Your tax dollars at work: Inside the United States’ $52.6B “black budget”
by Cyrus Farivar
Arstechnica.com
Aug 29 2013
The United States’ “black budget” for fiscal 2013 amounts to $52.6 billion (or $167 per American), and it details what The Washington Post calls a “bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny.”
According to a new front-page story on Thursday, the Post says that it now has the entire 178-page classified budget summary as supplied by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. This entire budget comprises the annual expenditures for the NSA, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and other spy and military agencies.
With respect to the tech-focused highlights, the Post notes that the CIA and NSA “have launched aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as ‘offensive cyber operations.’”
Additionally, it appears there are far more potential leakers than we once thought. According to the Post’s reporting, the “NSA planned to investigate at least 4,000 possible insider threats in 2013, cases in which the agency suspected sensitive information may have been compromised by one of its own.”
The Rest…HERE
