSA, NRO. A total Intelligence Community number, with the Intelligence Community as defined by 50 U.S.C. 401a(4), would also now include the various military intelligence services (e.g. Army Intel, Navy Intel, etc.), each with its respective weapon technology intelligence exploitation shop. A total budget would also include a large portion of the budget of the Department of Homeland Security which was previously fragment across multiple government agencies. A $60 billion government-wide Intelligence Community budget is not at all out of line with the post 9/11 organizational reality. It seems that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is just now getting a clear picture of the fragmented intelligence community budget.
When you're dealing with sixteen separate agencies, including elements from the Department of Defense, to say something like "intelligence budget" is almost meaningless. What's pure intelligence? What's national defense? What is a mix? In fact, it often comes down to what some particular task or program is "anointed" by management. Different areas get reorganized and shuffled into different organizational structures. To say nothing of the fact that the addition of DHS to the Intelligence Community was the largest government reorganization in over a half-century, since the creation of the Department of Defense and CIA by the National Security Act of 1947.
Shuffle more, and you can probably make the "intelligence" budget appear lower. But the truth is that "it seems that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is just now getting a clear picture of the fragmented intelligence community budget."
And that should be a good thing.
On a different note, revealing classified or sensitive information by improper handling of technology solutions is a perennial problem, and it still floors me that the vetting and release process doesn't properly capture things like this (though they've gotten MUCH better).
Re:Stargate (Score:3, Insightful)
Compared to? (Score:3, Insightful)
Does anyone know how much that budget was back in 2000?
At least, insescurity works for the little guy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I knew it (Score:5, Insightful)
Name that quote (Score:5, Insightful)
That's it?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Only $60B ???!!!
Personally, I'd rather see us spend $120B on intelligence and get it RIGHT than only spend $60B and get it WRONG and end up going to war based on that faulty intelligence at a price tag of $82B up-front and more annually!
Politics and loss of life aside, it's just better economics!
Misinformation (Score:5, Insightful)
Megatrends: Cold War Era - 21st Century (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That's it?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been said before, but I guess I need to say it again: There was absolutely nothing wrong with the intelligence. The Bush administration just didn't care whether Iraq had WDMs or not (nor whether they had any links with Al-Qaida, etc.); they decided to invade, and so they did. All the 'intelligence' they submitted to justify their decision beforehand was stuff that the intelligence agencies had rejected as false or inaccurate again and again. That they say that the intelligence was bad afterwards is only adding insult to injury.
Re:No One Will Be Fired (Score:2, Insightful)
So, the Director of National Intelligence should be fired because a PowerPoint presentation reveals something that is so broad and vague, given the that fact that the "intelligence" budget is "secret" has been a joke for the last decade?
The reason the intelligence budget has been secret has been so adversaries can't see how much you're spending on any one agency, which can imply underlying operations or technologies and techniques depending on how granular budget breakdowns were. It's never been that the total number has been "secret"; it's been that many of the constituent elements have been correctly kept secret, which necessarily means that the total amount can't be known exactly.
What is or isn't "intelligence" is a matter of definition, and as the article notes, it's just a matter of the fact that the DNI is now getting ahold of the fragmented budgets of the thousands of fragmented components and programs in the sixteen Intelligence Community components, many of which are in DOD, that currently fall under the operational guise of "intelligence", including massive chunks of NSA and entire agencies managing assets in space, like NRO.
Even this number doesn't likely accurately represent the "intelligence" budget, since so many areas are a mix of other disciplines, especially national security.
(Way to get in an off-topic post that manages to rant about conspiracy theories, Orwell (can we have a Godwin's Law for Orwell references at some point?), religion, and Hurricane Katrina all in one, though. America does not "serve at the president's pleasure" (nice US Attorney firing reference, though! Bravo!), no one thinks terrorism is to blame for everything or even most things (except for the things for which it is to blame, and some choose willful ignorance about the scope and nature of the problem), and Bush himself routinely has said that he has made mistakes and bad decisions, and no one except complete idiots would think anyone of any political stripe is "never wrong". And Katrina. Ugh. Fastest federal response ever to a disaster of that size and scope, and the local and state agencies knew about this for several, several days, and DID have the capability to do a lot more, and didn't. So, what, you want more federal control over states and localities? Maybe a law to allow domestic use of the military in natural disasters? Oh, wait...that is really Bush's secret attempt to declare martial law, right? I can't keep up.)
