The Washington Post recently published a fascinating three part series describing the mind-blowing scale of secret intelligence and counter-terrorism operations in the United States in the aftermath of the 9/11 attach.  Did you know that 850,000 Americans have top secret clearance now? The series is fascinating reading. Even looking at a map identifying the number of locations where such activity occurs is stunning.  And the series shows a scandalous level of wasteful spending and secrecy that we should not tolerate by the government in the US.  If the tea-partiers want a target of government action circumscribing liberty, here it is.

A good summary, for those so inclined, is provided in the latest issue of The New Yorker.

• Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
• An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
• In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet of space.
• 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.
• 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.

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The story the Post tells is not about criminal conspiracies or rogue elements or corruption in the usual sense. No one’s dedication to the cause of protecting America is questioned. The tale has no villains—unless you count the pathologies of secrecy and bureaucracy and the panicky bravado that led the White House, Congress, and the public to frame the response to Al Qaeda as an essentially unlimited War on Terror. It is an exposé about a secret world, but it exposes no secrets. Interviewees who asked for anonymity did so not in order to “leak”—to reveal classified information—but to express judgments that their bosses and colleagues might hold against them. Virtually all the data that the paper collected in the two years it took to prepare the series was already in the public record.

And this fall, even more on the story will be coming on Frontline on PBS. Here is the preview.