Thursday 22 July 2010

Top Secret America

Washington Post investigation 'Top Secret America' pulls a lot of information together about the world on intelligence, covert law enforcement and the like. There are also some pretty good visualisations helping to make sense of this information. It's worth a look.

I'm oddly amazed by the amout of space these intelligence operations need, as well as the Posts focus on absolute numbers. The size of these operations touches on something I was thinking about yesterday - intelligence gluts surpassing any analytic capability because of the sheer amount of data produced by contemporary surveillance systems.

Additionally, Wired magazine has reported on the role that congress played in the large numbers of contractors involved in intelligence, and the claims that publishing this information puts US national security at risk (the list of sites was first run past people in US intelligence services to check this wasn't the case, and some of the locations are vague).

Wonder if there'll be something like this for the UK any time soon?

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