Re:Reverse Engineered? (Score:5, Insightful)
To quote Bullet Tooth Tony:
"Never underestimate the predictability of stupidity...."
Re:No One Will Be Fired (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA, it soundly like somebody forgot to strip the hidden data.
This right here is proof as far as I'm concerned that anybody who seriously thinks that the US Government staged 9/11, shot down TWA 800, killed JFK or faked the Apollo landings really needs to have their head examined.
Seriously. This seems like the third or forth story along these lines in as many weeks. Recall the Coalition Provisional Authority leaks because somebody couldn't disable the previous versions feature of word. And now this?
I'm sorry, but our Government is too incompetent to manage any of the things above. I kinda wish they were in a way... then maybe Iraq wouldn't be such a mess, Katrina would have been handled correctly and 9/11 wouldn't have happened.
Re:I knew it (Score:5, Insightful)
I have always been saying that MS products have no place in government
Yes, because this is all Microsoft's fault. It has nothing to do whatsoever with the incompetence of the person/people who created this Powerpoint show and left classified data in the version that was released to the public.
If only the Feds were using an open-source solution. An open-source slide show program would have been smart enough to realize that they left classified data in the document and would have alerted them prior to the document being released to the public.
Re:Quote from ID4 (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't actually think they spend $20,000.00 on a hammer, $30,000.00 on a toilet seat do you?
Well, yeah, they actually probably do, but only in no-bid contracts awarded to whatever company the Director of the Federal agency requesting the contract worked for previously. ;)
Re:Here's something to consider... (Score:3, Insightful)
What was secret was the budget for individual pieces of the intelligence community, which can imply underlying specific operations, programs, and technologies on which a nation may be spending money. And that should be secret. This, however, necessarily means that the total exact amount spent on intelligence programs is also secret. So we have a situation where we don't know something like:
1 + 4 + 2 + 4 + 6 + 9 + 1 + 3 + 7 = 37
but do know:
A + B + C + D + E + X + ??? = 37 (approximately)
This has always been the case, will continue to be the case, as it should be, and is still the case even though this broad and vague number of how much is spent on "contractors", coupled with a percentage of total spent on contractors, is known.
And even this number isn't likely accurate, because what is or isn't "intelligence" is a matter of definitions and organization. All of these items are being paid for regardless. This is like saying what the "defense" budget is. Sure, we can throw out a huge number under the umbrella of DOD. But some of that money is also part of the "intelligence" budget. In fact, a huge chunk is. So which is it? Defense? Intelligence? Both?
And yes, a lot of this information about granular budgets of individual agencies and programs has been successfully kept from adversaries. It's not like we want to keep a total of ALL intelligence spending secret; the Soviet Union didn't even really care about that when it existed, and could deduce it accurately enough if it cared. What it WOULD care about is things like NRO's budget, or the budgets of the cryptanalysis components of the services, or NGA's budget, or line items in those budgets, etc. THAT is why the "intelligence budget" has properly been "secret".
It's not like it's a mystery how much we're paying in taxes.
9 women cannot make a baby in 1 month (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I knew it (Score:3, Insightful)
MS is notorious for leaving too much information in the document without being visible to the plain eye.
Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy (Score:3, Insightful)
No it isn't. The concept of "security through obscurity" has nothing to do with this, this was not an attempt to hide the actual figure in a haystack and hope no one would find it. What's going on here is called stupidity. Whoever put the slides together didn't think through what actual information was embedded in the PowerPoint, didn't understand how PowerPoint works. This has *nothing* to do with attempting to hide something, it has to do with no understand that the something was there in the first place.
Please drop the tired cliché
Re:I knew it (Score:5, Insightful)
No, while I'd usually agree with you, this is a glaring example of why more people in government should use MS products. Can we get PowerPoint installed on more desktops in the Justice Department?
Re:That's it?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
Of course, a Powerpoint presentation on WMD rarely goes astray.
Re:I knew it (Score:3, Insightful)
So what would the advantage of OSS software give? They could modify the program so that this data doesn't get released? Great. So we have a program that magically knows what data is classified, or we have a classified flag that can be added (or forgotten to be added by clerical staff). Would you allow classified data to be used to create a graph? Probably not.
