(Washington Post Special Report) For nearly two years, The Washington Post has been working on a massive investigative piece on the state of the post-9/11 intelligence and security industries which would have been impossible before the Internet. Titled “Top Secret America,” the Post’s exposé required the labors of more than 20 journalists. The report’s key takeaways may not be terrible surprises with respect to the conventional wisdom about the military-industrial complex — that it wastes money and is so disorganized that key pieces of intelligence get ignored to potentially perilous effect — but its thoroughness and searchability make it a uniquely 21st century piece of reporting, both for its subject matter and for its own composition. Here’s the heart of the report on the 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies involved in America’s counterterror, homeland security, and intelligence operations, as summarized by veteran investigative journalists Dana Priest and William M. Arkin: 1)......Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks. 2)......Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored. These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart of the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.

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