The Washington Post dropped a bombshell today when it unleashed a two year investigation which reveled U.S. intelligence has grown so large and pervasive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, or how many programs exists within it.
The investigation's other findings include:
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counter terrorism, 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.
* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
* Analysts, who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying' share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
This investigation has opened the eyes of many to ask, are we getting our monies worth with U.S. intelligence?
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