As far as i remember OOo implements graph and data copying between various OOo applications in exactly the same way too. This is simply the poor sod that had to make the slideshow either not realising or forgetting that this happens.
This is why documents like this PowerPoint should be distributed in some format like a PDF, there is no reason to be able to modify the slideshow publically or see the source behind any of the graphics, charts or diagrams.
Re:I knew it (Score:5, Insightful)
running the numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
The only people this was a secret from was the American people.
It's important to remember that $60BN doesn't spend itself, and it doesn't spend itself in small numbers. A whole lot of Americans knew that a whole lot of money was being spent on (essentially) nothing. It's also important to remember that this money mostly goes to defense contractors, and most of that goes to the upper management. Make no mistake: the rich don't spend in proportion to their income. They hoard. This money is being turned into silver spoons for a whole lot of terrorism-profiteers.
Fun trivia: $60BN is enough to give *every* child and adult in the US $200; about half a week's wages for people working minimum wage (before the roughly 1/3rd that goes to taxes, of course.)
It's enough to employ (are you sitting down?) one point two MILLION people in $50k/year jobs.
Now sit there and explain to me why New Orleans is still a disaster area, why 10 million kids in the US don't get enough food to eat, ~1% of the population (3.5 million people) is homeless (third of those are children), and why poor residents living in New England have their federal assistance for home heating cut.
This nation's spending priorities are so out of whack it is abhorrent.
Billions here, billions there... (Score:5, Insightful)
News organizations constantly report million and billion dollar budgets without providing context. On the radio and on TV, for example, the announcer usually takes exceptional care to pause, then spit out the word as if it's a death-defying number: billion.
No one even *knows* what a billion is. Can you conceptualize one billion things? I don't know what a billion is. I can't even fathom it. Anyone who tells you they can is lying. All we know is that a billion is more than a million and less than a trillion.
So, for context, that $60,000,000,000 dollars that was mentioned was for the USA 2005 budget, which was about $2,400,000,000,000.* That's only 2.5% of the budget, and if you're a citizen of the US you'd better hope and pray that your country is spending at least 2% of the budget on intelligence in these times.
* See, you had to think about it for a second to figure out how big that number is. (In newsspeak, that's $2.4 TRILLLLLIIIIONNNN)
Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that the "mistakes" like these are done by the government, so that you would think exactly that. You have just fallen into their trap!
Not really, but your logic makes about as much sense as the conspiracy theorists. Just because one idiot who works for the government screwed up, doesn't imply anything about other people, and other agencies? Why would it? Just like saying someone working for one company screwed up, so all companies must be incompetent, and have been for 40 years? Do you not think that sounds screwy as well?
Re:running the numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
Because, sir, if you give a man $200, you feed him for half a week. If you keep up the hegemony status of that man's nation, and use a successful war to spur on the economy (as successful wars always do), you feed him for a lifetime. Remember that although there may be poverty in America, there is nothing resembling an actual humanitarian crisis due to an outright failure of the economy to sell food where it's needed - and there will never be one, so long as America remains the superpower.
As a Louisiana resident, I know the Katrina disaster response was woefully inadequate and an embarrassment to our nation. But that isn't to say that the federal government should have any role in the long-term rebuilding of the city. The worst thing New Orleans, or in fact anywhere, could have is handouts. All they do is provide a source of capital that nobody can compete with, and therefore nobody bothers to work towards restoring an economy.
Re:Old Jedi Mind Trick (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stargate (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if you were behind the evil conspiracy revealed in that book, wouldn't something like this be the ideal way to defuse the book and its accusations?
Duh
Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy (Score:3, Insightful)
I know you're joking, but it's really called misinformation and could easily be used to discourage from people estimating the real number. Maybe earlier estimates were dead on, and the DIA got a little sketched. Bottom line, intelligence like this is very weak because your main source is also your target, god only knows what they're lying and what kind of paranoid off the wall scheme they are going to come up with next.
Re:Billions here, billions there... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why exactly if i may ask? To be assured of oil? To be assured your next president is an moron as well? To be sure this $DEFENSE_CORP gets it's bonus? To be sure the US will have a enemy available when it needs one?
