Explore the US black budget for surveillance

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Click on the big black box to go to interactive feature here.

U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top-secret budget.

The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.

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Terry Gilliam observed the current mess with a high degree of prescience in his 1985 flim Brazil:

Sam Lowry: Excuse me, Dawson, can you put me through to Mr. Helpmann’s office?
Dawson: I’m afraid I can’t sir. You have to go through the proper channels.
Sam Lowry: And you can’t tell me what the proper channels are, because that’s classified information?
Dawson: I’m glad to see the Ministry’s continuing its tradition of recruiting the brightest and best, sir.
Sam Lowry: Thank you, Dawson.

If films have taught us anything, whenever you hand a bunch of shady people a big bag of money and tell them to go off and make good things happen, you will get one of three results:
[ol]
[li]A blacker-than-black secret assassination program with genetically modified agents who, despite all of their training in covert kills get in big shootouts and against-traffic car chases in exotic locales[/li][li]A conspriracy to use the funds in order to run a private intelligence service to manipulate the government into going to war to sway the stock market for the benefit of back room machinationists[/li][li]A giant freakin’ laser designed to vaporize a human target from space designed by wacky undergraduate physics students who will then cause it to hilariously self-destruct while igniting a giant-sized pan of Jiffy Pop within their scheming advisor’s newly remodeled house set to Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”[/li][/ol]
In reality, the intelligence apparatus appears to have been developed for a massive electronic eavesdropping and data collection effort in order to sift through every single Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest page on the Internet. Curiously, this has resulted in very little actionable data. There was a brief blip of concern about the potential terror potential of James Lilek’s Gallery of Regrettable Food but it was ultimately determined that this Cold War threat poses only a minor risk in today’s post-home-cooking environment.

Other than that, I have nothing, except that cybersecurity, electronic counterintelligence, and UAV contractors have been making out like bandits while the rest of the military/aerospace contractors are floundering. You may draw your own conclusions from that.

Stranger