Washingto Post - Top Secret America

[mooby]

I feel like the article boils down to this one little bit of knowledge. We have invested so much money and resources into national security that it's become so huge that there is nobody that can oversee it, and as a result a lot of time/money/resources are being wasted from multiple agencies and programs that are basically covering the same thing.

I wish it was as simple as El Presidente' just creating one office that has control over all national intelligence and making sure that that office can control the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. etc. and can make sure that multiple resources aren't being wasted covering one angle. We need to be organized to be effective at national security, and I feel like this article creates a clear picture that national security has become so disorganized that it's hard to tell whether it's doing a good job or not. And while my proposal above is simplistic in design, there are probably too many flaws to be found that would ever prevent it from happening.

You could say that's what the office of the ODNI was made for, to control the flow of info and to organize everything so everybody was handling a different aspect and so there aren't 50,000 reports that cover the same thing. But the article makes it pretty clear that all the agencies have their own interests, some of which are above what the ODNI has access to.

When I read parts of that story about how some agency re-classified certain information so that the ODNI can't have access to it, or how it changed its' budget so the ODNI can't have access to that either, it just screams ineffectiveness on the behalf of the national government to organize how national security is handled.