Blogs of War

The free culture movement and hacker ethos are full of both great and absolutely terrible ideas. As ideologies and subcultures go they’re sort of like the Libertarian Party. Everything lines up so well, makes so much sense, and then people go off the deep end. Wikileaks has definitely gone off deep end.

Wikileaks is an especially powerful concept that resonates with the especially naive but this project subverts democratic institutions, ignores the rule of law, and exposes heroic sources to imprisonment, torture, even death. If Americans want greater transparency, or other policy changes, they have democratic processes at their disposal. Creating that change, through those processes, is the only legitimate way for Wikileaks supporters and free culture types to achieve their goals.

Apply these tools to people who have no absolutely voice, no recourse, no hope and you might have a leg to stand on but no rational person can argue that U.S. citizens fit that profile. As it stands now these people are enemies of this state, enemies of legitimate freedom, and enemies of democracy.

Q&A on the IC Post-9/11 and Truth about Contractors address some of the issues raised in the Washington Post series but the tone is dry, defensive, and bureaucratic.

This is the kind of communication that doesn’t really appeal to anyone except the people who created it. It certainly won’t win any converts. This highlights what has always been a challenge for the IC – balancing effective public relations and secrecy. My problem with that is that not only should it be a priority for them but they should have mastered it by now. In fact, they should be better at it than anyone else – period.

Perhaps this mess will highlight the need for the IC to aggressively move beyond damage control as a PR strategy. It’s time to kill the lame brochureware web sites, limit the dry memos to internal use or policy wonks, and engage the American people.

An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. – Top Secret America, Washington Post

Everyone seems to up in arms about this figure. It’s seen as confirmation that we have too many spies, too many analysts, and generally too much of everything associated with top secret work. While that may be true this number isn’t quite the slam dunk many think it is because encapsulates countless people who are only indirectly involved in the handling of intelligence or classified material.

To understand what this number means you have to first have some appreciation of what is involved in staffing and supporting a secured project or facility. The nature of the work often requires that administrative and facilities staff, down to the janitor level for example, be cleared at some level. White it’s undoubtedly true that some of this work is inappropriately classified the process of compartmentalizing access (think need to know) actually works pretty well most of the time.

A good place to get a feel for what these projects look like, and how they’re staffed is my former employer’s career site. SAIC has countless Top Secret, Top Secret SCI, and other cleared jobs in their database. A quick scan reveals the following:

Supply and Material Manager – Top Secret
JOB DESCRIPTION: Provide logistics and supply expertise in support of the JDICE team at Nellis AFB, NV.

Candidate will perform material and equipment acquisition for in-house and project related material and supply requirements, identify vendors capable of providing material, equipment, and supplies for specific requirements, issue requests for quotes to qualified vendors, evaluate vendor quotes for specific components and determine the best value approach for fulfilling material requirements, develop purchase orders for specific requirements for Air Force and OSD equipment, ensure compliance with Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), Department of Defense Acquisition Regulations for material acquisition, utilize spreadsheets and hand receipts for developing, issuing, and tracking material. Candidate will monitor, store and issue government furnished equipment and material for regular office and test specific use, and act as the organization’s alternate Telephone Control Officer, equipment custodian and supply liaison. Additionally, candidate will also provide logistical support, equipment, supplies and personnel to facilitate effective and efficient execution of JDICE activities. Must be willing to travel (approximately 10%).

Not exactly James Bond is it? In your company you probably refer to this as the “wharehouse guy.”

Accounting Specialist – Top Secret SCI
JOB DESCRIPTION: Provide logistics and supply expertise in support of the JDICE team at Nellis AFB, NV.

