Top Secret America

Top Secret America is a series of investigative articles published on the post-9/11 growth of the United States Intelligence Community. The report was first published in The Washington Post on July 19, 2010, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dana Priest and William Arkin.

The three-part series, which took nearly two years to research, was prepared with the assistance of more than a dozen journalists. It focuses on the expansion of secret intelligence departments within the government, and the outsourcing of services.

An online database at TopSecretAmerica.com, as well as the articles to be published, were made available to government officials several months prior to the publications of the report. Each data point at the website was substantiated by at least two public records. The government was requested to advise of any specific concerns, but at that time, none were offered.

The Public Broadcasting System featured Priest and Arkin's work on Top Secret America in a September 6, 2011 broadcast of the news documentary series Frontline.^video That same month, the book Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State was published by Little, Brown and Company.

Published July 19, 2010, this first installment focuses on the U.S. intelligence system's growth and redundancies. It questions its manageability, as it has become "so large, so unwieldy, and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it, or exactly how many agencies do the same work." The report states that "An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances."

This segment, published on July 20, 2010, describes the widespread use by the U.S. of private contractors to fulfill essential intelligence functions, despite regulations prohibiting this. At present "close to 30 percent of the workforce in the intelligence agencies is contractors": 265,000 out of 854,000. "So great is the government's appetite for private contractors with top-secret clearances that there are now more than 300 companies, often nicknamed 'body shops,' that specialize in finding candidates, often for a fee that approaches $50,000 a person."

...
Wikipedia