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Washington Post publishes US intelligence agencies’ “black budget” based on Snowden leaked document

September 4, 2013 / Leave a comment

Jumping on to JJ”s post on National Security Archive and Snowden resource documents, the Washington Post recently published its analysis and interesting infographic of the $52.6 billion dollar “black budget” of the US Intelligence agencies ( [attached PDF of infographic]. The Washington Post has released 17 pages of the top-secret 178-page budget summary for the National Intelligence Program that was leaked by Edward Snowden (attached and below).

U.S. spy network’s successes, failures and objectives detailed in ‘black budget’ summary

The pages in this document appear in the summary of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s multivolume FY 2013 Congressional Budget Justification — the U.S. intelligence community’s top-secret “black budget.” It covers many of the high-profile agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, as well as lesser-known programs, including those within the Treasury, State and Energy Departments. This budget does not include funding for intelligence-gathering by the military.

Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses those funds. See detailed breakdowns of how the U.S. government allocates resources across the intelligence community and within individual agencies in the annotated pages below.

FY 2013
Congressional Budget Justification


National Security Archive Posts Snowden Resource Documents

September 4, 2013 / Leave a comment

The nongovernmental National Security Archive at The George Washington University has posted a compilation of over 125 documents to provide context and specifics about the about “The Snowden Affair.”

This “Web Resource” includes documents from the White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and the National Security Agency (NSA), and more.

* White House and ODNI efforts to explain, justify, and defend the programs
* Correspondence between outside critics and executive branch officials
* Fact sheets and white papers distributed (and sometimes later withdrawn) by the government
* Key laws and court decisions (both Supreme Court and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court)
* Documents on the Total Information Awareness (later Terrorist Information Awareness, or TIA) program, an earlier proposal for massive data collection
* Manuals on how to exploit the Internet for intelligence

These documents provide context to the disclosures of documents provided by Edward Snowden on the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance activities.

EFF: Timeline of NSA Domestic Spying

August 25, 2013 / Leave a comment

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created an extensive Timeline of NSA Domestic Spying that refers to legislation, reports, hearings, events, and leaked documents. It details laws and earlier programs (e.g. Total Information Awareness) that predate the most recent revelations. (It begins in 1791!) It has links to documents and hearings that make it a virtual bibliography and more than a simple list of events. EFF notes that:

All of the evidence found in this timeline can also be found in the Summary of Evidence we submitted to the court in Jewel v. National Security Agency (NSA). It is intended to recall all the credible accounts and information of the NSA’s domestic spying program found in the media, congressional testimony, books, and court actions. The timeline also includes documents leaked by the Guardian in June 2013 that confirmed the domestic spying by the NSA.

Constitutional Protections in Homeland Security

December 5, 2008 / Leave a comment

On Wednesday (December 3, 2008) the Majority Staff of the House Committee on Homeland Security hosted a series of roundtable discussions on the future of privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties at the Department of Homeland Security. There is a schedule for the event, “A Path Forward: Constitutional Protections in Homeland Security,” here with a list of participants and topics, but that does not look like a permanent link. There is also a link to a live audio feed (hosted by a dot-com, not the House), but I gather it was only “live” since it does not work today.

I’m not sure of the status of such single-party, staff-not-members hearings and whether we can ever expect a transcript of such things. Is there a category of “government publication” into which this fits? or is this just another piece of fugitive ephemera?

There is a news story about the meeting here:

The panelists said that too many loopholes exist in the Privacy Act, government data mining programs are ineffective, and information-sharing programs are growing without any accountability. This “discussion” seems interesting and worth documenting somewhere.

President Gets More Spying Powers and Keeps U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Board from Operating

July 11, 2008 / Leave a comment

Who’s Watching the Spies?, by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, Newsweek, Jul 9, 2008

The White House has rejected House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s pick for a newly created U.S. government civil liberties board–a move that may doom efforts to get the panel up and running while President Bush remains in office.

…the only government board specifically charged with monitoring the impact of U.S. government actions on civil liberties and privacy interests has a decreasing chance of ever actually meeting, much less doing anything, for the rest of the year.

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