309,775,732 friends, 854,000 enemies

I want to take a moment to salute the reporters over at the Washington Post. As a tax-paying, freedom-loving American, I thank you for your hard work and bravery. You've ruffled a few feathers in Washington, and 9,999 other locations.

This is an era where shining a light on things that ought to be transparent in the first place is more than a little nerve-wracking. It's an era where comedian John Stewart is usually (and sadly) the only one asking the hard questions. So to see someone write a huge report on the 854,000 Americans who have Top Secret Clearance, and what they are working on, is pretty refreshing.

Such secrecy can undermine the normal chain of command when senior officials use it to cut out rivals or when subordinates are ordered to keep secrets from their commanders.
One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it. Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out about a program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer. "What do you mean you can't tell me? I pay for the program," he recalled saying in a heated exchange.

The article, and its many interactive charts and maps, are worth at least 10 minutes of everyone's time, and most of us nerdly or paranoid types could justify burning much more time pouring through the 16 page main article and the amazing web of hyperlinks in the charts. Pop over to the Washington Post and take a look at the report. It's an accounting of which agencies and companies are doing what in the name of National Security. 1,271 Government Organizations and 1,931 Private Companies work together at 10,000 locations to publish 50,000 intelligence reports a year. It's too much for anyone to hope to be on top of it all, and we keep growing it bigger and making it more redundant. Yet despite all those Republicans and Tea Partiers harping about oversized government, they never seem to want to trim a few security agencies out of the mix.

854,000 people. If all the folks with Top Secret Clearance were gathered together in an empty part of the map to found a new city all by themselves, they would be the 12th-largest city in the U.S. It would be smaller than Detroit, but bigger than San Francisco.

I'll leave off with one of the amusing observations of the article:

Every one of these buildings has at least one of these rooms, known as a SCIF, for sensitive compartmented information facility. Some are as small as a closet; others are four times the size of a football field.

SCIF size has become a measure of status in Top Secret America, or at least in the Washington region of it. "In D.C., everyone talks SCIF, SCIF, SCIF," said Bruce Paquin, who moved to Florida from the Washington region several years ago to start a SCIF construction business. "They've got the penis envy thing going. You can't be a big boy unless you're a three-letter agency and you have a big SCIF."