Top secret America
by Dana Priest · first published 2011
11mentions
4recommended by
8HN commenters
2012–2022first – last mentioned
50% recommend50% neutral
Describes the enormous, top-secret, invisible universe created by the government after 9/11 and describes why the system in place to keep us safe may actually be putting us in greater danger.
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Top Secret America is a good if somewhat depressing read on all of this: http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/d... With compartmentization and the short terms of congress people (2 years and then…
on “NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy to Say if We Spied on You” ↗If you found this article enjoyable you should check out the book: http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/d... This article is from a while back and in the intervening time the journalists came out with a book that goes into more detail.
on “A hidden world, growing beyond control ” ↗Read Top Secret America by Dana Priest. These are among the highest paying government jobs. The strongholds of NSA are in the wealthiest counties in the nation. And we don't even know what they do... I think it's reasonable…
on “Government likely to open criminal probe into NSA leaks” ↗…off of the material -- both in a technical and journalistic sense, including this one about NSA infiltrating Google data centers: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i... 2010 - Top Secret America -- this to me was a highly underrated project that attempted to expose how utterly out-of-control and ungainly America's national security apparatus is. If you read it before the Snowden revelations,…
on “Jeff Bezos Defends Decision to Buy Washington Post” ↗I recommend reading "Top Secret America." It's really eye opening, and discusses the post-9/11 increase to our intelligence services and how that lead to the large number of contractors. Importantly the authors note that in the increase in…
on “Former NSA Contractor Sentenced to 9 Years for Heist of U.S. Secrets” ↗…in coverage and editorial opinion at the WaPo. Prior to this, the Washington Post had published a striking expose of the national security state, by reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin, entitled "Top Secret America". Here's legendary nuclear weapons historian Richard Rhodes reviewing the book that came out of that effort in 2011: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/top-secre... > "“Top Secret America”…
on “The CIA and the Media (1977)” ↗…would be pretty interesting. I suspect that these "national security" types get a sizable and relatively automatic boost in pay for a PhD and it's likely not correlated to any performance or value. Top Secret America by Dana Priest (http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/d...) is a somewhat interesting read on it. There are some politically angled results you can take from it but one of the most…
on “What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community” ↗The last major work of investigative journalism of that nature at the post was "Top Secret America" with lead reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin (2010): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Secret_America Feel free to point to anything even vaguely similar since Bezos took over the post.
on “Promotion of alternative social platforms policy” ↗…the editors do what the owners tell them to do, and hey, meet the Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos whose AWS got a $600 million CIA contract for web services, so no more investigative journalism like Top Secret America, please! As far as the main points Hossenfelder raises, i.e. basic concepts like original sources, range of uncertainties, margins of error, unquestioning reliance on press releases, alternative hypothesis,…
on “Why does science news suck so much?” ↗…Bloomberg suing the Federal Reserve under FOIA [1], or sending reporters to hotspots for first-hand reporting. Personally I think a combination of data journalism and investigative journalism (like WaPo's Top Secret America [2] and Bloomberg's FOIA lawsuit and reporting) are their best way forward. Both require resources most individual bloggers can't provide, and both are real news, real journalism. [1]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-23/fed-s-once-secret-d...…
on “Choosing Hong Kong Is a Brilliant Move by Edward Snowden” ↗Sadly, it is a business, and it's become an entrenched part of the political landscape. It's hard to read "Top Secret America" [1] and not come to that conclusion. A lack of transparency for intelligence operations means their outcomes are difficult to measure, which in turn means the bang-for-the-buck efficacy of those operations…
on “If spying on citizens was a business” ↗