Top secret America

What Hacker News says

1. sgnelsonJul 2019
   I recommend reading "Top Secret America." It's really eye opening, and discusses the post-9/11 increase to our intelligence services and how that lead to the large number of contractors.

   Importantly the authors note that in the increase in sheer number of employees/bureaucracy/contractors/duplicative effort, has lead to a worsening in the national security apparatus. I believe they're right.

   They also have a website here as it was in part a WaPo series: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/

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2. dansoJun 2016
   And even in the 00s, pre-Bezos, it was hitting stuff out of the park:

   2014 - Stop and Seize -- this series about police confiscating hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists without charging crimes was a hugely eye-opening piece of investigative journalism...was widely discussed on HN too, IIRC: http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/collection/st...

   2013 - The WaPo shared in the Snowden-related Pulitzer, but on its own, I feel that it did some of the best work off of the material -- both in a technical and journalistic sense, including this one about NSA infiltrating Google data centers: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...

   2010 - Top Secret America -- this to me was a highly underrated project that attempted to expose how utterly out-of-control and ungainly America's national security apparatus is. If you read it before the Snowden revelations, you probably would have just nodded your head: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/

   And many more...It's unfortunate that a lot of resources are now being poured into aggregate-Upworthy-baity-headline crap...but honestly, even that material is pretty good. It's just super unfortunate that their headline writer has completely engorged themselves on social media marketing. WaPo truly has some of the worst headlines of any professional publication today.

   edit: as an example of some of the great work under the "PostEverything" banner, which seems like kind of the WaPo's attempt to compete with Vox/BuzzFeed/Daily Mail...I bookmarked this piece from a widow trying to explain how "the second year without my husband is in some ways harder than the first"...one of the few non-technical bookmarks on my Pinboard. In retrospect, the headline isn't bad, but the writing is still profound...I've actually been visiting WaPo via URL directly just to see what guest columns have been published...just need a plugin to hide the headlines: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/04/...

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3. TheCondorJun 2013
   Read Top Secret America by Dana Priest. These are among the highest paying government jobs. The strongholds of NSA are in the wealthiest counties in the nation. And we don't even know what they do... I think it's reasonable to call it profiting.
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4. dfcApr 2013
   If you found this article enjoyable you should check out the book:

   http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/d...

   This article is from a while back and in the intervening time the journalists came out with a book that goes into more detail.

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5. TheCondorJun 2012
   Top Secret America is a good if somewhat depressing read on all of this: http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/d...

   With compartmentization and the short terms of congress people (2 years and then there could be a change, worse if the party in control switches) nobody knows what our top secret money is spent on. It's so bad that we ask the people we give the money to if what they are doing is worth while because nobody knows and nobody wants to be the guy that cut the budget of x y ad z and let the terrorists attack again.

   Think on the order of a half trillion dollars that they can kind of account for (it's black, could be more, probably not tons less) that we have no idea what it actually does.

   Funny thing, NSA might not know and probably doesn't have an easy way to find out. This is an artistic response in that it doesn't make them sound like idiots for not knowing. there is just a staggering amount of communication going on, even if tried really hard to follow the rules try would still screw up.

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6. photochemsynDec 2022
   The last major work of investigative journalism of that nature at the post was "Top Secret America" with lead reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin (2010):

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Secret_America

   Feel free to point to anything even vaguely similar since Bezos took over the post.

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