Candidate will perform material and equipment acquisition for in-house and project related material and supply requirements, identify vendors capable of providing material, equipment, and supplies for specific requirements, issue requests for quotes to qualified vendors, evaluate vendor quotes for specific components and determine the best value approach for fulfilling material requirements, develop purchase orders for specific requirements for Air Force and OSD equipment, ensure compliance with Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), Department of Defense Acquisition Regulations for material acquisition, utilize spreadsheets and hand receipts for developing, issuing, and tracking material. Candidate will monitor, store and issue government furnished equipment and material for regular office and test specific use, and act as the organization’s alternate Telephone Control Officer, equipment custodian and supply liaison. Additionally, candidate will also provide logistical support, equipment, supplies and personnel to facilitate effective and efficient execution of JDICE activities. Must be willing to travel (approximately 10%).

Boooring. Again, this person is not complicating the gathering, analysis, and distribution of the nation’s intelligence. They’re just working the periphery.

Help Desk Support Specialist IV – Top Secret

The Enterprise Support Technician will be a member of a larger EST staff providing help desk functions to the Theater Command, Control, Communications, Computer & Intelligence (C4I) Support Center (TSCS) – Belvoir Operations Center. EST personnel will be the entry point of all calls to TCSC-Belvoir Operations Center and will coordinate TCSC network information and updates to the TCSC COMSTAT Report with the USSOUTHCOM TNCC. Enterprise Support Technician will analyze the TNCC-published TCSC COMSTAT networks service call report and make recommendations to reduce the number of TCSC-related future calls by responding to key problems. EST candidate will refine user training, develop online help screens, and provide input to TNCC. EST may be required to remotely monitor Network monitoring consoles after normal duty hours. EST will provide preliminary screening of problems and requests and forward those issues that cannot be resolved by the EST to the appropriate TCSC section, team, or staff member for action. Additional duties include creating user accounts, performing routine scheduled enterprise maintenance and daily back-ups of servers, as well as administering the Blackberry Enterprise Services for TCSC-SOUTHCOM customers. May be required to work a rotating shift.

A Top Secret Help Desk guy is, at the end of the day, still just a help desk guy.

These are just a few examples but countless non-cleared positions in the workforce have their cleared counterpart performing equally boring work off somewhere else – hopefully quietly. It’s usually not as exciting as it would appear. In fact it’s usually quite tedious and boring in the way that only government or government contractor work can be. So, the spies, analysts, and super-genius scientists who reverse engineer UFOs, are out there but they’re a fraction of the 854,000 figure that everyone is throwing around in disgust at the moment.

The great majority of the 854,000 people with top secret security clearances thrive within expensive offices located in the United States. The number of heroes protecting Americans by gathering intelligence in foreign countries is tiny. – Ishmael Jones, The Corner

On the Web:
Frontline: Top Secret America
Washington Post: Top Secret America

U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee today issued the following statement in response to the first story in a series of reports by the Washington Post examining the American national security apparatus:

“The first story in this series generally tells us a lot of what was already known—the national security bureaucracy is large, redundant and lacks the nimbleness to respond to threats posed to our nation. The first installment somewhat overstates the problem of intelligence growth by conflating intelligence and defense activities, but it supports my long-held belief that the answer to addressing threats to American security won’t come in the form of a larger intelligence bureaucracy. It will come from building a streamlined and integrated national security community that is capable of quickly responding to current and emerging threats.

“In 2006, as chairman of this committee, we examined this issue and issued a report that found problems with bureaucratic growth at the top and a lack of urgency and direction within the intelligence community. It is frustrating that years later, others are looking at this issue and finding the exact same problems.

“Congressional Republicans have pushed for years to address these issues, by seeking to limit bureaucratic growth at our intelligence agencies and focusing scarce national security dollars towards operations and away from agency headquarters. Republicans also have fought successfully to cut pork-barrel spending in the annual intelligence bill by eliminating the earmarks that fuel some of the unnecessary growth and don’t offer the American people the transparency they need or deserve for directed spending.

“Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee will continue to push to get resources and funding to our intelligence professionals in the field and out of Washington. As we have in the past, we will continue efforts to limit bureaucratic growth, redundancy and earmarks in future intelligence bills to get money where it is needed most—providing for the security and protection of our nation.”

