Journal: Secret Intelligence Costs Taxpayer $75 Billion a Year
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Secretive spending on U.S. intelligence disclosed
By Adam Entous
Reuters
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Intelligence activities across the U.S. government and military cost a total of $75 billion a year, the nation’s top intelligence official said on Tuesday, disclosing an overall number long shrouded in secrecy.
Phi Beta Iota: So much for all those who questioned our long-standing repetitive statement that secret U.S. intelligence is costing the U.S. taxpayer $65 billion a year. We were deliberately off by $10 billion. Now that we have established this, perhaps the time has come for both the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the General Accountability Office (GAO) to ask the obvious question: What does the taxpayer get for this vast sum, and how could it be spent better?
[...] do you tell the public when they ask why you are spending $75 billion a year on the 20% you can steal (but not process) only to produce less than 4% of what key decision-makers [...]
[...] machine-speed discovery, discrimination, distillation, and display, and we stink at that as well. $75 billion a year on secret sources and methods, and we still cannot afford world-class analysts fluent in one or [...]
[...] anaysis. The welcome acknowledgement by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) that we spend $75 billion a year on secret intelligence and covert action, combined with the recent release of most of the U.S. telecommunications spy [...]
[...] Beta Iota: The US IC, now known to cost the taxpayer $75 billion a year, is out of balance, something we first documented in book-length detail inON INTELLIGENCE: Spies [...]