I think it's a lot of money to put into organisation of which the effect is disputable and limited. I bet you'd save far more lifes spending that money on trafic safety, health care and old fashioned crime prevention. Or perhaps use it to actually achieve at least a little bit of those 'millenium goals'. That might just stop some terrorists along the line as well.
conceptualization (Score:4, Insightful)
A billion things is a thousand millions of things. The decimal orders of magnitude, scientific notation and other notation systems have been developed precisely to represent such large numbers. This is sufficient to allow for some pretty significant conclusions to be drawn about a billion in relation to other numbers.
When you say conceptualize, I think you mean count.
Re:I knew it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy (Score:5, Insightful)
Right... because some office worker is dumb (or simply didn't know the need to strip the data), it then follows that EVERYONE in the government is just as dumb / incompetent.
Very good logic there.
Re:Ho Hum (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ho Hum (Score:3, Insightful)
And yes, I realize we can all come up with more examples of fraud, abuse, illegal or questionable activities, etc. and so on, but it has nothing to do with militarism or jingoism, sorry to say. The statement that "nearly all of what the US defense and intelligence infrastructure does day-in, day-out is focused on protecting the people of the United States" is an accurate one, even including all the negatives.
If all you can see is the bad acts (or in some cases not "bad", but just those you personally disagree with) of any entity, and can't separate individual mistakes or bad acts from the larger roles, you're in a far deeper slumber than the ones you'd accuse others of not waking from.
Re:Ho Hum (Score:4, Insightful)
When I worked for the USAF during the cold war, spying on americans was illegal. Evidently, those in charge now believe that spying on Americans is acceptable now. [aclu.org]
Currently, the US intelligence infrastructure seems to have new missions.
It gathers intelligence from and about the American people. [washingtonpost.com]
It makes justifications for actions of the current administration. [tpmcafe.com]
I thinking that we should a lot more information about the amount of our taxes that are being used for these purposes, don't you?
Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy (Score:3, Insightful)
I also think the real purpose of a lot of our financial aid is to keep nations in africa and other places balkanized and ineffectual.
But I'm just paranoid.
Re:RTFA ! (Score:3, Insightful)
TFA speaks to this exact point. The biggest increase didn't happen between "1995 and 2005" or "2000 and 2005", but between 2001-2003, when the largest government restructuring in nearly sixty years - since the creation of DOD and CIA with the National Security Act of 1947 - added a whole slew of capabilities and entities to the "intelligence" infrastructure of the United States, with the addition of DHS to the IC and the creation of the position and office of DNI.
It's all about organizational structure and what elements are considered intelligence. For example, a lot of elements now considered part of the "intelligence" budget are also part of the "defense" budget. And then you put the "intelligence" and "defense" budgets next to each other and they look really large, don't they? Except they're not additive. Nearly all of the "increase" comes from now including many defense activities and domestic security components under the guise of "intelligence".
Sure, we've increased intelligence spending. But intelligence spending still only around 2.5% of the total US budget. Defense spending is less than 20% (not anywhere near the "over half" some people like to say). We've also increased the number and types of programs that fall under the high-level, broad "intelligence" umbrella.
As an aside, for people concerned about outsourcing and contractors, the IC is considering that issue as well [washingtonpost.com], but the fact is that the IC couldn't function without the array of products, services, and capabilities it obtains via specialty contractors.
Re:running the numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF are you eating? I spend $80 a week at the grocery store, and split that with my SO. That's including meat every night, and 2 or 3 6 packs of nice beer. You really need to re-examine your eating habits.
Re:There's something creepy (Score:3, Insightful)
That depends. If I'm hiring a contractor to destroy countries, assassinate my enemies, kill people, find out other people's secrets, and so forth, I would probably understand if he didn't want to share his methods with me.
Of course, a better analogy is this: we, the taxpayers, are like shareholders of a corporation. Do corporate officers keep secrets from the shareholders who own the company they are simply hired to manage? The answer is yes! One part of a company will even keep secrets from another (try getting a job at an Apple Store and just see if you get to read the source code to iTunes, or learn about the planned features of Mac OS X 10.6).
Re:Guess the DoD changed their security policy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No One Will Be Fired (Score:3, Insightful)
50% Troll
50% Overrated
TrollMods think I'm a terrorist, because they can debate as well as Bush can fight terrorism.