Keeping us safe

That's the mantra of the government in the 21st century.  The amount of time, effort, people and money involved in this effort is almost beyond belief.  The Washington Post had a series of in-depth articles on "Top Secret America"  in 2010.  

The conclusion they reached can be found in the words of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, former commander of 145,000 troops in Iraq,

 "I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities. The complexity of this system defies description."
"Because it (the security agencies) lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in  message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste. We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."

Here are some of the major conclusions of the series:
* 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.

Again, this report was printed in 2010.  That was almost 3 years ago.  Can you imagine how much worse it is now?