This morning, the Washington Post began a series of articles on the growth of the Intelligence Community following the terrorist attacks on 9/11. The reporting does not reflect the Intelligence Community we know.

We accept that we operate in an environment that limits the amount of information we can share. However, the fact is, the men and women of the Intelligence Community have improved our operations, thwarted attacks, and are achieving untold successes every day.

In recent years, we have reformed the IC in ways that have improved the quality, quantity, regularity, and speed of our support to policymakers, warfighters, and homeland defenders, and we will continue our reform efforts. We provide oversight, while also encouraging initiative. We work constantly to reduce inefficiencies and redundancies, while preserving a degree of intentional overlap among agencies to strengthen analysis, challenge conventional thinking, and eliminate single points of failure. We are mindful of the size of our contractor ranks, but greatly value the critical flexibility and specialized skills they contribute to our mission.

The challenges that lie ahead are difficult and complex. We will continue to scrutinize our own operations, seek ways to improve and adapt, and work with Congress on its crucial oversight and reform efforts. We can always do better, and we will. And the importance of our mission and our commitment to keeping America safe will remain steadfast, whether they are reflected in the day’s news or not.

David C. Gompert

Via DNI.gov (PDF)

The project in their own words:

“Top Secret America” is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked – with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.

The articles in this series and an online database at topsecretamerica.com depict the scope and complexity of the government’s national security program through interactive maps and other graphics. Every data point on the Web site is substantiated by at least two public records.

Because of the nature of this project, we allowed government officials to see the Web site several months ago and asked them to tell us of any specific concerns. They offered none at that time. As the project evolved, we shared the Web site’s revised capabilities. Again, we asked for specific concerns. One government body objected to certain data points on the site and explained why; we removed those items. Another agency objected that the entire Web site could pose a national security risk but declined to offer specific comments.

I suspect the hype around a bunch of open source intelligence framed in spooky videos and flashy graphics is a little overblown. I’ve had little success digging through the site on my own (more on that below) so it’s difficult to say. I’ll be surprised if any significant new information flows from this but the scope of this work and level of contractor involvement may surprise many people and therein lies the risk. The direct national security threat is minimal but the public relations impact is already significant.

I tried to look up my former employer, SAIC, and explore their “top secret relationships” but found only database errors. I’m sure whatever bug or bandwidth issues the site is facing will be resolved soon though. I doubt SAIC is rooting for the Washington Post web team:

Major companies like Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) are said to be worried about a database that Washington Post researchers have compiled linking contractors to the location and function of their contracts. That’s because SAIC performs many classified functions for the government, and at least one intelligence agency occasionally uses SAIC facilities as cover for its own operations. That’s how intermingled the worlds have become.

This intermingling isn’t new, and isn’t just a post 9/11 phenomenon, but that event did (not surprisingly) trigger exponential growth in all directions. Managing this growth is a herculean task but declaring it unmanageable and unworkable is a bit of a stretch. The system presents countless opportunities for reform and improvement but it largely works. It’s easy for critics to point to events like the Times Square bombing attempt but how do they account for what is essentially a tranquil homeland in the face of so many threats?

In a perfect world this would spark productive discussion about how the intelligence community is resourced and managed. What we’ll get though is political grandstanding, conspiracy theories, and potentially another layer of bureaucracy. Of course, another other story could always blow up and shift the public’s attention before this one takes root. Lindsay Lohan, the DNI is counting on you.

Update:
The Atlantic Wire has a roundup.

The Daily Mail covered the rollout:

Almost invisible to ground radar, it is designed to travel at high jet speeds and cover massive distances between continents.

The plane is built to carry out intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance on enemy territory using onboard sensors.

And it has been designed to carry a cache of weapons – including bombs and missiles -, giving it a potential long-range strike capability.

It can be controlled from anywhere in the world with satellite communications.

Experts say the cutting-edge design is at the forefront of world technology and as advanced as any US development.

BAE has a helpful FAQ here and video of the rollout.

Have a safe and happy fourth!